COTODE: COntinuous Trajectory neural Ordinary Differential Equations for modelling event sequences

Observation of the underlying actors that generate event sequences reveals that they often evolve continuously. Most modern methods, however, tend to model such processes through at most piecewise-continuous trajectories. To address this, we adopt a way of viewing events not as standalone phenomena but instead as observations of a Gaussian Process, which in turn governs the actor's dynamics. We propose integrating these obtained dynamics, resulting in a continuous-trajectory modification of the widely successful Neural ODE model. Through Gaussian Process theory, we were able to evaluate the uncertainty in an actor's representation, which arises from not observing them between events. This estimate led us to develop a novel, theoretically backed negative feedback mechanism. Empirical studies indicate that our model with Gaussian process interpolation and negative feedback achieves state-of-the-art performance, with improvements up to 20% AUROC against similar architectures.

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\%.