Successfully predicting gentrification could have many social and commercial applications; however, real estate sales are difficult to predict because they belong to a chaotic system comprised of intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics, perceived value, and market speculation. Using New York City real estate as our subject, we combine modern techniques of data science and machine learning with traditional spatial analysis to create robust real estate prediction models for both classification and regression tasks. We compare several cutting edge machine learning algorithms across spatial, semi-spatial and non-spatial feature engineering techniques, and we empirically show that spatially-conscious machine learning models outperform non-spatial models when married with advanced prediction techniques such as feed-forward artificial neural networks and gradient boosting machine models.

From the early days of computing, games have been important testbeds for studying how well machines can do sophisticated decision making. In recent years, machine learning has made dramatic advances with artificial agents reaching superhuman performance in challenge domains like Go, Atari, and some variants of poker. As with their predecessors of chess, checkers, and backgammon, these game domains have driven research by providing sophisticated yet well-defined challenges for artificial intelligence practitioners. We continue this tradition by proposing the game of Hanabi as a new challenge domain with novel problems that arise from its combination of purely cooperative gameplay and imperfect information in a two to five player setting. In particular, we argue that Hanabi elevates reasoning about the beliefs and intentions of other agents to the foreground. We believe developing novel techniques capable of imbuing artificial agents with such theory of mind will not only be crucial for their success in Hanabi, but also in broader collaborative efforts, and especially those with human partners. To facilitate future research, we introduce the open-source Hanabi Learning Environment, propose an experimental framework for the research community to evaluate algorithmic advances, and assess the performance of current state-of-the-art techniques.

We present DANTE, a novel method for training neural networks using the alternating minimization principle. DANTE provides an alternate perspective to traditional gradient-based backpropagation techniques commonly used to train deep networks. It utilizes an adaptation of quasi-convexity to cast training a neural network as a bi-quasi-convex optimization problem. We show that for neural network configurations with both differentiable (e.g. sigmoid) and non-differentiable (e.g. ReLU) activation functions, we can perform the alternations very effectively. DANTE can also be extended to networks with multiple hidden layers. In experiments on standard datasets, neural networks trained using the proposed method were found to be very promising and competitive to traditional backpropagation techniques, both in terms of quality of the solution, as well as training speed.

In many statistics and machine learning frameworks, stochastic optimization with high variance gradients has become an important problem. For example, the performance of Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) seriously depends on the variance of its stochastic gradient estimator. In this paper, we focused on this problem and proposed a novel framework of variance reduction using multi-level Monte Carlo (MLMC) method. The framework is naturally compatible with reparameterization gradient estimators, which are one of the efficient variance reduction techniques that use the reparameterization trick. We also proposed a novel MCVI algorithm for stochastic gradient estimation on MLMC method in which sample size $N$ is adaptively estimated according to the ratio of the variance and computational cost for each iteration. We furthermore proved that, in our method, the norm of the gradient could converge to $0$ asymptotically. Finally, we evaluated our method by comparing it with benchmark methods in several experiments and showed that our method was able to reduce gradient variance and sampling cost efficiently and be closer to the optimum value than the other methods were.

We describe TF-Replicator, a framework for distributed machine learning designed for DeepMind researchers and implemented as an abstraction over TensorFlow. TF-Replicator simplifies writing data-parallel and model-parallel research code. The same models can be effortlessly deployed to different cluster architectures (i.e. one or many machines containing CPUs, GPUs or TPU accelerators) using synchronous or asynchronous training regimes. To demonstrate the generality and scalability of TF-Replicator, we implement and benchmark three very different models: (1) A ResNet-50 for ImageNet classification, (2) a SN-GAN for class-conditional ImageNet image generation, and (3) a D4PG reinforcement learning agent for continuous control. Our results show strong scalability performance without demanding any distributed systems expertise of the user. The TF-Replicator programming model will be open-sourced as part of TensorFlow 2.0 (see https://github.com/tensorflow/community/pull/25).

Understanding proper distance measures between distributions is at the core of several learning tasks such as generative models, domain adaptation, clustering, etc. In this work, we focus on {\it mixture distributions} that arise naturally in several application domains where the data contains different sub-populations. For mixture distributions, established distance measures such as the Wasserstein distance do not take into account imbalanced mixture proportions. Thus, even if two mixture distributions have identical mixture components but different mixture proportions, the Wasserstein distance between them will be large. This often leads to undesired results in distance-based learning methods for mixture distributions. In this paper, we resolve this issue by introducing {\it Normalized Wasserstein} distance. The key idea is to introduce mixture proportions as optimization variables, effectively normalizing mixture proportions in the Wasserstein formulation. Using the proposed normalized Wasserstein distance, instead of the vanilla one, leads to significant gains working with mixture distributions with imbalanced mixture proportions. We demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed distance in GANs, domain adaptation, adversarial clustering and hypothesis testing over mixture of Gaussians, MNIST, CIFAR-10, CelebA and VISDA datasets.

