Logit models are usually applied when studying individual travel behavior, i.e., to predict travel mode choice and to gain behavioral insights on traveler preferences. Recently, some studies have applied machine learning to model travel mode choice and reported higher out-of-sample prediction accuracy than conventional logit models (e.g., multinomial logit). However, there has not been a comprehensive comparison between logit models and machine learning that covers both prediction and behavioral analysis. This paper aims at addressing this gap by examining the key differences in model development, evaluation, and behavioral interpretation between logit and machine-learning models for travel-mode choice modeling. To complement the theoretical discussions, we also empirically evaluated the two approaches on stated-preference survey data for a new type of transit system integrating high-frequency fixed routes and micro-transit. The results show that machine learning can produce significantly higher predictive accuracy than logit models and are better at capturing the nonlinear relationships between trip attributes and mode-choice outcomes. On the other hand, compared to the multinomial logit model, the best-performing machine-learning model, the random forest model, produces less reasonable behavioral outputs (i.e. marginal effects and elasticities) when they were computed from a standard approach. By introducing some behavioral constraints into the computation of behavioral outputs from a random forest model, however, we obtained better results that are somewhat comparable with the multinomial logit model. We believe that there is great potential in merging ideas from machine learning and conventional statistical methods to develop refined models for travel-behavior research and suggest some possible research directions.

These studies are mostly based on publiclyavailable datasets, where each class typically contains more than 100 audio examples [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Contrastingly, only few works study the problem of training neural audio classifiers with few audio examples (for instance, less than 10 per class) [10, 11, 12, 13]. In this work, we study how a number of neural network architectures perform in such situation. Two primary reasons motivate our work: (i) given that humans are able to learn novel concepts from few examples, we aim to quantify up to what extent such behavior is possible in current neural machine listening systems; and (ii) provided that data curation processes are tedious and expensive, it is unreasonable to assume that sizable amounts of annotated audio are always available for training neural network classifiers. The challenge of training neural networks with few audio data has been previously addressed. For example, Morfi and Stowell [12] approached the problem via factorising an audio transcription task into two intermediate sub-tasks: event and tag detection.

Such information includes: the database in modern hospital systems, usually known as Electronic Health Records (EHR), which store the patients' diagnosis, medication, laboratory test results, medical image data, etc.; information on various health behaviors tracked and stored by wearable devices, ubiquitous sensors and mobile applications, such as the smoking status, alcoholism history, exercise level, sleeping conditions, etc.; information collected by census or various surveys regarding sociodemographic factors of the target cohort; and information on people's mental health inferred from their social media activities or social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. These health-related data come from heterogeneous sources, describe assorted aspects of the individual's health conditions. Such data is rich in structure and information which has great research potentials for revealing unknown medical knowledge about genomic epidemiology, disease developments and correlations, drug discoveries, medical diagnosis, mental illness prevention, health behavior adaption, etc. In real-world problems, the number of features relating to a certain health condition could grow exponentially with the development of new information techniques for collecting and measuring data. To reveal the causal influence between various factors and a certain disease or to discover the correlations among diseases from data at such a tremendous scale, requires the assistance of advanced information technology such as data mining, machine learning, text mining, etc. Machine learning technology not only provides a way for learning qualitative relationships among features and patients, but also the quantitative parameters regarding the strength of such correlations.

Recently, considerable research effort has been devoted to developing deep architectures for topic models to learn topic structures. Although several deep models have been proposed to learn better topic proportions of documents, how to leverage the benefits of deep structures for learning word distributions of topics has not yet been rigorously studied. Here we propose a new multi-layer generative process on word distributions of topics, where each layer consists of a set of topics and each topic is drawn from a mixture of the topics of the layer above. As the topics in all layers can be directly interpreted by words, the proposed model is able to discover interpretable topic hierarchies. As a self-contained module, our model can be flexibly adapted to different kinds of topic models to improve their modelling accuracy and interpretability. Extensive experiments on text corpora demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model.

Identification of patterns from discrete data time-series for statistical inference, threat detection, social opinion dynamics, brain activity prediction has received recent momentum. In addition to the huge data size, the associated challenges are, for example, (i) missing data to construct a closed time-varying complex network, and (ii) contribution of unknown sources which are not probed. Towards this end, the current work focuses on statistical neuron system model with multi-covariates and unknown inputs. Previous research of neuron activity analysis is mainly limited with effects from the spiking history of target neuron and the interaction with other neurons in the system while ignoring the influence of unknown stimuli. We propose to use unknown unknowns, which describes the effect of unknown stimuli, undetected neuron activities and all other hidden sources of error. The maximum likelihood estimation with the fixed-point iteration method is implemented. The fixed-point iterations converge fast, and the proposed methods can be efficiently parallelized and offer computational advantage especially when the input spiking trains are over long time-horizon. The developed framework provides an intuition into the meaning of having extra degrees-of-freedom in the data to support the need for unknowns. The proposed algorithm is applied to simulated spike trains and on real-world experimental data of mouse somatosensory, mouse retina and cat retina. The model shows a successful increasing of system likelihood with respect to the conditional intensity function, and it also reveals the convergence with iterations. Results suggest that the neural connection model with unknown unknowns can efficiently estimate the statistical properties of the process by increasing the network likelihood.

