Statistical Machine Learning and Exploratory Data Analysis research group (SMiLE)

The SMiLE research group researches advanced statistical (probabilistic) machine learning methods for data analysis, especially methods for learning from multiple sources of data and methods for interactive analysis including nonlinear dimensionality reduction and visualization of high-dimensional data. Application areas include bioinformatics, telecommunications, intelligent information access, and information retrieval.

Group Members

Jaakko Peltonen
professor, group leader 		Jyrki Nummenmaa
professor 		Kalervo Järvelin
professor 		Timo Nummenmaa
senior research fellow 		Md. Hijbul Alam
postdoctoral researcher 		Ranganath B. N.
postdoctoral researcher
Ziyuan Lin
doctoral student1 		Chien Lu
doctoral student 		Alessio Moro
doctoral student (joint supervision) 		Jonathan Strahl
doctoral student1 (joint supervision) 		Wen Xu
doctoral student (joint supervision)
Kalle Aaltonen
master's thesis researcher 		Mika Mahosenaho
master's thesis researcher

Co-affiliates through joint projects:
Mykola Andrushchenko
doctoral student (joint supervision) 		Joonas Kauppinen
doctoral student (joint supervision) 		Olli Kuparinen
postdoctoral researcher2 		Essi Syrjälä
doctoral student3 (joint supervision) 		Elizaveta Zimina
doctoral student4 (joint supervision)
1also affiliated with Probabilistic Machine Learning group at Aalto University, Department of Computer Science
2affiliated with Tampere University, Faculty of Communication Sciences
3affiliated with Tampere University, Faculty of Social Sciences
4affiliated with Tampere University, Research Center for Information and Systems

Alumni:

  • Trung Hieu Nguyen, postdoctoral researcher
  • Gong Jin, master's thesis researcher
  • Akewak Jeba, research assistant

Recent Publications

  1. Chien Lu, Elina Koskinen, Dale Leorke, Timo Nummenmaa, and Jaakko Peltonen. The World Is Your Playground: A Bibliometric and Text Mining Analysis of Location-Based Game Research. In Proceedings of ArtsIT 2020, 9th EAI International Conference: ArtsIT, Interactivity & Game Creation, accepted for publication, 2020.

  2. Benoît Colange, Jaakko Peltonen, Michaël Aupetit, Denys Dutykh, and Sylvain Lespinats. Steering Distortions to Preserve Classes and Neighbors in Supervised Dimensionality Reduction. In Proceedings of NeurIPS 2020, Thirty-fourth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, accepted for publication, 2020.

  3. Chien Lu, Jaakko Peltonen, Jyrki Nummenmaa, and Kalervo Järvelin. Probabilistic Dynamic Non-negative Group Factor Model for Multi-source Text Mining. In Proceedings of CIKM 2020, 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, accepted for publication, 2020.

  4. Chien Lu, Xiaozhou Lu, Timo Nummenmaa, Zheying Zhang, and Jaakko Peltonen. Patches and Player Community Perceptions: Analysis of No Man's Sky Steam Reviews. In DiGRA 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere, DiGRA, 2020. (final paper on publisher webpages)

  5. Chien Lu, Jaakko Peltonen, Timo Nummenmaa, Xiaozhou Li, and Zheying Zhang. What Makes a Trophy Hunter: An Empirical Analysis of Reddit Discussions. In Jonna Koivisto, Mila Bujií, and Juho Hamari, editors, Proceedings of GamiFIN 2020, 4th International GamiFIN conference, pages 146-156, CEUR-WS, 2020. (preprint pdf, final open access article on publisher webpages)

