Simplicial SMOTE: Oversampling Solution to the Imbalanced Learning Problem

SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique) is the established geometric approach to random oversampling to balance classes in the imbalanced learning problem, followed by many extensions. Its idea is to introduce synthetic data points of the minor class, with each new point being the convex combination of an existing data point and one of its k-nearest neighbors. In this paper, by viewing SMOTE as sampling from the edges of a geometric neighborhood graph and borrowing tools from the topological data analysis, we propose a novel technique, Simplicial SMOTE, that samples from the simplices of a geometric neighborhood simplicial complex. A new synthetic point is defined by the barycentric coordinates w.r.t. a simplex spanned by an arbitrary number of data points being sufficiently close rather than a pair. Such a replacement of the geometric data model results in better coverage of the underlying data distribution compared to existing geometric sampling methods and allows the generation of synthetic points of the minority class closer to the majority class on the decision boundary. We experimentally demonstrate that our Simplicial SMOTE outperforms several popular geometric sampling methods, including the original SMOTE. Moreover, we show that simplicial sampling can be easily integrated into existing SMOTE extensions. We generalize and evaluate simplicial extensions of the classic Borderline SMOTE, Safe-level SMOTE, and ADASYN algorithms, all of which outperform their graph-based counterparts.

LLM-KT: A Versatile Framework for Knowledge Transfer from Large Language Models to Collaborative Filtering

We present LLM-KT, a flexible framework designed to enhance collaborative filtering (CF) models by seamlessly integrating LLM (Large Language Model)-generated features. Unlike existing methods that rely on passing LLM-generated features as direct inputs, our framework injects these features into an intermediate layer of any CF model, allowing the model to reconstruct and leverage the embeddings internally. This model-agnostic approach works with a wide range of CF models without requiring architectural changes, making it adaptable to various recommendation scenarios. Our framework is built for easy integration and modification, providing researchers and developers with a powerful tool for extending CF model capabilities through efficient knowledge transfer. We demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments on the MovieLens and Amazon datasets, where it consistently improves baseline CF models. Experimental studies showed that LLM-KT is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in context-aware settings but can be applied to a broader range of CF models than current approaches.

Multimodal Banking Dataset: Understanding Client Needs through Event Sequences

Financial organizations collect a huge amount of data about clients that typically has a temporal (sequential) structure and is collected from various sources (modalities). Due to privacy issues, there are no large-scale open-source multimodal datasets of event sequences, which significantly limits the research in this area. In this paper, we present the industrial-scale publicly available multimodal banking dataset, MBD, that contains more than 1.5M corporate clients with several modalities: 950M bank transactions, 1B geo position events, 5M embeddings of dialogues with technical support and monthly aggregated purchases of four bank's products. All entries are properly anonymized from real proprietary bank data. Using this dataset, we introduce a novel benchmark with two business tasks: campaigning (purchase prediction in the next month) and matching of clients. We provide numerical results that demonstrate the superiority of our multi-modal baselines over single-modal techniques for each task. As a result, the proposed dataset can open new perspectives and facilitate the future development of practically important large-scale multimodal algorithms for event sequences. HuggingFace Link: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ai-lab/MBD Github Link: https://github.com/Dzhambo/MBD

DeTPP: Leveraging Object Detection for Robust Long-Horizon Event Prediction

Forecasting future events over extended periods, known as long-horizon prediction, is a fundamental task in various domains, including retail, finance, healthcare, and social networks. Traditional methods, such as Marked Temporal Point Processes (MTPP), typically use autoregressive models to predict multiple future events. However, these models frequently encounter issues such as converging to constant or repetitive outputs, which significantly limits their effectiveness and applicability. To overcome these limitations, we propose DeTPP (Detection-based Temporal Point Processes), a novel approach inspired by object detection methods from computer vision. DeTPP utilizes a novel matching-based loss function that selectively focuses on reliably predictable events, enhancing both training robustness and inference diversity. Our method sets a new state-of-the-art in long-horizon event prediction, significantly outperforming existing MTPP and next-K approaches. The implementation of DeTPP is publicly available on GitHub.

MedSyn: LLM-based Synthetic Medical Text Generation Framework

Generating synthetic text addresses the challenge of data availability in privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare. This study explores the applicability of synthetic data in real-world medical settings. We introduce MedSyn, a novel medical text generation framework that integrates large language models with a Medical Knowledge Graph (MKG). We use MKG to sample prior medical information for the prompt and generate synthetic clinical notes with GPT-4 and fine-tuned LLaMA models. We assess the benefit of synthetic data through application in the ICD code prediction task. Our research indicates that synthetic data can increase the classification accuracy of vital and challenging codes by up to 17.8% compared to settings without synthetic data. Furthermore, to provide new data for further research in the healthcare domain, we present the largest open-source synthetic dataset of clinical notes for the Russian language, comprising over 41k samples covering 219 ICD-10 codes.

