Sort:
Open Access Issue
Survey on foundations and research progress of big data knowledge fusion
Journal of National University of Defense Technology 2026, 48(2): 296-310
Published: 01 April 2026
Abstract PDF (2.7 MB) Collect
Downloads:6
Significance

In the contemporary era of big data intelligence, knowledge has evolved into the fundamental driving force behind technological development and innovation. However, the sheer volume of data generated today is often fragmented, multi-source, and heterogeneous, existing in isolated silos that limit its utility. The primary significance of big data knowledge fusion lies in its ability to bridge these gaps. By systematically associating and integrating these fragmented data points, knowledge fusion constructs a unified, comprehensive knowledge system. This process is not merely a technical exercise in data aggregation; it serves as a critical support mechanism for enhancing knowledge completeness. Without effective fusion, AI systems operate on partial truths. By unifying data, it enables a transition from simple information processing to advanced cognitive intelligence. This allows machines not just to perceive data, but to understand relationships, reason through complexities, and maintain a holistic view of the world. Consequently, knowledge fusion acts as the bedrock for the next generation of intelligent systems, ensuring that decision-making is based on a reliable, cohesive, and complete representation of reality.

Progress

The research landscape of knowledge fusion has advanced significantly, evolving from basic methodologies to complex, high-dimensional integration suitable for the big data era. This progress can be categorized into foundational links and emerging frontiers:

1. Foundational Links (CLASSIC METHods):

The systematic review identifies three core pillars that constitute the traditional framework of knowledge fusion:

Knowledge Representation Learning: This involves transforming symbolic knowledge into computable vector spaces, allowing machines to process complex relationships mathematically.

Knowledge Alignment Matching: This link focuses on identifying and linking equivalent entities or concepts across different, disparate datasets.

Knowledge Conflict Resolution: When multi-source data disagrees (e.g., conflicting birth dates for the same person), this process utilizes truth discovery algorithms to resolve contradictions and ensure the veracity of the fused knowledge.

2. New Progress in the Context of Big Data:

Beyond these basics, the field has made deep explorations into frontier directions to handle the complexity of modern data:

Temporal Knowledge Fusion: Recognizing that facts change over time, recent research focuses on incorporating time-series data to capture the evolution of knowledge, rather than treating it as static.

Cross-Modal Knowledge Fusion: With the rise of multimedia data, progress has been made in fusing text, images, and video, breaking down the barriers between different sensory modalities to create a comprehensive understanding.

LLMs (large language models) Knowledge Fusion: Leveraging the generative and reasoning capabilities of LLMs (like GPT series), researchers are developing new methods to automate knowledge extraction and integration, utilizing the parametric knowledge embedded within these massive models.

Conclusions and Prospects

The panoramic review provides a crucial roadmap for the theoretical expansion and technological evolution of big data knowledge fusion. It concludes that while traditional methods provide a necessary scaffolding, the future of the field requires addressing increasingly complex, dynamic, and abstract challenges.

Looking forward, two primary research trends highlight the future direction of the field:

The Fusion of Symbolic and Parametric Knowledge: This represents the convergence of explicit, structured knowledge (Knowledge Graphs) with the implicit, probabilistic knowledge found in deep neural networks (LLMs). This hybrid approach aims to combine the interpretability and accuracy of symbolic systems with the generalization and flexibility of parametric models, effectively bridging the gap between "logical" and "intuitive" AI.

Cross-Modal Temporal Knowledge Fusion: Future research will likely focus on the intersection of modality and time. It is no longer sufficient to fuse static images and text; systems must understand how multi-modal relationships evolve dynamically. This is essential for applications like digital twins and autonomous agents that must navigate a changing, multi-sensory world.

In summary, the field is moving toward a more integrated, dynamic, and cognitive-aware methodology, providing the essential guidance needed to build the intelligent infrastructures of the future.

Open Access Issue
Discovering Association Rules with Graph Patterns in Temporal Networks
Tsinghua Science and Technology 2023, 28(2): 344-359
Published: 29 September 2022
Abstract PDF (1.7 MB) Collect
Downloads:122

Discovering regularities between entities in temporal graphs is vital for many real-world applications (e.g., social recommendation, emergency event detection, and cyberattack event detection). This paper proposes temporal graph association rules (TGARs) that extend traditional graph-pattern association rules in a static graph by incorporating the unique temporal information and constraints. We introduce quality measures (e.g., support, confidence, and diversification) to characterize meaningful TGARs that are useful and diversified. In addition, the proposed support metric is an upper bound for alternative metrics, allowing us to guarantee a superset of patterns. We extend conventional confidence measures in terms of maximal occurrences of TGARs. The diversification score strikes a balance between interestingness and diversity. Although the problem is NP-hard, we develop an effective discovery algorithm for TGARs that integrates TGARs generation and TGARs selection and shows that mining TGARs is feasible over a temporal graph. We propose pruning strategies to filter TGARs that have low support or cannot make top- k as early as possible. Moreover, we design an auxiliary data structure to prune the TGARs that do not meet the constraints during the TGARs generation process to avoid conducting repeated subgraph matching for each extension in the search space. We experimentally verify the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of our algorithms in discovering diversified top- k TGARs from temporal graphs in real-life applications.

Regular Paper Issue
Item Cold-Start Recommendation with Personalized Feature Selection
Journal of Computer Science and Technology 2020, 35(5): 1217-1230
Published: 30 September 2020
Abstract Collect

The problem of recommending new items to users (often referred to as item cold-start recommendation) remains a challenge due to the absence of users’ past preferences for these items. Item features from side information are typically leveraged to tackle the problem. Existing methods formulate regression methods, taking item features as input and user ratings as output. These methods are confronted with the issue of overfitting when item features are high-dimensional, which greatly impedes the recommendation experience. Availing of high-dimensional item features, in this work, we opt for feature selection to solve the problem of recommending top-N new items. Existing feature selection methods find a common set of features for all users, which fails to differentiate users’ preferences over item features. To personalize feature selection, we propose to select item features discriminately for different users. We study the personalization of feature selection at the level of the user or user group. We fulfill the task by proposing two embedded feature selection models. The process of personalized feature selection filters out the dimensions that are irrelevant to recommendations or unappealing to users. Experimental results on real-life datasets with high-dimensional side information reveal that the proposed method is effective in singling out features that are crucial to top-N recommendation and hence improving performance.

Open Access Issue
Course Drop-out Prediction on MOOC Platform via Clustering and Tensor Completion
Tsinghua Science and Technology 2019, 24(4): 412-422
Published: 07 March 2019
Abstract PDF (3.8 MB) Collect
Downloads:54

As a supplement to traditional education, online courses offer people, regardless of their age, gender, or profession, the chance to access state-of-the-art knowledge. Nonetheless, despite the large number of students who choose to begin online courses, it is easy to observe that quite a few of them drop out in the middle, and information on this is vital for course organizers to improve their curriculum outlines. In this work, in order to make a precise prediction of the drop-out rate, we propose a combined method MOOP, which consists of a global tensor and local tensor to express all available feature aspects. Specifically, the global tensor structure is proposed to model the data of the online courses, while a local tensor is clustered to capture the inner connection of courses. Consequently, drop-out prediction is achieved by adopting a high-accuracy low-rank tensor completion method, equipped with a pigeon-inspired algorithm to optimize the parameters. The proposed method is empirically evaluated on real-world Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) data, and is demonstrated to offer remarkable superiority over alternatives in terms of efficiency and accuracy.

Total 4