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 several deep learning based models have been proposed for end-to-end learning of dialogs. While these models can be trained from data without the need for any additional annotations, it is hard to interpret them. On the other hand, there exist traditional state based dialog systems, where the states of the dialog are discrete and hence easy to interpret. However these states need to be handcrafted and annotated in the data. To achieve the best of both worlds, we propose Latent State Tracking Network (LSTN) using which we learn an interpretable model in unsupervised manner. The model defines a discrete latent variable at each turn of the conversation which can take a finite set of values. Since these discrete variables are not present in the training data, we use EM algorithm to train our model in unsupervised manner. In the experiments, we show that LSTN can help achieve interpretability in dialog models without much decrease in performance compared to end-to-end approaches.

Several applications of Reinforcement Learning suffer from instability due to high variance. This is especially prevalent in high dimensional domains. Regularization is a commonly used technique in machine learning to reduce variance, at the cost of introducing some bias. Most existing regularization techniques focus on spatial (perceptual) regularization. Yet in reinforcement learning, due to the nature of the Bellman equation, there is an opportunity to also exploit temporal regularization based on smoothness in value estimates over trajectories. This paper explores a class of methods for temporal regularization. We formally characterize the bias induced by this technique using Markov chain concepts. We illustrate the various characteristics of temporal regularization via a sequence of simple discrete and continuous MDPs, and show that the technique provides improvement even in high-dimensional Atari games.

Patient subtyping based on temporal observations can lead to significantly nuanced subtyping that acknowledges the dynamic characteristics of diseases. Existing methods for subtyping trajectories treat the evolution of clinical observations as a homogeneous process or employ data available at regular intervals. In reality, diseases may have transient underlying states and a state-dependent observation pattern. In our paper, we present an approach to subtype irregular patient data while acknowledging the underlying progression of disease states. Our approach consists of two components: a probabilistic model to determine the likelihood of a patient's observation trajectory and a mixture model to measure similarity between asynchronous patient trajectories. We demonstrate our model by discovering subtypes of progression to hemodynamic instability (requiring cardiovascular intervention) in a patient cohort from a multi-institution ICU dataset. We find three primary patterns: two of which show classic signs of decompensation (rising heart rate with dropping blood pressure), with one of these showing a faster course of decompensation than the other. The third pattern has transient period of low heart rate and blood pressure. We also show that our model results in a 13% reduction in average cross-entropy error compared to a model with no state progression when forecasting vital signs.

This paper introduces a method, based on deep reinforcement learning, for automatically generating a general purpose decision making function. A Deep Q-Network agent was trained in a simulated environment to handle speed and lane change decisions for a truck-trailer combination. In a highway driving case, it is shown that the method produced an agent that matched or surpassed the performance of a commonly used reference model. To demonstrate the generality of the method, the exact same algorithm was also tested by training it for an overtaking case on a road with oncoming traffic. Furthermore, a novel way of applying a convolutional neural network to high level input that represents interchangeable objects is also introduced.

Abstract-- Human Activity Recognition (HAR) based on motion sensors has drawn a lot of attention over the last few years, since perceiving the human status enables context-aware applications to adapt their services on users' needs. However, motion sensor fusion and feature extraction have not reached their full potentials, remaining still an open issue. In this paper, we introduce PerceptionNet, a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that applies a late 2D convolution to multimodal time-series sensor data, in order to extract automatically efficient features for HAR. We evaluate our approach on two public available HAR datasets to demonstrate that the proposed model fuses effectively multimodal sensors and improves the performance of HAR. In particular, PerceptionNet surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art HAR methods based on: (i) features extracted from humans, (ii) deep CNNs exploiting early fusion approaches, and (iii) Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), by an average accuracy of more than 3%. The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) over the last few years, has contributed to the collection of huge amounts of time-series data. An IoT device with high sampling rates, such as a wearable, produces hundreds of data every second, resulting to a data explosion, considering the vast number of such devices connected over the internet. Through real-time or batch data processing, meaningful information is extracted, revealing daily patterns of individual owners or social groups.

Recommender systems help users find relevant items of interest, for example on e-commerce or media streaming sites. Most academic research is concerned with approaches that personalize the recommendations according to long-term user profiles. In many real-world applications, however, such long-term profiles often do not exist and recommendations therefore have to be made solely based on the observed behavior of a user during an ongoing session. Given the high practical relevance of the problem, an increased interest in this problem can be observed in recent years, leading to a number of proposals for session-based recommendation algorithms that typically aim to predict the user's immediate next actions. In this work, we present the results of an in-depth performance comparison of a number of such algorithms, using a variety of datasets and evaluation measures. Our comparison includes the most recent approaches based on recurrent neural networks like GRU4REC, factorized Markov model approaches such as FISM or FOSSIL, as well as simpler methods based, e.g., on nearest neighbor schemes. Our experiments reveal that algorithms of this latter class, despite their sometimes almost trivial nature, often perform equally well or significantly better than today's more complex approaches based on deep neural networks. Our results therefore suggest that there is substantial room for improvement regarding the development of more sophisticated session-based recommendation algorithms.

Infants are experts at playing, with an amazing ability to generate novel structured behaviors in unstructured environments that lack clear extrinsic reward signals. We seek to mathematically formalize these abilities using a neural network that implements curiosity-driven intrinsic motivation. Using a simple but ecologically naturalistic simulated environment in which an agent can move and interact with objects it sees, we propose a "world-model" network that learns to predict the dynamic consequences of the agent's actions. Simultaneously, we train a separate explicit "self-model" that allows the agent to track the error map of its own world-model, and then uses the self-model to adversarially challenge the developing world-model. We demonstrate that this policy causes the agent to explore novel and informative interactions with its environment, leading to the generation of a spectrum of complex behaviors, including ego-motion prediction, object attention, and object gathering. Moreover, the world-model that the agent learns supports improved performance on object dynamics prediction, detection, localization and recognition tasks. Taken together, our results are initial steps toward creating flexible autonomous agents that self-supervise in complex novel physical environments.

Up to the 1980s, most natural language processing systems were based on complex sets of hand-written rules. Starting in the late 1980s, however, there was a revolution in natural language processing with the introduction of machine learning algorithms for language processing. This was due to both the steady increase in computational power (see Moore's law) and the gradual lessening of the dominance of Chomskyantheories of linguistics (e.g. Some of the earliest-used machine learning algorithms, such as decision trees, produced systems of hard if-then rules similar to existing hand-written rules. However, part-of-speech tagging introduced the use of hidden Markov models to natural language processing, and increasingly, research has focused on statistical models, which make soft, probabilistic decisions based on attaching real-valued weights to the features making up the input data.

Quantum Graphical Models (QGMs) generalize classical graphical models by adopting the formalism for reasoning about uncertainty from quantum mechanics. Unlike classical graphical models, QGMs represent uncertainty with density matrices in complex Hilbert spaces. Hilbert space embeddings (HSEs) also generalize Bayesian inference in Hilbert spaces. We investigate the link between QGMs and HSEs and show that the sum rule and Bayes rule for QGMs are equivalent to the kernel sum rule in HSEs and a special case of Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression, respectively. We show that these operations can be kernelized, and use these insights to propose a Hilbert Space Embedding of Hidden Quantum Markov Models (HSE-HQMM) to model dynamics. We present experimental results showing that HSE-HQMMs are competitive with state-of-the-art models like LSTMs and PSRNNs on several datasets, while also providing a nonparametric method for maintaining a probability distribution over continuous-valued features.