Industry is evolving towards Industry 4.0, which holds the promise of increased flexibility in manufacturing, better quality and improved productivity. A core actor of this growth is using sensors, which must capture data that can used in unforeseen ways to achieve a performance not achievable without them. However, the complexity of this improved setting is much greater than what is currently used in practice. Hence, it is imperative that the management cannot only be performed by human labor force, but part of that will be done by automated algorithms instead. A natural way to represent the data generated by this large amount of sensors, which are not acting measuring independent variables, and the interaction of the different devices is by using a graph data model. Then, machine learning could be used to aid the Industry 4.0 system to, for example, perform predictive maintenance. However, machine learning directly on graphs, needs feature engineering and has scalability issues. In this paper we discuss methods to convert (embed) the graph in a vector space, such that it becomes feasible to use traditional machine learning methods for Industry 4.0 settings.

News recommender systems are aimed to personalize users experiences and help them to discover relevant articles from a large and dynamic search space. Therefore, news domain is a challenging scenario for recommendations, due to its sparse user profiling, fast growing number of items, accelerated item's value decay, and users preferences dynamic shift. Some promising results have been recently achieved by the usage of Deep Learning techniques on Recommender Systems, specially for item's feature extraction and for session-based recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks. In this paper, its presented a Deep Learning architecture for Session-Based recommendations of News articles. This architecture is composed of two modules, the first responsible to learn news articles representations, based on their text and metadata, and the second module aimed to provide session-based recommendations using Recurrent Neural Networks. The recommendation task addressed in this work is next-item prediction for user sessions: "what is the next most likely article a user might read in a session?" User session context is leveraged by the architecture to provide additional information in such extreme cold-start scenario of news recommendation. Users' behavior and item features are both merged in an hybrid recommendation approach. A temporal offline evaluation method is also proposed as a complementary contribution, for a more realistic evaluation of such task, considering dynamic factors that affect global readership interests like popularity, recency, and seasonality.

Machine learning has become a basic tool in scientific research and for the development of technologies with significant impact on society. In fact, such methods allow to discover regularities in data and make predictions without explicit knowledge of the rules governing the system under analysis. However, a price must be paid for exploiting such a modeling flexibility: machine learning methods are usually black-box, meaning that it is difficult to fully understand what the machine is doing and how. This poses constraints on the applicability of such methods, neglecting the possibility to gather novel scientific insights from experimental data. Our research aims to open the black-box of recurrent neural networks, an important family of neural networks suitable to process sequential data. Here, we propose a novel methodology that allows to provide a mechanistic interpretation of their behaviour when used to solve computational tasks. The methodology is based on mathematical constructs called excitable network attractors, which are models represented as networks in phase space composed by stable attractors and excitable connections between them. As the behaviour of recurrent neural networks depends on training and inputs driving the autonomous system, we introduce an algorithm to extract network attractors directly from a trajectory generated by the neural network while solving tasks. Simulations conducted on a controlled benchmark highlight the relevance of the proposed methodology for interpreting the behaviour of recurrent neural networks on tasks that involve learning a finite number of stable states.

An econometric or statistical model may undergo a marginal gain when a new variable is admitted, and a marginal loss if an existing variable is removed. The value of a variable to the model is quantified by its expected marginal gain and marginal loss. Assuming the equality of opportunity, we derive a few formulas which evaluate the overall performance in potential modeling scenarios. However, the value is not symmetric to marginal gain and marginal loss; thus, we introduce an unbiased solution. Simulation studies show that our new approaches significantly outperform a few practice-used variable selection methods.

Deep learning constitutes a recent, modern technique for image processing and data analysis, with promising results and large potential. As deep learning has been successfully applied in various domains, it has recently entered also the domain of agriculture. In this paper, we perform a survey of 40 research efforts that employ deep learning techniques, applied to various agricultural and food production challenges. We examine the particular agricultural problems under study, the specific models and frameworks employed, the sources, nature and pre-processing of data used, and the overall performance achieved according to the metrics used at each work under study. Moreover, we study comparisons of deep learning with other existing popular techniques, in respect to differences in classification or regression performance. Our findings indicate that deep learning provides high accuracy, outperforming existing commonly used image processing techniques.

