In this paper, we use a well-known Deep Learning technique called Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks to find sessions that are prone to code failure in applications that rely on telemetry data for system health monitoring. We also use LSTM networks to extract telemetry patterns that lead to a specific code failure. For code failure prediction, we treat the telemetry events, sequence of telemetry events and the outcome of each sequence as words, sentence and sentiment in the context of sentiment analysis, respectively. Our proposed method is able to process a large set of data and can automatically handle edge cases in code failure prediction. We take advantage of Bayesian optimization technique to find the optimal hyper parameters as well as the type of LSTM cells that leads to the best prediction performance. We then introduce the Contributors and Blockers concepts. In this paper, contributors are the set of events that cause a code failure, while blockers are the set of events that each of them individually prevents a code failure from happening, even in presence of one or multiple contributor(s). Once the proposed LSTM model is trained, we use a greedy approach to find the contributors and blockers. To develop and test our proposed method, we use synthetic (simulated) data in the first step. The synthetic data is generated using a number of rules for code failures, as well as a number of rules for preventing a code failure from happening. The trained LSTM model shows over 99% accuracy for detecting code failures in the synthetic data. The results from the proposed method outperform the classical learning models such as Decision Tree and Random Forest. Using the proposed greedy method, we are able to find the contributors and blockers in the synthetic data in more than 90% of the cases, with a performance better than sequential rule and pattern mining algorithms.

We introduce and analyse two algorithms for exploration-exploitation in discrete and continuous Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) based on exploration bonuses. SCAL$^+$ is a variant of SCAL (Fruit et al., 2018) that performs efficient exploration-exploitation in any unknown weakly-communicating MDP for which an upper bound C on the span of the optimal bias function is known. For an MDP with $S$ states, $A$ actions and $\Gamma \leq S$ possible next states, we prove that SCAL$^+$ achieves the same theoretical guarantees as SCAL (i.e., a high probability regret bound of $\widetilde{O}(C\sqrt{\Gamma SAT})$), with a much smaller computational complexity. Similarly, C-SCAL$^+$ exploits an exploration bonus to achieve sublinear regret in any undiscounted MDP with continuous state space. We show that C-SCAL$^+$ achieves the same regret bound as UCCRL (Ortner and Ryabko, 2012) while being the first implementable algorithm with regret guarantees in this setting. While optimistic algorithms such as UCRL, SCAL or UCCRL maintain a high-confidence set of plausible MDPs around the true unknown MDP, SCAL$^+$ and C-SCAL$^+$ leverage on an exploration bonus to directly plan on the empirically estimated MDP, thus being more computationally efficient.

The complex and computationally expensive features of the forward landscape and sedimentary basin evolution models pose a major challenge in the development of efficient inference and optimization methods. Bayesian inference provides a methodology for estimation and uncertainty quantification of free model parameters. In our previous work, parallel tempering Bayeslands was developed as a framework for parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification for the landscape and basin evolution modelling software Badlands. Parallel tempering Bayeslands features high-performance computing with dozens of processing cores running in parallel to enhance computational efficiency. Although parallel computing is used, the procedure remains computationally challenging since thousands of samples need to be drawn and evaluated. In large-scale landscape and basin evolution problems, a single model evaluation can take from several minutes to hours, and in certain cases, even days. Surrogate-assisted optimization has been with successfully applied to a number of engineering problems. This motivates its use in optimisation and inference methods suited for complex models in geology and geophysics. Surrogates can speed up parallel tempering Bayeslands by developing computationally inexpensive surrogates to mimic expensive models. In this paper, we present an application of surrogate-assisted parallel tempering where that surrogate mimics a landscape evolution model including erosion, sediment transport and deposition, by estimating the likelihood function that is given by the model. We employ a machine learning model as a surrogate that learns from the samples generated by the parallel tempering algorithm. The results show that the methodology is effective in lowering the overall computational cost significantly while retaining the quality of solutions.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are distributed systems whose computing elements, or neurons, are characterized by analog internal dynamics and by digital and sparse inter-neuron, or synaptic, communications. The sparsity of the synaptic spiking inputs and the corresponding event-driven nature of neural processing can be leveraged by hardware implementations to obtain significant energy reductions as compared to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). SNNs can be used not only as coprocessors tocarry out given computing tasks, such as classification, but also as learning machines that adapt their internal parameters, e.g., their synaptic weights, on the basis of data and of a learning criterion. This paper provides an overview of models, learning rules, and applications of SNNs from the viewpoint of stochastic signal processing. INTRODUCTION Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have become the de-facto standard tool to carry out supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning tasks. Their recent successes range from image classifiers that outperform human experts in medical diagnosis to machines that defeat professional players at complex games such as Go.

