This is the first editorial of the journal, discussing the balance between humans and AI in healthcare and emphasizing the need for a human-centric approach in AI and ML applications.
Following up on a previous analysis of graph embeddings, we generalize and expand some results to the general setting of vector symbolic architectures (VSA) and hyperdimensional computing (HDC). Importantly, we explore the mathematical relationship between superposition, orthogonality, and tensor product. We establish the tensor product representation as the central representation, with a suite of unique properties. These include it being the most general and expressive representation, as well as being the most compressed representation that has errorrless unbinding and detection.
We study news neural networks to approximate function of distributions in a probability space. Two classes of neural networks based on quantile and moment approximation are proposed to learn these functions and are theoretically supported by universal approximation theorems. By mixing the quantile and moment features in other new networks, we develop schemes that outperform existing networks on numerical test cases involving univariate distributions. For bivariate distributions, the moment neural network outperforms all other networks.
It is common to split a dataset into training and testing sets before fitting a statistical or machine learning model. However, there is no clear guidance on how much data should be used for training and testing. In this article we show that the optimal splitting ratio is $\sqrt{p}:1$, where $p$ is the number of parameters in a linear regression model that explains the data well.
We explore the application of a nonlinear MCMC technique first introduced in [1] to problems in Bayesian machine learning. We provide a convergence guarantee in total variation that uses novel results for long-time convergence and large-particle ("propagation of chaos") convergence. We apply this nonlinear MCMC technique to sampling problems including a Bayesian neural network on CIFAR10.
We propose an empirical Bayes estimator based on Dirichlet process mixture model for estimating the sparse normalized mean difference, which could be directly applied to the high dimensional linear classification. In theory, we build a bridge to connect the estimation error of the mean difference and the misclassification error, also provide sufficient conditions of sub-optimal classifiers and optimal classifiers. In implementation, a variational Bayes algorithm is developed to compute the posterior efficiently and could be parallelized to deal with the ultra-high dimensional case.
We propose the kl-UCB ++ algorithm for regret minimization in stochastic bandit models with exponential families of distributions. We prove that it is simultaneously asymptotically optimal (in the sense of Lai and Robbins' lower bound) and minimax optimal. This is the first algorithm proved to enjoy these two properties at the same time. This work thus merges two different lines of research with simple and clear proofs.
We identify conditional parity as a general notion of non-discrimination in machine learning. In fact, several recently proposed notions of non-discrimination, including a few counterfactual notions, are instances of conditional parity. We show that conditional parity is amenable to statistical analysis by studying randomization as a general mechanism for achieving conditional parity and a kernel-based test of conditional parity.
This paper introduces the YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge hosted as a Kaggle competition and also describes my approach to experimenting with various models. For each of my experiments, I provide the score result as well as possible improvements to be made. Towards the end of the paper, I discuss the various ensemble learning techniques that I applied on the dataset which significantly boosted my overall competition score. At last, I discuss the exciting future of video understanding research and also the many applications that such research could significantly improve.
Reciprocal processes are acausal generalizations of Markov processes introduced by Bernstein in 1932. In the literature, a significant amount of attention has been focused on developing dynamical models for reciprocal processes. In this paper, we provide a probabilistic graphical model for reciprocal processes. This leads to a principled solution of the smoothing problem via message passing algorithms. For the finite state space case, convergence analysis is revisited via the Hilbert metric.
We describe a novel optimization method for finite sums (such as empirical risk minimization problems) building on the recently introduced SAGA method. Our method achieves an accelerated convergence rate on strongly convex smooth problems. Our method has only one parameter (a step size), and is radically simpler than other accelerated methods for finite sums. Additionally it can be applied when the terms are non-smooth, yielding a method applicable in many areas where operator splitting methods would traditionally be applied.
In this paper we derive variability measures for the conditional probability distributions of a pair of random variables, and we study its application in the inference of causal-effect relationships. We also study the combination of the proposed measures with standard statistical measures in the the framework of the ChaLearn cause-effect pair challenge. The developed model obtains an AUC score of 0.82 on the final test database and ranked second in the challenge.
In this paper the exact linear relation between the leading eigenvectors of the modularity matrix and the singular vectors of an uncentered data matrix is developed. Based on this analysis the concept of a modularity component is defined, and its properties are developed. It is shown that modularity component analysis can be used to cluster data similar to how traditional principal component analysis is used except that modularity component analysis does not require data centering.
We present a simple theoretical framework, and corresponding practical procedures, for comparing probabilistic models on real data in a traditional machine learning setting. This framework is based on the theory of proper scoring rules, but requires only basic algebra and probability theory to understand and verify. The theoretical concepts presented are well-studied, primarily in the statistics literature. The goal of this paper is to advocate their wider adoption for performance evaluation in empirical machine learning.
In order to investigate the breast cancer prediction problem on the aging population with the grades of DCIS, we conduct a tree augmented naive Bayesian network experiment trained and tested on a large clinical dataset including consecutive diagnostic mammography examinations, consequent biopsy outcomes and related cancer registry records in the population of women across all ages. The aggregated results of our ten-fold cross validation method recommend a biopsy threshold higher than 2% for the aging population.
Recently, \citet{SuttonMW15} introduced the emphatic temporal differences (ETD) algorithm for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. In this short note, we show that the projected fixed-point equation that underlies ETD involves a contraction operator, with a $\sqrtγ$-contraction modulus (where $γ$ is the discount factor). This allows us to provide error bounds on the approximation error of ETD. To our knowledge, these are the first error bounds for an off-policy evaluation algorithm under general target and behavior policies.
This paper develops the exact linear relationship between the leading eigenvector of the unnormalized modularity matrix and the eigenvectors of the adjacency matrix. We propose a method for approximating the leading eigenvector of the modularity matrix, and we derive the error of the approximation. There is also a complete proof of the equivalence between normalized adjacency clustering and normalized modularity clustering. Numerical experiments show that normalized adjacency clustering can be as twice efficient as normalized modularity clustering.
We present a new package in R implementing Bayesian additive regression trees (BART). The package introduces many new features for data analysis using BART such as variable selection, interaction detection, model diagnostic plots, incorporation of missing data and the ability to save trees for future prediction. It is significantly faster than the current R implementation, parallelized, and capable of handling both large sample sizes and high-dimensional data.
There has been growing recent interest in probabilistic interpretations of kernel-based methods as well as learning in Banach spaces. The absence of a useful Lebesgue measure on an infinite-dimensional reproducing kernel Hilbert space is a serious obstacle for such stochastic models. We propose an estimation model for the ridge regression problem within the framework of abstract Wiener spaces and show how the support vector machine solution to such problems can be interpreted in terms of the Gaussian Radon transform.
Alexander Lorbert, David M. Blei, Robert E. Schapire
et al.
We offer a novel view of AdaBoost in a statistical setting. We propose a Bayesian model for binary classification in which label noise is modeled hierarchically. Using variational inference to optimize a dynamic evidence lower bound, we derive a new boosting-like algorithm called VIBoost. We show its close connections to AdaBoost and give experimental results from four datasets.