Time series anomaly detection is instrumental in maintaining system availability in various domains. Current work in this research line mainly focuses on learning data normality deeply and comprehensively by devising advanced neural network structures and new reconstruction/prediction learning objectives. However, their one-class learning process can be misled by latent anomalies in training data (i.e., anomaly contamination) under the unsupervised paradigm. Their learning process also lacks knowledge about the anomalies. Consequently, they often learn a biased, inaccurate normality boundary. To tackle these problems, this paper proposes calibrated one-class classification for anomaly detection, realizing contamination-tolerant, anomaly-informed learning of data normality via uncertainty modeling-based calibration and native anomaly-based calibration. Specifically, our approach adaptively penalizes uncertain predictions to restrain irregular samples in anomaly contamination during optimization, while simultaneously encouraging confident predictions on regular samples to ensure effective normality learning. This largely alleviates the negative impact of anomaly contamination. Our approach also creates native anomaly examples via perturbation to simulate time series abnormal behaviors. Through discriminating these dummy anomalies, our one-class learning is further calibrated to form a more precise normality boundary. Extensive experiments on ten real-world datasets show that our model achieves substantial improvement over sixteen state-of-the-art contenders.

The representation of categorical data with hierarchical coupling relationships (i.e., value to value cluster interactions) is very critical yet challenging for capturing data characteristics in learning tasks. This paper proposes a novel and flexible coupled unsupervised categorical data representation (CURE) framework which not only captures the hierarchical couplings but also is flexible to be instantiated for contrastive learning tasks. Based on two complementary value coupling functions, CURE is instantiated into two instances: the coupled data embedding (CDE) for clustering and the coupled outlier scoring of high-dimensional data (COSH) for outlier detection, by customizing the ways of value clustering and coupling learning between value clusters. CDE embeds categorical data into a new space in which features are independent and semantics are rich. COSH represents data with an outlying vector to capture complex outlying behaviors of objects in high-dimensional data. Substantial experiments show that CDE significantly outperforms three popular unsupervised embedding methods and three state-of-the-art similarity-based representation methods, and COSH performs significantly better than five state-of-the-art outlier detection methods on high-dimensional data sets. CDE and COSH are scalable and stable, linear to data size and quadratic to the number of features, and are insensitive to their parameters.

Classic recommender systems face challenges in addressing the data sparsity and cold-start problems with only modeling the user-item relation. An essential direction is to incorporate and understand the additional heterogeneous relations, e.g., user-user and item-item relations, since each user-item interaction is often influenced by other users and items, which form the user’s/item’s influential contexts. This induces important yet challenging issues, including modeling heterogeneous relations, interactions, and the strength of the influence from users/items in the influential contexts. To this end, we design Influential-Context Aggregation Units (ICAU) to aggregate the user-user/item-item relations within a given context as the influential context embeddings. Accordingly, we propose a Heterogeneous relations-Embedded Recommender System (HERS) based on ICAUs to model and interpret the underlying motivation of user-item interactions by considering user-user and item-item influences. The experiments on two real-world datasets show the highly improved recommendation quality made by HERS and its superiority in handling the cold-start problem. In addition, we demonstrate the interpretability of modeling influential contexts in explaining the recommendation results.

Appropriate similarity measures always play a critical role in data analytics, learning, and processing. Measuring the intrinsic similarity of categorical data for unsupervised learning has not been substantially addressed, and even less effort has been made for the similarity analysis of categorical data that is not independent and identically distributed (non-IID). In this work, a Coupled Metric Similarity (CMS) is defined for unsupervised learning which flexibly captures the value-to-attribute-to-object heterogeneous coupling relationships. CMS learns the similarities in terms of intrinsic heterogeneous intra- and inter-attribute couplings and attribute-to-object couplings in categorical data. The CMS validity is guaranteed by satisfying metric properties and conditions, and CMS can flexibly adapt to IID to non-IID data. CMS is incorporated into spectral clustering and k-modes clustering and compared with relevant state-of-the-art similarity measures that are not necessarily metrics. The experimental results and theoretical analysis show the CMS effectiveness of capturing independent and coupled data characteristics, which significantly outperforms other similarity measures on most datasets.