Bayesian Learning
Evaluating classification models with Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test
In most binary classification problems we use the ROC Curve and ROC AUC score as measurements of how well the model separates the predictions of the two different classes. I explain this mechanism in another article, but the intuition is easy: if the model gives lower probability scores for the negative class, and higher scores for the positive class, we can say that this is a good model. Now here's the catch: we can also use the KS-2samp test to do that! The KS statistic for two samples is simply the highest distance between their two CDFs, so if we measure the distance between the positive and negative class distributions, we can have another metric to evaluate classifiers. There is a benefit for this approach: the ROC AUC score goes from 0.5 to 1.0, while KS statistics range from 0.0 to 1.0.
Survey and Evaluation of Causal Discovery Methods for Time Series
Assaad, Charles K. (Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LIG, EasyVista) | Devijver, Emilie (Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LIG) | Gaussier, Eric (Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LIG)
We introduce in this survey the major concepts, models, and algorithms proposed so far to infer causal relations from observational time series, a task usually referred to as causal discovery in time series. To do so, after a description of the underlying concepts and modelling assumptions, we present different methods according to the family of approaches they belong to: Granger causality, constraint-based approaches, noise-based approaches, score-based approaches, logic-based approaches, topology-based approaches, and difference-based approaches. We then evaluate several representative methods to illustrate the behaviour of different families of approaches. This illustration is conducted on both artificial and real datasets, with different characteristics. The main conclusions one can draw from this survey is that causal discovery in times series is an active research field in which new methods (in every family of approaches) are regularly proposed, and that no family or method stands out in all situations. Indeed, they all rely on assumptions that may or may not be appropriate for a particular dataset.
Rule-based Evolutionary Bayesian Learning
Botsas, Themistoklis, Mason, Lachlan R., Matar, Omar K., Pan, Indranil
In our previous work, we introduced the rule-based Bayesian Regression, a methodology that leverages two concepts: (i) Bayesian inference, for the general framework and uncertainty quantification and (ii) rule-based systems for the incorporation of expert knowledge and intuition. The resulting method creates a penalty equivalent to a common Bayesian prior, but it also includes information that typically would not be available within a standard Bayesian context. In this work, we extend the aforementioned methodology with grammatical evolution, a symbolic genetic programming technique that we utilise for automating the rules' derivation. Our motivation is that grammatical evolution can potentially detect patterns from the data with valuable information, equivalent to that of expert knowledge. We illustrate the use of the rule-based Evolutionary Bayesian learning technique by applying it to synthetic as well as real data, and examine the results in terms of point predictions and associated uncertainty.
Functional mixture-of-experts for classification
Pham, Nhat Thien, Chamroukhi, Faicel
We develop a mixtures-of-experts (ME) approach to the multiclass classification where the predictors are univariate functions. It consists of a ME model in which both the gating network and the experts network are constructed upon multinomial logistic activation functions with functional inputs. We perform a regularized maximum likelihood estimation in which the coefficient functions enjoy interpretable sparsity constraints on targeted derivatives. We develop an EM-Lasso like algorithm to compute the regularized MLE and evaluate the proposed approach on simulated and real data.
Neural Noise Shows the Uncertainty of Our Memories
In the moment between reading a phone number and punching it into your phone, you may find that the digits have mysteriously gone astray--even if you've seared the first ones into your memory, the last ones may still blur unaccountably. Was the 6 before the 8 or after it? Maintaining such scraps of information long enough to act on them draws on an ability called visual working memory. For years, scientists have debated whether working memory has space for only a few items at a time or if it just has limited room for detail: Perhaps our mind's capacity is spread across either a few crystal-clear recollections or a multitude of more dubious fragments. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
Learn Mobile Price Prediction Through Four Classification Algorithms
This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon. Mobile phones come in all sorts of prices, features, specifications and all. Price estimation and prediction is an important part of consumer strategy. Deciding on the correct price of a product is very important for the market success of a product. A new product that has to be launched, must have the correct price so that consumers find it appropriate to buy the product.
Enhanced Nearest Neighbor Classification for Crowdsourcing
Duan, Jiexin, Qiao, Xingye, Cheng, Guang
In machine learning, crowdsourcing is an economical way to label a large amount of data. However, the noise in the produced labels may deteriorate the accuracy of any classification method applied to the labelled data. We propose an enhanced nearest neighbor classifier (ENN) to overcome this issue. Two algorithms are developed to estimate the worker quality (which is often unknown in practice): one is to construct the estimate based on the denoised worker labels by applying the $k$NN classifier to the expert data; the other is an iterative algorithm that works even without access to the expert data. Other than strong numerical evidence, our proposed methods are proven to achieve the same regret as its oracle version based on high-quality expert data. As a technical by-product, a lower bound on the sample size assigned to each worker to reach the optimal convergence rate of regret is derived.
Bayesian Statistics Overview and your first Bayesian Linear Regression Model
Frequentist and Bayesian are two different versions of statistics. Frequentist is a more classical version, which, as the name suggests, rely on the long run frequency of events (data points) to calculate the variable of interest. Bayesian on the other hand, can also work without having a large number of events (in fact, it could work even with one data point!). The cardinal difference between the two is that: frequentist will give you a point estimate, whereas Bayesian will give you a distribution. Having a point estimate means that -- "we are certain that this is the output for this variable of interest". Whereas, having a distribution can be interpreted as -- "we have some belief that the mean of the distribution is the good estimate for this variable of interest, but there is uncertainty too, in the form of standard deviation".
Glossary of Data Science Terminology: A Beginner's Guide
Increased Internet speeds and advanced technology means data science is high in demand. According to Glassdoor, a career as a data scientist is the third-best job in the United States for 2022. This increase in popularity means that all IT professionals, and aspiring professionals, should be familiar with our list of data science terms. For those looking to become a data scientist, in-depth knowledge of both basic and advanced data science terminology is vital. Our glossary of data science terminology will act as a data science terminology cheat sheet of basic and advanced terms as you start your journey as a data scientist.
Bayesian autoencoders with uncertainty quantification: Towards trustworthy anomaly detection
Yong, Bang Xiang, Brintrup, Alexandra
Despite numerous studies of deep autoencoders (AEs) for unsupervised anomaly detection, AEs still lack a way to express uncertainty in their predictions, crucial for ensuring safe and trustworthy machine learning systems in high-stake applications. Therefore, in this work, the formulation of Bayesian autoencoders (BAEs) is adopted to quantify the total anomaly uncertainty, comprising epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties. To evaluate the quality of uncertainty, we consider the task of classifying anomalies with the additional option of rejecting predictions of high uncertainty. In addition, we use the accuracy-rejection curve and propose the weighted average accuracy as a performance metric. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the BAE and total anomaly uncertainty on a set of benchmark datasets and two real datasets for manufacturing: one for condition monitoring, the other for quality inspection.