Tabular data are ubiquitous in real world applications. Although many commonly-used neural components (e.g., convolution) and extensible neural networks (e.g., ResNet) have been developed by the machine learning community, few of them were effective for tabular data and few designs were adequately tailored for tabular data structures. In this paper, we propose a novel and flexible neural component for tabular data, called Abstract Layer (AbstLay), which learns to explicitly group correlative input features and generate higher-level features for semantics abstraction. Also, we design a structure re-parameterization method to compress AbstLay, thus reducing the computational complexity by a clear margin in the reference phase. A special basic block is built using AbstLays, and we construct a family of Deep Abstract Networks (DANets) for tabular data classification and regression by stacking such blocks. In DANets, a special shortcut path is introduced to fetch information from raw tabular features, assisting feature interactions across different levels. Comprehensive experiments on seven real-world tabular datasets show that our AbstLay and DANets are effective for tabular data classification and regression, and the computational complexity is superior to competitive methods. Besides, we evaluate the performance gains of DANet as it goes deep, verifying the extendibility of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/WhatAShot/DANet.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) as we know it, is the reason behind all the advancements that we see in today's world, on the technology front (of course!). Soon, we will see machines or robots taking over most of the humane work. From healthcare to insurance, banking to finance, eCommerce to Edtech and Fintech, we can see the footprints and lasting impressions of AI in every industry domain and Software/IT is no exception. While we talk about software engineering, software development and all related aspects of SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) come under it. From analyzing the requirements to designing, developing, deploying, and testing, software engineering vastly covers all these areas and more.

In this blog post, I will use machine learning and Python for predicting house prices. I will use a Random Forest Classifier (in fact Random Forest regression). In the end, I will demonstrate my Random Forest Python algorithm! There is no law except the law that there is no law. Data Science is about discovering hidden patterns (laws) in your data.

When using machine learning techniques in decision-making processes, the interpretability of the models is important. In the present paper, we adopted the Shapley additive explanation (SHAP), which is based on fair profit allocation among many stakeholders depending on their contribution, for interpreting a gradient-boosting decision tree model using hospital data. For better interpretability, we propose two novel techniques as follows: (1) a new metric of feature importance using SHAP and (2) a technique termed feature packing, which packs multiple similar features into one grouped feature to allow an easier understanding of the model without reconstruction of the model. We then compared the explanation results between the SHAP framework and existing methods. In addition, we showed how the A/G ratio works as an important prognostic factor for cerebral infarction using our hospital data and proposed techniques.

As AI systems demonstrate increasingly strong predictive performance, their adoption has grown in numerous domains. However, in high-stakes domains such as criminal justice and healthcare, full automation is often not desirable due to safety, ethical, and legal concerns, yet fully manual approaches can be inaccurate and time consuming. As a result, there is growing interest in the research community to augment human decision making with AI assistance. Besides developing AI technologies for this purpose, the emerging field of human-AI decision making must embrace empirical approaches to form a foundational understanding of how humans interact and work with AI to make decisions. To invite and help structure research efforts towards a science of understanding and improving human-AI decision making, we survey recent literature of empirical human-subject studies on this topic. We summarize the study design choices made in over 100 papers in three important aspects: (1) decision tasks, (2) AI models and AI assistance elements, and (3) evaluation metrics. For each aspect, we summarize current trends, discuss gaps in current practices of the field, and make a list of recommendations for future research. Our survey highlights the need to develop common frameworks to account for the design and research spaces of human-AI decision making, so that researchers can make rigorous choices in study design, and the research community can build on each other's work and produce generalizable scientific knowledge. We also hope this survey will serve as a bridge for HCI and AI communities to work together to mutually shape the empirical science and computational technologies for human-AI decision making.

Sparse decision tree optimization has been one of the most fundamental problems in AI since its inception and is a challenge at the core of interpretable machine learning. Sparse decision tree optimization is computationally hard, and despite steady effort since the 1960's, breakthroughs have only been made on the problem within the past few years, primarily on the problem of finding optimal sparse decision trees. However, current state-of-the-art algorithms often require impractical amounts of computation time and memory to find optimal or near-optimal trees for some real-world datasets, particularly those having several continuous-valued features. Given that the search spaces of these decision tree optimization problems are massive, can we practically hope to find a sparse decision tree that competes in accuracy with a black box machine learning model? We address this problem via smart guessing strategies that can be applied to any optimal branch-and-bound-based decision tree algorithm. We show that by using these guesses, we can reduce the run time by multiple orders of magnitude, while providing bounds on how far the resulting trees can deviate from the black box's accuracy and expressive power. Our approach enables guesses about how to bin continuous features, the size of the tree, and lower bounds on the error for the optimal decision tree. Our experiments show that in many cases we can rapidly construct sparse decision trees that match the accuracy of black box models. To summarize: when you are having trouble optimizing, just guess.

Originally published on Towards AI the World's Leading AI and Technology News and Media Company. If you are building an AI-related product or service, we invite you to consider becoming an AI sponsor. At Towards AI, we help scale AI and technology startups. Let us help you unleash your technology to the masses. Life is full of decisions and eventually, we do measure which option to take on some logical-based analysis.

When a bank considers whether it would offer a loan to someone or not, it considers a chronological list of questions to decide if it's safe to approve such a loan. The questions under consideration could begin with simple ones such as what's the individual's annual income. Based on the answers, the next set of questions could involve finding out if the person has any existing loans, has defaulted on credit card payments, etc. Assuming the person draws a salary of $30,000, has no existing loans or criminal record, and makes his credit card payments on time, the bank may offer him the loan. You can call this a basic form of a decision tree.

Music mood classification has been a challenging problem in comparison with some other classification problems (e.g., genre, composer, or period). One solution for addressing this challenging is to use an of ensemble machine learning models. In this paper, we show that visualization techniques can effectively convey the popular prediction as well as uncertainty at different music sections along the temporal axis, while enabling the analysis of individual ML models in conjunction with their application to different musical data. In addition to the traditional visual designs, such as stacked line graph, ThemeRiver, and pixel-based visualization, we introduced a new variant of ThemeRiver, called "dual-flux ThemeRiver", which allows viewers to observe and measure the most popular prediction more easily than stacked line graph and ThemeRiver. Testing indicates that visualizing ensemble predictions is helpful both in model-development workflows and for annotating music using model predictions.

Porosity has been identified as the key indicator of the durability properties of concrete exposed to aggressive environments. This paper applies ensemble learning to predict porosity of high-performance concrete containing supplementary cementitious materials. The concrete samples utilized in this study are characterized by eight composition features including w/b ratio, binder content, fly ash, GGBS, superplasticizer, coarse/fine aggregate ratio, curing condition and curing days. The assembled database consists of 240 data records, featuring 74 unique concrete mixture designs. The proposed machine learning algorithms are trained on 180 observations (75%) chosen randomly from the data set and then tested on the remaining 60 observations (25%). The numerical experiments suggest that the regression tree ensembles can accurately predict the porosity of concrete from its mixture compositions. Gradient boosting trees generally outperforms random forests in terms of prediction accuracy. For random forests, the out-of-bag error based hyperparameter tuning strategy is found to be much more efficient than k-Fold Cross-Validation.