In many projects I carried out, companies, despite having fantastic AI business ideas, display a tendency to slowly become frustrated when they realize that they do not have enough data… However, solutions do exist! The purpose of this article is to briefly introduce you to some of them (the ones that are proven effective in my practice) rather than to list all existing solutions. The problem of data scarcity is very important since data are at the core of any AI project. The size of a dataset is often responsible for poor performances in ML projects. Most of the time, data related issues are the main reason why great AI projects cannot be accomplished.

The inference performance of the pseudolikelihood method is discussed in the framework of the inverse Ising problem when the $\ell_2$-regularized (ridge) linear regression is adopted. This setup is introduced for theoretically investigating the situation where the data generation model is different from the inference one, namely the model mismatch situation. In the teacher-student scenario under the assumption that the teacher couplings are sparse, the analysis is conducted using the replica and cavity methods, with a special focus on whether the presence/absence of teacher couplings is correctly inferred or not. The result indicates that despite the model mismatch, one can perfectly identify the network structure using naive linear regression without regularization when the number of spins $N$ is smaller than the dataset size $M$, in the thermodynamic limit $N\to \infty$. Further, to access the underdetermined region $M < N$, we examine the effect of the $\ell_2$ regularization, and find that biases appear in all the coupling estimates, preventing the perfect identification of the network structure. We, however, find that the biases are shown to decay exponentially fast as the distance from the center spin chosen in the pseudolikelihood method grows. Based on this finding, we propose a two-stage estimator: In the first stage, the ridge regression is used and the estimates are pruned by a relatively small threshold; in the second stage the naive linear regression is conducted only on the remaining couplings, and the resultant estimates are again pruned by another relatively large threshold. This estimator with the appropriate regularization coefficient and thresholds is shown to achieve the perfect identification of the network structure even in $0

The newly emerged machine learning (e.g. deep learning) methods have become a strong driving force to revolutionize a wide range of industries, such as smart healthcare, financial technology, and surveillance systems. Meanwhile, privacy has emerged as a big concern in this machine learning-based artificial intelligence era. It is important to note that the problem of privacy preservation in the context of machine learning is quite different from that in traditional data privacy protection, as machine learning can act as both friend and foe. Currently, the work on the preservation of privacy and machine learning (ML) is still in an infancy stage, as most existing solutions only focus on privacy problems during the machine learning process. Therefore, a comprehensive study on the privacy preservation problems and machine learning is required. This paper surveys the state of the art in privacy issues and solutions for machine learning. The survey covers three categories of interactions between privacy and machine learning: (i) private machine learning, (ii) machine learning aided privacy protection, and (iii) machine learning-based privacy attack and corresponding protection schemes. The current research progress in each category is reviewed and the key challenges are identified. Finally, based on our in-depth analysis of the area of privacy and machine learning, we point out future research directions in this field.

We merge computational mechanics' definition of causal states (predictively-equivalent histories) with reproducing-kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) representation inference. The result is a widely-applicable method that infers causal structure directly from observations of a system's behaviors whether they are over discrete or continuous events or time. A structural representation -- a finite- or infinite-state kernel $\epsilon$-machine -- is extracted by a reduced-dimension transform that gives an efficient representation of causal states and their topology. In this way, the system dynamics are represented by a stochastic (ordinary or partial) differential equation that acts on causal states. We introduce an algorithm to estimate the associated evolution operator. Paralleling the Fokker-Plank equation, it efficiently evolves causal-state distributions and makes predictions in the original data space via an RKHS functional mapping. We demonstrate these techniques, together with their predictive abilities, on discrete-time, discrete-value infinite Markov-order processes generated by finite-state hidden Markov models with (i) finite or (ii) uncountably-infinite causal states and (iii) a continuous-time, continuous-value process generated by a thermally-driven chaotic flow. The method robustly estimates causal structure in the presence of varying external and measurement noise levels.

