Time series models such as dynamical systems are frequently fitted to a cohort of data, ignoring variation between individual entities such as patients. In this paper we show how these models can be personalised to an individual level while retaining statistical power, via use of multi-task learning (MTL). To our knowledge this is a novel development of MTL which applies to time series both with and without control inputs. The modelling framework is demonstrated on a physiological drug response problem which results in improved predictive accuracy and uncertainty estimation over existing state-of-the-art models.

This work addresses the problem of learning sparse representations of tensor data using structured dictionary learning. It proposes learning a mixture of separable dictionaries to better capture the structure of tensor data by generalizing the separable dictionary learning model. Two different approaches for learning mixture of separable dictionaries are explored and sufficient conditions for local identifiability of the underlying dictionary are derived in each case. Moreover, computational algorithms are developed to solve the problem of learning mixture of separable dictionaries in both batch and online settings. Numerical experiments are used to show the usefulness of the proposed model and the efficacy of the developed algorithms.

Determining the optimal initial dose for warfarin is a critically important task. Several factors have an impact on the therapeutic dose for individual patients, such as patients' physical attributes (Age, Height, etc.), medication profile, co-morbidities, and metabolic genotypes (CYP2C9 and VKORC1). These wide range factors influencing therapeutic dose, create a complex environment for clinicians to determine the optimal initial dose. Using a sample of 4,237 patients, we have proposed a companion classification model to one of the most popular dosing algorithms (International Warfarin Pharmacogenetics Consortium (IWPC) clinical model), which identifies the appropriate cohort of patients for applying this model. The proposed model functions as a clinical decision support system which assists clinicians in dosing. We have developed a classification model using Support Vector Machines, with a polynomial kernel function to determine if applying the dose prediction model is appropriate for a given patient. The IWPC clinical model will only be used if the patient is classified as "Safe for model". By using the proposed methodology, the dosing mode's prediction accuracy increases by 15 percent in terms of Root Mean Squared Error and 17 percent in terms of Mean Absolute Error in dose estimates of patients classified as "Safe for model".

This paper presents a supervised learning algorithm, namely, the Synaptic Efficacy Function with Meta-neuron based learning algorithm (SEF-M) for a spiking neural network with a time-varying weight model. For a given pattern, SEF-M uses the learning algorithm derived from meta-neuron based learning algorithm to determine the change in weights corresponding to each presynaptic spike times. The changes in weights modulate the amplitude of a Gaussian function centred at the same presynaptic spike times. The sum of amplitude modulated Gaussian functions represents the synaptic efficacy functions (or time-varying weight models). The performance of SEF-M is evaluated against state-of-the-art spiking neural network learning algorithms on 10 benchmark datasets from UCI machine learning repository. Performance studies show superior generalization ability of SEF-M. An ablation study on time-varying weight model is conducted using JAFFE dataset. The results of the ablation study indicate that using a time-varying weight model instead of single weight model improves the classification accuracy by 14%. Thus, it can be inferred that a single input-output layer spiking neural network with time-varying weight model is computationally more efficient than a multi-layer spiking neural network with long-term or short-term weight model.

In many real-world systems, information can be transmitted in two qualitatively different ways: by {\em copying} or by {\em transformation}. {\em Copying} occurs when messages are transmitted without modification, for example when an offspring receives an unaltered copy of a gene from its parent. {\em Transformation} occurs when messages are modified in a systematic way during transmission, e.g., when non-random mutations occur during biological reproduction. Standard information-theoretic measures of information transmission, such as mutual information, do not distinguish these two modes of information transfer, even though they may reflect different mechanisms and have different functional consequences. We propose a decomposition of mutual information which separately quantifies the information transmitted by copying versus the information transmitted by transformation. Our measures of copy and transformation information are derived from a few simple axioms, and have natural operationalizations in terms of hypothesis testing and thermodynamics. In this later case, we show that our measure of copy information corresponds to the minimal amount of work needed by a physical copying process, having special relevance for the physics of replication of biological information. We demonstrate our measures on a real world dataset of amino acid substitution rates. Our decomposition into copy and transformation information is general and applies to any system in which the fidelity of copying, rather than simple predictability, is of critical relevance.

