Hierarchical clustering is an important technique to organize big data for exploratory data analysis. However, existing one-size-fits-all hierarchical clustering methods often fail to meet the diverse needs of different users. To address this challenge, we present an interactive steering method to visually supervise constrained hierarchical clustering by utilizing both public knowledge (e.g., Wikipedia) and private knowledge from users. The novelty of our approach includes 1) automatically constructing constraints for hierarchical clustering using knowledge (knowledge-driven) and intrinsic data distribution (data-driven), and 2) enabling the interactive steering of clustering through a visual interface (user-driven). Our method first maps each data item to the most relevant items in a knowledge base. An initial constraint tree is then extracted using the ant colony optimization algorithm. The algorithm balances the tree width and depth and covers the data items with high confidence. Given the constraint tree, the data items are hierarchically clustered using evolutionary Bayesian rose tree. To clearly convey the hierarchical clustering results, an uncertainty-aware tree visualization has been developed to enable users to quickly locate the most uncertain sub-hierarchies and interactively improve them. The quantitative evaluation and case study demonstrate that the proposed approach facilitates the building of customized clustering trees in an efficient and effective manner.
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
A good clustering can help a data analyst to explore and understand a data set, but what constitutes a good clustering may depend on domain-specific and application-specific criteria. These criteria can be difficult to formalize, even when it is easy for an analyst to know a good clustering when she sees one. We present a new approach to interactive clustering for data exploration, called \ciif, based on a particularly simple feedback mechanism, in which an analyst can choose to reject individual clusters and request new ones. The new clusters should be different from previously rejected clust…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Twitter（推特）
A good clustering can help a data analyst to explore and understand a data set, but what constitutes a good clustering may depend on domain-specific and application-specific criteria. These criteria can be difficult to formalize, even when it is easy for an analyst to know a good clustering when they see one. We present a new approach to interactive clustering for data exploration called TINDER, based on a particularly simple feedback mechanism, in which an analyst can reject a given clustering and request a new one, which is chosen to be different from the previous clustering while fitting th…
Clustering is a powerful tool in data analysis, but it is often difficult to find a grouping that aligns with a user's needs. To address this, several methods incorporate constraints obtained from users into clustering algorithms, but unfortunately do not apply to hierarchical clustering. We design an interactive Bayesian algorithm that incorporates user interaction into hierarchical clustering while still utilizing the geometry of the data by sampling a constrained posterior distribution over hierarchies. We also suggest several ways to intelligently query a user. The algorithm, along with th…
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT（赫尔辛基信息技术研究所 HIIT）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
A central concern in an interactive intelligent system is optimization of its actions, to be maximally helpful to its human user. In recommender systems for instance, the action is to choose what to recommend, and the optimization task is to recommend items the user prefers. The optimization is done based on earlier user's feedback (e.g. "likes" and "dislikes"), and the algorithms assume the feedback to be faithful. That is, when the user clicks "like," they actually prefer the item. We argue that this fundamental assumption can be extensively violated by human users, who are not passive feedb…
We study the design of interactive clustering algorithms for data sets satisfying natural stability assumptions. Our algorithms start with any initial clustering and only make local changes in each step; both are desirable features in many applications. We show that in this constrained setting one can still design provably efficient algorithms that produce accurate clusterings. We also show that our algorithms perform well on real-world data.