  6. Katariina Koivusaari, Essi Syrjälä, Sari Niinistö, Hanna-Mari Takkinen, Suvi Ahonen, Mari Âkerlund, Tuuli E. Korhonen, Jorma Toppari, Jorma Ilonen, Jaakko Peltonen, Jaakko Nevalainen, Mikael Knip, Tapani Alatossava, Riitta Veijola, and Suvi M. Virtanen. Consumption of differently processed milk products in infancy and early childhood and the risk of islet autoimmunity. British Journal of Nutrition, February 2020, pages 1-17, 2020. (final article on publisher webpages)

  7. Chien Lu and Jaakko Peltonen. Enhancing Nearest Neighbor Based Entropy Estimator for High Dimensional Distributions vis Bootstrapping Local Ellipsoid. In Proceedings of AAAI-20, Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 34 no. 4), pages 5013-5020, AAAI, 2020. (preprint pdf, final article on publisher webpages)

  8. Jonathan Strahl, Jaakko Peltonen, Hiroshi Mamitsuka, and Samuel Kaski. Scalable Probabilistic Matrix Factorization with Graph-Based Priors. In Proceedings of AAAI-20, Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 34 no. 4), pages 5851-5858, AAAI, 2020. (preprint article in ArXiv, final article on publisher webpages)

  9. Miikka Lehtonen, Chien Lu, Timo Nummenmaa, and Jaakko Peltonen. Adoption of requirements engineering methods in game development: A literature and postmortem analysis. In proceedings of ArtsIT 2019, 8th EAI International Conference: ArtsIT, Interactivity & Game Creation, pages 436-457, Springer, 2019. (final article on publisher webpages)

  10. Mika Vanhala, Chien Lu, Jaakko Peltonen, Sanna Sundqvist, Jyrki Nummenmaa, and Kalervo Järvelin. The Usage of Large Data Sets in Consumer Online Behaviour: A Bibliometric and Computational Text-mining-driven Analysis of Previous Research. Journal of Business Research, 106:46-59, January 2020. (final article on publisher webpages)

  11. Olli Kuparinen, Liisa Mustanoja, Jaakko Peltonen, Jenni Santaharju, and Unni-Päivä Leino. Muutosmallit Helsingin puhekielessä. Sananjalka, 61(61):30-56, 2019. (final article on publisher webpages)

  12. Soeren Nickel, Max Sondag, Wouter Meulemans, Markus Chimani, Stephen Kobourov, Jaakko Peltonen, and Martin Nöllenburg. Computing Stable Demers Cartograms. In proceedings of GD 2019, the 27th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization, pages 46-60, Springer, 2019. (preprint article in ArXiv, final article on publisher webpages)

  13. Chien Lu, Jaakko Peltonen and Timo Nummenmaa. Game Postmortems vs. Developer Reddit AMAs: Computational Analysis of Developer Communication. In proceedings of FDG 2019, International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, article 22, pages 1-7, ACM, 2019. (preprint pdf, final article on publisher webpages)

  14. Essi Syrjälä, Jaakko Nevalainen, Jaakko Peltonen, Hanna-Mari Takkinen, Leena Hakola, Mari Âkerlund, Riitta Veijola, Jorma Ilonen, Jorma Toppari, Mikael Knip, and Suvi M. Virtanen. A Joint Modeling Approach for Childhood Meat, Fish and Egg Consumption and the Risk of Advanced Islet Autoimmunity. Scientific Reports, 9, Article number 7760, 2019. (final open access article on publisher webpages)

  15. Xiaozhou Li, Chien Lu, Jaakko Peltonen, and Zheying Zhang. A Statistical Analysis of Steam User Profiles towards Personalized Gamification. In proceedings of GamiFIN 2019, 3rd Annual International GamiFIN conference, pages 217-228, CEUR-WS, 2019. Award-winning: best paper award, GamiFIN 2019. (final open access article on publisher pages)

  16. Elizaveta Zimina, Jyrki Nummenmaa, Kalervo Järvelin, Jaakko Peltonen, and Kostas Stefanidis. MuG-QA: Multilingual Grammatical Question Answering for RDF Data. In Proceedings of PIC 2018, International Conference on Progress in Informatics and Computing, pages 57-61, IEEE, 2018. Award-winning: best paper award, PIC 2018. (preprint pdf, final article on publisher webpages)

