Artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and neural networks represent incredibly exciting and powerful machine learning-based techniques used to solve many real-world problems. For a primer on machine learning, you may want to read this five-part series that I wrote. While human-like deductive reasoning, inference, and decision-making by a computer is still a long time away, there have been remarkable gains in the application of AI techniques and associated algorithms. The concepts discussed here are extremely technical, complex, and based on mathematics, statistics, probability theory, physics, signal processing, machine learning, computer science, psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. That said, this article is not meant to provide such a technical treatment, but rather to explain these concepts at a level that can be understood by most non-practitioners, and can also serve as a reference or review for technical folks as well.

We trust you've had a suitably enjoyable week, especially those in the UK enjoying the hot weather. Let's journey back and look at some of the digital marketing stats you might have missed. The roundup includes news about GDPR, personalisation, AI, and lots more. As always, be sure to check out the Internet Statistics Compendium for further facts and figures. When it comes to digital experiences, personalisation is way down on the list of things consumers care about.

Jeremy Achin, DataRobot CEO, co-founder, and architect of automated machine learning, kicked off the conference with his keynote address. He delivered a primer on AI as a tool for finding business opportunity in data and outlined the history of DataRobot from its humble beginnings in 2012 in a co-founder's kitchen in Connecticut, U.S. to a global company five years later. He closed out by presenting a vision for the future of the technology. Takuya Kudo, Accenture Applied Intelligence Unit, delivered a keynote on the surging demand for data science and the improving performance accuracy in automated machine learning. Kaoru Kawamoto, Head of Business Analysis for Osaka Gas, presented the final keynote.

The Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) preprocessing algorithm is considered "de facto" standard in the framework of learning from imbalanced data. This is due to its simplicity in the design of the procedure, as well as its robustness when applied to different type of problems. Since its publication in 2002, SMOTE has proven successful in a variety of applications from several different domains. SMOTE has also inspired several approaches to counter the issue of class imbalance, and has also significantly contributed to new supervised learning paradigms, including multilabel classification, incremental learning, semi-supervised learning, multi-instance learning, among others. It is standard benchmark for learning from imbalanced data. It is also featured in a number of different software packages -- from open source to commercial. In this paper, marking the fifteen year anniversary of SMOTE, we reflect on the SMOTE journey, discuss the current state of affairs with SMOTE, its applications, and also identify the next set of challenges to extend SMOTE for Big Data problems.

The question whether an ontology can safely be replaced by another, possibly simpler, one is fundamental for many ontology engineering and maintenance tasks. It underpins, for example, ontology versioning, ontology modularization, forgetting, and knowledge exchange. What safe replacement means depends on the intended application of the ontology. If, for example, it is used to query data, then the answers to any relevant ontology-mediated query should be the same over any relevant data set; if, in contrast, the ontology is used for conceptual reasoning, then the entailed subsumptions between concept expressions should coincide. This gives rise to different notions of ontology inseparability such as query inseparability and concept inseparability, which generalize corresponding notions of conservative extensions. We survey results on various notions of inseparability in the context of description logic ontologies, discussing their applications, useful model-theoretic characterizations, algorithms for determining whether two ontologies are inseparable (and, sometimes, for computing the difference between them if they are not), and the computational complexity of this problem.

The following is a list of free books on Machine Learning. A Brief Introduction To Neural Networks provides a comprehensive overview of the subject of neural networks and is divided into 4 parts –Part I: From Biology to Formalization -- Motivation, Philosophy, History and Realization of Neural Models,Part II: Supervised learning Network Paradigms, Part III: Unsupervised learning Network Paradigms and Part IV: Excursi, Appendices and Registers. A Course In Machine Learning is designed to provide a gentle and pedagogically organized introduction to the field and provide a view of machine learning that focuses on ideas and models, not on math. The audience of this book is anyone who knows differential calculus and discrete math, and can program reasonably well. An undergraduate in their fourth or fifth semester should be fully capable of understanding this material. However, it should also be suitable for first year graduate students, perhaps at a slightly faster pace.

Note: rank(M) rM uniqueness of decomposition 31.

Ensembles are popular methods for solving practical supervised learning problems. They reduce the risk of having underperforming models in production-grade software. Although critical, methods for learning heterogeneous regression ensembles have not been proposed at large scale, whereas in classical ML literature, stacking, cascading and voting are mostly restricted to classification problems. Regression poses distinct learning challenges that may result in poor performance, even when using well established homogeneous ensemble schemas such as bagging or boosting. In this paper, we introduce MetaBags, a novel, practically useful stacking framework for regression. MetaBags is a meta-learning algorithm that learns a set of meta-decision trees designed to select one base model (i.e. expert) for each query, and focuses on inductive bias reduction. A set of meta-decision trees are learned using different types of meta-features, specially created for this purpose - to then be bagged at meta-level. This procedure is designed to learn a model with a fair bias-variance trade-off, and its improvement over base model performance is correlated with the prediction diversity of different experts on specific input space subregions. The proposed method and meta-features are designed in such a way that they enable good predictive performance even in subregions of space which are not adequately represented in the available training data. An exhaustive empirical testing of the method was performed, evaluating both generalization error and scalability of the approach on synthetic, open and real-world application datasets. The obtained results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.

In the context of multicriteria decision making, the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) functions play a crucial role in aggregating multiple criteria evaluations into an overall assessment supporting the decision makers' choice. Determining OWA weights, therefore, is an essential part of this process. Available methods for determining OWA weights, however, often require heavy computational loads in real-life large-scale optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a new approach to simplify the well-known minimax disparity model for determining OWA weights. For this purpose, we use to the binomial decomposition framework in which natural constraints can be imposed on the level of complexity of the weight distribution. The original problem of determining OWA weights is thereby transformed into a smaller scale optimization problem, formulated in terms of the coefficients in the binomial decomposition. Our preliminary results show that a small set of these coefficients can encode for an appropriate full-dimensional set of OWA weights.

A new report by the Lords Select Committee in the UK claims that Britain is in a strong position to be a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence. But to get there--and to keep AI safe and ethical--tech firms should follow the Committee's newly proposed "AI Code." The new report was penned by the House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Committee, and it's titled "AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able?." The AI Committee is proposing a path for both the British government and UK-based businesses to move forward as AI increasingly expands in power and scope. The report is particularly timely given the recent scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook data and growing concerns that tech companies aren't working in the public's best interests.