Bayesian Learning
A Machine Learning based Robust Prediction Model for Real-life Mobile Phone Data
Real-life mobile phone data may contain noisy instances, which is a fundamental issue for building a prediction model with many potential negative consequences. The complexity of the inferred model may increase, may arise overfitting problem, and thereby the overall prediction accuracy of the model may decrease. In this paper, we address these issues and present a robust prediction model for real-life mobile phone data of individual users, in order to improve the prediction accuracy of the model. In our robust model, we first effectively identify and eliminate the noisy instances from the training dataset by determining a dynamic noise threshold using naive Bayes classifier and laplace estimator, which may differ from user-to-user according to their unique behavioral patterns. After that, we employ the most popular rule-based machine learning classification technique, i.e., decision tree, on the noise-free quality dataset to build the prediction model. Experimental results on the real-life mobile phone datasets (e.g., phone call log) of individual mobile phone users, show the effectiveness of our robust model in terms of precision, recall and f-measure.
Cyclical Stochastic Gradient MCMC for Bayesian Deep Learning
Zhang, Ruqi, Li, Chunyuan, Zhang, Jianyi, Chen, Changyou, Wilson, Andrew Gordon
The posteriors over neural network weights are high dimensional and multimodal. Each mode typically characterizes a meaningfully different representation of the data. We develop Cyclical Stochastic Gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) to automatically explore such distributions. In particular, we propose a cyclical stepsize schedule, where larger steps discover new modes, and smaller steps characterize each mode. We prove that our proposed learning rate schedule provides faster convergence to samples from a stationary distribution than SG-MCMC with standard decaying schedules. Moreover, we provide extensive experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of cyclical SG-MCMC in learning complex multimodal distributions, especially for fully Bayesian inference with modern deep neural networks.
A new approach to learning in Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs)
Benhamou, E., Atif, J., Laraki, R.
In this paper, we revisit the parameter learning problem, namely the estimation of model parameters for Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs). DBNs are directed graphical models of stochastic processes that encompasses and generalize Hidden Markov models (HMMs) and Linear Dynamical Systems (LDSs). Whenever we apply these models to economics and finance, we are forced to make some modeling assumptions about the state dynamics and the graph topology (the DBN structure). These assumptions may be incorrectly specified and contain some additional noise compared to reality. Trying to use a best fit approach through maximum likelihood estimation may miss this point and try to fit at any price these models on data. We present here a new methodology that takes a radical point of view and instead focus on the final efficiency of our model. Parameters are hence estimated in terms of their efficiency rather than their distributional fit to the data. The resulting optimization problem that consists in finding the optimal parameters is a hard problem. We rely on Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) method to tackle this issue. We apply this method to the seminal problem of trend detection in financial markets. We see on numerical results that the resulting parameters seem less error prone to over fitting than traditional moving average cross over trend detection and perform better. The method developed here for algorithmic trading is general. It can be applied to other real case applications whenever there is no physical law underlying our DBNs.
ELKI: A large open-source library for data analysis - ELKI Release 0.7.5 "Heidelberg"
Schubert, Erich, Zimek, Arthur
This paper documents the release of the ELKI data mining framework, version 0.7.5. ELKI is an open source (AGPLv3) data mining software written in Java. The focus of ELKI is research in algorithms, with an emphasis on unsupervised methods in cluster analysis and outlier detection. In order to achieve high performance and scalability, ELKI offers data index structures such as the R*-tree that can provide major performance gains. ELKI is designed to be easy to extend for researchers and students in this domain, and welcomes contributions of additional methods. ELKI aims at providing a large collection of highly parameterizable algorithms, in order to allow easy and fair evaluation and benchmarking of algorithms. We will first outline the motivation for this release, the plans for the future, and then give a brief overview over the new functionality in this version. We also include an appendix presenting an overview on the overall implemented functionality.
Automatic Bayesian Density Analysis
Vergari, Antonio, Molina, Alejandro, Peharz, Robert, Ghahramani, Zoubin, Kersting, Kristian, Valera, Isabel
Making sense of a dataset in an automatic and unsupervised fashion is a challenging problem in statistics and AI. Classical approaches for {exploratory data analysis} are usually not flexible enough to deal with the uncertainty inherent to real-world data: they are often restricted to fixed latent interaction models and homogeneous likelihoods; they are sensitive to missing, corrupt and anomalous data; moreover, their expressiveness generally comes at the price of intractable inference. As a result, supervision from statisticians is usually needed to find the right model for the data. However, since domain experts are not necessarily also experts in statistics, we propose Automatic Bayesian Density Analysis (ABDA) to make exploratory data analysis accessible at large. Specifically, ABDA allows for automatic and efficient missing value estimation, statistical data type and likelihood discovery, anomaly detection and dependency structure mining, on top of providing accurate density estimation. Extensive empirical evidence shows that ABDA is a suitable tool for automatic exploratory analysis of mixed continuous and discrete tabular data.
Machine Learning with Java and Weka Simpliv
This is the bite size course to learn Java Programming for Machine Learning and Statistical Learning with Weka library. In CRISP DM data mining process, machine learning is at the modeling and evaluation stage. You will need to know some Java programming, and you can learn Java programming from my "Create Your Calculator: Learn Java Programming Basics Fast" course. You will learn Java Programming for machine learning and you will be able to train your own prediction models with naive bayes, decision tree, knn, neural network, linear regression, and evaluate your models very soon after learning the course.
Bayesian Nonparametric Adaptive Spectral Density Estimation for Financial Time Series
James, Nick, Marchant, Roman, Gerlach, Richard, Cripps, Sally
Discrimination between non-stationarity and long-range dependency is a difficult and long-standing issue in modelling financial time series. This paper uses an adaptive spectral technique which jointly models the non-stationarity and dependency of financial time series in a non-parametric fashion assuming that the time series consists of a finite, but unknown number, of locally stationary processes, the locations of which are also unknown. The model allows a non-parametric estimate of the dependency structure by modelling the auto-covariance function in the spectral domain. All our estimates are made within a Bayesian framework where we use aReversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm for inference. We study the frequentist properties of our estimates via a simulation study, and present a novel way of generating time series data from a nonparametric spectrum. Results indicate that our techniques perform well across a range of data generating processes. We apply our method to a number of real examples and our results indicate that several financial time series exhibit both long-range dependency and non-stationarity.
Discovering Context Effects from Raw Choice Data
Seshadri, Arjun, Peysakhovich, Alexander, Ugander, Johan
Many applications in preference learning assume that decisions come from the maximization of a stable utility function. Yet a large experimental literature shows that individual choices and judgements can be affected by "irrelevant" aspects of the context in which they are made. An important class of such contexts is the composition of the choice set. In this work, our goal is to discover such choice set effects from raw choice data. We introduce an extension of the Multinomial Logit (MNL) model, called the context dependent random utility model (CDM), which allows for a particular class of choice set effects. We show that the CDM can be thought of as a second-order approximation to a general choice system, can be inferred optimally using maximum likelihood and, importantly, is easily interpretable. We apply the CDM to both real and simulated choice data to perform principled exploratory analyses for the presence of choice set effects.
Scalable Nonparametric Sampling from Multimodal Posteriors with the Posterior Bootstrap
Fong, Edwin, Lyddon, Simon, Holmes, Chris
Increasingly complex datasets pose a number of challenges for Bayesian inference. Conventional posterior sampling based on Markov chain Monte Carlo can be too computationally intensive, is serial in nature and mixes poorly between posterior modes. Further, all models are misspecified, which brings into question the validity of the conventional Bayesian update. We present a scalable Bayesian nonparametric learning routine that enables posterior sampling through the optimization of suitably randomized objective functions. A Dirichlet process prior on the unknown data distribution accounts for model misspecification, and admits an embarrassingly parallel posterior bootstrap algorithm that generates independent and exact samples from the nonparametric posterior distribution. Our method is particularly adept at sampling from multimodal posterior distributions via a random restart mechanism. We demonstrate our method on Gaussian mixture model and sparse logistic regression examples.
A Bayesian Deep Learning Framework for End-To-End Prediction of Emotion from Heartbeat
Harper, Ross, Southern, Joshua
Automatic prediction of emotion promises to revolutionise human-computer interaction. Recent trends involve fusion of multiple modalities - audio, visual, and physiological - to classify emotional state. However, practical considerations 'in the wild' limit collection of this physiological data to commoditised heartbeat sensors. Furthermore, real-world applications often require some measure of uncertainty over model output. We present here an end-to-end deep learning model for classifying emotional valence from unimodal heartbeat data. We further propose a Bayesian framework for modelling uncertainty over valence predictions, and describe a procedure for tuning output according to varying demands on confidence. We benchmarked our framework against two established datasets within the field and achieved peak classification accuracy of 90%. These results lay the foundation for applications of affective computing in real-world domains such as healthcare, where a high premium is placed on non-invasive collection of data, and predictive certainty.