Xianlong Zeng

Xianlong Zeng, Yijing Gao, Fanghao Song et al.

This study introduces a simple yet effective method for identifying similar data points across non-free text domains, such as tabular and image data, using Large Language Models (LLMs). Our two-step approach involves data point summarization and hidden state extraction. Initially, data is condensed via summarization using an LLM, reducing complexity and highlighting essential information in sentences. Subsequently, the summarization sentences are fed through another LLM to extract hidden states, serving as compact, feature-rich representations. This approach leverages the advanced comprehension and generative capabilities of LLMs, offering a scalable and efficient strategy for similarity identification across diverse datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in identifying similar data points on multiple datasets. Additionally, our approach enables non-technical domain experts, such as fraud investigators or marketing operators, to quickly identify similar data points tailored to specific scenarios, demonstrating its utility in practical applications. In general, our results open new avenues for leveraging LLMs in data analysis across various domains

Phoebe Jing, Yijing Gao, Yuanhang Zhang et al.

In the realm of predictive analytics, the nuanced domain knowledge of investigators often remains underutilized, confined largely to subjective interpretations and ad hoc decision-making. This paper explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to bridge this gap by systematically converting investigator-derived insights into quantifiable, actionable features that enhance model performance. We present a framework that leverages LLMs' natural language understanding capabilities to encode these red flags into a structured feature set that can be readily integrated into existing predictive models. Through a series of case studies, we demonstrate how this approach not only preserves the critical human expertise within the investigative process but also scales the impact of this knowledge across various prediction tasks. The results indicate significant improvements in risk assessment and decision-making accuracy, highlighting the value of blending human experiential knowledge with advanced machine learning techniques. This study paves the way for more sophisticated, knowledge-driven analytics in fields where expert insight is paramount.

Xiang Liu, Hau Chan, Minming Li et al.

Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach that allows requesters (\eg, servers) to obtain local training models from workers (e.g., clients). Since workers are typically unwilling to provide training services/models freely and voluntarily, many incentive mechanisms in FL are designed to incentivize participation by offering monetary rewards from requesters. However, existing studies neglect two crucial aspects of real-world FL scenarios. First, workers can possess inherent incompatibility characteristics (e.g., communication channels and data sources), which can lead to degradation of FL efficiency (e.g., low communication efficiency and poor model generalization). Second, the requesters are budgeted, which limits the amount of workers they can hire for their tasks. In this paper, we investigate the scenario in FL where multiple budgeted requesters seek training services from incompatible workers with private training costs. We consider two settings: the cooperative budget setting where requesters cooperate to pool their budgets to improve their overall utility and the non-cooperative budget setting where each requester optimizes their utility within their own budgets. To address efficiency degradation caused by worker incompatibility, we develop novel compatibility-aware incentive mechanisms, CARE-CO and CARE-NO, for both settings to elicit true private costs and determine workers to hire for requesters and their rewards while satisfying requester budget constraints. Our mechanisms guarantee individual rationality, truthfulness, budget feasibility, and approximation performance. We conduct extensive experiments using real-world datasets to show that the proposed mechanisms significantly outperform existing baselines.

Phoebe Jing, Yijing Gao, Xianlong Zeng

In the field of fraud detection, the availability of comprehensive and privacy-compliant datasets is crucial for advancing machine learning research and developing effective anti-fraud systems. Traditional datasets often focus on transaction-level information, which, while useful, overlooks the broader context of customer behavior patterns that are essential for detecting sophisticated fraud schemes. The scarcity of such data, primarily due to privacy concerns, significantly hampers the development and testing of predictive models that can operate effectively at the customer level. Addressing this gap, our study introduces a benchmark that contains structured datasets specifically designed for customer-level fraud detection. The benchmark not only adheres to strict privacy guidelines to ensure user confidentiality but also provides a rich source of information by encapsulating customer-centric features. We have developed the benchmark that allows for the comprehensive evaluation of various machine learning models, facilitating a deeper understanding of their strengths and weaknesses in predicting fraudulent activities. Through this work, we seek to bridge the existing gap in data availability, offering researchers and practitioners a valuable resource that empowers the development of next-generation fraud detection techniques.

