Fixing the reviewresponse.cls LaTeX Class to Allow Multi-Page Comments

Today, I will show how to fix the Latex reviewresponse.cls class to allow multi-page comments.

If you have ever written a detailed response to reviewers in LaTeX, you may have noticed that long reviewer comments sometimes get cut off instead of continuing on the next page. This happens because the comments are enclosed in non-breakable tcolorbox environments.

The Problem

In the original version of reviewresponse.cls, the environments for reviewer comments look something like this:

\newenvironment{generalcomment}{%
  \begin{tcolorbox}[attach title to upper,
    title={General Comments},
    after title={.\enskip},
    fonttitle={\bfseries},
    coltitle={colorcommentfg},
    colback={colorcommentbg},
    colframe={colorcommentframe},
  ]
}{\end{tcolorbox}}

\newenvironment{revcomment}[1][]{\refstepcounter{revcomment}
  \begin{tcolorbox}[adjusted title={Comment \arabic{revcomment}},
    fonttitle={\bfseries},
    colback={colorcommentbg},
    colframe={colorcommentframe},
    coltitle={colorcommentbg},
    #1
  ]
}{\end{tcolorbox}}

\newenvironment{changes}{\begin{tcolorbox}[colback={colorchangebg},
  colframe={colorchangeframe},enhanced jigsaw,]
}{\end{tcolorbox}}

These definitions produce nice colored boxes, but the problem is that tcolorbox by default does not break across pages. When your reviewer writes a long paragraph, LaTeX tries to keep the entire box on one page, which can result in missing text or strange layout issues.

The Solution

The fix is simple: you need to make the boxes breakable and enhanced. The tcolorbox package provides two key options for this:

  • breakable — allows the content to flow onto the next page.
  • enhanced jigsaw — ensures compatibility with decorations, titles, and other layout features when breaking boxes.

Here is the fixed version of the environments:

\newenvironment{generalcomment}{%
  \begin{tcolorbox}[
    enhanced jigsaw,
    breakable,
    attach title to upper,
    title={General Comments},
    after title={.\enskip},
    fonttitle={\bfseries},
    coltitle={colorcommentfg},
    colback={colorcommentbg},
    colframe={colorcommentframe},
  ]
}{\end{tcolorbox}}

\newenvironment{revcomment}[1][]{%
  \refstepcounter{revcomment}
  \begin{tcolorbox}[
    enhanced jigsaw,
    breakable,
    adjusted title={Comment \arabic{revcomment}},
    fonttitle={\bfseries},
    colback={colorcommentbg},
    colframe={colorcommentframe},
    coltitle={colorcommentbg},
    #1
  ]
}{\end{tcolorbox}}

\newenvironment{revresponse}[1][{}]{%
  \textbf{Response:} #1\par
}{\vspace{4em plus 0.2em minus 1.5em}}

\newenvironment{changes}{%
  \begin{tcolorbox}[
    enhanced jigsaw,
    breakable,
    colback={colorchangebg},
    colframe={colorchangeframe},
  ]
}{\end{tcolorbox}}

Result

After this modification, your reviewer comments and “changes” boxes will automatically continue onto the next page, no matter how long they are. You can now safely include large comments or detailed explanations without worrying about text being cut off.

Conclusion

By simply adding enhanced jigsaw and breakable to the tcolorbox environments, you make your LaTeX review responses much more robust. This small fix prevents truncated comments and keeps your document professional and reviewer-friendly.

Posted in Latex | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

How to fix reviewresponse.cls for custom reviewer numbering

Recently, I have found anice Latex class that can be used to write answers to reviewers for the rebuttal of journal papers. This latex class is called reviewresponse.cls, which can be found on GitHub. It allows to write an answer to reviewers with comments such as:

....

