Hierarchical forecasting with intermittent time series is a challenge in both research and empirical studies. The overall forecasting performance is heavily affected by the forecasting accuracy of intermittent time series at bottom levels. In this paper, we present a forecasting reconciliation approach that treats the bottom level forecast as latent to ensure higher forecasting accuracy on the upper levels of the hierarchy. We employ a pure deep learning forecasting approach N-BEATS for continuous time series on top levels and a widely used tree-based algorithm LightGBM for the bottom level intermittent time series. The hierarchical forecasting with alignment approach is simple and straightforward to implement in practice. It sheds light on an orthogonal direction for forecasting reconciliation. When there is difficulty finding an optimal reconciliation, allowing suboptimal forecasts at a lower level could retain a high overall performance. The approach in this empirical study was developed by the first author during the M5 Forecasting Accuracy competition ranking second place. The approach is business orientated and could be beneficial for business strategic planning.

In the estimation of the causal effect under linear Structural Causal Models (SCMs), it is common practice to first identify the causal structure, estimate the probability distributions, and then calculate the causal effect. However, if the goal is to estimate the causal effect, it is not necessary to fix a single causal structure or probability distributions. In this paper, we first show from a Bayesian perspective that it is Bayes optimal to weight (average) the causal effects estimated under each model rather than estimating the causal effect under a fixed single model. This idea is also known as Bayesian model averaging. Although the Bayesian model averaging is optimal, as the number of candidate models increases, the weighting calculations become computationally hard. We develop an approximation to the Bayes optimal estimator by using Gaussian scale mixture distributions.

Imbalanced classification tasks are widespread in many real-world applications. For such classification tasks, in comparison with the accuracy rate, it is usually much more appropriate to use non-decomposable performance measures such as the Area Under the receiver operating characteristic Curve (AUC) and the $F_\beta$ measure as the classification criterion since the label class is imbalanced. On the other hand, the minimax probability machine is a popular method for binary classification problems and aims at learning a linear classifier by maximizing the accuracy rate, which makes it unsuitable to deal with imbalanced classification tasks. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new minimax probability machine for the $F_\beta$ measure, called MPMF, which can be used to deal with imbalanced classification tasks. A brief discussion is also given on how to extend the MPMF model for several other non-decomposable performance measures listed in the paper. To solve the MPMF model effectively, we derive its equivalent form which can then be solved by an alternating descent method to learn a linear classifier. Further, the kernel trick is employed to derive a nonlinear MPMF model to learn a nonlinear classifier. Several experiments on real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our new model.

We consider the problem of reaching a propositional goal condition in fully-observable non-deterministic (FOND) planning under a general class of fairness assumptions that are given explicitly. The fairness assumptions are of the form A/B and say that state trajectories that contain infinite occurrences of an action a from A in a state s and finite occurrence of actions from B, must also contain infinite occurrences of action a in s followed by each one of its possible outcomes. The infinite trajectories that violate this condition are deemed as unfair, and the solutions are policies for which all the fair trajectories reach a goal state. We show that strong and strong-cyclic FOND planning, as well as QNP planning, a planning model introduced recently for generalized planning, are all special cases of FOND planning with fairness assumptions of this form which can also be combined. FOND+ planning, as this form of planning is called, combines the syntax of FOND planning with some of the versatility of LTL for expressing fairness constraints. A new planner is implemented by reducing FOND+ planning to answer set programs, and the performance of the planner is evaluated in comparison with FOND and QNP planners, and LTL synthesis tools.

Diabetes is currently one of the most common, dangerous, and costly diseases in the world that is caused by an increase in blood sugar or a decrease in insulin in the body. Diabetes can have detrimental effects on people's health if diagnosed late. Today, diabetes has become one of the challenges for health and government officials. Prevention is a priority, and taking care of people's health without compromising their comfort is an essential need. In this study, the Ensemble training methodology based on genetic algorithms are used to accurately diagnose and predict the outcomes of diabetes mellitus. In this study, we use the experimental data, real data on Indian diabetics on the University of California website. Current developments in ICT, such as the Internet of Things, machine learning, and data mining, allow us to provide health strategies with more intelligent capabilities to accurately predict the outcomes of the disease in daily life and the hospital and prevent the progression of this disease and it's many complications. The results show the high performance of the proposed method in diagnosing the disease, which has reached 98.8%, and 99% accuracy in this study.

In the age of the intelligent era, more and more innovative concepts emerge daily. One of them is undoubtedly the field of "artificial intelligence." In this case, specifically, "deep learning," a sub-branch of AI, will encounter us when we need to dive deeper into complex problems, and it is used in many areas today. We develop deep learning models to achieve specific tasks, and in some cases, surpass human, repetitive capabilities. In this article, we will explore how the GPU is used for deep learning with code examples.

A Data Scientist is responsible for extracting, manipulating, pre-processing and generating predictions out of data. In order to do so, he requires various statistical tools and programming languages. In this article, we will share some of the Data Science Tools used by Data Scientists to carry out their data operations. We will understand the key features of the tools, benefits they provide and comparison of various data science tools. Stay updated with latest technology trends Join DataFlair on Telegram!! Data Science has emerged out as one of the most popular fields of 21st Century. Companies employ Data Scientists to help them gain insights about the market and to better their products.

The development of recommender systems that optimize multi-turn interaction with users, and model the interactions of different agents (e.g., users, content providers, vendors) in the recommender ecosystem have drawn increasing attention in recent years. Developing and training models and algorithms for such recommenders can be especially difficult using static datasets, which often fail to offer the types of counterfactual predictions needed to evaluate policies over extended horizons. To address this, we develop RecSim NG, a probabilistic platform for the simulation of multi-agent recommender systems. RecSim NG is a scalable, modular, differentiable simulator implemented in Edward2 and TensorFlow. It offers: a powerful, general probabilistic programming language for agent-behavior specification; tools for probabilistic inference and latent-variable model learning, backed by automatic differentiation and tracing; and a TensorFlow-based runtime for running simulations on accelerated hardware. We describe RecSim NG and illustrate how it can be used to create transparent, configurable, end-to-end models of a recommender ecosystem, complemented by a small set of simple use cases that demonstrate how RecSim NG can help both researchers and practitioners easily develop and train novel algorithms for recommender systems.

Reinforcement learning agents have demonstrated remarkable achievements in simulated environments. Data efficiency poses an impediment to carrying this success over to real environments. The design of data-efficient agents calls for a deeper understanding of information acquisition and representation. We develop concepts and establish a regret bound that together offer principled guidance. The bound sheds light on questions of what information to seek, how to seek that information, and what information to retain. To illustrate concepts, we design simple agents that build on them and present computational results that demonstrate improvements in data efficiency. Other learning paradigms are about minimization; reinforcement learning is about maximization.

Thomas Jefferson, the American statesman and third US president, was many things (including, notoriously, a slave-owner). But whatever else he was (or wasn't), he was a firm believer in what he called the "suffrage of the people" -- what today we'd call democracy. The democracy he had in mind, of course, wasn't a truly "general suffrage" of all citizens: in its most ambitious form it enfranchised only male taxpayers and soldiers. It was also far removed from the classical ideal set by Ancient Athens, in which all eligible citizens gathered regularly to debate and settle policy. Still, even Jefferson's limited and strictly "representative" version of democracy required something vital if it was to function properly: not just an able and knowledgeable public service, but a well-informed voting public.