Bayesian Learning
Sentiment Analysis for Open Domain Conversational Agent
Alissa, Mohamad, Haddad, Issa, Meyer, Jonathan, Obeid, Jade, Vilaetis, Kostis, Wiecek, Nicolas, Wongariyakavee, Sukrit
Sentiment analysis analysis models to open domain human continues to be highly challenging with the research robot interaction is investigated within this community attempting many sub-problems paper. The models are used on a dataset that have not been completely solved (Pozzi et al., specific to user interaction with the Alana 2017b). With this in mind, it is expected that system (a Alexa prize system) in order scripted conversations between two humans like to determine which would be more appropriate what is done in movies, unscripted conversations for the task of identifying sentiment between two humans, and human-machine interaction when a user interacts with a nonhuman systems will contain a varying amount of driven socialbot. With the identification sentiment with very different dialogue. of a model, various improvements Working with a large dataset in the area of are attempted and detailed prior to human-machine interaction systems allows the integration into the Alana system. The evaluation of already existing tools and machine study showed that a Random Forest Model learning techniques to better optimise development with 25 trees trained on the dataset specific within this area. The model is integrated to user interaction with the Alana system into Alana (a 2017 Alexa prize system (Ram et al., combined with the dataset present in 2017) consisting of an ensemble of bots, combining NLTK Vader outperforms other models.
Factor Analysis, Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis, Variational Inference, and Variational Autoencoder: Tutorial and Survey
Ghojogh, Benyamin, Ghodsi, Ali, Karray, Fakhri, Crowley, Mark
This is a tutorial and survey paper on factor analysis, probabilistic Principal Component Analysis (PCA), variational inference, and Variational Autoencoder (VAE). These methods, which are tightly related, are dimensionality reduction and generative models. They asssume that every data point is generated from or caused by a low-dimensional latent factor. By learning the parameters of distribution of latent space, the corresponding low-dimensional factors are found for the sake of dimensionality reduction. For their stochastic and generative behaviour, these models can also be used for generation of new data points in the data space. In this paper, we first start with variational inference where we derive the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) and Expectation Maximization (EM) for learning the parameters. Then, we introduce factor analysis, derive its joint and marginal distributions, and work out its EM steps. Probabilistic PCA is then explained, as a special case of factor analysis, and its closed-form solutions are derived. Finally, VAE is explained where the encoder, decoder and sampling from the latent space are introduced. Training VAE using both EM and backpropagation are explained.
Learning optimal Bayesian prior probabilities from data
Noninformative uniform priors are staples of Bayesian inference, especially in Bayesian machine learning. This study challenges the assumption that they are optimal and their use in Bayesian inference yields optimal outcomes. Instead of using arbitrary noninformative uniform priors, we propose a machine learning based alternative method, learning optimal priors from data by maximizing a target function of interest. Applying na\"ive Bayes text classification methodology and a search algorithm developed for this study, our system learned priors from data using the positive predictive value metric as the target function. The task was to find Wikipedia articles that had not (but should have) been categorized under certain Wikipedia categories. We conducted five sets of experiments using separate Wikipedia categories. While the baseline models used the popular Bayes-Laplace priors, the study models learned the optimal priors for each set of experiments separately before using them. The results showed that the study models consistently outperformed the baseline models with a wide margin of statistical significance (p < 0.001). The measured performance improvement of the study model over the baseline was as high as 443% with the mean value of 193% over five Wikipedia categories.
A Survey of Community Detection Approaches: From Statistical Modeling to Deep Learning
Jin, Di, Yu, Zhizhi, Jiao, Pengfei, Pan, Shirui, Yu, Philip S., Zhang, Weixiong
Community detection, a fundamental task for network analysis, aims to partition a network into multiple sub-structures to help reveal their latent functions. Community detection has been extensively studied in and broadly applied to many real-world network problems. Classical approaches to community detection typically utilize probabilistic graphical models and adopt a variety of prior knowledge to infer community structures. As the problems that network methods try to solve and the network data to be analyzed become increasingly more sophisticated, new approaches have also been proposed and developed, particularly those that utilize deep learning and convert networked data into low dimensional representation. Despite all the recent advancement, there is still a lack of insightful understanding of the theoretical and methodological underpinning of community detection, which will be critically important for future development of the area of network analysis. In this paper, we develop and present a unified architecture of network community-finding methods to characterize the state-of-the-art of the field of community detection. Specifically, we provide a comprehensive review of the existing community detection methods and introduce a new taxonomy that divides the existing methods into two categories, namely probabilistic graphical model and deep learning. We then discuss in detail the main idea behind each method in the two categories. Furthermore, to promote future development of community detection, we release several benchmark datasets from several problem domains and highlight their applications to various network analysis tasks. We conclude with discussions of the challenges of the field and suggestions of possible directions for future research.
B-SMALL: A Bayesian Neural Network approach to Sparse Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning
Madan, Anish, Prasad, Ranjitha
There is a growing interest in the learning-to-learn paradigm, also known as meta-learning, where models infer on new tasks using a few training examples. Recently, meta-learning based methods have been widely used in few-shot classification, regression, reinforcement learning, and domain adaptation. The model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) algorithm is a well-known algorithm that obtains model parameter initialization at meta-training phase. In the meta-test phase, this initialization is rapidly adapted to new tasks by using gradient descent. However, meta-learning models are prone to overfitting since there are insufficient training tasks resulting in over-parameterized models with poor generalization performance for unseen tasks. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian neural network based MAML algorithm, which we refer to as the B-SMALL algorithm. The proposed framework incorporates a sparse variational loss term alongside the loss function of MAML, which uses a sparsifying approximated KL divergence as a regularizer. We demonstrate the performance of B-MAML using classification and regression tasks, and highlight that training a sparsifying BNN using MAML indeed improves the parameter footprint of the model while performing at par or even outperforming the MAML approach. We also illustrate applicability of our approach in distributed sensor networks, where sparsity and meta-learning can be beneficial.
