Limitations due to image recognition and the ambiguity of book covers themselves made it difficult for some to be categorized. There was difficulty with biographies and memoirs, medical and science books, and children's books being confused with comics or graphic novels. Furthermore, the researchers didn't compare how well their neural network performs vis-a-vis an actual person's ability to judge a book by its cover.

State of the art machine learning algorithms are highly optimized to provide the optimal prediction possible, naturally resulting in complex models. While these models often outperform simpler more interpretable models by order of magnitudes, in terms of understanding the way the model functions, we are often facing a "black box". In this paper we suggest a simple method to interpret the behavior of any predictive model, both for regression and classification. Given a particular model, the information required to interpret it can be obtained by studying the partial derivatives of the model with respect to the input.

Recent work in model-agnostic explanations of black-box machine learning has demonstrated that interpretability of complex models does not have to come at the cost of accuracy or model flexibility. However, it is not clear what kind of explanations, such as linear models, decision trees, and rule lists, are the appropriate family to consider, and different tasks and models may benefit from different kinds of explanations. Instead of picking a single family of representations, in this work we propose to use "programs" as model-agnostic explanations. We show that small programs can be expressive yet intuitive as explanations, and generalize over a number of existing interpretable families. We propose a prototype program induction method based on simulated annealing that approximates the local behavior of black-box classifiers around a specific prediction using random perturbations. Finally, we present preliminary application on small datasets and show that the generated explanations are intuitive and accurate for a number of classifiers.

Complex problems may require sophisticated, non-linear learning methods such as kernel machines or deep neural networks to achieve state of the art prediction accuracies. However, high prediction accuracies are not the only objective to consider when solving problems using machine learning. Instead, particular scientific applications require some explanation of the learned prediction function. Unfortunately, most methods do not come with out of the box straight forward interpretation. Even linear prediction functions are not straight forward to explain if features exhibit complex correlation structure. In this paper, we propose the Measure of Feature Importance (MFI). MFI is general and can be applied to any arbitrary learning machine (including kernel machines and deep learning). MFI is intrinsically non-linear and can detect features that by itself are inconspicuous and only impact the prediction function through their interaction with other features. Lastly, MFI can be used for both --- model-based feature importance and instance-based feature importance (i.e, measuring the importance of a feature for a particular data point).

We consider the problem of estimating the arithmetic average of a finite collection of real vectors stored in a distributed fashion across several compute nodes subject to a communication budget constraint. Our analysis does not rely on any statistical assumptions about the source of the vectors. This problem arises as a subproblem in many applications, including reduce-all operations within algorithms for distributed and federated optimization and learning. We propose a flexible family of randomized algorithms exploring the trade-off between expected communication cost and estimation error. Our family contains the full-communication and zero-error method on one extreme, and an $\epsilon$-bit communication and ${\cal O}\left(1/(\epsilon n)\right)$ error method on the opposite extreme. In the special case where we communicate, in expectation, a single bit per coordinate of each vector, we improve upon existing results by obtaining $\mathcal{O}(r/n)$ error, where $r$ is the number of bits used to represent a floating point value.

We develop a framework for incorporating structured graphical models in the \emph{encoders} of variational autoencoders (VAEs) that allows us to induce interpretable representations through approximate variational inference. This allows us to both perform reasoning (e.g. classification) under the structural constraints of a given graphical model, and use deep generative models to deal with messy, high-dimensional domains where it is often difficult to model all the variation. Learning in this framework is carried out end-to-end with a variational objective, applying to both unsupervised and semi-supervised schemes.

We present the Wright-Fisher Indian buffet process (WF-IBP), a probabilistic model for time-dependent data assumed to have been generated by an unknown number of latent features. This model is suitable as a prior in Bayesian nonparametric feature allocation models in which the features underlying the observed data exhibit a dependency structure over time. More specifically, we establish a new framework for generating dependent Indian buffet processes, where the Poisson random field model from population genetics is used as a way of constructing dependent beta processes. Inference in the model is complex, and we describe a sophisticated Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm for exact posterior simulation. We apply our construction to develop a nonparametric focused topic model for collections of time-stamped text documents and test it on the full corpus of NIPS papers published from 1987 to 2015.

In this work, we present an application of Locally Interpretable Machine-Agnostic Explanations to 2-D chemical structures. Using this framework we are able to provide a structural interpretation for an existing black-box model for classifying biologically produced fuel compounds with regard to Research Octane Number. This method of "painting" locally interpretable explanations onto 2-D chemical structures replicates the chemical intuition of synthetic chemists, allowing researchers in the field to directly accept, reject, inform and evaluate decisions underlying inscrutably complex quantitative structure-activity relationship models.

With the advent of highly predictive but opaque deep learning models, it has become more important than ever to understand and explain the predictions of such models. Existing approaches define interpretability as the inverse of complexity and achieve interpretability at the cost of accuracy. This introduces a risk of producing interpretable but misleading explanations. As humans, we are prone to engage in this kind of behavior \cite{mythos}. In this paper, we take a step in the direction of tackling the problem of interpretability without compromising the model accuracy. We propose to build a Treeview representation of the complex model via hierarchical partitioning of the feature space, which reveals the iterative rejection of unlikely class labels until the correct association is predicted.

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is designed for the most challenging ones: when the gradient is unknown, evaluating a solution is costly, and evaluations are noisy. This is, for instance, the case when we want to find optimal parameters for a machine learning algorithm [Snoek et al., 2012], because testing a set of parameters can take hours, and because of the stochastic nature of many machine learning algorithms. Besides parameter tuning, Bayesian optimization recently attracted a lot of interest for direct policy search in robot learning [Lizotte et al., 2007, Wilson et al., 2014, Calandra et al., 2016] and online adaptation; for example, it was recently used to allow a legged robot to learn a new gait after a mechanical damage in about 10-15 trials (2 minutes) [Cully et al., 2015]. At its core, Bayesian optimization builds a probabilistic model of the function to be optimized (the reward/performance/cost function) using the samples that have already been evaluated [Shahriari et al., 2016]; usually, this model is a Gaussian process [Williams and Rasmussen, 2006]. To select the next sample to be evaluated, Bayesian optimization optimizes an acquisition function which leverages the model to predict the most promising areas of the search space.