In this work, we study recommendation systems modelled as contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems. We propose a graph-based recommendation system that learns and exploits the geometry of the user space to create meaningful clusters in the user domain. This reduces the dimensionality of the recommendation problem while preserving the accuracy of MAB. We then study the effect of graph sparsity and clusters size on the MAB performance and provide exhaustive simulation results both in synthetic and in real-case datasets. Simulation results show improvements with respect to state-of-the-art MAB algorithms.

We study the problem of subsampling in differential privacy (DP), a question that is the centerpiece behind many successful differentially private machine learning algorithms. Specifically, we provide a tight upper bound on the R\'enyi Differential Privacy (RDP) (Mironov, 2017) parameters for algorithms that: (1) subsample the dataset, and then (2) apply a randomized mechanism M to the subsample, in terms of the RDP parameters of M and the subsampling probability parameter. This result generalizes the classic subsampling-based "privacy amplification" property of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy that applies to only one fixed pair of $(\epsilon,\delta)$, to a stronger version that exploits properties of each specific randomized algorithm and satisfies an entire family of $(\epsilon(\delta),\delta)$-differential privacy for all $\delta\in [0,1]$. Our experiments confirm the advantage of using our techniques over keeping track of $(\epsilon,\delta)$ directly, especially in the setting where we need to compose many rounds of data access.

Abstract--Recently, deep learning has been playing a central role in machine learning research and applications. Since AlexNet, increasingly more advanced networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in computer vision, speech recognition, language processing, game playing, medical imaging, and so on. In our previous studies, we proposed quadratic/second-order neurons and deep quadratic neural networks. In a quadratic neuron, the inner product of a vector of data and the corresponding weights in a conventional neuron is replaced with a quadratic function. The resultant second-order neuron enjoys an enhanced expressive capability over the conventional neuron. However, how quadratic neurons improve the expressing capability of a deep quadratic network has not been studied up to now, preferably in relation to that of a conventional neural network. In this paper, we ask three basic questions regarding the expressive capability of a quadratic network: (1) for the one-hidden-layer network structure, is there any function that a quadratic network can approximate much more efficiently than a conventional network? Our main contributions are the three theorems shedding light upon these three questions and demonstrating the merits of a quadratic network in terms of expressive efficiency, unique capability, and compact architecture respectively. Ver recent years, deep learning has become the mainstream approach for machine learning. Since AlextNet [1], increasingly more advanced neural networks [2-6] are being proposed, such as GoogleNet, ResNet, DenseNet, GAN and variants, to enable practical performance comparable to or beyond what the human delivers in computer vision [7], speech recognition [8], language processing [9] game playing [10], medical imaging [11-13], and so on. A heuristic understanding of why these deep learning models are so successful is that these models representate knowledge in hierarchy and facilitate high-dimensional nonlinear functional fitting.

Class imbalance is an intrinsic characteristic of multi-label data. Most of the labels in multi-label data sets are associated with a small number of training examples, much smaller compared to the size of the data set. Class imbalance poses a key challenge that plagues most multi-label learning methods. Ensemble of Classifier Chains (ECC), one of the most prominent multi-label learning methods, is no exception to this rule, as each of the binary models it builds is trained from all positive and negative examples of a label. To make ECC resilient to class imbalance, we first couple it with random undersampling. We then present two extensions of this basic approach, where we build a varying number of binary models per label and construct chains of different sizes, in order to improve the exploitation of majority examples with approximately the same computational budget. Experimental results on 16 multi-label datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in a variety of evaluation metrics.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is one of the leading techniques for protein studies. The method features a number of properties, allowing to explain macromolecular interactions mechanistically and resolve structures with atomic resolution. However, due to laborious data analysis, a full potential of NMR spectroscopy remains unexploited. Here we present an approach aiming at automation of two major bottlenecks in the analysis pipeline, namely, peak picking and chemical shift assignment. Our approach combines deep learning, non-parametric models and combinatorial optimization, and is able to detect signals of interest in a multidimensional NMR data with high accuracy and match them with atoms in medium-length protein sequences, which is a preliminary step to solve protein spatial structure.