This paper offers a comprehensive review of the research on Natural Language Generation (NLG) over the past two decades, especially in relation to data-to-text generation and text-to-text generation deep learning methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey aims to (a) give the latest synthesis of deep learning research on the NLG core tasks, as well as the architectures adopted in the field; (b) detail meticulously and comprehensively various NLG tasks and datasets, and draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, focusing on different evaluation methods and their relationships; (c) highlight some future emphasis and relatively recent research issues that arise due to the increasing synergy between NLG and other artificial intelligence areas, such as computer vision, text and computational creativity.

A Bayesian Network is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) on a set of $n$ random variables (identified with the vertices); a Bayesian Network Distribution (BND) is a probability distribution on the rv's that is Markovian on the graph. A finite mixture of such models is the projection on these variables of a BND on the larger graph which has an additional "hidden" (or "latent") random variable $U$, ranging in $\{1,\ldots,k\}$, and a directed edge from $U$ to every other vertex. Models of this type are fundamental to research in Causal Inference, where $U$ models a confounding effect. One extremely special case has been of longstanding interest in the theory literature: the empty graph. Such a distribution is simply a mixture of $k$ product distributions. A longstanding problem has been, given the joint distribution of a mixture of $k$ product distributions, to identify each of the product distributions, and their mixture weights. Our results are: (1) We improve the sample complexity (and runtime) for identifying mixtures of $k$ product distributions from $\exp(O(k^2))$ to $\exp(O(k \log k))$. This is almost best possible in view of a known $\exp(\Omega(k))$ lower bound. (2) We give the first algorithm for the case of non-empty graphs. The complexity for a graph of maximum degree $\Delta$ is $\exp(O(k(\Delta^2 + \log k)))$. (The above complexities are approximate and suppress dependence on secondary parameters.)

In a world where all the manual tasks are automated, machine learning algorithms can help computers in playing chess, get smarter and to perform surgeries. One of the vital features of this revolution is how computing tools and techniques have been democratized. Machine learning can be supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning. If you are one of the data scientists or machine learning enthusiasts then you should get a hang of the machine learning algorithms. Here are the top 10 latest machine learning algorithms to explore in 2022.

Currently, it is hard to reap the benefits of deep learning for Bayesian methods, which allow the explicit specification of prior knowledge and accurately capture model uncertainty. We present Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs). PFNs leverage large-scale machine learning techniques to approximate a large set of posteriors. The only requirement for PFNs to work is the ability to sample from a prior distribution over supervised learning tasks (or functions). Our method restates the objective of posterior approximation as a supervised classification problem with a set-valued input: it repeatedly draws a task (or function) from the prior, draws a set of data points and their labels from it, masks one of the labels and learns to make probabilistic predictions for it based on the set-valued input of the rest of the data points. Presented with a set of samples from a new supervised learning task as input, PFNs make probabilistic predictions for arbitrary other data points in a single forward propagation, having learned to approximate Bayesian inference. We demonstrate that PFNs can near-perfectly mimic Gaussian processes and also enable efficient Bayesian inference for intractable problems, with over 200-fold speedups in multiple setups compared to current methods. We obtain strong results in very diverse areas such as Gaussian process regression, Bayesian neural networks, classification for small tabular data sets, and few-shot image classification, demonstrating the generality of PFNs. Code and trained PFNs are released at https://github.com/automl/TransformersCanDoBayesianInference.

In recent decades, technological advances have made it possible to collect large data sets. In this context, the model-based clustering is a very popular, flexible and interpretable methodology for data exploration in a well-defined statistical framework. One of the ironies of the increase of large datasets is that missing values are more frequent. However, traditional ways (as discarding observations with missing values or imputation methods) are not designed for the clustering purpose. In addition, they rarely apply to the general case, though frequent in practice, of Missing Not At Random (MNAR) values, i.e. when the missingness depends on the unobserved data values and possibly on the observed data values. The goal of this paper is to propose a novel approach by embedding MNAR data directly within model-based clustering algorithms. We introduce a selection model for the joint distribution of data and missing-data indicator. It corresponds to a mixture model for the data distribution and a general MNAR model for the missing-data mechanism, which may depend on the underlying classes (unknown) and/or the values of the missing variables themselves. A large set of meaningful MNAR sub-models is derived and the identifiability of the parameters is studied for each of the sub-models, which is usually a key issue for any MNAR proposals. The EM and Stochastic EM algorithms are considered for estimation. Finally, we perform empirical evaluations for the proposed submodels on synthetic data and we illustrate the relevance of our method on a medical register, the TraumaBase (R) dataset.

