MTSCI: A Conditional Diffusion Model for Multivariate Time Series Consistent Imputation

Missing values are prevalent in multivariate time series, compromising the integrity of analyses and degrading the performance of downstream tasks. Consequently, research has focused on multivariate time series imputation, aiming to accurately impute the missing values based on available observations. A key research question is how to ensure imputation consistency, i.e., intra-consistency between observed and imputed values, and inter-consistency between adjacent windows after imputation. However, previous methods rely solely on the inductive bias of the imputation targets to guide the learning process, ignoring imputation consistency and ultimately resulting in poor performance. Diffusion models, known for their powerful generative abilities, prefer to generate consistent results based on available observations. Therefore, we propose a conditional diffusion model for Multivariate Time Series Consistent Imputation (MTSCI). Specifically, MTSCI employs a contrastive complementary mask to generate dual views during the forward noising process. Then, the intra contrastive loss is calculated to ensure intra-consistency between the imputed and observed values. Meanwhile, MTSCI utilizes a mixup mechanism to incorporate conditional information from adjacent windows during the denoising process, facilitating the inter-consistency between imputed samples. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on multivariate time series imputation task under different missing scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/JeremyChou28/MTSCI.

C-Mamba: Channel Correlation Enhanced State Space Models for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

In recent years, significant progress has been made in multivariate time series forecasting using Linear-based, Transformer-based, and Convolution-based models. However, these approaches face notable limitations: linear forecasters struggle with representation capacities, attention mechanisms suffer from quadratic complexity, and convolutional models have a restricted receptive field. These constraints impede their effectiveness in modeling complex time series, particularly those with numerous variables. Additionally, many models adopt the Channel-Independent (CI) strategy, treating multivariate time series as uncorrelated univariate series while ignoring their correlations. For models considering inter-channel relationships, whether through the self-attention mechanism, linear combination, or convolution, they all incur high computational costs and focus solely on weighted summation relationships, neglecting potential proportional relationships between channels. In this work, we address these issues by leveraging the newly introduced state space model and propose \textbf{C-Mamba}, a novel approach that captures cross-channel dependencies while maintaining linear complexity without losing the global receptive field. Our model consists of two key components: (i) channel mixup, where two channels are mixed to enhance the training sets; (ii) channel attention enhanced patch-wise Mamba encoder that leverages the ability of the state space models to capture cross-time dependencies and models correlations between channels by mining their weight relationships. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on seven real-world time series datasets. Moreover, the proposed mixup and attention strategy exhibits strong generalizability across other frameworks.

Frequency Enhanced Pre-training for Cross-city Few-shot Traffic Forecasting

The field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) relies on accurate traffic forecasting to enable various downstream applications. However, developing cities often face challenges in collecting sufficient training traffic data due to limited resources and outdated infrastructure. Recognizing this obstacle, the concept of cross-city few-shot forecasting has emerged as a viable approach. While previous cross-city few-shot forecasting methods ignore the frequency similarity between cities, we have made an observation that the traffic data is more similar in the frequency domain between cities. Based on this fact, we propose a \textbf{F}requency \textbf{E}nhanced \textbf{P}re-training Framework for \textbf{Cross}-city Few-shot Forecasting (\textbf{FEPCross}). FEPCross has a pre-training stage and a fine-tuning stage. In the pre-training stage, we propose a novel Cross-Domain Spatial-Temporal Encoder that incorporates the information of the time and frequency domain and trains it with self-supervised tasks encompassing reconstruction and contrastive objectives. In the fine-tuning stage, we design modules to enrich training samples and maintain a momentum-updated graph structure, thereby mitigating the risk of overfitting to the few-shot training data. Empirical evaluations performed on real-world traffic datasets validate the exceptional efficacy of FEPCross, outperforming existing approaches of diverse categories and demonstrating characteristics that foster the progress of cross-city few-shot forecasting.