\reviewer

\begin{revcomment}
Figure 4 - please include legend to the right or below the main figure as in panel b legend overlaps with line of plot making confusion i interpretation. gentle grey grid in backround will also be valuable for plot investigation.
\end{revcomment}
\begin{revresponse}
    [your answer]
\end{revresponse}
\begin{changes}
    some changes you made
\end{changes}

\begin{revcomment}
    No avaliable implementation.
\end{revcomment}
\begin{revresponse}
     [your answer]
\end{revresponse}
\begin{changes}
    some changes you made
\end{changes}

which will then generate something beautiful like:

However, I have found a problem with this class, which is that the reviewers are automatically numbered as Reviewer 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…. But, in several cases, the reviewers are not numbered sequentially and some numbers may be skipped.

To fix this issue, the solution is to redefine the /reviewer command in reviewresponse.cls as follows:

\newcommand*{\reviewer}[1][]{%
  \clearpage
  % If no optional argument, step the counter as before.
  \if\relax\detokenize{#1}\relax
    \refstepcounter{reviewer}%
  \else
    % If an argument was given, set reviewer to N-1 then refstep to N.
    % Using \numexpr avoids the off-by-one problem while keeping refstepcounter
    % (so labels/anchors behave correctly).
    \setcounter{reviewer}{\numexpr#1-1\relax}%
    \refstepcounter{reviewer}%
  \fi
  \@ifundefined{pdfbookmark}{}{%
    \pdfbookmark[1]{Reviewer \arabic{reviewer}}{hyperref@reviewer\arabic{reviewer}}%
  }%
  \section*{Authors' Response to Reviewer~\arabic{reviewer}}
}

After making this modification, the \reviewer command can now be used in your latex document with a parameter to specify the reviewer number that you want, like this: \reviewer[5]. The result then looks like this:


And now the problem is fixed.

That is all for today, I just wanted to share this solution in case someone has the same problem with reviewresponse.cls.

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The Conference Hotel Booking Scam

Something interesting happened to me in the last few days. To my knowledge, this seems to be a scam, and to be something relatively new, so I want to share the information.

Here is the context. I will be a keynote speaker at a conference in Asia in a few months, and out of the blue, a company that appeared to be based in the Netherlands contacted me a few days ago by email offering to arrange my hotel accommodation. At first, the email from “ExploreEra Reservations” (reservation.nl@exploreera.info) looked very professional. They mentioned the conference location and month, and politely asked for my exact arrival and departure dates to reserve my hotel room. Their email was worded in the kind of tone you might expect from a real conference travel desk. Here is a screenshot:

But there was some red flag already in this e-mail, such as indicating that they require 30 days to cancel the reservation, which is highly unusual. In fact, a hotel reservation can in general be cancelled in 24 hours for most hotels without fees. But I still responded with basic details about my dates to see what they would say. In the follow-up email, there was more serious red flags. Here is a screenshot:

At about the same time as this, in a separated e-mail, they sent me a PandaDoc form for a hotel booking with a proposed rate of €200 per night, while also asking for personal information and a signature, and there was a weird disclaimer in small print indicating that they are not affiliated to the conference (very suspicious!), and there are HUGE cancellation fees:


Thus, I decided to investigate this. I Googled the proposed hotel name and found that their real rate is more like 20-50 euros per night on Booking DOT com, not 199 euros.

Then, I googled their organization — ExploreEra.info — and quickly discovered that at least two conferences have issued very serious warnings about emails from this domain approaching their attendees to book hotels on their behalf without authorization.

For example, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) posted an alert noting that emails from ExploreEra.info have been contacting their delegates, pretending to arrange accommodation on behalf of the conference. Here is a screenshot of this warning:

Another event also issued a similar warning:


So, is this a scam? Well, in the emails I have received, they never mentioned directly that they work for the conference, but the emails are worded in a way that gives this impression. And based on the above warnings from other conferences, and the apparently inflated price and 30 days cancellation policy, it seems indeed to be a scam. Thus, be warned!

By the way, there are several messages on Twitter warning about similar schemes, although I dont know if it is from the same people:

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Huge traffic from a botnet looking for datasets

Today, I received an e-mail from the Web hosting company indicating that my website had exceeded the bandwidth limit of the content delivery network (CDN) for my package. I was quite surprised. Hence, I checked the control panel, and I saw a huge increase in bandwidth for the last three days, as shown below (in GBs).