In this paper, we propose a new method of Bayesian measurement for spectral deconvolution, which regresses spectral data into the sum of unimodal basis function such as Gaussian or Lorentzian functions. Bayesian measurement is a framework for considering not only the target physical model but also the measurement model as a probabilistic model, and enables us to estimate the parameter of a physical model with its confidence interval through a Bayesian posterior distribution given a measurement data set. The measurement with Poisson noise is one of the most effective system to apply our proposed method. Since the measurement time is strongly related to the signal-to-noise ratio for the Poisson noise model, Bayesian measurement with Poisson noise model enables us to clarify the relationship between the measurement time and the limit of estimation. In this study, we establish the probabilistic model with Poisson noise for spectral deconvolution. Bayesian measurement enables us to perform virtual and computer simulation for a certain measurement through the established probabilistic model. This property is called "Virtual Measurement Analytics(VMA)" in this paper. We also show that the relationship between the measurement time and the limit of estimation can be extracted by using the proposed method in a simulation of synthetic data and real data for XPS measurement of MoS$_2$.

The burgeoning need for kidney transplantation mandates immediate attention. Mismatch of deceased donor-recipient kidney leads to post-transplant death. To ensure ideal kidney donor-recipient match and minimize post-transplant deaths, the paper develops a prediction model that identifies factors that determine the probability of success of renal transplantation, that is, if the kidney procured from the deceased donor can be transplanted or discarded. The paper conducts a study enveloping data for 584 imported kidneys collected from 12 transplant centers associated with an organ procurement organization located in New York City, NY. The predicting model yielding best performance measures can be beneficial to the healthcare industry. Transplant centers and organ procurement organizations can take advantage of the prediction model to efficiently predict the outcome of kidney transplantation. Consequently, it will reduce the mortality rate caused by mismatching of donor-recipient kidney transplantation during the surgery.

We provide high-probability sample complexity guarantees for exact structure recovery and accurate Predictive Learning using noise-corrupted samples from an acyclic (tree-shaped) graphical model. The hidden variables follow a tree-structured Ising model distribution whereas the observable variables are generated by a binary symmetric channel, taking the hidden variables as its input. This model arises naturally in a variety of applications, such as in physics, biology, computer science, and finance. The noiseless structure learning problem has been studied earlier by Bresler and Karzand (2018); this paper quantifies how noise in the hidden model impacts the sample complexity of structure learning and predictive distributional inference by proving upper and lower bounds on the sample complexity. Quite remarkably, for any tree with $p$ vertices and probability of incorrect recovery $\delta>0$, the order of necessary number of samples remains logarithmic as in the noiseless case, i.e., $\mathcal{O}(\log(p/\delta))$, for both aforementioned tasks. We also present a new equivalent of Isserlis' Theorem for sign-valued tree-structured distributions, yielding a new low-complexity algorithm for higher order moment estimation.

This paper considers the problem of recognizing eating gestures by tracking wrist motion. Eating gestures can have large variability in motion depending on the subject, utensil, and type of food or beverage being consumed. Previous works have shown viable proofs-of-concept of recognizing eating gestures in laboratory settings with small numbers of subjects and food types, but it is unclear how well these methods would work if tested on a larger population in natural settings. As more subjects, locations and foods are tested, a larger amount of motion variability could cause a decrease in recognition accuracy. To explore this issue, this paper describes the collection and annotation of 51,614 eating gestures taken by 269 subjects eating a meal in a cafeteria. Experiments are described that explore the complexity of hidden Markov models (HMMs) and the amount of training data needed to adequately capture the motion variability across this large data set. Results found that HMMs needed a complexity of 13 states and 5 Gaussians to reach a plateau in accuracy, signifying that a minimum of 65 samples per gesture type are needed. Results also found that 500 training samples per gesture type were needed to identify the point of diminishing returns in recognition accuracy. Overall, the findings provide evidence that the size a data set typically used to demonstrate a laboratory proofs-of-concept may not be sufficiently large enough to capture all the motion variability that could be expected in transitioning to deployment with a larger population. Our data set, which is 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than all data sets tested in previous works, is being made publicly available.

This paper develops algorithms for high-dimensional stochastic control problems based on deep learning and dynamic programming (DP). Differently from the classical approximate DP approach, we first approximate the optimal policy by means of neural networks in the spirit of deep reinforcement learning, and then the value function by Monte Carlo regression. This is achieved in the DP recursion by performance or hybrid iteration, and regress now or later/quantization methods from numerical probabilities. We provide a theoretical justification of these algorithms. Consistency and rate of convergence for the control and value function estimates are analyzed and expressed in terms of the universal approximation error of the neural networks. Numerical results on various applications are presented in a companion paper [2] and illustrate the performance of our algorithms.

Finding the most probable explanation for observed variables in a Bayesian network is a notoriously intractable problem, particularly if there are hidden variables in the network. In this paper we examine the complexity of a related problem, that is, the problem of finding a set of sufficiently dissimilar, yet all plausible, explanations. Applications of this problem are, e.g., in search query results (you won't want 10 results that all link to the same website) or in decision support systems. We show that the problem of finding a 'good enough' explanation that differs in structure from the best explanation is at least as hard as finding the best explanation itself.