MagiNet: Mask-Aware Graph Imputation Network for Incomplete Traffic Data

Due to detector malfunctions and communication failures, missing data is ubiquitous during the collection of traffic data. Therefore, it is of vital importance to impute the missing values to facilitate data analysis and decision-making for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). However, existing imputation methods generally perform zero pre-filling techniques to initialize missing values, introducing inevitable noises. Moreover, we observe prevalent over-smoothing interpolations, falling short in revealing the intrinsic spatio-temporal correlations of incomplete traffic data. To this end, we propose Mask-Aware Graph imputation Network: MagiNet. Our method designs an adaptive mask spatio-temporal encoder to learn the latent representations of incomplete data, eliminating the reliance on pre-filling missing values. Furthermore, we devise a spatio-temporal decoder that stacks multiple blocks to capture the inherent spatial and temporal dependencies within incomplete traffic data, alleviating over-smoothing imputation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art imputation methods on five real-world traffic datasets, yielding an average improvement of 4.31% in RMSE and 3.72% in MAPE.

CondTSF: One-line Plugin of Dataset Condensation for Time Series Forecasting

Dataset condensation is a newborn technique that generates a small dataset that can be used in training deep neural networks to lower training costs. The objective of dataset condensation is to ensure that the model trained with the synthetic dataset can perform comparably to the model trained with full datasets. However, existing methods predominantly concentrate on classification tasks, posing challenges in their adaptation to time series forecasting (TS-forecasting). This challenge arises from disparities in the evaluation of synthetic data. In classification, the synthetic data is considered well-distilled if the model trained with the full dataset and the model trained with the synthetic dataset yield identical labels for the same input, regardless of variations in output logits distribution. Conversely, in TS-forecasting, the effectiveness of synthetic data distillation is determined by the distance between predictions of the two models. The synthetic data is deemed well-distilled only when all data points within the predictions are similar. Consequently, TS-forecasting has a more rigorous evaluation methodology compared to classification. To mitigate this gap, we theoretically analyze the optimization objective of dataset condensation for TS-forecasting and propose a new one-line plugin of dataset condensation designated as Dataset Condensation for Time Series Forecasting (CondTSF) based on our analysis. Plugging CondTSF into previous dataset condensation methods facilitates a reduction in the distance between the predictions of the model trained with the full dataset and the model trained with the synthetic dataset, thereby enhancing performance. We conduct extensive experiments on eight commonly used time series datasets. CondTSF consistently improves the performance of all previous dataset condensation methods across all datasets, particularly at low condensing ratios.

Dual-Channel Multiplex Graph Neural Networks for Recommendation

Efficient recommender systems play a crucial role in accurately capturing user and item attributes that mirror individual preferences. Some existing recommendation techniques have started to shift their focus towards modeling various types of interaction relations between users and items in real-world recommendation scenarios, such as clicks, marking favorites, and purchases on online shopping platforms. Nevertheless, these approaches still grapple with two significant shortcomings: (1) Insufficient modeling and exploitation of the impact of various behavior patterns formed by multiplex relations between users and items on representation learning, and (2) ignoring the effect of different relations in the behavior patterns on the target relation in recommender system scenarios. In this study, we introduce a novel recommendation framework, Dual-Channel Multiplex Graph Neural Network (DCMGNN), which addresses the aforementioned challenges. It incorporates an explicit behavior pattern representation learner to capture the behavior patterns composed of multiplex user-item interaction relations, and includes a relation chain representation learning and a relation chain-aware encoder to discover the impact of various auxiliary relations on the target relation, the dependencies between different relations, and mine the appropriate order of relations in a behavior pattern. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our \model surpasses various state-of-the-art recommendation methods. It outperforms the best baselines by 10.06\% and 12.15\% on average across all datasets in terms of R@10 and N@10 respectively.

Dataset Condensation for Time Series Classification via Dual Domain Matching

Time series data has been demonstrated to be crucial in various research fields. The management of large quantities of time series data presents challenges in terms of deep learning tasks, particularly for training a deep neural network. Recently, a technique named \textit{Dataset Condensation} has emerged as a solution to this problem. This technique generates a smaller synthetic dataset that has comparable performance to the full real dataset in downstream tasks such as classification. However, previous methods are primarily designed for image and graph datasets, and directly adapting them to the time series dataset leads to suboptimal performance due to their inability to effectively leverage the rich information inherent in time series data, particularly in the frequency domain. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Dataset \textit{\textbf{Cond}}ensation for \textit{\textbf{T}}ime \textit{\textbf{S}}eries \textit{\textbf{C}}lassification via Dual Domain Matching (\textbf{CondTSC}) which focuses on the time series classification dataset condensation task. Different from previous methods, our proposed framework aims to generate a condensed dataset that matches the surrogate objectives in both the time and frequency domains. Specifically, CondTSC incorporates multi-view data augmentation, dual domain training, and dual surrogate objectives to enhance the dataset condensation process in the time and frequency domains. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which outperforms other baselines and learns a condensed synthetic dataset that exhibits desirable characteristics such as conforming to the distribution of the original data.

