Cluster analysis is a staple of unsupervised machine learning and data science. It is very useful for data mining and big data because it automatically finds patterns in the data, without the need for labels, unlike supervised machine learning. In a real-world environment, you can imagine that a robot or an artificial intelligence won't always have access to the optimal answer, or maybe there isn't an optimal correct answer. You'd want that robot to be able to explore the world on its own, and learn things just by looking for patterns. Do you ever wonder how we get the data that we use in our supervised machine learning algorithms?

My view of the world is shaped by where I stand, but from this spot the future of analytics for 2016 looks pretty exciting! Analytics has never been more needed or interesting. Machine learning dates back to at least 1950 but until recently has been the domain of elites and subject to "winters" of inattention. I predict that it is here to stay, because large enterprises are embracing it. In addition to researchers and digital natives, these days established companies are asking how to move machine learning into production.

Increased investor interest in AI startups – from around 10 deals in Q1'11 to over 120 in Q2'16 – can be attributed to recent advances in machine learning algorithms, particularly "deep learning" technology, a souped up version of AI. Just this week, Google integrated deep learning into its Google Translate tool; Baidu announced the launch of DeepBench, an "open source benchmarking tool for evaluating deep learning performance across different hardware platforms"; and NVIDIA introduced Xavier, a deep learning-based supercomputer for driverless cars. In the private market, Google put deep learning in the spotlight back in 2014 when it acquired 4 startups focused on this AI tech in quick succession: DeepMind, Vision Factory, Dark Blue Labs, and DNNresearch. Apple, which joined the race in 2015, most recently acquired Turi, which has developed a deep learning toolkit, among other AI-based solutions. Not to be outdone, Intel has acquired around 5 AI startups since January 2015, including deep learning startup Nervana Systems and, more recently, Movidius.

Humans learn a predictive model of the world and use this model to reason about future events and the consequences of actions. In contrast to most machine predictors, we exhibit an impressive ability to generalize to unseen scenarios and reason intelligently in these settings. One important aspect of this ability is physical intuition (Lake et al., 2016). In this work, we explore the potential of unsupervised learning to find features that promote better generalization to settings outside the supervised training distribution. Our task is predicting the stability of towers of square blocks. We demonstrate that an unsupervised model, trained to predict future frames of a video sequence of stable and unstable block configurations, can yield features that support extrapolating stability prediction to blocks configurations outside the training set distribution.

The development of global sensitivity analysis of numerical model outputs has recently raised new issues on 1-dimensional Poincar\'e inequalities. Typically two kind of sensitivity indices are linked by a Poincar\'e type inequality, which provide upper bounds of the most interpretable index by using the other one, cheaper to compute. This allows performing a low-cost screening of unessential variables. The efficiency of this screening then highly depends on the accuracy of the upper bounds in Poincar\'e inequalities. The novelty in the questions concern the wide range of probability distributions involved, which are often truncated on intervals. After providing an overview of the existing knowledge and techniques, we add some theory about Poincar\'e constants on intervals, with improvements for symmetric intervals. Then we exploit the spectral interpretation for computing exact value of Poincar\'e constants of any admissible distribution on a given interval. We give semi-analytical results for some frequent distributions (truncated exponential, triangular, truncated normal), and present a numerical method in the general case. Finally, an application is made to a hydrological problem, showing the benefits of the new results in Poincar\'e inequalities to sensitivity analysis.

Recently, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods have been proposed for scaling up Monte Carlo computations to large data problems. Whilst these approaches have proven useful in many applications, vanilla SG-MCMC might suffer from poor mixing rates when random variables exhibit strong couplings under the target densities or big scale differences. In this study, we propose a novel SG-MCMC method that takes the local geometry into account by using ideas from Quasi-Newton optimization methods. These second order methods directly approximate the inverse Hessian by using a limited history of samples and their gradients. Our method uses dense approximations of the inverse Hessian while keeping the time and memory complexities linear with the dimension of the problem. We provide a formal theoretical analysis where we show that the proposed method is asymptotically unbiased and consistent with the posterior expectations. We illustrate the effectiveness of the approach on both synthetic and real datasets. Our experiments on two challenging applications show that our method achieves fast convergence rates similar to Riemannian approaches while at the same time having low computational requirements similar to diagonal preconditioning approaches.

We consider learning the principal subspace of a large set of vectors from an extremely small number of compressive measurements of each vector. Our theoretical results show that even a constant number of measurements per column suffices to approximate the principal subspace to arbitrary precision, provided that the number of vectors is large. This result is achieved by a simple algorithm that computes the eigenvectors of an estimate of the covariance matrix. The main insight is to exploit an averaging effect that arises from applying a different random projection to each vector. We provide a number of simulations confirming our theoretical results.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have become one of the most studied frameworks for unsupervised learning due to their intuitive formulation. They have also been shown to be capable of generating convincing examples in limited domains, such as low-resolution images. However, they still prove difficult to train in practice and tend to ignore modes of the data generating distribution. Quantitatively capturing effects such as mode coverage and more generally the quality of the generative model still remain elusive. We propose Generative Adversarial Parallelization (GAP), a framework in which many GANs or their variants are trained simultaneously, exchanging their discriminators. This eliminates the tight coupling between a generator and discriminator, leading to improved convergence and improved coverage of modes. We also propose an improved variant of the recently proposed Generative Adversarial Metric and show how it can score individual GANs or their collections under the GAP model.

2048 is an engaging single-player, nondeterministic video puzzle game, which, thanks to the simple rules and hard-to-master gameplay, has gained massive popularity in recent years. As 2048 can be conveniently embedded into the discrete-state Markov decision processes framework, we treat it as a testbed for evaluating existing and new methods in reinforcement learning. With the aim to develop a strong 2048 playing program, we employ temporal difference learning with systematic n-tuple networks. We show that this basic method can be significantly improved with temporal coherence learning, multi-stage function approximator with weight promotion, carousel shaping, and redundant encoding. In addition, we demonstrate how to take advantage of the characteristics of the n-tuple network, to improve the algorithmic effectiveness of the learning process by i) delaying the (decayed) update and applying lock-free optimistic parallelism to effortlessly make advantage of multiple CPU cores. This way, we were able to develop the best known 2048 playing program to date, which confirms the effectiveness of the introduced methods for discrete-state Markov decision problems.

Business experiments: Business experiments, experimental design and AB testing are all techniques for testing the validity of something – be that a strategic hypothesis, new product packaging or a marketing approach. It is basically about trying something in one part of the organization and then comparing it with another where the changes were not made (used as a control group). It's useful if you have two or more options to decide between. Visual analytics: Data can be analyzed in different ways and the simplest way is to create a visual or graph and look at it to spot patterns. This is an integrated approach that combines data analysis with data visualization and human interaction.