  17. Tuukka Ruotsalo*, Jaakko Peltonen*, Manuel J. A. Eugster, Dorota Glowacka, Patrik Floréen, Petri Myllymäki, Giulio Jacucci, and Samuel Kaski. Interactive Intent Modeling for Exploratory Search. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 36(4), article 44, October 2018. (* equal contributions) (final open access article on publisher webpages)

  18. Md Hijbul Alam*, Jaakko Peltonen*, Jyrki Nummenmaa, and Kalervo Järvelin. Author Tree-structured Hierarchical Dirichlet Process. In L. Soldatova, J. Vanschoren, G. Papadopoulos, and M. Ceci, editors, Proceedings of DS 2018, the 21st International Conference on Discovery Science, LLNCS 11198, pages 311-327, Springer, 2018. (* equal contributions) (preprint pdf, final paper on publisher pages)

  19. Elizaveta Zimina, Jyrki Nummenmaa, Kalervo Järvelin, Jaakko Peltonen, Kostas Stefanidis and Heikki Hyyrö. GQA: Grammatical Question Answering for RDF Data. In Semantic Web Challenges : 5th SemWebEval Challenge at ESWC 2018, Heraklion, Greece, June 3-7, 2018, Revised Selected Papers, pages 82-97, Springer International Publishing, 2018. (preprint pdf, final paper on publisher pages)

  20. Md Hijbul Alam*, Jaakko Peltonen*, Jyrki Nummenmaa, and Kalervo Järvelin. Tree-structured Hierarchical Dirichlet Process. (* equal contributions) In S. Rodriguez, J. Prieto, P. Faria, S. Klos, A. Fernandez, S. Mazuelas, M. D. Jimenez-Lopez, M. N. Moreno, and E. M. Navarro Martinez, editors, Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Special Sessions, 15th International Conference (Proceedings of DCAI 2018), pages 291-299, Springer, 2019. (preprint pdf, final paper on publisher pages)

  21. Jaakko Peltonen, Ziyuan Lin, Kalervo Järvelin, and Jyrki Nummenmaa. PIHVI: Online Forum Posting Analysis with Interactive Hierarchical Visualization. In Proceedings of ESIDA 2018, 2nd ACM IUI Workshop on Exploratory Search and Interactive Data Analytics, CEUR-WS, 2018. (final paper on publisher pages)

  22. Stevan Rudinac, Tat-Seng Chua, Nicolas Diaz-Ferreyra, Gerald Friedland, Tatjana Gornostaja, Benoit Huet, Rianne Kaptein, Krister Linén, Marie-Francine Moens, Jaakko Peltonen, Miriam Redi, Markus Schedl, David A. Shamma, Alan Smeaton, and Lexing Xie. Rethinking Summarization and Storytelling for Modern Social Multimedia. In Proceedings of MMM'18, The 24th International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, pages 632-644, Springer, 2018. (preprint pdf, final paper on publisher pages)

  23. Dominik Sacha, Michael Sedlmair, Leishi Zhang, John A. Lee, Jaakko Peltonen, Daniel Weiskopf, Stephen C. North, and Daniel A. Keim. What You See Is What You Can Change: Human-Centered Machine Learning By Interactive Visualization. Neurocomputing, 268:164-175, 2017. (preprint pdf, final article on publisher webpages)

  24. Kumaripaba Athukorala, Luana Micallef, Chao An, Aki Reijonen, Jaakko Peltonen, Tuukka Ruotsalo, and Giulio Jacucci. Visualizing activity traces to support collaborative literature searching. In Proceedings of VINCI '17, the 10th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction, pages 45-52, ACM, 2017. (final article on publisher webpages)

