Cookies Policy
The website need some cookies and similar means to function. If you permit us, we will use those means to collect data on your visits for aggregated statistics to improve our service. Find out More
Accept Reject
  • Menu
About

About

Areas of research:

- Knowledge discovery

  • Supervised learning   
  • Multiple predictive models
  • Applied knowledge discovery

- Intelligent transportation systems

  • Planning and operations of public transports

Interest
Topics
Details

Details

  • Name

    João Mendes Moreira
  • Role

    Senior Researcher
  • Since

    01st January 2011
008
Publications

2026

Personalized Counterfactual Explanations via Cluster-Based Fine-Tuning of GANs

Authors
Fares, AA; Mendes-Moreira, J;

Publication
INTELLIGENT DATA ENGINEERING AND AUTOMATED LEARNING-IDEAL 2025, PT II

Abstract
Counterfactual explanations (CFs) help users understand and act on black-box machine learning decisions by suggesting minimal changes to achieve a desired outcome. However, existing methods often ignore individual feasibility, leading to unrealistic or unactionable recommendations. We propose a personalized CF generation method based on cluster-specific fine-tuning of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). By grouping users with similar behavior and constraints, we adapt immutable features and cost weights per cluster, allowing GANs to generate more actionable and user-aligned counterfactuals. Experiments on the German Credit dataset show that our approach achieves a 6x improvement in prediction gain and a 30% reduction in sparsity compared to a baseline CounterGAN, while maintaining plausibility and acceptable latency for online use.

2026

STARK: Enhancing Traffic Prediction Through Spatiotemporal Adaptive Refinement With Knowledge Distillation

Authors
Pandey, S; Sharma, S; Kumar, R; Moreira, JM; Chandra, J;

Publication
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SYSTEMS

Abstract
Traffic flow prediction remains a complex task due to the intricate spatial and temporal correlations in real-world traffic data. Although existing graph neural network (GNN) approaches have shown promise in capturing these relationships, their high computational requirements limit their suitability for real-time deployment. To overcome these limitations, we propose spatiotemporal adaptive refinement with knowledge distillation (STARK), a novel and efficient framework that integrates graph fusion with adaptive knowledge distillation (AKD) in a spatiotemporal graph convolutional network (STGCN). Our method leverages graph fusion to capture both localized and global traffic dynamics, enhancing adaptability across diverse traffic conditions. It further employs two dedicated teacher models that independently emphasize spatial and temporal features, guiding a lightweight student model through a distillation process that dynamically adjusts based on prediction uncertainty. This adaptive learning mechanism enables the student model to prioritize and better learn from more difficult prediction instances. Evaluations on four benchmark traffic datasets [PEMS03, PEMS04, PEMSD7(M), and PEMS08] demonstrate that STARK achieves competitive predictive performance, measured by mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE), while significantly reducing computational overhead. Our approach thus offers an effective and scalable solution for real-time traffic forecasting.

2026

A Scalable Approach for Unified Large Events Models in Soccer

Authors
Mendes Neves, T; Meireles, L; Mendes Moreira, J;

Publication
MACHINE LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASES. APPLIED DATA SCIENCE TRACK AND DEMO TRACK, ECML PKDD 2025, PT X

Abstract
Large Events Models (LEMs) are a class of models designed to predict and analyze the sequence of events in soccer matches, capturing the complex dynamics of the game. The original LEM framework, based on a chain of classifiers, faced challenges such as synchronization, scalability issues, and limited context utilization. This paper proposes a unified and scalable approach to model soccer events using a tabular autoregressive model. Our models demonstrate significant improvements over the original LEM, achieving higher accuracy in event prediction and better simulation quality, while also offering greater flexibility and scalability. The unified LEM framework enables a wide range of applications in soccer analytics that we display in this paper, including real-time match outcome prediction, player performance analysis, and game simulation, serving as a general solution for many problems in the field.

2026

Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases

Authors
Koprinska, I; Mendes-Moreira, J; Branco, P;

Publication
Communications in Computer and Information Science

Abstract

2026

Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases

Authors
Koprinska, I; Mendes-Moreira, J; Branco, P;

Publication
Communications in Computer and Information Science

Abstract