In Dynamic Ensemble Selection (DES) techniques, only the most competent classifiers are selected to classify a given query sample. Hence, the key issue in DES is how to estimate the competence of each classifier in a pool to select the most competent ones. In order to deal with this issue, we proposed a novel dynamic ensemble selection framework using meta-learning, called META-DES. The framework is divided into three steps. In the first step, the pool of classifiers is generated from the training data. In the second phase the meta-features are computed using the training data and used to train a meta-classifier that is able to predict whether or not a base classifier from the pool is competent enough to classify an input instance. In this paper, we propose improvements to the training and generalization phase of the META-DES framework. In the training phase, we evaluate four different algorithms for the training of the meta-classifier. For the generalization phase, three combination approaches are evaluated: Dynamic selection, where only the classifiers that attain a certain competence level are selected; Dynamic weighting, where the meta-classifier estimates the competence of each classifier in the pool, and the outputs of all classifiers in the pool are weighted based on their level of competence; and a hybrid approach, in which first an ensemble with the most competent classifiers is selected, after which the weights of the selected classifiers are estimated in order to be used in a weighted majority voting scheme. Experiments are carried out on 30 classification datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the changes proposed in this paper significantly improve the recognition accuracy of the system in several datasets.

Generalized linear models (GLMs) arise in high-dimensional machine learning, statistics, communications and signal processing. In this paper we analyze GLMs when the data matrix is random, as relevant in problems such as compressed sensing, error-correcting codes or benchmark models in neural networks. We evaluate the mutual information (or "free entropy") from which we deduce the Bayes-optimal estimation and generalization errors. Our analysis applies to the high-dimensional limit where both the number of samples and the dimension are large and their ratio is fixed. Non-rigorous predictions for the optimal errors existed for special cases of GLMs, e.g. for the perceptron, in the field of statistical physics based on the so-called replica method. Our present paper rigorously establishes those decades old conjectures and brings forward their algorithmic interpretation in terms of performance of the generalized approximate message-passing algorithm. Furthermore, we tightly characterize, for many learning problems, regions of parameters for which this algorithm achieves the optimal performance, and locate the associated sharp phase transitions separating learnable and non-learnable regions. We believe that this random version of GLMs can serve as a challenging benchmark for multi-purpose algorithms. This paper is divided in two parts that can be read independently: The first part (main part) presents the model and main results, discusses some applications and sketches the main ideas of the proof. The second part (supplementary informations) is much more detailed and provides more examples as well as all the proofs.

Naive Bayes spam filters are highly susceptible to data poisoning attacks. Here, known spam sources/blacklisted IPs exploit the fact that their received emails will be treated as (ground truth) labeled spam examples, and used for classifier training (or re-training). The attacking source thus generates emails that will skew the spam model, potentially resulting in great degradation in classifier accuracy. Such attacks are successful mainly because of the poor representation power of the naive Bayes (NB) model, with only a single (component) density to represent spam (plus a possible attack). We propose a defense based on the use of a mixture of NB models. We demonstrate that the learned mixture almost completely isolates the attack in a second NB component, with the original spam component essentially unchanged by the attack. Our approach addresses both the scenario where the classifier is being re-trained in light of new data and, significantly, the more challenging scenario where the attack is embedded in the original spam training set. Even for weak attack strengths, BIC-based model order selection chooses a two-component solution, which invokes the mixture-based defense. Promising results are presented on the TREC 2005 spam corpus.

When analysing graph structure, it can be difficult to determine whether patterns found are due to chance, or due to structural aspects of the process that generated the data. Hypothesis tests are often used to support such analyses. These allow us to make statistical inferences about which null models are responsible for the data, and they can be used as a heuristic in searching for meaningful patterns. The minimum description length (MDL) principle [6, 4] allows us to build such hypothesis tests, based on efficient descriptions of the data. Broadly: we translate the regularity we are interested in into a code for the data, and if this code describes the data more efficiently than a code corresponding to the null model, by a sufficient margin, we may reject the null model. This is a frequentist approach to MDL, based on hypothesis testing. Bayesian approaches to MDL for model selection rather than model rejection are more common, but for the purposes of pattern analysis, a hypothesis testing approach provides a more natural fit with existing literature. 1 We provide a brief illustration of this principle based on the running example of analysing the size of the largest clique in a graph. We illustrate how a code can be constructed to efficiently represent graphs with large cliques, and how the description length of the data under this code can be compared to the description length under a code corresponding to a null model to show that the null model is highly unlikely to have generated the data.

We present a probabilistic modeling framework and adaptive sampling algorithm wherein unsupervised generative models are combined with black box predictive models to tackle the problem of input design. In input design, one is given one or more stochastic "oracle" predictive functions, each of which maps from the input design space (e. g., DNA sequences or images) to a distribution over a property of interest (e. g., protein fluorescence or image content). Given such stochastic oracles, the problem is to find an input that is expected to maximize one or more properties, or to achieve a specified value of one or more properties, or any combination thereof. We demonstrate experimentally that our approach substantially outperforms other recently presented methods for tackling a specific version of this problem, namely, maximization when the oracle is assumed to be deterministic and unbiased. We also demonstrate that our method can tackle more general versions of the problem.