Graph Data Condensation via Self-expressive Graph Structure Reconstruction

With the increasing demands of training graph neural networks (GNNs) on large-scale graphs, graph data condensation has emerged as a critical technique to relieve the storage and time costs during the training phase. It aims to condense the original large-scale graph to a much smaller synthetic graph while preserving the essential information necessary for efficiently training a downstream GNN. However, existing methods concentrate either on optimizing node features exclusively or endeavor to independently learn node features and the graph structure generator. They could not explicitly leverage the information of the original graph structure and failed to construct an interpretable graph structure for the synthetic dataset. To address these issues, we introduce a novel framework named \textbf{G}raph Data \textbf{C}ondensation via \textbf{S}elf-expressive Graph Structure \textbf{R}econstruction (\textbf{GCSR}). Our method stands out by (1) explicitly incorporating the original graph structure into the condensing process and (2) capturing the nuanced interdependencies between the condensed nodes by reconstructing an interpretable self-expressive graph structure. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis validate the efficacy of the proposed method across diverse GNN models and datasets. Our code is available at https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2aonyp5ln5gisdqtjimu8/GCSR.zip?rlkey=11cuwfpsf54wxiiktu0klud0x&dl=0

AceMap: Knowledge Discovery through Academic Graph

The exponential growth of scientific literature requires effective management and extraction of valuable insights. While existing scientific search engines excel at delivering search results based on relational databases, they often neglect the analysis of collaborations between scientific entities and the evolution of ideas, as well as the in-depth analysis of content within scientific publications. The representation of heterogeneous graphs and the effective measurement, analysis, and mining of such graphs pose significant challenges. To address these challenges, we present AceMap, an academic system designed for knowledge discovery through academic graph. We present advanced database construction techniques to build the comprehensive AceMap database with large-scale academic publications that contain rich visual, textual, and numerical information. AceMap also employs innovative visualization, quantification, and analysis methods to explore associations and logical relationships among academic entities. AceMap introduces large-scale academic network visualization techniques centered on nebular graphs, providing a comprehensive view of academic networks from multiple perspectives. In addition, AceMap proposes a unified metric based on structural entropy to quantitatively measure the knowledge content of different academic entities. Moreover, AceMap provides advanced analysis capabilities, including tracing the evolution of academic ideas through citation relationships and concept co-occurrence, and generating concise summaries informed by this evolutionary process. In addition, AceMap uses machine reading methods to generate potential new ideas at the intersection of different fields. Exploring the integration of large language models and knowledge graphs is a promising direction for future research in idea evolution. Please visit \url{https://www.acemap.info} for further exploration.

Multi-scale Traffic Pattern Bank for Cross-city Few-shot Traffic Forecasting

Traffic forecasting is crucial for intelligent transportation systems (ITS), aiding in efficient resource allocation and effective traffic control. However, its effectiveness often relies heavily on abundant traffic data, while many cities lack sufficient data due to limited device support, posing a significant challenge for traffic forecasting. Recognizing this challenge, we have made a noteworthy observation: traffic patterns exhibit similarities across diverse cities. Building on this key insight, we propose a solution for the cross-city few-shot traffic forecasting problem called Multi-scale Traffic Pattern Bank (MTPB). Primarily, MTPB initiates its learning process by leveraging data-rich source cities, effectively acquiring comprehensive traffic knowledge through a spatial-temporal-aware pre-training process. Subsequently, the framework employs advanced clustering techniques to systematically generate a multi-scale traffic pattern bank derived from the learned knowledge. Next, the traffic data of the data-scarce target city could query the traffic pattern bank, facilitating the aggregation of meta-knowledge. This meta-knowledge, in turn, assumes a pivotal role as a robust guide in subsequent processes involving graph reconstruction and forecasting. Empirical assessments conducted on real-world traffic datasets affirm the superior performance of MTPB, surpassing existing methods across various categories and exhibiting numerous attributes conducive to the advancement of cross-city few-shot forecasting methodologies. The code is available in https://github.com/zhyliu00/MTPB.