Yifan Zhao

Hegang Chen, Yuyin Lu, Zhiming Dai et al.

Recent advances in sequencing technologies have enabled researchers to explore cellular heterogeneity at single-cell resolution. Meanwhile, interpretability has gained prominence parallel to the rapid increase in the complexity and performance of deep learning models. In recent years, topic models have been widely used for interpretable single-cell embedding learning and clustering analysis, which we refer to as single-cell embedded topic models. However, previous studies evaluated the interpretability of the models mainly through qualitative analysis, and these single-cell embedded topic models suffer from the potential problem of interpretation collapse. Furthermore, their neglect of external biological knowledge constrains analytical performance. Here, we present scE2TM, an external knowledge-guided single-cell embedded topic model that provides a high-quality cell embedding and strong interpretation, contributing to comprehensive scRNA-seq data analysis. Our comprehensive evaluation across 20 scRNA-seq datasets demonstrates that scE2TM achieves significant clustering performance gains compared to 7 state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we propose a new interpretability evaluation benchmark that introduces 10 metrics to quantitatively assess the interpretability of single-cell embedded topic models. The results show that the interpretation provided by scE2TM performs encouragingly in terms of diversity and consistency with the underlying biological signals, contributing to a better revealing of the underlying biological mechanisms.

Bin Li, Jiayan Pei, Feiyang Xiao et al.

In the mobile internet era, the Online Food Ordering Service (OFOS) emerges as an integral component of inclusive finance owing to the convenience it brings to people. OFOS platforms offer dynamic allocation incentives to users and merchants through diverse marketing campaigns to encourage payments while maintaining the platforms' budget efficiency. Despite significant progress, the marketing domain continues to face two primary challenges: (i) how to allocate a limited budget with greater efficiency, demanding precision in predicting users' monotonic response (i.e. sensitivity) to incentives, and (ii) ensuring spatio-temporal adaptability and robustness in diverse marketing campaigns across different times and locations. To address these issues, we propose a Constrained Monotonic Adaptive Network (CoMAN) method for spatio-temporal perception within marketing pricing. Specifically, we capture spatio-temporal preferences within attribute features through two foundational spatio-temporal perception modules. To further enhance catching the user sensitivity differentials to incentives across varied times and locations, we design modules for learning spatio-temporal convexity and concavity as well as for expressing sensitivity functions. CoMAN can achieve a more efficient allocation of incentive investments during pricing, thus increasing the conversion rate and orders while maintaining budget efficiency. Extensive offline and online experimental results within our diverse marketing campaigns demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach while outperforming the monotonic state-of-the-art method.