The development of high-throughput sequencing technologies has led to the production of largescale molecular profiling data, allowing us to gain insights into underlying biological processes (Wid lak, 2013). One such technology is microarray sequencing, in which mRNA counts are used to describe gene expression. Such data, known as transcriptomics, are widely used in the biomedical domain and when analyzed alongside survival times have provided extraordinary opportunities for biomarker characterization and prognostic modelling (Bøvelstad et al., 2007; Lloyd et al., 2015; Lightbody et al., 2019; Lu et al., 2021). However, profiling data is often high-dimensional, which introduces several statistical challenges including: (i) variable selection, (ii) effect estimation of the features, and (iii) scalable computation. The task of variable selection is particularly important, as few genes typically have an effect on the outcome. Motivated by clinical applicability, we propose a state-of-the-art scalable (variational) Bayesian variable selection method for the proportional hazards models. In recent years, several methods have been proposed to analyze sparse high-dimensional data, with one of the most popular being the LASSO (Tibshirani, 1996). As biomedical studies are often concerned with clinical phenotypes, such as time to disease recurrence or overall survival time, these methods have been adapted to support survival analysis (Antoniadis et al., 2010; Witten and Tibshirani, 2010). For instance, the LASSO, ridge and elastic-net penalties have all been extended to the proportional hazards model (Tibshirani, 1997; Gui and Li, 2005; Zou and Hastie, 2005; Simon et al., 2011).

This paper provides both an introduction to and a detailed overview of the principles and practice of classifier calibration. A well-calibrated classifier correctly quantifies the level of uncertainty or confidence associated with its instance-wise predictions. This is essential for critical applications, optimal decision making, cost-sensitive classification, and for some types of context change. Calibration research has a rich history which predates the birth of machine learning as an academic field by decades. However, a recent increase in the interest on calibration has led to new methods and the extension from binary to the multiclass setting. The space of options and issues to consider is large, and navigating it requires the right set of concepts and tools. We provide both introductory material and up-to-date technical details of the main concepts and methods, including proper scoring rules and other evaluation metrics, visualisation approaches, a comprehensive account of post-hoc calibration methods for binary and multiclass classification, and several advanced topics.

Independent component analysis is intended to recover the unknown components as independent as possible from their linear mixtures. This technique has been widely used in many fields, such as data analysis, signal processing, and machine learning. In this paper, we present a novel boosting-based algorithm for independent component analysis. Our algorithm fills the gap in the nonparametric independent component analysis by introducing boosting to maximum likelihood estimation. A variety of experiments validate its performance compared with many of the presently known algorithms.

We consider a seller offering a large network of $N$ products over a time horizon of $T$ periods. The seller does not know the parameters of the products' linear demand model, and can dynamically adjust product prices to learn the demand model based on sales observations. The seller aims to minimize its pseudo-regret, i.e., the expected revenue loss relative to a clairvoyant who knows the underlying demand model. We consider a sparse set of demand relationships between products to characterize various connectivity properties of the product network. In particular, we study three different sparsity frameworks: (1) $L_0$ sparsity, which constrains the number of connections in the network, and (2) off-diagonal sparsity, which constrains the magnitude of cross-product price sensitivities, and (3) a new notion of spectral sparsity, which constrains the asymptotic decay of a similarity metric on network nodes. We propose a dynamic pricing-and-learning policy that combines the optimism-in-the-face-of-uncertainty and PAC-Bayesian approaches, and show that this policy achieves asymptotically optimal performance in terms of $N$ and $T$. We also show that in the case of spectral and off-diagonal sparsity, the seller can have a pseudo-regret linear in $N$, even when the network is dense.

This paper addresses and solves some challenges in the adoption of machine learning in insurance with the democratization of model deployment. The first challenge is reducing the labelling effort (hence focusing on the data quality) with the help of active learning, a feedback loop between the model inference and an oracle: as in insurance the unlabeled data is usually abundant, active learning can become a significant asset in reducing the labelling cost. For that purpose, this paper sketches out various classical active learning methodologies before studying their empirical impact on both synthetic and real datasets. Another key challenge in insurance is the fairness issue in model inferences. We will introduce and integrate a post-processing fairness for multi-class tasks in this active learning framework to solve these two issues. Finally numerical experiments on unfair datasets highlight that the proposed setup presents a good compromise between model precision and fairness.