The level set tree approach of Hartigan (1975) provides a probabilistically based and highly interpretable encoding of the clustering behavior of a dataset. By representing the hierarchy of data modes as a dendrogram of the level sets of a density estimator, this approach offers many advantages for exploratory analysis and clustering, especially for complex and high-dimensional data. Several R packages exist for level set tree estimation, but their practical usefulness is limited by computational inefficiency, absence of interactive graphical capabilities and, from a theoretical perspective, r…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Scientists in many fields have the common and basic need of dimensionality reduction: visualizing the underlying structure of the massive multivariate data in a low-dimensional space. However, many dimensionality reduction methods confront the so-called "crowding problem" that clusters tend to overlap with each other in the embedding. Previously, researchers expect to avoid that problem and seek to make clusters maximally separated in the embedding. However, the proposed in-tree (IT) based method, called IT-map, allows clusters in the embedding to be locally overlapped, while seeking to make t…
Context Steering: A New Paradigm for Compression-based Embeddings by Synthesizing Relevant Information Features
Grupo de Neurocomputación Biológica（生物神经计算小组）；Departamento de Ingeniería Informática（信息工程系）；Escuela Politécnica Superior（高级技术学院）；Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）
Finite element model updating is challenging because 1) the problem is oftentimes underdetermined while the measurements are limited and/or incomplete; 2) many combinations of parameters may yield responses that are similar with respect to actual measurements; and 3) uncertainties inevitably exist. The aim of this research is to leverage upon computational intelligence through statistical inference to facilitate an enhanced, probabilistic finite element model updating using incomplete modal response measurement. This new framework is built upon efficient inverse identification through optimiza…
Faculty of Education, Qufu Normal University（曲阜师范大学教育学院）；School of Computer Science, Qufu Normal University（曲阜师范大学计算机学院）；Chinese Academy of Education Big Data, Qufu Normal University（曲阜师范大学中国教育大数据研究院）
Group tendency is a research branch of computer assisted learning. The construction of good learning behavior is of great significance to learners' learning process and learning effect, and is the key basis of data-driven education decision-making. Clustering analysis is an effective method for the study of group tendency. Therefore, it is necessary to obtain the online learning behavior big data set of multi period and multi course, and describe the learning behavior as multi-dimensional learning interaction activities. First of all, on the basis of data initialization and standardization, we…
the University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
Iterative clustering algorithms help us to learn the insights behind the data. Unfortunately, this may allow adversaries to infer the privacy of individuals with some background knowledge. In the worst case, the adversaries know the centroids of an arbitrary iteration and the information of n-1 out of n items. To protect individual privacy against such an inference attack, preserving differential privacy (DP) for the iterative clustering algorithms has been extensively studied in the interactive settings. However, existing interactive differentially private clustering algorithms suffer from a …
Deep Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) continues to find success in predictive decision-making with temporal event sequences. Recent studies have shown the importance and practicality of visual analytics in interpreting deep learning models for real-world applications. However, very limited work enables interactions with deep learning models and guides practitioners to form hypotheticals towards the desired prediction outcomes, especially for sequence prediction. Specifically, no existing work has addressed the what-if analysis and value perturbation along different time-steps for sequence outco…
We propose a framework for interactive and explainable machine learning that enables users to (1) understand machine learning models; (2) diagnose model limitations using different explainable AI methods; as well as (3) refine and optimize the models. Our framework combines an iterative XAI pipeline with eight global monitoring and steering mechanisms, including quality monitoring, provenance tracking, model comparison, and trust building. To operationalize the framework, we present explAIner, a visual analytics system for interactive and explainable machine learning that instantiates all phas…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Fitnescity Labs（Fitnescity实验室）
Data clustering is a common unsupervised learning method frequently used in exploratory data analysis. However, identifying relevant structures in unlabeled, high-dimensional data is nontrivial, requiring iterative experimentation with clustering parameters as well as data features and instances. The number of possible clusterings for a typical dataset is vast, and navigating in this vast space is also challenging. The absence of ground-truth labels makes it impossible to define an optimal solution, thus requiring user judgment to establish what can be considered a satisfiable clustering resul…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计学院）
Mean shift is a simple interactive procedure that gradually shifts data points towards the mode which denotes the highest density of data points in the region. Mean shift algorithms have been effectively used for data denoising, mode seeking, and finding the number of clusters in a dataset in an automated fashion. However, the merits of mean shift quickly fade away as the data dimensions increase and only a handful of features contain useful information about the cluster structure of the data. We propose a simple yet elegant feature-weighted variant of mean shift to efficiently learn the featu…
We propose a general framework for interactively learning models, such as (binary or non-binary) classifiers, orderings/rankings of items, or clusterings of data points. Our framework is based on a generalization of Angluin's equivalence query model and Littlestone's online learning model: in each iteration, the algorithm proposes a model, and the user either accepts it or reveals a specific mistake in the proposal. The feedback is correct only with probability $p > 1/2$ (and adversarially incorrect with probability $1 - p$), i.e., the algorithm must be able to learn in the presence of arbitra…
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）；Korea University（高丽大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Chung-Ang University（中央大学）；Catholic University of Daegu（大邱天主教大学）
