Disadvantaged groups around the world have suffered and endured higher mortality during the current COVID-19 pandemic. This contrast disparity suggests that socioeconomic and health-related factors may drive inequality in disease outcome. To identify these factors correlated with COVID-19 outcome, country aggregate data provided by the Lancet COVID-19 Commission subjected to correlation analysis. Socioeconomic and health-related variables were used to predict mortality in the top 5 most affected countries using ridge regression and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) models. Our data reveal that predictors related to demographics and social disadvantage correlate with COVID-19 mortality per million and that XGBoost performed better than ridge regression. Taken together, our findings suggest that the health consequence of the current pandemic is not just confined to indiscriminate impact of a viral infection but that these preventable effects are amplified based on pre-existing health and socioeconomic inequalities.

There is an urgent need to build models to tackle Indoor Air Quality issue. Since the model should be accurate and fast, Reduced Order Modelling technique is used to reduce the dimensionality of the problem. The accuracy of the model, that represent a dynamic system, is improved integrating real data coming from sensors using Data Assimilation techniques. In this paper, we formulate a new methodology called Latent Assimilation that combines Data Assimilation and Machine Learning. We use a Convolutional neural network to reduce the dimensionality of the problem, a Long-Short-Term-Memory to build a surrogate model of the dynamic system and an Optimal Interpolated Kalman Filter to incorporate real data. Experimental results are provided for CO2 concentration within an indoor space. This methodology can be used for example to predict in real-time the load of virus, such as the SARS-COV-2, in the air by linking it to the concentration of CO2.

You probably already have your holiday shopping taken care of and are already looking at a stack of confirmed delivery tracking numbers. But if, say, a friend of yours is still in need of last-minute shopping information, or you just want to double check what's out there, the Engadget Holiday Gift Guides for 2020 are here to help. Zoom has posted update notes for a version of its video chat client that should be available later today. If you have one of Apple's new M1-powered Macs, you'll want to keep an eye out because this update brings the first version with native support for Apple Silicon. There's no version number listed yet, but once it's available, you'll be able to get it with a new installer from the Zoom download page.

Choosing a proper set of kernel functions is an important problem in learning Gaussian Process (GP) models since each kernel structure has different model complexity and data fitness. Recently, automatic kernel composition methods provide not only accurate prediction but also attractive interpretability through search-based methods. However, existing methods suffer from slow kernel composition learning. To tackle large-scaled data, we propose a new sparse approximate posterior for GPs, MultiSVGP, constructed from groups of inducing points associated with individual additive kernels in compositional kernels. We demonstrate that this approximation provides a better fit to learn compositional kernels given empirical observations. We also theoretically justification on error bound when compared to the traditional sparse GP. In contrast to the search-based approach, we present a novel probabilistic algorithm to learn a kernel composition by handling the sparsity in the kernel selection with Horseshoe prior. We demonstrate that our model can capture characteristics of time series with significant reductions in computational time and have competitive regression performance on real-world data sets.

We propose a Distributional Approach to address Controlled Text Generation from pre-trained Language Models (LMs). This view permits to define, in a single formal framework, "pointwise" and "distributional" constraints over the target LM -- to our knowledge, this is the first approach with such generality -- while minimizing KL divergence with the initial LM distribution. The optimal target distribution is then uniquely determined as an explicit EBM (Energy-Based Model) representation. From that optimal representation we then train the target controlled autoregressive LM through an adaptive distributional variant of Policy Gradient. We conduct a first set of experiments over pointwise constraints showing the advantages of our approach over a set of baselines, in terms of obtaining a controlled LM balancing constraint satisfaction with divergence from the initial LM (GPT-2). We then perform experiments over distributional constraints, a unique feature of our approach, demonstrating its potential as a remedy to the problem of Bias in Language Models. Through an ablation study we show the effectiveness of our adaptive technique for obtaining faster convergence.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) reaches a superhuman level of play in many complete information games. The state of the art search algorithm used in combination with DRL is Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). We take another approach to DRL using a Minimax algorithm instead of MCTS and learning only the evaluation of states, not the policy. We show that for multiple games it is competitive with the state of the art DRL for the learning performances and for the confrontations.

This study introduces the Territory Design for Dynamic Multi-Period Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (TD-DMPVRPTW), motivated by a real-world application at a food company's distribution center. This problem deals with the design of contiguous and compact territories for delivery of orders from a depot to a set of customers, with time windows, over a multi-period planning horizon. Customers and their demands vary dynamically over time. The problem is modeled as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) and solved by a proposed heuristic. The heuristic solutions are compared with the proposed MILP solutions on a set of small artificial instances and the food company's solutions on a set of real-world instances. Computational results show that the proposed algorithm can yield high-quality solutions within moderate running times.

Small business classification is a difficult and important task within many applications, including customer segmentation. Training on small business names introduces gender and geographic origin biases. A model for predicting one of 66 business types based only upon the business name was developed in this work (top-1 f1-score = 60.2%). Two approaches to removing the bias from this model are explored: replacing given names with a placeholder token, and augmenting the training data with gender-swapped examples. The results for these approaches is reported, and the bias in the model was reduced by hiding given names from the model. However, bias reduction was accomplished at the expense of classification performance (top-1 f1-score = 56.6%). Augmentation of the training data with gender-swapping samples proved less effective at bias reduction than the name hiding approach on the evaluated dataset.

Investors try to predict returns of financial assets to make successful investment. Many quantitative analysts have used machine learning-based methods to find unknown profitable market rules from large amounts of market data. However, there are several challenges in financial markets hindering practical applications of machine learning-based models. First, in financial markets, there is no single model that can consistently make accurate prediction because traders in markets quickly adapt to newly available information. Instead, there are a number of ephemeral and partially correct models called "alpha factors". Second, since financial markets are highly uncertain, ensuring interpretability of prediction models is quite important to make reliable trading strategies. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Trader-Company method, a novel evolutionary model that mimics the roles of a financial institute and traders belonging to it. Our method predicts future stock returns by aggregating suggestions from multiple weak learners called Traders. A Trader holds a collection of simple mathematical formulae, each of which represents a candidate of an alpha factor and would be interpretable for real-world investors. The aggregation algorithm, called a Company, maintains multiple Traders. By randomly generating new Traders and retraining them, Companies can efficiently find financially meaningful formulae whilst avoiding overfitting to a transient state of the market. We show the effectiveness of our method by conducting experiments on real market data.

Increased availability of epidemiological data, novel digital data streams, and the rise of powerful machine learning approaches have generated a surge of research activity on real-time epidemic forecast systems. In this paper, we propose the use of a novel data source, namely retail market data to improve seasonal influenza forecasting. Specifically, we consider supermarket retail data as a proxy signal for influenza, through the identification of sentinel baskets, i.e., products bought together by a population of selected customers. We develop a nowcasting and forecasting framework that provides estimates for influenza incidence in Italy up to 4 weeks ahead. We make use of the Support Vector Regression (SVR) model to produce the predictions of seasonal flu incidence. Our predictions outperform both a baseline autoregressive model and a second baseline based on product purchases. The results show quantitatively the value of incorporating retail market data in forecasting models, acting as a proxy that can be used for the real-time analysis of epidemics.