Ying Xu

Dongming Han, Wei Chen, Rusheng Pan et al.

This paper presents GraphFederator, a novel approach to construct joint representations of multi-party graphs and supports privacy-preserving visual analysis of graphs. Inspired by the concept of federated learning, we reformulate the analysis of multi-party graphs into a decentralization process. The new federation framework consists of a shared module that is responsible for joint modeling and analysis, and a set of local modules that run on respective graph data. Specifically, we propose a federated graph representation model (FGRM) that is learned from encrypted characteristics of multi-party graphs in local modules. We also design multiple visualization views for joint visualization, exploration, and analysis of multi-party graphs. Experimental results with two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Donghui Yan, Songxiang Gu, Ying Xu et al.

Similarity plays a fundamental role in many areas, including data mining, machine learning, statistics and various applied domains. Inspired by the success of ensemble methods and the flexibility of trees, we propose to learn a similarity kernel called rpf-kernel through random projection forests (rpForests). Our theoretical analysis reveals a highly desirable property of rpf-kernel: far-away (dissimilar) points have a low similarity value while nearby (similar) points would have a high similarity}, and the similarities have a native interpretation as the probability of points remaining in the same leaf nodes during the growth of rpForests. The learned rpf-kernel leads to an effective clustering algorithm--rpfCluster. On a wide variety of real and benchmark datasets, rpfCluster compares favorably to K-means clustering, spectral clustering and a state-of-the-art clustering ensemble algorithm--Cluster Forests. Our approach is simple to implement and readily adapt to the geometry of the underlying data. Given its desirable theoretical property and competitive empirical performance when applied to clustering, we expect rpf-kernel to be applicable to many problems of an unsupervised nature or as a regularizer in some supervised or weakly supervised settings.

Donghui Yan, Ying Xu

The recent decades have seen a surge of interests in distributed computing. Existing work focus primarily on either distributed computing platforms, data query tools, or, algorithms to divide big data and conquer at individual machines etc. It is, however, increasingly often that the data of interest are inherently distributed, i.e., data are stored at multiple distributed sites due to diverse collection channels, business operations etc. We propose to enable learning and inference in such a setting via a general framework based on the distortion minimizing local transformations. This framework only requires a small amount of local signatures to be shared among distributed sites, eliminating the need of having to transmitting big data. Computation can be done very efficiently via parallel local computation. The error incurred due to distributed computing vanishes when increasing the size of local signatures. As the shared data need not be in their original form, data privacy may also be preserved. Experiments on linear (logistic) regression and Random Forests have shown promise of this approach. This framework is expected to apply to a general class of tools in learning and inference with the continuity property.