Modeling Time-Series and Spatial Data for Recommendations and Other Applications
It aims to improve recommender systems for users by handling spatial and temporal data dynamics, though the work appears incremental as it builds on existing neural MTPP frameworks.
The thesis tackles challenges in modeling continuous-time event sequences (CTES) for recommender systems by addressing data quality issues like missing events and designing accurate models for points-of-interest recommendations, with applications extended to large-scale CTES retrieval and human activity prediction.
With the research directions described in this thesis, we seek to address the critical challenges in designing recommender systems that can understand the dynamics of continuous-time event sequences. We follow a ground-up approach, i.e., first, we address the problems that may arise due to the poor quality of CTES data being fed into a recommender system. Later, we handle the task of designing accurate recommender systems. To improve the quality of the CTES data, we address a fundamental problem of overcoming missing events in temporal sequences. Moreover, to provide accurate sequence modeling frameworks, we design solutions for points-of-interest recommendation, i.e., models that can handle spatial mobility data of users to various POI check-ins and recommend candidate locations for the next check-in. Lastly, we highlight that the capabilities of the proposed models can have applications beyond recommender systems, and we extend their abilities to design solutions for large-scale CTES retrieval and human activity prediction. A significant part of this thesis uses the idea of modeling the underlying distribution of CTES via neural marked temporal point processes (MTPP). Traditional MTPP models are stochastic processes that utilize a fixed formulation to capture the generative mechanism of a sequence of discrete events localized in continuous time. In contrast, neural MTPP combine the underlying ideas from the point process literature with modern deep learning architectures. The ability of deep-learning models as accurate function approximators has led to a significant gain in the predictive prowess of neural MTPP models. In this thesis, we utilize and present several neural network-based enhancements for the current MTPP frameworks for the aforementioned real-world applications.