  25. Ziyuan Lin and Jaakko Peltonen. An Information Retrieval Approach for Finding Dependent Subspaces of Multiple Views. In Proceedings of MLDM 2017, International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining, pages 1-16, Springer, 2017. (preprint pdf, final article on publisher webpages)

  26. Jaakko Peltonen, Kseniia Belorustceva, and Tuukka Ruotsalo. Improving Search Result Comprehension by Topic-Relevance Map Visualization. Refereed extended abstract (4 pages), in Proceedings of IUI 2017, 22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2017. (final article on publisher webpages)

  27. Jaakko Peltonen, Jonathan Strahl, and Patrik Floreen. Negative Relevance Feedback for Exploratory Search with Visual Interactive Intent Modeling. In Proceedings of IUI 2017, 22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2017. (final open access article on publisher webpages)

  28. Jaakko Peltonen, Kseniia Belorustceva, and Tuukka Ruotsalo. Topic-Relevance Map: Visualization for Improving Search Result Comprehension. In Proceedings of IUI 2017, 22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2017. (final open access article on publisher webpages)

  29. Jaakko Peltonen and Ziyuan Lin. Parallel Coordinate Plots for Neighbor Retrieval. In Proceedings of IVAPP 2017, International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications, 2017. (final article on publisher webpages)

  30. Dominik Sacha, Leishi Zhang, Michael Sedlmair, John A. Lee, Jaakko Peltonen, Daniel Weiskopf, Stephen North, and Daniel A. Keim. Visual interaction with dimensionality reduction: a structured literature analysis. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 23(1): 241-250, 2016. (final article on publisher webpages)

  31. Hamed R. Tavakoli, Hanieh Poostchi, Jaakko Peltonen, Jorma Laaksonen, and Samuel Kaski. Preliminary studies on personalized preference prediction from gaze in comparing visualizations. In Proceedings of ISVC'16, 12th International Symposium on Visual Computing, part II, pages 576-585, Springer, 2016. (final article on publisher webpages)

  32. Mats Sjöberg, Hung-Han Chen, Patrik Floréen, Markus Koskela, Kai Kuikkaniemi, Tuukka Lehtiniemi, and Jaakko Peltonen. Digital Me: Controlling and Making Sense of My Digital Footprint. In Proceedings of Symbiotic 2016, The 5th International Workshop on Symbiotic Interaction, pages 155-167, Springer, 2017. (preprint pdf, final open access article on publisher webpages)

  33. Jaakko Peltonen and Ziyuan Lin. Peacock Bundles: Bundle Coloring for Graphs with Globality-Locality Trade-off. In Proceedings of GD 2016, The 24th International Symposium on Graph Drawing & Network Visualization, pages 52-64, Springer, 2016. (final article on publisher webpages)

  34. Ziyuan Lin* and Jaakko Peltonen*. An Information Retrieval Approach to Finding Dependent Subspaces of Multiple Views. ArXiv preprint, arXiv:1511.06423 [stat], 2015. (* equal contributions)

  35. Antti Honkela, Jaakko Peltonen, Hande Topa, Iryna Charapitsa, Filomena Matarese, Korbinian Grote, Hendrik G. Stunnenberg, George Reid, Neil D. Lawrence, and Magnus Rattray. Genome-wide modeling of transcription kinetics reveals patterns of RNA production delays. In proceedings of the NIPS 2015 workshop on Machine Learning for Computational Biology, 2015.

