Yan Fu

En-Yu Yu, Yan Fu, Jun-Lin Zhou et al.

Many real-world systems can be expressed in temporal networks with nodes playing far different roles in structure and function and edges representing the relationships between nodes. Identifying critical nodes can help us control the spread of public opinions or epidemics, predict leading figures in academia, conduct advertisements for various commodities, and so on. However, it is rather difficult to identify critical nodes because the network structure changes over time in temporal networks. In this paper, considering the sequence topological information of temporal networks, a novel and effective learning framework based on the combination of special GCNs and RNNs is proposed to identify nodes with the best spreading ability. The effectiveness of the approach is evaluated by weighted Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model. Experimental results on four real-world temporal networks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms both traditional and deep learning benchmark methods in terms of the Kendall $τ$ coefficient and top $k$ hit rate.

Faez Ahmed, Yaxin Cui, Yan Fu et al.

Graph Neural Networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in recent years, ranging from drug discovery, recommendation systems, image classification, social network analysis to natural language understanding. This paper shows their efficacy in modeling relationships between products and making predictions for unseen product networks. By representing products as nodes and their relationships as edges of a graph, we show how an inductive graph neural network approach, named GraphSAGE, can efficiently learn continuous representations for nodes and edges. These representations also capture product feature information such as price, brand, or engineering attributes. They are combined with a classification model for predicting the existence of the relationship between products. Using a case study of the Chinese car market, we find that our method yields double the prediction performance compared to an Exponential Random Graph Model-based method for predicting the co-consideration relationship between cars. While a vanilla GraphSAGE requires a partial network to make predictions, we introduce an `adjacency prediction model' to circumvent this limitation. This enables us to predict product relationships when no neighborhood information is known. Finally, we demonstrate how a permutation-based interpretability analysis can provide insights on how design attributes impact the predictions of relationships between products. This work provides a systematic method to predict the relationships between products in many different markets.

Ya-Hui An, Qiang Dong, Chong-Jing Sun et al.

In last decades, diversity and accuracy have been regarded as two important measures in evaluating a recommendation model. However, a clear concern is that a model focusing excessively on one measure will put the other one at risk, thus it is not easy to greatly improve diversity and accuracy simultaneously. In this paper, we propose to enhance the Resource-Allocation (RA) similarity in resource transfer equations of diffusion-like models, by giving a tunable exponent to the RA similarity, and traversing the value of the exponent to achieve the optimal recommendation results. In this way, we can increase the recommendation scores (allocated resource) of many unpopular objects. Experiments on three benchmark data sets, MovieLens, Netflix, and RateYourMusic show that the modified models can yield remarkable performance improvement compared with the original ones.

Da-Cheng Nie, Ya-Hui An, Qiang Dong et al.

Recent decade has witnessed the increasing popularity of recommender systems, which help users acquire relevant commodities and services from overwhelming resources on Internet. Some simple physical diffusion processes have been used to design effective recommendation algorithms for user-object bipartite networks, typically mass diffusion (MD) and heat conduction (HC) algorithms which have different advantages respectively on accuracy and diversity. In this paper, we investigate the effect of weight assignment in the hybrid of MD and HC, and find that a new hybrid algorithm of MD and HC with balanced weights will achieve the optimal recommendation results, we name it balanced diffusion (BD) algorithm. Numerical experiments on three benchmark data sets, MovieLens, Netflix and RateYourMusic (RYM), show that the performance of BD algorithm outperforms the existing diffusion-based methods on the three important recommendation metrics, accuracy, diversity and novelty. Specifically, it can not only provide accurately recommendation results, but also yield higher diversity and novelty in recommendations by accurately recommending unpopular objects.

Chongjing Sun, Philip S. Yu, Xiangnan Kong et al.

Publishing social network data for research purposes has raised serious concerns for individual privacy. There exist many privacy-preserving works that can deal with different attack models. In this paper, we introduce a novel privacy attack model and refer it as a mutual friend attack. In this model, the adversary can re-identify a pair of friends by using their number of mutual friends. To address this issue, we propose a new anonymity concept, called k-NMF anonymity, i.e., k-anonymity on the number of mutual friends, which ensures that there exist at least k-1 other friend pairs in the graph that share the same number of mutual friends. We devise algorithms to achieve the k-NMF anonymity while preserving the original vertex set in the sense that we allow the occasional addition but no deletion of vertices. Further we give an algorithm to ensure the k-degree anonymity in addition to the k-NMF anonymity. The experimental results on real-word datasets demonstrate that our approach can preserve the privacy and utility of social networks effectively against mutual friend attacks.