Designing efficient algorithms that learn and plan in sequential decision-making tasks with large state and action spaces has become a central task of modern reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. RL often assumes the environment as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), described by a tuple of state space, action space, reward function, and transition probability function. Due to a large number of possible states and actions, traditional tabular reinforcement learning methods such as Q-learning (Watkins, 1989), which directly access each state-action pair, are computationally intractable. A common approach to cope with high-dimensional state and action spaces is to utilize feature mappings such as linear functions or neural networks to map states and actions to a low-dimensional space. Recently, a large body of literature has been devoted to provide regret bounds for online RL with linear function approximation. These works can be divided into two main categories. The first category of works is of model-free style, which directly parameterizes the action-value function as a linear function of some given feature mapping. For instance, Jin et al. (2020) studied the episodic MDPs with linear MDP assumption, which assumes that both transition probability function and reward function can be represented as a linear function of a given feature mapping.

Handwritten Digit Recognition is an interesting machine learning problem in which we have to identify the handwritten digits through various classification algorithms. There are a number of ways and algorithms to recognize handwritten digits, including Deep Learning/CNN, SVM, Gaussian Naive Bayes, KNN, Decision Trees, Random Forests, etc. In this article, we will deploy a variety of machine learning algorithms from the Sklearn's library on our dataset to classify the digits into their categories. We will use Sklearn's load_digits dataset, which is a collection of 8x8 images (64 features)of digits. The dataset contains a total of 1797 sample points.

This paper addresses the issue of detecting hierarchical changes in latent variable models (HCDL) from data streams. There are three different levels of changes for latent variable models: 1) the first level is the change in data distribution for fixed latent variables, 2) the second one is that in the distribution over latent variables, and 3) the third one is that in the number of latent variables. It is important to detect these changes because we can analyze the causes of changes by identifying which level a change comes from (change interpretability). This paper proposes an information-theoretic framework for detecting changes of the three levels in a hierarchical way. The key idea to realize it is to employ the MDL (minimum description length) change statistics for measuring the degree of change, in combination with DNML (decomposed normalized maximum likelihood) code-length calculation. We give a theoretical basis for making reliable alarms for changes. Focusing on stochastic block models, we employ synthetic and benchmark datasets to empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in terms of change interpretability as well as change detection.

Developing machine learning enabled smart manufacturing is promising for composite structures assembly process. To improve production quality and efficiency of the assembly process, accurate predictive analysis on dimensional deviations and residual stress of the composite structures is required. The novel composite structures assembly involves two challenges: (i) the highly nonlinear and anisotropic properties of composite materials; and (ii) inevitable uncertainty in the assembly process. To overcome those problems, we propose a neural network Gaussian process model considering input uncertainty for composite structures assembly. Deep architecture of our model allows us to approximate a complex process better, and consideration of input uncertainty enables robust modeling with complete incorporation of the process uncertainty. Based on simulation and case study, the NNGPIU can outperform other benchmark methods when the response function is nonsmooth and nonlinear. Although we use composite structure assembly as an example, the proposed methodology can be applicable to other engineering systems with intrinsic uncertainties.

We study a version of adversarial classification where an adversary is empowered to corrupt data inputs up to some distance $\varepsilon$, using tools from variational analysis. In particular, we describe necessary conditions associated with the optimal classifier subject to such an adversary. Using the necessary conditions, we derive a geometric evolution equation which can be used to track the change in classification boundaries as $\varepsilon$ varies. This evolution equation may be described as an uncoupled system of differential equations in one dimension, or as a mean curvature type equation in higher dimension. In one dimension we rigorously prove that one can use the initial value problem starting from $\varepsilon=0$, which is simply the Bayes classifier, in order to solve for the global minimizer of the adversarial problem. Numerical examples illustrating these ideas are also presented.

Starting in this chapter, the assumption is that the environment is a finite Markov Decision Process (finite MDP). In this chapter we'll see how we can use DP algorithms to compute the value functions in a slightly different, less intractable way. The general idea is to take these 2 equations, and turn them into update rules for for improving the approximations of our value functions. It will make more sense later on. Policy Evaluation Policy evaluation means computing the state-value function Vπ for an arbitrary policy π.