  36. Antti Honkela*, Jaakko Peltonen*, Hande Topa, Iryna Charapitsa, Filomena Matarese, Korbinian Grote, Hendrik G. Stunnenberg, George Reid, Neil D. Lawrence, and Magnus Rattray. Genome-wide modeling of transcription kinetics reveals patterns of RNA production delays. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(42):13115-13120, 2015. (* A.H. and J.P. contributed equally to this work.) (final article on publisher webpages)

  37. Tuukka Ruotsalo, Jaakko Peltonen, Manuel J. A. Eugster, Dorota Glowacka, Aki Reijonen, Giulio Jacucci, Petri Myllymäki, and Samuel Kaski. SciNet: Interactive intent modeling for information discovery. In Proceedings of SIGIR'15, the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pages 1043-1044. ACM, New York, NY, 2015. Refereed abstract (2 pages). (PDF)

  38. Antti Honkela, Jaakko Peltonen, Hande Topa, Iryna Charapitsa, Filomena Matarese, Korbinian Grote, Hendrik G. Stunnenberg, George Reid, Neil D. Lawrenc$ Genome-wide modelling of transcription kinetics reveals patterns of RNA processing delays. ArXiv preprint, arXiv:1503.01081 [q-bio.GN], 2015.

  39. Jaakko Peltonen and Ziyuan Lin. Information Retrieval Approach to Meta-visualization. Machine Learning, 99(2):189-229, 2015. (final article on publisher webpages)

  40. Chirayu Wongchockprasitti, Jaakko Peltonen, Tuukka Ruotsalo, Payel Bandyopadhyay, Giulio Jacucci and Peter Brusilovsky. User Model In a Box: Cross-System User Model Transfer for Resolving Cold Start Problems. In Proceedings of UMAP'15, The 23rd Conference on User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization, pages 289-301, Springer, 2015. (final paper on publisher pages, slides, presentation in UMAP conference navigator)

  41. Zhirong Yang, Jaakko Peltonen, and Samuel Kaski. Majorization-Minimization for Manifold Embedding. In Proceedings of AISTATS'15, The 18th International Conference on Artificial Intellgence and Statistics, JMLR W&CP, pp. 1088-1097, 2015. (abstract on publisher webpages, paper on publisher webpages, supplementary information on publisher webpages)

  42. Salvatore Andolina, Khalil Klouche, Jaakko Peltonen, Mohammad Hoque, Tuukka Ruotsalo, Diogo Cabral, Arto Klami, Dorota Glowacka, Patrik Floreen, and Giulio Jacucci. IntentStreams: Smart Parallel Search Streams for Branching Exploratory Search. In Proceedings of ACM IUI 2015, The 20th ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 300-305, 2015. (final paper on publisher pages, YouTube video of the system)

  43. Ali Faisal, Jaakko Peltonen, Elisabeth Georgii, Johan Rung, and Samuel Kaski. Toward computational cumulative biology by combining models of biological datasets. PLOS ONE, 9(11), 2014. (preprint pdf, final article on publisher webpages)

  44. Joni Pajarinen, Ari Hottinen, and Jaakko Peltonen. Optimizing spatial and temporal reuse in wireless networks by decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 13(4):866-879, 2014. (preprint pdf, final pdf on publisher pages)

  45. Zhirong Yang, Jaakko Peltonen, and Samuel Kaski. Optimization Equivalence of Divergences Improves Neighbor Embedding. In Proceedings of ICML 2014, The 31st International Conference on Machine Learning, 2014. (final pdf on publisher pages, supplemental document, code)

  46. Kerstin Bunte, Matti Järvisalo, Jeremias Berg, Petri Myllymäki, Jaakko Peltonen and Samuel Kaski. Optimal Neighborhood Preserving Visualization by Maximum Satisfiability. In Proceedings of AAAI-14, The Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2014. (preprint pdf, final pdf on publisher pages)

  47. Jaakko Peltonen, Ali Faisal, Elisabeth Georgii, Johan Rung and Samuel Kaski. Toward computational cumulative biology by combining models of biological datasets. In NIPS 2014 Workshop on Machine Learning in Computational Biology, 2014.

  48. Tuukka Ruotsalo, Jaakko Peltonen, Manuel J. A. Eugster, Dorota Glowacka, Ksenia Konyushkova, Kumaripaba Athukorala, Ilkka Kosunen, Aki Reijonen, Petri Myllymaki, Giulio Jacucci, Samuel Kaski. Bayesian Optimization in Interactive Scientific Search. In NIPS 2014 Workshop on Bayesian Optimization in Academia and Industry, 2014.

