A new attention-based model for the gradient boosting machine (GBM) called AGBoost (the attention-based gradient boosting) is proposed for solving regression problems. The main idea behind the proposed AGBoost model is to assign attention weights with trainable parameters to iterations of GBM under condition that decision trees are base learners in GBM. Attention weights are determined by applying properties of decision trees and by using the Huber's contamination model which provides an interesting linear dependence between trainable parameters of the attention and the attention weights. This peculiarity allows us to train the attention weights by solving the standard quadratic optimization problem with linear constraints. The attention weights also depend on the discount factor as a tuning parameter, which determines how much the impact of the weight is decreased with the number of iterations. Numerical experiments performed for two types of base learners, original decision trees and extremely randomized trees with various regression datasets illustrate the proposed model.

Smart wearables have played an integral part in our day to day life. From recording ECG signals to analysing body fat composition, the smart wearables can do it all. The smart devices encompass various sensors which can be employed to derive meaningful information regarding the user's physical and psychological conditions. Our approach focuses on employing such sensors to identify and obtain the variations in the mood of a user at a given instance through the use of supervised machine learning techniques. The study examines the performance of various supervised learning models such as Decision Trees, Random Forests, XGBoost, LightGBM on the dataset. With our proposed model, we obtained a high recognition rate of 92.5% using XGBoost and LightGBM for 9 different emotion classes. By utilizing this, we aim to improvise and suggest methods to aid emotion recognition for better mental health analysis and mood monitoring.

New models of random forests jointly using the attention and self-attention mechanisms are proposed for solving the regression problem. The models can be regarded as extensions of the attention-based random forest whose idea stems from applying a combination of the Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression and the Huber's contamination model to random forests. The self-attention aims to capture dependencies of the tree predictions and to remove noise or anomalous predictions in the random forest. The self-attention module is trained jointly with the attention module for computing weights. It is shown that the training process of attention weights is reduced to solving a single quadratic or linear optimization problem. Three modifications of the general approach are proposed and compared. A specific multi-head self-attention for the random forest is also considered. Heads of the self-attention are obtained by changing its tuning parameters including the kernel parameters and the contamination parameter of models. Numerical experiments with various datasets illustrate the proposed models and show that the supplement of the self-attention improves the model performance for many datasets.

ControlBurn is a Python package to construct feature-sparse tree ensembles that support nonlinear feature selection and interpretable machine learning. The algorithms in this package first build large tree ensembles that prioritize basis functions with few features and then select a feature-sparse subset of these basis functions using a weighted lasso optimization criterion. The package includes visualizations to analyze the features selected by the ensemble and their impact on predictions. Hence ControlBurn offers the accuracy and flexibility of tree-ensemble models and the interpretability of sparse generalized additive models. ControlBurn is scalable and flexible: for example, it can use warm-start continuation to compute the regularization path (prediction error for any number of selected features) for a dataset with tens of thousands of samples and hundreds of features in seconds. For larger datasets, the runtime scales linearly in the number of samples and features (up to a log factor), and the package support acceleration using sketching. Moreover, the ControlBurn framework accommodates feature costs, feature groupings, and $\ell_0$-based regularizers. The package is user-friendly and open-source: its documentation and source code appear on https://pypi.org/project/ControlBurn/ and https://github.com/udellgroup/controlburn/.

One model may make a wrong prediction. But if you combine the predictions of several models into one, you can make better predictions. This concept is called ensemble learning. Ensembles are methods that combine multiple models to build more powerful models. Ensemble methods have gained huge popularity during the last decade.

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. One model may make a wrong prediction.

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. Machine Learning Algorithms have historically been used in the Credit and Fraud Space.

Multi-label classification is a challenging task, particularly in domains where the number of labels to be predicted is large. Deep neural networks are often effective at multi-label classification of images and textual data. When dealing with tabular data, however, conventional machine learning algorithms, such as tree ensembles, appear to outperform competition. Random forest, being a popular ensemble algorithm, has found use in a wide range of real-world problems. Such problems include fraud detection in the financial domain, crime hotspot detection in the legal sector, and in the biomedical field, disease probability prediction when patient records are accessible. Since they have an impact on people's lives, these domains usually require decision-making systems to be explainable. Random Forest falls short on this property, especially when a large number of tree predictors are used. This issue was addressed in a recent research named LionForests, regarding single label classification and regression. In this work, we adapt this technique to multi-label classification problems, by employing three different strategies regarding the labels that the explanation covers. Finally, we provide a set of qualitative and quantitative experiments to assess the efficacy of this approach.

Electromyography signals can be used as training data by machine learning models to classify various gestures. We seek to produce a model that can classify six different hand gestures with a limited number of samples that generalizes well to a wider audience while comparing the effect of our feature extraction results on model accuracy to other more conventional methods such as the use of AR parameters on a sliding window across the channels of a signal. We appeal to a set of more elementary methods such as the use of random bounds on a signal, but desire to show the power these methods can carry in an online setting where EMG classification is being conducted, as opposed to more complicated methods such as the use of the Fourier Transform. To augment our limited training data, we used a standard technique, known as jitter, where random noise is added to each observation in a channel wise manner. Once all datasets were produced using the above methods, we performed a grid search with Random Forest and XGBoost to ultimately create a high accuracy model. For human computer interface purposes, high accuracy classification of EMG signals is of particular importance to their functioning and given the difficulty and cost of amassing any sort of biomedical data in a high volume, it is valuable to have techniques that can work with a low amount of high-quality samples with less expensive feature extraction methods that can reliably be carried out in an online application.

You are right that randomness will play a role (like with many other algorithms including MCMC samplers for Bayesian models, XGBoost, LightGBM, neural networks etc.) in the results. The obvious way to minimize randomness in the results of any hyper-parameter optimization method for RF (whether it's random grid-search, grid search or some Bayesian hyperparameter optimization method) is to increase the number of trees (which reduces the randomness in the model behavior - albeit at the cost of an increased training time). Alternatively, you construct a surrogate model on top of the results that takes into account that the signal, of where the best model in the hyperparameter landscape is, is noisy through an appropriate amount of smoothing/regularization.