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Poster

Probabilistic Querying of Continuous-Time Event Sequences

Alex Boyd · Yuxin Chang · Stephan Mandt · Padhraic Smyth

Auditorium 1 Foyer 144

Abstract: Continuous-time event sequences, i.e., sequences consisting of continuous time stamps and associated event types (``marks''), are an important type of sequential data with many applications, e.g., in clinical medicine or user behavior modeling. Since these data are typically modeled in an autoregressive manner (e.g., using neural Hawkes processes or their classical counterparts), it is natural to ask questions about future scenarios such as ``what kind of event will occur next'' or ``will an event of type $A$ occur before one of type $B$.'' Addressing such queries with direct methods such as naive simulation can be highly inefficient from a computational perspective. This paper introduces a new typology of query types and a framework for addressing them using importance sampling. Example queries include predicting the $n^\text{th}$ event type in a sequence and the hitting time distribution of one or more event types. We also leverage these findings further to be applicable for estimating general ``$A$ before $B$'' type of queries. We prove theoretically that our estimation method is effectively always better than naive simulation and demonstrate empirically based on three real-world datasets that our approach can produce orders of magnitude improvements in sampling efficiency compared to naive methods.

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