This article applies the conceptual framework of constructor theory of information to cognition theory. The main result of this work is that cognition theory, in specific situations concerning for example the conjunction fallacy heuristic, requires the use of superinformation media, just as quantum theory. This result entails that quantum and cognition theories can be considered as elements of a general class of superinformation-based subsidiary theories.

Decision trees are ubiquitous in machine learning for their ease of use and interpretability; however, they are not typically implemented in reinforcement learning because they cannot be updated via stochastic gradient descent. Traditional applications of decision trees for reinforcement learning have focused instead on making commitments to decision boundaries as the tree is grown one layer at a time. We overcome this critical limitation by allowing for a gradient update over the entire tree structure that improves sample complexity when a tree is fuzzy and interpretability when sharp. We offer three key contributions towards this goal. First, we motivate the need for policy gradient-based learning by examining the theoretical properties of gradient descent over differentiable decision trees. Second, we introduce a regularization framework that yields interpretability via sparsity in the tree structure. Third, we demonstrate the ability to construct a decision tree via policy gradient in canonical reinforcement learning domains and supervised learning benchmarks.

In current clinical practices, electroencephalograms (EEG) are reviewed and analyzed by trained neurologists to provide supports for therapeutic decisions. Manual reviews can be laborious and error prone. Automatic and accurate seizure/non-seizure classification methods are desirable. A critical challenge is that seizure morphologies exhibit considerable variabilities. In order to capture essential seizure features, this paper leverages an emerging deep learning model, the independently recurrent neural network (IndRNN), to construct a new approach for the seizure/non-seizure classification. This new approach gradually expands the time scales, thereby extracting temporal and spatial features from the local time duration to the entire record. Evaluations are conducted with cross-validation experiments across subjects over the noisy data of CHB-MIT. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we explore how the segment length affects the classification performance. Thirteen different segment lengths are assessed, showing that the classification performance varies over the segment lengths, and the maximal fluctuating margin is more than 4%. Thus, the segment length is an important factor influencing the classification performance.

Electronic medical records (EMRs) supports the development of machine learning algorithms for predicting disease incidence, patient response to treatment, and other healthcare events. But insofar most algorithms have been centralized, taking little account of the decentralized, non-identically independently distributed (non-IID), and privacy-sensitive characteristics of EMRs that can complicate data collection, sharing and learning. To address this challenge, we introduced a community-based federated machine learning (CBFL) algorithm and evaluated it on non-IID ICU EMRs. Our algorithm clustered the distributed data into clinically meaningful communities that captured similar diagnoses and geological locations, and learnt one model for each community. Throughout the learning process, the data was kept local on hospitals, while locally-computed results were aggregated on a server. Evaluation results show that CBFL outperformed the baseline FL algorithm in terms of Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (ROC AUC), Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (PR AUC), and communication cost between hospitals and the server. Furthermore, communities' performance difference could be explained by how dissimilar one community was to others.

We propose Deep Q-Networks (DQN) with model-based exploration, an algorithm combining both model-free and model-based approaches that explores better and learns environments with sparse rewards more efficiently. DQN is a generalpurpose, model-free algorithm and has been proven to perform well in a variety of tasks including Atari 2600 games since it's first proposed by Minh et el[1]. However, like many other reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, DQN suffers from poor sample efficiency when rewards are sparse in an environment. As a result, most of the transitions stored in the replay memory have no informative reward signal, and provide limited value to the convergence and training of the Q-Network. However, one insight is that these transitions can be used to learn the dynamics of the environment as a supervised learning problem. The transitions also provide information of the distribution of visited states. Our algorithm utilizes these two observations to perform a one-step planning during exploration to pick an action that leads to states least likely to be seen, thus improving the performance of exploration. We demonstrate our agent's performance in two classic environments with sparse rewards in OpenAI gym[2]: Mountain Car and Lunar Lander.