  49. Kerstin Bunte, Matti Järvisalo, Jeremias Berg, Petri Myllymäki, Jaakko Peltonen and Samuel Kaski. Optimal Neighborhood Preserving Visualization by Maximum Satisfiability. In Proceedings of RCRA 2014, 21st RCRA International Workshop on Experimental Evaluation of Algorithms for Solving Problems with Combinatorial Explosion, 2014.

  50. Antti Kangasrääsiö, Dorota Glowacka, Tuukka Ruotsalo, Jaakko Peltonen, Manuel J. A. Eugster, Ksenia Konyushkova, Kumaripaba Athukorala, Ilkka Kosunen, Aki Reijonen, Petri Myllymäki, Giulio Jacucci, and Samuel Kaski. Interactive Visualization of Search Intent for Exploratory Information Retrieval. In ICML 2014 Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computing, 2014.

  51. Ali Faisal, Jaakko Peltonen, Elisabeth Georgii, Johan Rung, and Samuel Kaski. Toward computational cumulative biology by combining models of biological datasets. ArXiv preprint, arXiv:1404.0329v1 [q-bio.QM], 2014.

  52. Tuukka Ruotsalo, Jaakko Peltonen, Aki Reijonen, Giulio Jacucci, Manuel J.A. Euster, and Samuel Kaski. IntentRadar: Interactive Search User Interface that Anticipates User's Search Intents. Refereed extended abstract (4 pages) in CHI Interactivity 2014, 2014.

Recent Research Talks

This is a partial list of recent research talks given by the group.
  • Machine Learning in Visualization for Big Data 2020 (MLVis 2020) workshop, session 1. Tutorial presentations by Daniel Archambault, Ian Nabney, and Jaakko Peltonen, and paper presentations. (workshop website with materials, recording of YouTube livestream)
  • Machine Learning in Visualization for Big Data 2020 (MLVis 2020) workshop, session 2. Paper presentations and panel discussion, chaired by Daniel Archambault, Ian Nabney, and Jaakko Peltonen. (workshop website with materials, recording of YouTube livestream)
  • Jaakko Peltonen, AI Helsinki Seminar, January 28, 2019: Exploring Online Discussion with Probabilistic Models. An overview of our work on topic modeling and interactive social media exploration. (materials of the talk online)
  • Jaakko Peltonen, Aalto University, Machine Learning Coffee Seminar, November 26, 2018: Exploring Large And Hierarchical Online Discussion Venues With Probabilistic Models. An overview of our work on deep hierarhical topic modeling and interactive exploration of social media discussion forums. (video of the talk available on YouTube)
  • Jaakko Peltonen, University of Tampere, December 8, 2015: Statistical approaches for visual exploratory data analysis. An overview of selected exploratory data analysis and visualization works.
  • Jaakko Peltonen, University of Pittsburgh, September 2, 2015: An information retrieval approach to visualization of high-dimensional data. An overview of selected visualization works. (pdf slides, announcement of the talk in the CoMeT system)
  • Jaakko Peltonen, University of Pittsburgh, September 1, 2015: Lost in Publications? How to Find Your Way in 50 Million Scientific Documents. Describes the work on information seeking and cross-system transfer of open user models contained in the CIKM 2013 and UMAP 2015 publications. (pdf slides, announcement of the talk in the CoMeT system)
  • Jaakko Peltonen, University of Tampere, Methods Festival 2015, August 20, 2015: Better Information Seeking through Statistics: How to Find Your Way in 50 Million Scientific Documents.
  • Jaakko Peltonen, University of Szeged, Hungary, February 6, 2015: Lost in Publications? How to Find Your Way in 50 Million Scientific Documents.