Efficiently aggregating data from different sources is a challenging problem, particularly when samples from each source are distributed differently.

Machine learning technologies have permeated everyday life and it is common nowadays that an automated system makes decisions for/about us, such as who is going to get bank credit.

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to ask rich, creative, and revealing questions. Here we introduce a cognitive model capable of constructing humanlike questions. Our approach treats questions as formal programs that, when executed on the state of the world, output an answer. The model specifies a probability distribution over a complex, compositional space of programs, favoring concise programs that help the agent learn in the current context. We evaluate our approach by modeling the types of open-ended questions generated by humans who were attempting to learn about an ambiguous situation in a game. We find that our model predicts what questions people will ask, and can creatively produce novel questions that were not present in the training set. In addition, we compare a number of model variants, finding that both question informativeness and complexity are important for producing human-like questions.

UP A is widely used in practice.

Screening is important for the diagnosis and treatment of a wide variety of diseases. A good screening policy should be personalized to the features of the patient and to the dynamic history of the patient (including the history of screening).

We study a variant of online linear optimization where the player receives a hint about the loss function at the beginning of each round. The hint is given in the form of a vector that is weakly correlated with the loss vector on that round.

Interval-valued outputs arise naturally in fields such as computational biology and survival analysis. In the latter setting, one is interested in predicting the time until some adverse event, such as death, occurs.

We introduce a new formulation of the Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Process (HiP-MDP), a framework for modeling families of related tasks using low-dimensional latent embeddings.

Prevailing batch Bayesian optimisation methods allow all control variables to be freely altered at each iteration. Real-world experiments, however, often have physical limitations making it time-consuming to alter all settings for each recommendation in a batch. This gives rise to a unique problem in BO: in a recommended batch, a set of variables that are expensive to experimentally change need to be fixed, while the remaining control variables can be varied. We formulate this as a process-constrained batch Bayesian optimisation problem. We propose two algorithms, pc-BO(basic) and pc-BO(nested).

We revisit the classical problem of optimal experimental design (OED) under a new mathematical model grounded in a geometric motivation. Specifically, we introduce models based on elementary symmetric polynomials; these polynomials capture "partial volumes" and offer a graded interpolation between the widely used A-optimal design and D-optimal design models, obtaining each of them as special cases. We analyze properties of our models, and derive both greedy and convex-relaxation algorithms for computing the associated designs. Our analysis establishes approximation guarantees on these algorithms, while our empirical results substantiate our claims and demonstrate a curious phenomenon concerning our greedy method. Finally, as a byproduct, we obtain new results on the theory of elementary symmetric polynomials that may be of independent interest.