By looking at the logs, I saw that some bots from thousands of different addresses where trying to access datasets from the SPMF website using malformed URLs with multiple times the word “datasets” inside. Here is an excerpt from the logs:

These URLs do not exist, however due to the configurations of the server, they were redirected to the real dataset URLs thus and consuming a huge amount of bandwidth.

Since all the requests came from different IPs from dozen different countries, it would not be realistic to ban all the IP addresses.

Thus, I have check how to fix the configuration. Finally, I modified the .htaccess file of the server to block malformed requests and also deactivate the default fuzzy URL matching done by the server to match paths that dont exist with real paths on the server. This may have caused some slight issue on the website during the last hours. But now, I think that the problem is fixed and the website will be faster!

So why my website was flooded by requests for datasets? I think that the most likely reason is that some people have decided to launch a web scraping botnet for data, and that the bot is buggy such that it would recursively add /datasets/ to the same path dozens of times like in this URL:

… /spmf/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/datasets/costtrans/datasets/onshelf/datasets/husp/datasets/husp/datasets/husp/BIBLE_sequence_utility.txt

Than the botnet would not realize that it is actually always downloading the same files over and over again from similar URLs….

Update a few hours later: I see that my new rules in .htaccess are working as now all invalid requests are now blocked:

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New version of SPMF: 2.63!

This is just a short blog post to let you know that SPMF 2.63 is released on the SPMF website, with some new features such as the Visual Pattern Viewer (to display patterns visually), and also some new algorithms and several bug fixes.

The list of changes in SPMF 2.64 can be found on the download page.

Here, just to give you a glimpse of this new version, here is a screenshot of the Visual Pattern Viewer, utilized for viewing sequential patterns:

The Visual Pattern Viewer can be used to explore patterns visually with search and filter function and can display a large number of different pattern types like association rules, itemsets and more.

And here is the list of new algorithms in SPMF 2.63:

  • The EMDO algorithm for mining frequent parallel episodes and episode rules in complex event sequences by counting distinct occurrences (thanks to Oualid Ouarem et al. for the original code).
  • the EMDO-Rules for generating episode rules from parallel episodes found by EMDO. (Ouarem et al., 2024) new
  • The RMiner algorithm for high utility itemset mining (thanks to Pushp Sra et al. for the original code).
  • The ScentedUtilityMiner algorithm for high utility itemset mining with a recency constraint using reinduction counters (thanks to Pushp Sra et al. for the original code).
  • The Density Peak Clustering (DPC) algorithm for clustering vectors of numbers
  • The AEDBScan algorithm for clustering vectors of numbers

What’s next?

The development of SPMF is always ongoing. If you want to contribute code of new algorithms, feel free to contact with me with your code.

Hope you enjoy this new version of SPMF. For the next version 2.64, there will be more new algorithms and some further performance improvement. I expect that it would be released this Autumn.

Posted in open-source, spmf | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Upcoming feature of SPMF 2.63: Taxonomy Viewer

Today, I want to share briefly a new feature of the upcoming SPMF version 2.63, which is the taxonomy viewer. This tools allow to visualize a taxonomy used by algorithms such as CLH-Miner and FEACP.

The user interface is for now quite simple and looks like this:

In this example, I display a file called transaction_CLHMiner.txt, which defines the taxonomy:
1,6
2,6
3,7
4,8
5,8
6,7
9,1
10,1

And a transaction database given names to these items in a file taxonomy_CLHMiner.txt:

@ITEM=1=apple
@ITEM=2=orange
@ITEM=3=milk
@ITEM=4=bread
@ITEM=5=bagel
@ITEM=6=orange
@ITEM=7=FreshProducts
@ITEM=8=BreadProducts
@ITEM=9=red_apple
@ITEM=10=green_apple
1 3:6:5 1
5:3:3
1 2 3 4 5:25:5 10 1 6 3
2 3 4 5:20:8 3 6 3
1 3 4:8:5 1 2
1 3 5:22:10 6 6
2 3 5:9:4 2 3

This is just to give you a preview of some new features of SPMF. The next version should be released in about 1 week!

