--- name: icdm-writing-style description: Use when drafting or revising prose for an ICDM (IEEE International Conference on Data Mining) paper - the data-regime-first register, the named-mechanism discipline, measured-scale language instead of scalability adjectives, discovery-validity sentences, triple-blind-safe self-reference, and compression into the single 10-page IEEE all-inclusive cap. --- # ICDM Writing Style Revise a manuscript into the register ICDM reviewers reward: a **data-mining mechanism** made legible to a data-centric IEEE audience, with claims a reviewer can check and a scale story that is measured rather than asserted. Two hard constraints shape every choice — the Research Track is **triple-blind**, so the prose cannot lean on author identity, and the whole paper (references and appendix included) must fit **10 IEEE two-column pages**. ## Open with the data regime, not the model family ICDM work starts from the shape of the data: streams seen once, power-law-sparse graphs, implicit rather than explicit feedback, evolving edges, high-dimensional transactions. The strongest openings name that regime and make the mechanism its consequence. ```text Weak (model-first): "We propose a novel graph neural network with a new attention module for anomaly detection, achieving state-of-the-art results." ICDM-shaped (regime-first): "Interaction graphs arrive as an unbounded edge stream seen once and cannot be stored. We give a one-pass detector whose memory is sub-linear in the number of edges, with a stated error bound." ``` The second version names the regime, implies why existing methods fail, and scopes the mechanism before a reviewer asks. ## Name the mechanism, and give it a reason - Replace architecture nouns ("a transformer with X") with a **named mining mechanism** and the one property that makes it work (isolation, sparsity, restart probability, sketching). - Attach every strong adjective to the mechanism: not "our method is scalable" but "the sketch updates in amortized constant time per edge." - State the objective or the guarantee plainly enough that a reviewer sees *why* it should generalize before seeing the tables. ## Measure scale; do not adjective it ICDM referees read "efficient" and "scalable" as claims to be tested. Convert them: | Adjective (avoid) | Measured claim (prefer) | |---|---| | "scalable" | "constant per-edge latency as the stream grows 100x (Fig. 2)" | | "efficient" | "linear in |E|, sub-linear memory in the number of edges" | | "outperforms baselines" | "matches the batch detector's top-k ranking at 1/10 the memory" | | "robust" | "ranking quality within one std over 20 seeds across noise levels" | ## Write discovery-validity sentences The distinctive ICDM instinct is "is the finding real, or an artifact of the evaluation?" Pre-empt it: say *why* a flagged pattern, cluster, or anomaly means what you claim — tie it to a bound, a controlled injection with known truth, or a baseline that shares the setup. A result that could be an evaluation artifact reads as unfinished here. ## Keep self-reference triple-blind-safe - Cite your own prior work in the third person: "Prior work [7] introduced X" — never "in our earlier paper [7] we introduced X." - Remove "our deployed system," internal names, and acknowledgements from the body; they are anonymity violations, not style slips (see `icdm-submission`). ## Compress into 10 all-inclusive pages - Every paragraph competes with the appendix and references for the same 10 pages. Cut signposting roadmaps and background everyone knows. - Push protocol detail to an in-cap appendix or the cited anonymized repository, and keep the body's argument self-contained — because with no rebuttal, the body is your only chance to be understood. ## Vignette: rescuing a buried contribution A draft opens with two paragraphs on the importance of data mining and a model diagram. The revision deletes both, opens on "transactions arrive faster than they can be labeled," names the sparsity mechanism in sentence two, converts three "efficient/scalable" claims into measured latencies, and adds one discovery-validity sentence tying flagged transactions to a known-injection experiment. Same result, half a page shorter, and now legible to an ICDM reviewer on the first read. ## Output format ```text [Register] ICDM-ready / drifting to ML-flagship / drifting to journal [First-page arc] regime / task / mechanism / evidence / validity - present or missing [Scale language] measured / adjectival [Anonymity] third-person self-cites: yes / leaks found [Cut list] ```