We propose an approach to distinguish between correct and incorrect image classifications. Our approach can detect misclassifications which either occurunintentionally ("natural errors"), or due to intentional adversarial attacks ("adversarial errors"),both in a single unified framework. Our approach is based on the observation that correctly classified images tend to exhibit robust and consistent classifications under certain image transformations (e.g., horizontal flip, small image translation, etc.). In contrast, incorrectly classified images (whether due to adversarial errors or natural errors)tend to exhibit large variations in classification resultsunder such transformations. Our approach does not require any modifications or retraining of the classifier, hence can be applied to any pre-trained classifier. We further use state of the art targeted adversarial attacks to demonstrate that even when the adversary has full knowledge of our method, the adversarial distortion needed for bypassing our detector is no longer imperceptible tothe human eye. Our approach obtains state-of-the-art results compared to previous adversarial detectionmethods, surpassing them by a large margin.

We study a class of weakly identifiable location-scale mixture models for which the maximum likelihood estimates based on $n$ i.i.d. samples are known to have lower accuracy than the classical $n^{- \frac{1}{2}}$ error. We investigate whether the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm also converges slowly for these models. We first demonstrate via simulation studies a broad range of over-specified mixture models for which the EM algorithm converges very slowly, both in one and higher dimensions. We provide a complete analytical characterization of this behavior for fitting data generated from a multivariate standard normal distribution using two-component Gaussian mixture with varying location and scale parameters. Our results reveal distinct regimes in the convergence behavior of EM as a function of the dimension $d$. In the multivariate setting ($d \geq 2$), when the covariance matrix is constrained to a multiple of the identity matrix, the EM algorithm converges in order $(n/d)^{\frac{1}{2}}$ steps and returns estimates that are at a Euclidean distance of order ${(n/d)^{-\frac{1}{4}}}$ and ${ (n d)^{- \frac{1}{2}}}$ from the true location and scale parameter respectively. On the other hand, in the univariate setting ($d = 1$), the EM algorithm converges in order $n^{\frac{3}{4} }$ steps and returns estimates that are at a Euclidean distance of order ${ n^{- \frac{1}{8}}}$ and ${ n^{-\frac{1} {4}}}$ from the true location and scale parameter respectively. Establishing the slow rates in the univariate setting requires a novel localization argument with two stages, with each stage involving an epoch-based argument applied to a different surrogate EM operator at the population level. We also show multivariate ($d \geq 2$) examples, involving more general covariance matrices, that exhibit the same slow rates as the univariate case.

In this letter, we consider the problem of recovering an unknown sparse signal from noisy linear measurements, using an enhanced version of the popular Elastic-Net (EN) method. We modify the EN by adding a box-constraint, and we call it the Box-Elastic Net (Box-EN). We assume independent identically distributed (iid) real Gaussian measurement matrix with additive Gaussian noise. In many practical situations, the measurement matrix is not perfectly known, and so we only have a noisy estimate of it. In this work, we precisely characterize the mean squared error and the probability of support recovery of the Box-Elastic Net in the high-dimensional asymptotic regime. Numerical simulations validate the theoretical predictions derived in the paper and also show that the boxed variant outperforms the standard EN.

Speech Acts (SAs) are one of the important areas of pragmatics, which give us a better understanding of the state of mind of the people and convey an intended language function. Knowledge of the SA of a text can be helpful in analyzing that text in natural language processing applications. This study presents a dictionary-based statistical technique for Persian SA recognition. The proposed technique classifies a text into seven classes of SA based on four criteria: lexical, syntactic, semantic, and surface features. WordNet as the tool for extracting synonym and enriching features dictionary is utilized. To evaluate the proposed technique, we utilized four classification methods including Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method using RF and SVM as the best classifiers achieved a state-of-the-art performance with an accuracy of 0.95 for classification of Persian SAs. Our original vision of this work is introducing an application of SA recognition on social media content, especially the common SA in rumors. Therefore, the proposed system utilized to determine the common SAs in rumors. The results showed that Persian rumors are often expressed in three SA classes including narrative, question, and threat, and in some cases with the request SA.