Title: Modeling The Intensity Function Of Point Process Via Recurrent Neural Networks,
Abstract: Event sequence, asynchronously generated with random timestamp, is ubiquitous
among applications. The precise and arbitrary timestamp can carry important
clues about the underlying dynamics, and has lent the event data fundamentally
different from the time-series whereby series is indexed with fixed and equal
time interval. One expressive mathematical tool for modeling event is point
process. The intensity functions of many point processes involve two
components: the background and the effect by the history. Due to its inherent
spontaneousness, the background can be treated as a time series while the other
need to handle the history events. In this paper, we model the background by a
Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with its units aligned with time series indexes
while the history effect is modeled by another RNN whose units are aligned with
asynchronous events to capture the long-range dynamics. The whole model with
event type and timestamp prediction output layers can be trained end-to-end.
Our approach takes an RNN perspective to point process, and models its
background and history effect. For utility, our method allows a black-box
treatment for modeling the intensity which is often a pre-defined parametric
form in point processes. Meanwhile end-to-end training opens the venue for
reusing existing rich techniques in deep network for point process modeling. We
apply our model to the predictive maintenance problem using a log dataset by
more than 1000 ATMs from a global bank headquartered in North America.