Xianlong Zeng, Simon Lin, Chang Liu

The adoption of electronic health records (EHR) has become universal during the past decade, which has afforded in-depth data-based research. By learning from the large amount of healthcare data, various data-driven models have been built to predict future events for different medical tasks, such as auto diagnosis and heart-attack prediction. Although EHR is abundant, the population that satisfies specific criteria for learning population-specific tasks is scarce, making it challenging to train data-hungry deep learning models. This study presents the Claim Pre-Training (Claim-PT) framework, a generic pre-training model that first trains on the entire pediatric claims dataset, followed by a discriminative fine-tuning on each population-specific task. The semantic meaning of medical events can be captured in the pre-training stage, and the effective knowledge transfer is completed through the task-aware fine-tuning stage. The fine-tuning process requires minimal parameter modification without changing the model architecture, which mitigates the data scarcity issue and helps train the deep learning model adequately on small patient cohorts. We conducted experiments on a real-world claims dataset with more than one million patient records. Experimental results on two downstream tasks demonstrated the effectiveness of our method: our general task-agnostic pre-training framework outperformed tailored task-specific models, achieving more than 10\% higher in model performance as compared to baselines. In addition, our framework showed a great generalizability potential to transfer learned knowledge from one institution to another, paving the way for future healthcare model pre-training across institutions.

Xianlong Zeng, Fanghao Song, Zhongen Li et al.

The black-box nature of machine learning models limits their use in case-critical applications, raising faithful and ethical concerns that lead to trust crises. One possible way to mitigate this issue is to understand how a (mispredicted) decision is carved out from the decision boundary. This paper presents a human-in-the-loop approach to explain machine learning models using verbatim neighborhood manifestation. Contrary to most of the current eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) systems, which provide hit-or-miss approximate explanations, our approach generates the local decision boundary of the given instance and enables human intelligence to conclude the model behavior. Our method can be divided into three stages: 1) a neighborhood generation stage, which generates instances based on the given sample; 2) a classification stage, which yields classifications on the generated instances to carve out the local decision boundary and delineate the model behavior; and 3) a human-in-the-loop stage, which involves human to refine and explore the neighborhood of interest. In the generation stage, a generative model is used to generate the plausible synthetic neighbors around the given instance. After the classification stage, the classified neighbor instances provide a multifaceted understanding of the model behavior. Three intervention points are provided in the human-in-the-loop stage, enabling humans to leverage their own intelligence to interpret the model behavior. Several experiments on two datasets are conducted, and the experimental results demonstrate the potential of our proposed approach for boosting human understanding of the complex machine learning model.

Xianlong Zeng, Simon Lin, Chang Liu

The claims data, containing medical codes, services information, and incurred expenditure, can be a good resource for estimating an individual's health condition and medical risk level. In this study, we developed Transformer-based Multimodal AutoEncoder (TMAE), an unsupervised learning framework that can learn efficient patient representation by encoding meaningful information from the claims data. TMAE is motivated by the practical needs in healthcare to stratify patients into different risk levels for improving care delivery and management. Compared to previous approaches, TMAE is able to 1) model inpatient, outpatient, and medication claims collectively, 2) handle irregular time intervals between medical events, 3) alleviate the sparsity issue of the rare medical codes, and 4) incorporate medical expenditure information. We trained TMAE using a real-world pediatric claims dataset containing more than 600,000 patients and compared its performance with various approaches in two clustering tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that TMAE has superior performance compared to all baselines. Multiple downstream applications are also conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of our framework. The promising results confirm that the TMAE framework is scalable to large claims data and is able to generate efficient patient embeddings for risk stratification and analysis.

Xianlong Zeng, Soheil Moosavinasab, En-Ju D Lin et al.

Efficient representation of patients is very important in the healthcare domain and can help with many tasks such as medical risk prediction. Many existing methods, such as diagnostic Cost Groups (DCG), rely on expert knowledge to build patient representation from medical data, which is resource consuming and non-scalable. Unsupervised machine learning algorithms are a good choice for automating the representation learning process. However, there is very little research focusing on onpatient-level representation learning directly from medical claims. In this paper, weproposed a novel patient vector learning architecture that learns high quality,fixed-length patient representation from claims data. We conducted several experiments to test the quality of our learned representation, and the empirical results show that our learned patient vectors are superior to vectors learned through other methods including a popular commercial model. Lastly, we provide potential clinical interpretation for using our representation on predictive tasks, as interpretability is vital in the healthcare domain