The incredible possibilities artificial intelligence (AI) presents - and also its potential challenges - have made it an important talking point. Of course, there are a lot of myths out there about AI. Some like Alibaba founder Jack Ma said AI is not only a massive threat to jobs but could also spark World War III. Not only Ma, opinions are divided in the industry on whether AI is a job killer or a job creator. According to a recent report published by MIT Technology Review, Artificial Intelligence will not exactly eliminate jobs, but it will deconstruct them in the near future.

Machine learning is the subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. It explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners to develop statistical software and data analysis. In this course, you will work through various examples on advanced algorithms, and focus a bit more on some visualization options. We'll start by showing you how to use random forest to predict what type of insurance a patient has based on their treatment and you will get an overview of how to use random forest/decision tree and examine the model.

We present ease.ml, a declarative machine learning service platform we built to support more than ten research groups outside the computer science departments at ETH Zurich for their machine learning needs. With ease.ml, a user defines the high-level schema of a machine learning application and submits the task via a Web interface. The system automatically deals with the rest, such as model selection and data movement. In this paper, we describe the ease.ml architecture and focus on a novel technical problem introduced by ease.ml regarding resource allocation. We ask, as a "service provider" that manages a shared cluster of machines among all our users running machine learning workloads, what is the resource allocation strategy that maximizes the global satisfaction of all our users? Resource allocation is a critical yet subtle issue in this multi-tenant scenario, as we have to balance between efficiency and fairness. We first formalize the problem that we call multi-tenant model selection, aiming for minimizing the total regret of all users running automatic model selection tasks. We then develop a novel algorithm that combines multi-armed bandits with Bayesian optimization and prove a regret bound under the multi-tenant setting. Finally, we report our evaluation of ease.ml on synthetic data and on one service we are providing to our users, namely, image classification with deep neural networks. Our experimental evaluation results show that our proposed solution can be up to 9.8x faster in achieving the same global quality for all users as the two popular heuristics used by our users before ease.ml.

We comment on the fact that gradient ascent for logistic regression has a connection with the perceptron learning algorithm. Logistic learning is the "soft" variant of perceptron learning.

Short Video Abstract Prediction of disease onset from patient survey and lifestyle data is quickly becoming an important tool for diagnosing a disease before it progresses. In this study, data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) questionnaire is used to predict the onset of type II diabetes. An ensemble model using the output of five classification algorithms was developed to predict the onset on diabetes based on 16 features. The ensemble model had an AUC of 0.834 indicating high performance.

In this paper, we introduce a new sparsity-promoting prior, namely, the "normal product" prior, and develop an efficient algorithm for sparse signal recovery under the Bayesian framework. The normal product distribution is the distribution of a product of two normally distributed variables with zero means and possibly different variances. Like other sparsity-encouraging distributions such as the Student's $t$-distribution, the normal product distribution has a sharp peak at origin, which makes it a suitable prior to encourage sparse solutions. A two-stage normal product-based hierarchical model is proposed. We resort to the variational Bayesian (VB) method to perform the inference. Simulations are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm as compared with other state-of-the-art compressed sensing algorithms.

The spectral gap $\gamma$ of a finite, ergodic, and reversible Markov chain is an important parameter measuring the asymptotic rate of convergence. In applications, the transition matrix $P$ may be unknown, yet one sample of the chain up to a fixed time $n$ may be observed. We consider here the problem of estimating $\gamma$ from this data. Let $\pi$ be the stationary distribution of $P$, and $\pi_\star = \min_x \pi(x)$. We show that if $n = \tilde{O}\bigl(\frac{1}{\gamma \pi_\star}\bigr)$, then $\gamma$ can be estimated to within multiplicative constants with high probability. When $\pi$ is uniform on $d$ states, this matches (up to logarithmic correction) a lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}\bigl(\frac{d}{\gamma}\bigr)$ steps required for precise estimation of $\gamma$. Moreover, we provide the first procedure for computing a fully data-dependent interval, from a single finite-length trajectory of the chain, that traps the mixing time $t_{\text{mix}}$ of the chain at a prescribed confidence level. The interval does not require the knowledge of any parameters of the chain. This stands in contrast to previous approaches, which either only provide point estimates, or require a reset mechanism, or additional prior knowledge. The interval is constructed around the relaxation time $t_{\text{relax}} = 1/\gamma$, which is strongly related to the mixing time, and the width of the interval converges to zero roughly at a $1/\sqrt{n}$ rate, where $n$ is the length of the sample path.

The paper presents the application of Variational Autoencoders (VAE) for data dimensionality reduction and explorative analysis of mass spectrometry imaging data (MSI). The results confirm that VAEs are capable of detecting the patterns associated with the different tissue sub-types with performance than standard approaches.

Research on interference has provided evidence that the formation of dependencies between non-adjacent words relies on a cue-based retrieval mechanism. Two different models can account for one of the main predictions of interference, i.e., a slowdown at a retrieval site, when several items share a feature associated with a retrieval cue: Lewis and Vasishth's (2005) activation-based model and McElree's (2000) direct access model. Even though these two models have been used almost interchangeably, they are based on different assumptions and predict differences in the relationship between reading times and response accuracy. The activation-based model follows the assumptions of ACT-R, and its retrieval process behaves as a lognormal race between accumulators of evidence with a single variance. Under this model, accuracy of the retrieval is determined by the winner of the race and retrieval time by its rate of accumulation. In contrast, the direct access model assumes a model of memory where only the probability of retrieval varies between items; in this model, differences in latencies are a by-product of the possibility and repairing incorrect retrievals. We implemented both models in a Bayesian hierarchical framework in order to evaluate them and compare them. We show that some aspects of the data are better fit under the direct access model than under the activation-based model. We suggest that this finding does not rule out the possibility that retrieval may be behaving as a race model with assumptions that follow less closely the ones from the ACT-R framework. We show that by introducing a modification of the activation model, i.e, by assuming that the accumulation of evidence for retrieval of incorrect items is not only slower but noisier (i.e., different variances for the correct and incorrect items), the model can provide a fit as good as the one of the direct access model.

Recent advances in semi-supervised learning with deep generative models have shown promise in generalizing from small labeled datasets ($\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y}$) to large unlabeled ones ($\mathbf{x}$). In the case where the codomain has known structure, a large unfeatured dataset ($\mathbf{y}$) is potentially available. We develop a parameter-efficient, deep semi-supervised generative model for the purpose of exploiting this untapped data source. Empirical results show improved performance in disentangling latent variable semantics as well as improved discriminative prediction on Martian spectroscopic and handwritten digit domains.