Enhanced Twitter Sentiment Classification Using Contextual Information
Vosoughi, Soroush, Zhou, Helen, Roy, Deb
The rise in popularity and ubiquity of Twitter has made sentiment analysis of tweets an important and well-covered area of research. However, the 140 character limit imposed on tweets makes it hard to use standard linguistic methods for sentiment classification. On the other hand, what tweets lack in structure they make up with sheer volume and rich metadata. This metadata includes geolocation, temporal and author information. We hypothesize that sentiment is dependent on all these contextual factors. Different locations, times and authors have different emotional valences. In this paper, we explored this hypothesis by utilizing distant supervision to collect millions of labelled tweets from different locations, times and authors. We used this data to analyse the variation of tweet sentiments across different authors, times and locations. Once we explored and understood the relationship between these variables and sentiment, we used a Bayesian approach to combine these variables with more standard linguistic features such as n-grams to create a Twitter sentiment classifier. This combined classifier outperforms the purely linguistic classifier, showing that integrating the rich contextual information available on Twitter into sentiment classification is a promising direction of research.
The Bayesian Method of Tensor Networks
Bayesian learning is a powerful learning framework which combines the external information of the data (background information) with the internal information (training data) in a logically consistent way in inference and prediction. By Bayes rule, the external information (prior distribution) and the internal information (training data likelihood) are combined coherently, and the posterior distribution and the posterior predictive (marginal) distribution obtained by Bayes rule summarize the total information needed in the inference and prediction, respectively. In this paper, we study the Bayesian framework of the Tensor Network from two perspective. First, we introduce the prior distribution to the weights in the Tensor Network and predict the labels of the new observations by the posterior predictive (marginal) distribution. Since the intractability of the parameter integral in the normalization constant computation, we approximate the posterior predictive distribution by Laplace approximation and obtain the out-product approximation of the hessian matrix of the posterior distribution of the Tensor Network model. Second, to estimate the parameters of the stationary mode, we propose a stable initialization trick to accelerate the inference process by which the Tensor Network can converge to the stationary path more efficiently and stably with gradient descent method. We verify our work on the MNIST, Phishing Website and Breast Cancer data set. We study the Bayesian properties of the Bayesian Tensor Network by visualizing the parameters of the model and the decision boundaries in the two dimensional synthetic data set. For a application purpose, our work can reduce the overfitting and improve the performance of normal Tensor Network model.
Explicit regularization and implicit bias in deep network classifiers trained with the square loss
Deep ReLU networks trained with the square loss have been observed to perform well in classification tasks. We provide here a theoretical justification based on analysis of the associated gradient flow. We show that convergence to a solution with the absolute minimum norm is expected when normalization techniques such as Batch Normalization (BN) or Weight Normalization (WN) are used together with Weight Decay (WD). The main property of the minimizers that bounds their expected error is the norm: we prove that among all the close-to-interpolating solutions, the ones associated with smaller Frobenius norms of the unnormalized weight matrices have better margin and better bounds on the expected classification error. With BN but in the absence of WD, the dynamical system is singular. Implicit dynamical regularization -- that is zero-initial conditions biasing the dynamics towards high margin solutions -- is also possible in the no-BN and no-WD case. The theory yields several predictions, including the role of BN and weight decay, aspects of Papyan, Han and Donoho's Neural Collapse and the constraints induced by BN on the network weights.
Fairness in Machine Learning
Machine learning based systems are reaching society at large and in many aspects of everyday life. This phenomenon has been accompanied by concerns about the ethical issues that may arise from the adoption of these technologies. ML fairness is a recently established area of machine learning that studies how to ensure that biases in the data and model inaccuracies do not lead to models that treat individuals unfavorably on the basis of characteristics such as e.g. race, gender, disabilities, and sexual or political orientation. In this manuscript, we discuss some of the limitations present in the current reasoning about fairness and in methods that deal with it, and describe some work done by the authors to address them. More specifically, we show how causal Bayesian networks can play an important role to reason about and deal with fairness, especially in complex unfairness scenarios. We describe how optimal transport theory can be used to develop methods that impose constraints on the full shapes of distributions corresponding to different sensitive attributes, overcoming the limitation of most approaches that approximate fairness desiderata by imposing constraints on the lower order moments or other functions of those distributions. We present a unified framework that encompasses methods that can deal with different settings and fairness criteria, and that enjoys strong theoretical guarantees. We introduce an approach to learn fair representations that can generalize to unseen tasks. Finally, we describe a technique that accounts for legal restrictions about the use of sensitive attributes.
Inference post Selection of Group-sparse Regression Models
Panigrahi, Snigdha, MacDonald, Peter W., Kessler, Daniel
Conditional inference provides a rigorous approach to counter bias when data from automated model selections is reused for inference. We develop in this paper a statistically consistent Bayesian framework to assess uncertainties within linear models that are informed by grouped sparsities in covariates. Finding wide applications when genes, proteins, genetic variants, neuroimaging measurements are grouped respectively by their biological pathways, molecular functions, regulatory regions, cognitive roles, these models are selected through a useful class of group-sparse learning algorithms. An adjustment factor to account precisely for the selection of promising groups, deployed with a generalized version of Laplace-type approximations is the centerpiece of our new methods. Accommodating well known group-sparse models such as those selected by the Group LASSO, the overlapping Group LASSO, the sparse Group LASSO etc., we illustrate the efficacy of our methodology in extensive experiments and on data from a human neuroimaging application.