Posted in open-source, Pattern Mining | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

CFP: The OCSA 2025 conference

Today, I would like to share the call for papers for the upcoming OCSA 2025 conference, which will be held in Changsha, capital of the Hunan province of China. The details of the conference are as follows:

International Conference on Optoelectronics, Computer Science, and Algorithms (OCSA 2025)
Website: www.icocsa.net
Email: ocsa@163.com
Dates: September 19-21, 2025
Venue: Changsha, China
Indexing: EI database (pending approval)
Submission link: https://ocs.academiccenter.com/manager/dashboard

If you are interested, you may consider submitting a paper.

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Update on SPMF next version: the visual pattern viewer

I am still working on the upcoming version of SPMF. There is still much work todo. Following the previous post, I would like to give you a glimpse of the new visual pattern viewer that is under development for SPMF. This is a new tool that will allow to see patterns visually and search and filter them. It will be well-designed and will work with most pattern types that can be produced by SPMF. Here is a picture of the current version:

On that picture we can see a list of high utility sequential patterns displayed as a grid, where the utility of each pattern is displayed using a colored bar that varies from 0 to the maximum utility observed among the patterns in this example, which is 40. On the right, there is a search panel to filter the pattern by utility values or to search for a specific itemsets. In this example, only the patterns with a utility of at least 37 are displayed using the filter. In the menu bar, we can also sort the patterns by different orders:

For example, above the patterns were displayed by decreasing number of itemsets. We can change this to display them by ascending utility, and remove the filters, to obtain this:

Now, let me show you other pattern types. Here are high utility sequential rules:

And here are frequent high utility itemsets:

Update: I have fixed the alignment of colored bars representing measures. And the different measures are now displayed with different colors:

Conclusion

This is just an overview of this upcoming tool that will be incorporated in the new version of SPMF. If you have suggestions, please leave a comment below. Note also that this tool is under development. The released version may be different and have additional features.

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CFP: HP4MoDa 2025 @ IEEE BIBM 2025

Today, I would like to announce a new workshop that will be held at the IEEE BIBM 2025 conference, called 1st Workshop on Heuristic and Pattern Mining for Multi-Omics Data Analytics.

This workshop is suitable for pattern mining papers and machine learning, especially with applications to bioinformatics. The scope is quite large. You may the HP4MoDa workshop website for more details or e-mail me if you are not sure if your paper fit in the scope of the workshop!

A good thing is that the workshop will be in Hybrid mode, which means that participants can present their papers online or offline in Wuhan, China.

The dates are as follows:

  • Paper Submission: October 15, 2025
  • Acceptance Notification: November 10, 2025
  • Camera-ready Submission: November 23, 2025
  • Workshop date: December 15, 2025

All papers will be published in the regular conference proceedings of IEEE BIBM And we are planning to organize a special issue in a good journal as well (under discussion).

Hope to see your submission soon!

Posted in Bioinformatics, cfp, Conference, Data Mining, Machine Learning | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

An Improved Pattern Viewer

Today, I will talk about some features of the upcoming version of SPMF 2.63 that I am working on and is planned for release next month.

Improved Pattern Visualizer window

The first feature is an improvement of the Pattern Viewer tool so that it can display the richer SPMF format where items have names (strings) in patterns. Previously, a pattern file like this:

@ITEM=1=apple
@ITEM=2=orange
@ITEM=3=tomato
@ITEM=4=milk
@ITEM=5=bread
1 2 4 5
2 3 5
1 2 4 5
1 2 3 5
1 2 3 4 5
2 3 4

would be displayed as this by the Pattern Viewer:

Now, it is displayed as:

Other pattern visualizations

I am also working on adding other tools for visualization such as a Rule Viewer to visualize association rules and sequential rules like this:

The above screenshot is an early version. I will improve the appearance of this window and I still have to think about how to best integrate it in the software.

Today, I just wanted to show you some ideas of new features. If you have any ideas or comments, send me an e-mail or leave a comment below!

Posted in Data Mining, Data science, Java, open-source, Pattern Mining, spmf | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments