2017

Time-Dependent Representation for Neural Event Sequence Prediction

Li, Yang, Du, Nan, Bengio, Samy

Understand

Existing sequence prediction methods are mostly concerned with time-independent sequences, in which the actual time span between events is irrelevant and the distance between events is simply the difference between their order positions in the sequence.

  • While this time-independent view of sequences is applicable for data such as natural languages, e.g., dealing with words in a sentence, it is inappropriate and inefficient for many real world events that are observed and collected at unequally spaced points of time as they naturally arise, e.g., when a person goes to a grocery store or makes a phone call.
  • The time span between events can carry important information about the sequence dependence of human behaviors.
  • In this work, we propose a set of methods for using time in sequence prediction.

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