HoTPP Benchmark: Are We Good at the Long Horizon Events Forecasting?

In sequential event prediction, which finds applications in finance, retail, social networks, and healthcare, a crucial task is forecasting multiple future events within a specified time horizon. Traditionally, this has been addressed through autoregressive generation using next-event prediction models, such as Marked Temporal Point Processes. However, autoregressive methods use their own output for future predictions, potentially reducing quality as the prediction horizon extends. In this paper, we challenge traditional approaches by introducing a novel benchmark, HoTPP, specifically designed to evaluate a model's ability to predict event sequences over a horizon. This benchmark features a new metric inspired by object detection in computer vision, addressing the limitations of existing metrics in assessing models with imprecise time-step predictions. Our evaluations on established datasets employing various models demonstrate that high accuracy in next-event prediction does not necessarily translate to superior horizon prediction, and vice versa. HoTPP aims to serve as a valuable tool for developing more robust event sequence prediction methods, ultimately paving the way for further advancements in the field.

Universal representations for financial transactional data: embracing local, global, and external contexts

Effective processing of financial transactions is essential for banking data analysis. However, in this domain, most methods focus on specialized solutions to stand-alone problems instead of constructing universal representations suitable for many problems. We present a representation learning framework that addresses diverse business challenges. We also suggest novel generative models that account for data specifics, and a way to integrate external information into a client's representation, leveraging insights from other customers' actions. Finally, we offer a benchmark, describing representation quality globally, concerning the entire transaction history; locally, reflecting the client's current state; and dynamically, capturing representation evolution over time. Our generative approach demonstrates superior performance in local tasks, with an increase in ROC-AUC of up to 14\% for the next MCC prediction task and up to 46\% for downstream tasks from existing contrastive baselines. Incorporating external information improves the scores by an additional 20\%.

GigaPevt: Multimodal Medical Assistant

Building an intelligent and efficient medical assistant is still a challenging AI problem. The major limitation comes from the data modality scarceness, which reduces comprehensive patient perception. This demo paper presents the GigaPevt, the first multimodal medical assistant that combines the dialog capabilities of large language models with specialized medical models. Such an approach shows immediate advantages in dialog quality and metric performance, with a 1.18\% accuracy improvement in the question-answering task.

From Variability to Stability: Advancing RecSys Benchmarking Practices

In the rapidly evolving domain of Recommender Systems (RecSys), new algorithms frequently claim state-of-the-art performance based on evaluations over a limited set of arbitrarily selected datasets. However, this approach may fail to holistically reflect their effectiveness due to the significant impact of dataset characteristics on algorithm performance. Addressing this deficiency, this paper introduces a novel benchmarking methodology to facilitate a fair and robust comparison of RecSys algorithms, thereby advancing evaluation practices. By utilizing a diverse set of $30$ open datasets, including two introduced in this work, and evaluating $11$ collaborative filtering algorithms across $9$ metrics, we critically examine the influence of dataset characteristics on algorithm performance. We further investigate the feasibility of aggregating outcomes from multiple datasets into a unified ranking. Through rigorous experimental analysis, we validate the reliability of our methodology under the variability of datasets, offering a benchmarking strategy that balances quality and computational demands. This methodology enables a fair yet effective means of evaluating RecSys algorithms, providing valuable guidance for future research endeavors.

Temporal Graph Network Embedding with Causal Anonymous Walks Representations

Many tasks in graph machine learning, such as link prediction and node classification, are typically solved by using representation learning, in which each node or edge in the network is encoded via an embedding. Though there exists a lot of network embeddings for static graphs, the task becomes much more complicated when the dynamic (i.e. temporal) network is analyzed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for dynamic network representation learning based on Temporal Graph Network by using a highly custom message generating function by extracting Causal Anonymous Walks. For evaluation, we provide a benchmark pipeline for the evaluation of temporal network embeddings. This work provides the first comprehensive comparison framework for temporal network representation learning in every available setting for graph machine learning problems involving node classification and link prediction. The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models. The work also justifies the difference between them based on evaluation in various transductive/inductive edge/node classification tasks. In addition, we show the applicability and superior performance of our model in the real-world downstream graph machine learning task provided by one of the top European banks, involving credit scoring based on transaction data.