Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedback. Users' feedback can be positive and negative and both types of feedback have great potentials to boost recommendations. However, the number of negative feedback is much larger than that of positive one; thus incorporating them simultaneously is challenging since positive feedback could be buried by negative one. In this paper, we develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed deep recommender system (DEERS) framework. The experimental results based on real-world e-commerce data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Further experiments have been conducted to understand the importance of both positive and negative feedback in recommendations.

Today I've published my latest book "Mastering Machine Learning Algorithms" (in a few days it will be available on all channels). Machine learning is a subset of AI that aims to make modern-day computer systems smarter and more intelligent. The real power of machine learning resides in its algorithms, which make even the most difficult things capable of being handled by machines. However, with the advancement in the technology and requirements of data, machines will have to be smarter than they are today to meet the overwhelming data needs; mastering these algorithms and using them optimally is the need of the hour. Mastering Machine Learning Algorithms is your complete guide to quickly getting to grips with popular machine learning algorithms.

Trains have been a prominent mode of long-distance travel for decades, especially in the countries with a significant land area and large population. India, with a population of 1.324 billion people in 2016, has a railway system of network route length of 66, 687 kilometers, with 11, 122 locomotives, 7, 216 stations, that served 8.107 billion ridership in 2016 [7]. The Indian railway system is fourth largest in the world in terms of network size. However its trains are plagued with endemic delays that can be credited to (a) obsolete technology, e.g., dated rail engines, (b) size, e.g., large network structure and high railway traffic, (c) weather, e.g., fog in winter months in north India and rains during summer monsoons countrywide. In this paper, we take the initial steps in understanding and predicting train delays.

Temporal difference learning (TD) is a simple iterative algorithm used to estimate the value function corresponding to a given policy in a Markov decision process. Although TD is one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement learning, its theoretical analysis has proved challenging and few guarantees on its statistical efficiency are available. In this work, we provide a simple and explicit finite time analysis of temporal difference learning with linear function approximation. Except for a few key insights, our analysis mirrors standard techniques for analyzing stochastic gradient descent algorithms, and therefore inherits the simplicity and elegance of that literature. A final section of the paper shows that all of our main results extend to the study of Q-learning applied to high-dimensional optimal stopping problems.

Many real-world sequential decision making problems are partially observable by nature, and the environment model is typically unknown. Consequently, there is great need for reinforcement learning methods that can tackle such problems given only a stream of incomplete and noisy observations. In this paper, we propose deep variational reinforcement learning (DVRL), which introduces an inductive bias that allows an agent to learn a generative model of the environment and perform inference in that model to effectively aggregate the available information. We develop an n-step approximation to the evidence lower bound (ELBO), allowing the model to be trained jointly with the policy. This ensures that the latent state representation is suitable for the control task. In experiments on Mountain Hike and flickering Atari we show that our method outperforms previous approaches relying on recurrent neural networks to encode the past.

Spectral Inference Networks generalize Slow Feature Analysis to generic symmetric operators, and are closely related to Variational Monte Carlo methods from computational physics. As such, they can be a powerful tool for unsupervised representation learning from video or pairs of data. We derive a training algorithm for Spectral Inference Networks that addresses the bias in the gradients due to finite batch size and allows for online learning of multiple eigenfunctions. We show results of training Spectral Inference Networks on problems in quantum mechanics and feature learning for videos on synthetic datasets as well as the Arcade Learning Environment. Our results demonstrate that Spectral Inference Networks accurately recover eigenfunctions of linear operators, can discover interpretable representations from video and find meaningful subgoals in reinforcement learning environments.

Human professionals are often required to make decisions based on complex multivariate time series measurements in an online setting, e.g. in health care. Since human cognition is not optimized to work well in high-dimensional spaces, these decisions benefit from interpretable low-dimensional representations. However, many representation learning algorithms for time series data are difficult to interpret. This is due to non-intuitive mappings from data features to salient properties of the representation and non-smoothness over time. To address this problem, we propose to couple a variational autoencoder to a discrete latent space and introduce a topological structure through the use of self-organizing maps. This allows us to learn discrete representations of time series, which give rise to smooth and interpretable embeddings with superior clustering performance. Furthermore, to allow for a probabilistic interpretation of our method, we integrate a Markov model in the latent space. This model uncovers the temporal transition structure, improves clustering performance even further and provides additional explanatory insights as well as a natural representation of uncertainty. We evaluate our model on static (Fashion-)MNIST data, a time series of linearly interpolated (Fashion-)MNIST images, a chaotic Lorenz attractor system with two macro states, as well as on a challenging real world medical time series application. In the latter experiment, our representation uncovers meaningful structure in the acute physiological state of a patient.

Place cell activity of hippocampal pyramidal cells has been described as the cognitive substrate of spatial memory. Replay is observed during hippocampal sharp-wave-ripple-associated population burst events (PBEs) and is critical for consolidation and recall-guided behaviors. PBE activity has historically been analyzed as a phenomenon subordinate to the place code. Here, we use hidden Markov models to study PBEs observed in rats during exploration of both linear mazes and open fields. We demonstrate that estimated models are consistent with a spatial map of the environment, and can even decode animals' positions during behavior.

Place cell activity of hippocampal pyramidal cells has been described as the cognitive substrate of spatial memory. Replay is observed during hippocampal sharp-wave-ripple-associated population burst events (PBEs) and is critical for consolidation and recall-guided behaviors. PBE activity has historically been analyzed as a phenomenon subordinate to the place code. Here, we use hidden Markov models to study PBEs observed in rats during exploration of both linear mazes and open fields. We demonstrate that estimated models are consistent with a spatial map of the environment, and can even decode animals' positions during behavior.

'Indifference' refers to a class of methods used to control reward based agents. Indifference techniques aim to achieve one or more of three distinct goals: rewards dependent on certain events (without the agent being motivated to manipulate the probability of those events), effective disbelief (where agents behave as if particular events could never happen), and seamless transition from one reward function to another (with the agent acting as if this change is unanticipated). This paper presents several methods for achieving these goals in the POMDP setting, establishing their uses, strengths, and requirements. These methods of control work even when the implications of the agent's reward are otherwise not fully understood.