Improving Temporal Event Scheduling through STEP Perpetual Learning

Currently, most machine learning applications follow a one-off learning process: given a static dataset and a learning algorithm, generate a model for a task. These applications can neither adapt to a dynamic and changing environment, nor accomplish incremental task performance improvement continuously. STEP perpetual learning, by continuous knowledge refinement through sequential learning episodes, emphasizes the accomplishment of incremental task performance improvement. In this paper, we describe how a personalized temporal event scheduling system SmartCalendar, can benefit from STEP perpetual learning. We adopt the interval temporal logic to represent events’ temporal relationships and determine if events are temporally inconsistent. To provide strategies that approach user preferences for handling temporal inconsistencies, we propose SmartCalendar to recognize, resolve and learn from temporal inconsistencies based on STEP perpetual learning. SmartCalendar has several cornerstones: similarity measures for temporal inconsistency; a sparse decomposition method to utilize historical data; and a loss function based on cross-entropy to optimize performance. The experimental results on the collected dataset show that SmartCalendar incrementally improves its scheduling performance and substantially outperforms comparison methods.