We have recently seen many successful applications of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) on electronic medical records (EMRs), which contain histories of patients' diagnoses, medications, and other various events, in order to predict the current and future states of patients. Despite the strong performance of RNNs, it is often challenging for users to understand why the model makes a particular prediction. Such black-box nature of RNNs can impede its wide adoption in clinical practice. Furthermore, we have no established methods to interactively leverage users' domain expertise and prior knowled…
Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven（比利时鲁汶大学计算机科学系）
Constraint-based clustering algorithms exploit background knowledge to construct clusterings that are aligned with the interests of a particular user. This background knowledge is often obtained by allowing the clustering system to pose pairwise queries to the user: should these two elements be in the same cluster or not? Active clustering methods aim to minimize the number of queries needed to obtain a good clustering by querying the most informative pairs first. Ideally, a user should be able to answer a couple of these queries, inspect the resulting clustering, and repeat these two steps un…
Prismatic: Interactive Multi-View Cluster Analysis of Concept Stocks
HKUST（香港科技大学）；Sinovation Ventures；State Key Lab of CAD&CG and Laboratory of Art and Archaeology Image, Zhejiang University（浙江大学CAD与计算机图形学国家重点实验室和艺术与考古图像实验室）
Semi-supervised active clustering (SSAC) utilizes the knowledge of a domain expert to cluster data points by interactively making pairwise "same-cluster" queries. However, it is impractical to ask human oracles to answer every pairwise query. In this paper, we study the influence of allowing "not-sure" answers from a weak oracle and propose algorithms to efficiently handle uncertainties. Different types of model assumptions are analyzed to cover realistic scenarios of oracle abstraction. In the first model, random-weak oracle, an oracle randomly abstains with a certain probability. We also pro…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been introduced to interactive recommender systems (IRS) because of its nature of learning from dynamic interactions and planning for long-run performance. As IRS is always with thousands of items to recommend (i.e., thousands of actions), most existing RL-based methods, however, fail to handle such a large discrete action space problem and thus become inefficient. The existing work that tries to deal with the large discrete action space problem by utilizing the deep deterministic policy gradient framework suffers from the inconsistency between the cont…
Graphint: Graph-based Time Series Clustering Visualisation Tool
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；ENS（巴黎高等师范学院）；PSL（巴黎文理研究大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Università di Modena（摩德纳大学）；Lyon 1 University（里昂第一大学）；IUF（法国大学研究院）；Université Paris Cité（巴黎西岱大学）
Dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques are frequently used to analyze complex data sets, but their results are often not easy to interpret. We consider how to support users in interpreting apparent cluster structure on scatter plots where the axes are not directly interpretable, such as when the data is projected onto a two-dimensional space using a dimensionality-reduction method. Specifically, we propose a new method to compute an interpretable clustering automatically, where the explanation is in the original high-dimensional space and the clustering is coherent in the low-dimen…
With the continuous development of machine learning technology, major e-commerce platforms have launched recommendation systems based on it to serve a large number of customers with different needs more efficiently. Compared with traditional supervised learning, reinforcement learning can better capture the user's state transition in the decision-making process, and consider a series of user actions, not just the static characteristics of the user at a certain moment. In theory, it will have a long-term perspective, producing a more effective recommendation. The special requirements of reinfor…
While traditional research on text clustering has largely focused on grouping documents by topic, it is conceivable that a user may want to cluster documents along other dimensions, such as the authors mood, gender, age, or sentiment. Without knowing the users intention, a clustering algorithm will only group documents along the most prominent dimension, which may not be the one the user desires. To address the problem of clustering documents along the user-desired dimension, previous work has focused on learning a similarity metric from data manually annotated with the users intention or havi…
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
Machine Learning (ML) has been widely used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. A fundamental assumption in ML is that training data and real-world data should follow a similar distribution. However, a deployed ML model may suffer from out-of-distribution (OOD) issues due to distribution shifts in the real-world data. Though many algorithms have been proposed to detect OOD data from text corpora, there is still a lack of interactive tool support for ML developers. In this work, we propose DeepLens, an interactive system that helps users detect and explore OOD issues in massive te…
Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms（蒙特利尔学习算法研究所）
Concept discovery is one of the open problems in the interpretability literature that is important for bridging the gap between non-deep learning experts and model end-users. Among current formulations, concepts defines them by as a direction in a learned representation space. This definition makes it possible to evaluate whether a particular concept significantly influences classification decisions for classes of interest. However, finding relevant concepts is tedious, as representation spaces are high-dimensional and hard to navigate. Current approaches include hand-crafting concept datasets…
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India（印度理工学院甘地纳加尔分校）
In today's data-driven world, the sensitivity of information has been a significant concern. With this data and additional information on the person's background, one can easily infer an individual's private data. Many differentially private iterative algorithms have been proposed in interactive settings to protect an individual's privacy from these inference attacks. The existing approaches adapt the method to compute differentially private(DP) centroids by iterative Llyod's algorithm and perturbing the centroid with various DP mechanisms. These DP mechanisms do not guarantee convergence of d…
A clustering is an implicit assignment of labels of points, based on proximity to other points. It is these labels that are then used for downstream analysis (either focusing on individual clusters, or identifying representatives of clusters and so on). Thus, in order to trust a clustering as a first step in exploratory data analysis, we must trust the labels assigned to individual data. Without supervision, how can we validate this assignment? In this paper, we present a method to attach affinity scores to the implicit labels of individual points in a clustering. The affinity scores capture t…
