Bayesian Learning
Data-driven Advice for Applying Machine Learning to Bioinformatics Problems
Olson, Randal S., La Cava, William, Mustahsan, Zairah, Varik, Akshay, Moore, Jason H.
As the bioinformatics field grows, it must keep pace not only with new data but with new algorithms. Here we contribute a thorough analysis of 13 state-of-the-art, commonly used machine learning algorithms on a set of 165 publicly available classification problems in order to provide data-driven algorithm recommendations to current researchers. We present a number of statistical and visual comparisons of algorithm performance and quantify the effect of model selection and algorithm tuning for each algorithm and dataset. The analysis culminates in the recommendation of five algorithms with hyperparameters that maximize classifier performance across the tested problems, as well as general guidelines for applying machine learning to supervised classification problems.
Objective Bayesian Analysis for Change Point Problems
Hinoveanu, Laurentiu, Leisen, Fabrizio, Villa, Cristiano
In this paper we present a loss-based approach to change point analysis. In particular, we look at the problem from two perspectives. The first focuses on the definition of a prior when the number of change points is known a priori. The second contribution aims to estimate the number of change points by using a loss-based approach recently introduced in the literature. The latter considers change point estimation as a model selection exercise. We show the performance of the proposed approach on simulated data and real data sets.
Batched High-dimensional Bayesian Optimization via Structural Kernel Learning
Wang, Zi, Li, Chengtao, Jegelka, Stefanie, Kohli, Pushmeet
Optimization of high-dimensional black-box functions is an extremely challenging problem. While Bayesian optimization has emerged as a popular approach for optimizing black-box functions, its applicability has been limited to low-dimensional problems due to its computational and statistical challenges arising from high-dimensional settings. In this paper, we propose to tackle these challenges by (1) assuming a latent additive structure in the function and inferring it properly for more efficient and effective BO, and (2) performing multiple evaluations in parallel to reduce the number of iterations required by the method. Our novel approach learns the latent structure with Gibbs sampling and constructs batched queries using determinantal point processes. Experimental validations on both synthetic and real-world functions demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Joint mean and covariance estimation with unreplicated matrix-variate data
Hornstein, Michael, Fan, Roger, Shedden, Kerby, Zhou, Shuheng
It has been proposed that complex populations, such as those that arise in genomics studies, may exhibit dependencies among observations as well as among variables. This gives rise to the challenging problem of analyzing unreplicated high-dimensional data with unknown mean and dependence structures. Matrix-variate approaches that impose various forms of (inverse) covariance sparsity allow flexible dependence structures to be estimated, but cannot directly be applied when the mean and covariance matrices are estimated jointly. We present a practical method utilizing generalized least squares and penalized (inverse) covariance estimation to address this challenge. We establish consistency and obtain rates of convergence for estimating the mean parameters and covariance matrices. The advantages of our approaches are: (i) dependence graphs and covariance structures can be estimated in the presence of unknown mean structure, (ii) the mean structure becomes more efficiently estimated when accounting for the dependence structure among observations; and (iii) inferences about the mean parameters become correctly calibrated. We use simulation studies and analysis of genomic data from a twin study of ulcerative colitis to illustrate the statistical convergence and the performance of our methods in practical settings. Several lines of evidence show that the test statistics for differential gene expression produced by our methods are correctly calibrated and improve power over conventional methods.
Top 10 Machine Learning Algorithms for Beginners
The study of ML algorithms has gained immense traction post the Harvard Business Review article terming a'Data Scientist' as the'Sexiest job of the 21st century'. So, for those starting out in the field of ML, we decided to do a reboot of our immensely popular Gold blog The 10 Algorithms Machine Learning Engineers need to know - albeit this post is targetted towards beginners. ML algorithms are those that can learn from data and improve from experience, without human intervention. Learning tasks may include learning the function that maps the input to the output, learning the hidden structure in unlabeled data; or'instance-based learning', where a class label is produced for a new instance by comparing the new instance (row) to instances from the training data, which were stored in memory. 'Instance-based learning' does not create an abstraction from specific instances. Supervised learning can be explained as follows: use labeled training data to learn the mapping function from the input variables (X) to the output variable (Y).
Adversarial Perturbation Intensity Achieving Chosen Intra-Technique Transferability Level for Logistic Regression
Machine Learning models have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, ie. the manipulation of data by a attacker to defeat a defender's classifier at test time. We present a novel probabilistic definition of adversarial examples in perfect or limited knowledge setting using prior probability distributions on the defender's classifier. Using the asymptotic properties of the logistic regression, we derive a closed-form expression of the intensity of any adversarial perturbation, in order to achieve a given expected misclassification rate. This technique is relevant in a threat model of known model specifications and unknown training data. To our knowledge, this is the first method that allows an attacker to directly choose the probability of attack success. We evaluate our approach on two real-world datasets.
Gaussian Process bandits with adaptive discretization
Shekhar, Shubhanshu, Javidi, Tara
In this paper, the problem of maximizing a black-box function $f:\mathcal{X} \to \mathbb{R}$ is studied in the Bayesian framework with a Gaussian Process (GP) prior. In particular, a new algorithm for this problem is proposed, and high probability bounds on its simple and cumulative regret are established. The query point selection rule in most existing methods involves an exhaustive search over an increasingly fine sequence of uniform discretizations of $\mathcal{X}$. The proposed algorithm, in contrast, adaptively refines $\mathcal{X}$ which leads to a lower computational complexity, particularly when $\mathcal{X}$ is a subset of a high dimensional Euclidean space. In addition to the computational gains, sufficient conditions are identified under which the regret bounds of the new algorithm improve upon the known results. Finally an extension of the algorithm to the case of contextual bandits is proposed, and high probability bounds on the contextual regret are presented.
AI and Machine Learning in Cyber Security – Towards Data Science
Zen monks have been using a tool called a'koan' for hundreds of years to assist them in reaching enlightenment. These koans are like riddles or stories that can only be solved by letting go of ones narrowing believes and stories about how things should be. Zen students sit in silent meditation and observe how the koan is working on them, slowly transforming their way of looking at the world and revealing a tiny piece of the path to nirvana, that place of no suffering. You might wonder what that has to do with cyber security. With the increased popularity of deep learning and the omni presence of the term artificial intelligence (AI), a lot of security practitioners are tricked into believing that these approaches are the magic silver bullet we have been waiting for to solve all of our cyber security challenges.
10 Machine Learning Algorithms You need to Know – Towards Data Science
We live in a start of revolutionized era due to development of data analytics, large computing power, and cloud computing. Machine learning will definitely have a huge role there and the brains behind Machine Learning is based on algorithms. This article covers 10 most popular Machine Learning Algorithms which uses currently. These algorithms can be categorized into 3 main categories. Following algorithms are going to be covered in this article.
Bayesian Estimation of Multidimensional Latent Variables and Its Asymptotic Accuracy
Hierarchical learning models, such as mixture models and Bayesian networks, are widely employed for unsupervised learning tasks, such as clustering analysis. They consist of observable and hidden variables, which represent the given data and their hidden generation process, respectively. It has been pointed out that conventional statistical analysis is not applicable to these models, because redundancy of the latent variable produces singularities in the parameter space. In recent years, a method based on algebraic geometry has allowed us to analyze the accuracy of predicting observable variables when using Bayesian estimation. However, how to analyze latent variables has not been sufficiently studied, even though one of the main issues in unsupervised learning is to determine how accurately the latent variable is estimated. A previous study proposed a method that can be used when the range of the latent variable is redundant compared with the model generating data. The present paper extends that method to the situation in which the latent variables have redundant dimensions. We formulate new error functions and derive their asymptotic forms. Calculation of the error functions is demonstrated in two-layered Bayesian networks.