Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Education


100 Free Tutorials for learning R

@machinelearnbot

R language is the world's most widely used programming language for statistical analysis, predictive modeling and data science. It's popularity is claimed in many recent surveys and studies. R programming language is getting powerful day by day as number of supported packages grows. Some of big IT companies such as Microsoft and IBM have also started developing packages on R and offering enterprise version of R. What is R? R is a free language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. You can perform a variety of tasks using R language.


Google to Make Machine Learning Education Available For All

#artificialintelligence

Google AI is making it easier for everyone to learn ML by providing a huge range of free, in-depth educational content," Zuri Kemp, Programme Manager for Google's machine learning education, said in a statement. Google on Thursday introduced "Learn with Google AI" -- a set of educational resources developed by Machine Learning (ML) experts at the company, for people to learn about concepts, develop skills and apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) to real-world problems. "Learn with Google AI" comes with existing content as well as the new Machine Learning Crash Course (MLCC). "We believe it's important that the development of AI reflects as diverse a range of human perspectives and needs as possible. So, Google AI is making it easier for everyone to learn ML by providing a huge range of free, in-depth educational content," Zuri Kemp, Programme Manager for Google's machine learning education, said in a statement.


A Comparative Study of Pairwise Learning Methods based on Kernel Ridge Regression

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Many machine learning problems can be formulated as predicting labels for a pair of objects. Problems of that kind are often referred to as pairwise learning, dyadic prediction or network inference problems. During the last decade kernel methods have played a dominant role in pairwise learning. They still obtain a state-of-the-art predictive performance, but a theoretical analysis of their behavior has been underexplored in the machine learning literature. In this work we review and unify existing kernel-based algorithms that are commonly used in different pairwise learning settings, ranging from matrix filtering to zero-shot learning. To this end, we focus on closed-form efficient instantiations of Kronecker kernel ridge regression. We show that independent task kernel ridge regression, two-step kernel ridge regression and a linear matrix filter arise naturally as a special case of Kronecker kernel ridge regression, implying that all these methods implicitly minimize a squared loss. In addition, we analyze universality, consistency and spectral filtering properties. Our theoretical results provide valuable insights in assessing the advantages and limitations of existing pairwise learning methods.


Dirichlet Bayesian Network Scores and the Maximum Relative Entropy Principle

arXiv.org Machine Learning

A classic approach for learning Bayesian networks from data is to identify a maximum a posteriori (MAP) network structure. In the case of discrete Bayesian networks, MAP networks are selected by maximising one of several possible Bayesian Dirichlet (BD) scores; the most famous is the Bayesian Dirichlet equivalent uniform (BDeu) score from Heckerman et al (1995). The key properties of BDeu arise from its uniform prior over the parameters of each local distribution in the network, which makes structure learning computationally efficient; it does not require the elicitation of prior knowledge from experts; and it satisfies score equivalence. In this paper we will review the derivation and the properties of BD scores, and of BDeu in particular, and we will link them to the corresponding entropy estimates to study them from an information theoretic perspective. To this end, we will work in the context of the foundational work of Giffin and Caticha (2007), who showed that Bayesian inference can be framed as a particular case of the maximum relative entropy principle. We will use this connection to show that BDeu should not be used for structure learning from sparse data, since it violates the maximum relative entropy principle; and that it is also problematic from a more classic Bayesian model selection perspective, because it produces Bayes factors that are sensitive to the value of its only hyperparameter. Using a large simulation study, we found in our previous work (Scutari, 2016) that the Bayesian Dirichlet sparse (BDs) score seems to provide better accuracy in structure learning; in this paper we further show that BDs does not suffer from the issues above, and we recommend to use it for sparse data instead of BDeu. Finally, will show that these issues are in fact different aspects of the same problem and a consequence of the distributional assumptions of the prior.


machine learning for beginners - neural networks

#artificialintelligence

What is machine learning / ai? How to lean machine learning in practice? There are a lot of interested people out there but many do not know where to start. The difficult question basically is how to start actually learning it? Especially beginners might get discouraged because of statistics and math which is an integral part of machine learning.


Jupyter Pop-up coming to Boston on March 21

@machinelearnbot

O'Reilly Media and NumFOCUS will present Jupyter Pop-up Boston on March 21 at District Hall, in Boston's Seaport neighborhood. The event is a day-long exploration of Project Jupyter in a casual setting, focused on the local community. We'll have a dozen talks, a panel discussion, an "Ask Me Anything" with experts on the project, plus lots of time to meet and talk with people who share common interests and concerns. The timing is quite interesting for Jupyter. Success stories from 2016-17 such as the data science program at UC Berkeley illustrate the power of JupyterHub deployments at scale, in both education and industry.


Importance of Machine Learning Applications in Various Spheres

#artificialintelligence

Now, you at least have an idea of what machine learning is and how useful for businesses and the IT industry in general it is. So, it is high time to learn how to implement these magic algorithms. It is worth noting that there are already several ready-made machine learning tools intended to somehow simplify the work for your developers. Google launched its machine learning service called Awareness API last year. This service allows developers to understand the context in which customers use their smartphones.


Ignorance is Not Bliss in an Ever-Changing World

#artificialintelligence

Will you have a job next week? Will your skill set be valued in the job market in the years to come? If not, do you know what you need to do to keep your skills up-to-date? Over the past few decades, we have witnessed a large number of innovations that have changed how we live and work. I have been working as a social media consultant for over a decade, a job that was not even dreamed of when I graduated college.


Artificial intelligence could reinforce society's gender equality problems

#artificialintelligence

We are not only living in an age where women are being under-represented in many spheres of economic life, but technology could make this even worse. Women hold just 19% of board directorships in the US and Europe. This gender gap in the boardroom persists, despite the fact that, on average, women have obtained higher educational qualifications than their male counterparts for more than two decades in many OECD countries. And the main reason is social bias. This is on the verge of being further reinforced by artificial intelligence, as current data being used to train machines to learn are often biased.


DAGs with NO TEARS: Smooth Optimization for Structure Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Estimating the structure of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs, also known as Bayesian networks) is a challenging problem since the search space of DAGs is combinatorial and scales superexponentially with the number of nodes. Existing approaches rely on various local heuristics for enforcing the acyclicity constraint and are not well-suited to general purpose optimization packages for their solution. In this paper, we introduce a fundamentally different strategy: We formulate the structure learning problem as a smooth, constrained optimization problem over real matrices that avoids this combinatorial constraint entirely. This is achieved by a novel characterization of acyclicity that is not only smooth but also exact. The resulting nonconvex, constrained program involves smooth functions whose gradients are easy to compute and only involve elementary matrix operations. By using existing black-box optimization routines, our method uses global search to find an optimal DAG and can be implemented in about 50 lines of Python and outperforms existing methods without imposing any structural constraints.