The last decade has seen the rise of Adversarial Machine Learning (AML). This discipline studies how to manipulate data to fool inference engines, and how to protect those systems against such manipulation attacks. Extensive work on attacks against regression and classification systems is available, while little attention has been paid to attacks against time series forecasting systems. In this paper, we propose a decision analysis based attacking strategy that could be utilized against Bayesian forecasting dynamic models.

We propose Predictive Permutation Feature Selection (PPFS), a novel wrapper-based feature selection method based on the concept of Markov Blanket (MB). Unlike previous MB methods, PPFS is a universal feature selection technique as it can work for both classification as well as regression tasks on datasets containing categorical and/or continuous features. We propose Predictive Permutation Independence (PPI), a new Conditional Independence (CI) test, which enables PPFS to be categorised as a wrapper feature selection method. This is in contrast to current filter based MB feature selection techniques that are unable to harness the advancements in supervised algorithms such as Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM). The PPI test is based on the knockoff framework and utilizes supervised algorithms to measure the association between an individual or a set of features and the target variable. We also propose a novel MB aggregation step that addresses the issue of sample inefficiency. Empirical evaluations and comparisons on a large number of datasets demonstrate that PPFS outperforms state-of-the-art Markov blanket discovery algorithms as well as, well-known wrapper methods. We also provide a sketch of the proof of correctness of our method. Implementation of this work is available at \url{https://github.com/atif-hassan/PyImpetus}

This is a course on Machine Learning, Deep Learning (Tensorflow PyTorch) and Bayesian Learning (yes all 3 topics in one place!!!). We start off by analysing data using pandas, and implementing some algorithms from scratch using Numpy. These algorithms include linear regression, Classification and Regression Trees (CART), Random Forest and Gradient Boosted Trees. We start off using TensorFlow for our Deep Learning lessons. This will include Feed Forward Networks, Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Nets (RNNs).

We model here an epistemic bias we call \textit{interpretive blindness} (IB). IB is a special problem for learning from testimony, in which one acquires information only from text or conversation. We show that IB follows from a co-dependence between background beliefs and interpretation in a Bayesian setting and the nature of contemporary testimony. We argue that a particular characteristic contemporary testimony, \textit{argumentative completeness}, can preclude learning in hierarchical Bayesian settings, even in the presence of constraints that are designed to promote good epistemic practices.

Autonomous robots can benefit greatly from human-provided semantic characterizations of uncertain task environments and states. However, the development of integrated strategies which let robots model, communicate, and act on such soft data remains challenging. Here, a framework is presented for active semantic sensing and planning in human-robot teams which addresses these gaps by formally combining the benefits of online sampling-based POMDP policies, multi-modal semantic interaction, and Bayesian data fusion. This approach lets humans opportunistically impose model structure and extend the range of semantic soft data in uncertain environments by sketching and labeling arbitrary landmarks across the environment. Dynamic updating of the environment while searching for a mobile target allows robotic agents to actively query humans for novel and relevant semantic data, thereby improving beliefs of unknown environments and target states for improved online planning. Target search simulations show significant improvements in time and belief state estimates required for interception versus conventional planning based solely on robotic sensing. Human subject studies demonstrate a average doubling in dynamic target capture rate compared to the lone robot case, employing reasoning over a range of user characteristics and interaction modalities. Video of interaction can be found at https://youtu.be/Eh-82ZJ1o4I.

Statistical-Relational Model Discovery aims to find statistically relevant patterns in relational data. For example, a relational dependency pattern may stipulate that a user's gender is associated with the gender of their friends. As with propositional (non-relational) graphical models, the major scalability bottleneck for model discovery is computing instantiation counts: the number of times a relational pattern is instantiated in a database. Previous work on propositional learning utilized pre-counting or post-counting to solve this task. This paper takes a detailed look at the memory and speed trade-offs between pre-counting and post-counting strategies for relational learning. A pre-counting approach computes and caches instantiation counts for a large set of relational patterns before model search. A post-counting approach computes an instantiation count dynamically on-demand for each candidate pattern generated during the model search. We describe a novel hybrid approach, tailored to relational data, that achieves a sweet spot with pre-counting for patterns involving positive relationships (e.g. pairs of users who are friends) and post-counting for patterns involving negative relationships (e.g. pairs of users who are not friends). Our hybrid approach scales model discovery to millions of data facts.

Graphs from complex systems often share a partial underlying structure across domains while retaining individual features. Thus, identifying common structures can shed light on the underlying signal, for instance, when applied to scientific discoveries or clinical diagnoses. Furthermore, growing evidence shows that the shared structure across domains boosts the estimation power of graphs, particularly for high-dimensional data. However, building a joint estimator to extract the common structure may be more complicated than it seems, most often due to data heterogeneity across sources. This manuscript surveys recent work on statistical inference of joint Gaussian graphical models, identifying model structures that fit various data generation processes. Simulations under different data generation processes are implemented with detailed discussions on the choice of models.

Data-efficient learning algorithms are essential in many practical applications for which data collection and labeling is expensive or infeasible, e.g., for autonomous cars. To address this problem, meta-learning infers an inductive bias from a set of meta-training tasks in order to learn new, but related, task using a small number of samples. Most studies assume the meta-learner to have access to labeled data sets from a large number of tasks. In practice, one may have available only unlabeled data sets from the tasks, requiring a costly labeling procedure to be carried out before use in standard meta-learning schemes. To decrease the number of labeling requests for meta-training tasks, this paper introduces an information-theoretic active task selection mechanism which quantifies the epistemic uncertainty via disagreements among the predictions obtained under different inductive biases. We detail an instantiation for nonparametric methods based on Gaussian Process Regression, and report its empirical performance results that compare favourably against existing heuristic acquisition mechanisms.

Recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and the reduction in the cost of sensors have encouraged the development of smart environments, such as smart homes. Smart homes can offer home assistance services to improve the quality of life, autonomy and health of their residents, especially for the elderly and dependent. To provide such services, a smart home must be able to understand the daily activities of its residents. Techniques for recognizing human activity in smart homes are advancing daily. But new challenges are emerging every day. In this paper, we present recent algorithms, works, challenges and taxonomy of the field of human activity recognition in a smart home through ambient sensors. Moreover, since activity recognition in smart homes is a young field, we raise specific problems, missing and needed contributions. But also propose directions, research opportunities and solutions to accelerate advances in this field.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is vital for developing machine learning based models for critical safety systems. Common approaches for OOD detection assume access to some OOD samples during training which may not be available in a real-life scenario. Instead, we utilize the {\em predictive normalized maximum likelihood} (pNML) learner, in which no assumptions are made on the tested input. We derive an explicit expression of the pNML and its generalization error, denoted as the {\em regret}, for a single layer neural network (NN). We show that this learner generalizes well when (i) the test vector resides in a subspace spanned by the eigenvectors associated with the large eigenvalues of the empirical correlation matrix of the training data, or (ii) the test sample is far from the decision boundary. Furthermore, we describe how to efficiently apply the derived pNML regret to any pretrained deep NN, by employing the explicit pNML for the last layer, followed by the softmax function. Applying the derived regret to deep NN requires neither additional tunable parameters nor extra data. We extensively evaluate our approach on 74 OOD detection benchmarks using DenseNet-100, ResNet-34, and WideResNet-40 models trained with CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet-30 showing a significant improvement of up to 15.6\% over recent leading methods.