Venezuela's interior minister says six people have been arrested, after what President Nicolas Maduro says was an assassination attempt against him. The president accuses Colombia and a group of US financiers of trying to kill him. Venezuela's opposition fears the government will launch a crackdown. Colombia's Foreign Affairs Ministry called that accusation absurd, and in Washington, President Donald Trump's national security adviser John Bolton strongly denied any US role.

Venezuelan investigators hunting for a band of assailants allegedly behind a failed attempt to assassinate President Nicolas Maduro with explosives-laden drones have raided hotels and seized vehicles while grilling six suspects for details of the plot.

CARACAS – Authorities detained six people suspected of using explosives-laden drones in a failed bid to assassinate Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, officials said Sunday, in what one witness described as a terrifying attack that shook her apartment building. The government alleged that opposition factions conspired with assailants in Miami and Bogota, although they offered no specific evidence. Opposition leaders decried Maduro for broadly singling out his political opponents, and they warned he may use it to further suppress his critics. The thwarted attack comes as Venezuela is reeling from a worsening economic and humanitarian crisis and Maduro has grown increasingly isolated. Foreign nations, including the United States, are slapping economic sanctions against a growing list of high-ranking officials and decrying his government as an autocratic regime.

Missing data imputation can help improve the performance of prediction models in situations where missing data hide useful information. This paper compares methods for imputing missing categorical data for supervised classification tasks. We experiment on two machine learning benchmark datasets with missing categorical data, comparing classifiers trained on non-imputed (i.e., one-hot encoded) or imputed data with different levels of additional missing-data perturbation. We show imputation methods can increase predictive accuracy in the presence of missing-data perturbation, which can actually improve prediction accuracy by regularizing the classifier. We achieve the state-of-the-art on the Adult dataset with missing-data perturbation and k-nearest-neighbors (k-NN) imputation.

NIMFA is an open-source Python library that provides a unified interface to nonnegative matrix factorization algorithms. It includes implementations of state-of-the-art factorization methods, initialization approaches, and quality scoring. It supports both dense and sparse matrix representation. NIMFA's component-based implementation and hierarchical design should help the users to employ already implemented techniques or design and code new strategies for matrix factorization tasks.

This is a very serious, looming threat that we are currently unprepared to confront,

Maduro often blames the United States, which has imposed sanctions against officials in his government, of "conspiracy" and blamed U.S. politicians of fomenting plans to topple him to end nearly two decades of socialism in Venezuela.

A drone loaded with explosives detonated near a military event where Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was giving a speech, but he escaped unharmed in what the embattled leader called an assassination attempt. Seven people were wounded on Saturday in the apparent attack, which came as Maduro celebrated the National Guard's 81st anniversary in the capital, Caracas. Maduro later said "everything points" to a right-wing plot that an initial investigation suggested was linked to Colombia and the US state of Florida, where many Venezuelan exiles live. Several perpetrators were caught, he said, without elaborating. "This was an assassination attempt, they tried to assassinate me," Maduro said in a televised address.

Unknown assailants attempted to attack President Nicolas Maduro with drone-like devices armed with explosives that detonated just as the embattled leader was delivering a speech to hundreds of soldiers, the Venezuelan government said Saturday.

CARACAS – Drones armed with explosives detonated near Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in an apparent assassination attempt that took place while he was delivering a speech to hundreds of soldiers being broadcast live on television, officials said. Caught by surprise mid-speech, Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, looked up at the sky and winced after hearing the sound of an explosion pierce the air. "This was an attempt to kill me," he said later in an impassioned retelling of the events. "Today they attempted to assassinate me." Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez said the incident took place shortly after 5:30 p.m. as Maduro was celebrating the National Guard's 81st anniversary.