The study of eye gaze fixations on photographic images is an active research area. In contrast, the image subcategory of freehand sketches has not received as much attention for such studies. In this paper, we analyze the results of a free-viewing gaze fixation study conducted on 3904 freehand sketches distributed across 160 object categories. Our analysis shows that fixation sequences exhibit marked consistency within a sketch, across sketches of a category and even across suitably grouped sets of categories. This multi-level consistency is remarkable given the variability in depiction and extreme image content sparsity that characterizes hand-drawn object sketches. In our paper, we show that the multi-level consistency in the fixation data can be exploited to (a) predict a test sketch's category given only its fixation sequence and (b) build a computational model which predicts part-labels underlying fixations on objects. We hope that our findings motivate the community to deem sketch-like representations worthy of gaze-based studies vis-a-vis photographic images.

This paper studies an intelligent ultimate technique for health-monitoring and prognostic of common rotary machine components, particularly bearings. During a run-to-failure experiment, rich unsupervised features from vibration sensory data are extracted by a trained sparse auto-encoder. Then, the correlation of the extracted attributes of the initial samples (presumably healthy at the beginning of the test) with the succeeding samples is calculated and passed through a moving-average filter. The normalized output is named auto-encoder correlation-based (AEC) rate which stands for an informative attribute of the system depicting its health status and precisely identifying the degradation starting point. We show that AEC technique well-generalizes in several run-to-failure tests. AEC collects rich unsupervised features form the vibration data fully autonomous. We demonstrate the superiority of the AEC over many other state-of-the-art approaches for the health monitoring and prognostic of machine bearings.

In many data exploration tasks it is meaningful to identify groups of attribute interactions that are specific to a variable of interest. For instance, in a dataset where the attributes are medical markers and the variable of interest (class variable) is binary indicating presence/absence of disease, we would like to know which medical markers interact with respect to the binary class label. These interactions are useful in several practical applications, for example, to gain insight into the structure of the data, in feature selection, and in data anonymisation. We present a novel method, based on statistical significance testing, that can be used to verify if the data set has been created by a given factorised class-conditional joint distribution, where the distribution is parametrised by a partition of its attributes. Furthermore, we provide a method, named ASTRID, for automatically finding a partition of attributes describing the distribution that has generated the data. State-of-the-art classifiers are utilised to capture the interactions present in the data by systematically breaking attribute interactions and observing the effect of this breaking on classifier performance. We empirically demonstrate the utility of the proposed method with examples using real and synthetic data.

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods are used to approximate posterior distributions in models with unknown or computationally intractable likelihoods. Both the accuracy and computational efficiency of ABC depend on the choice of summary statistic, but outside of special cases where the optimal summary statistics are known, it is unclear which guiding principles can be used to construct effective summary statistics. In this paper we explore the possibility of automating the process of constructing summary statistics by training deep neural networks to predict the parameters from artificially generated data: the resulting summary statistics are approximately posterior means of the parameters. With minimal model-specific tuning, our method constructs summary statistics for the Ising model and the moving-average model, which match or exceed theoretically-motivated summary statistics in terms of the accuracies of the resulting posteriors.

A common applied statistics task involves building regression models to characterize non-linear relationships between variables. It is possible to fit such models by assuming a particular non-linear functional form, such as a sinusoidal, exponential, or polynomial function, to describe one variable's response to the variation in another. Unless this relationship is obvious from the outset, however, it involves possibly extensive model selection procedures to ensure the most appropriate model is retained. Alternatively, a non-parametric approach can be adopted by defining a set of knots across the variable space and use a spline or kernel regression to describe arbitrary non-linear relationships. However, knot layout procedures are somewhat ad hoc and can also involve variable selection. A third alternative is to adopt a Bayesian non-parametric strategy, and directly model the unknown underlying function.

Last week, we (and most of the rest of the internet) covered some research from MIT that uses a brain interface to help robots correct themselves when they're about to make a mistake. This is very cool, very futuristic stuff, but it only works if you wear a very, very silly hat that can classify your brain waves in 10 milliseconds flat. At Brown University, researchers in Stefanie Tellex's lab are working on a more social approach to helping robots more accurately interact with humans. By enabling a robot to model its own confusion in an interactive object-fetching task, the robot can ask relevant clarifying questions when necessary to help understand exactly what humans want. Whether you ask a human or a robot to fetch you an object, it's a simple task to perform if the object is unique in some way, and a more complicated task to perform if it involves several similar objects.

In this paper, we aim at recovering an undirected weighted graph of $N$ vertices from the knowledge of a perturbed version of the eigenspaces of its adjacency matrix $W$. For instance, this situation arises for stationary signals on graphs or for Markov chains observed at random times. Our approach is based on minimizing a cost function given by the Frobenius norm of the commutator $\mathsf{A} \mathsf{B}-\mathsf{B} \mathsf{A}$ between symmetric matrices $\mathsf{A}$ and $\mathsf{B}$. In the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi model with no self-loops, we show that identifiability (i.e., the ability to reconstruct $W$ from the knowledge of its eigenspaces) follows a sharp phase transition on the expected number of edges with threshold function $N\log N/2$. Given an estimation of the eigenspaces based on a $n$-sample, we provide support selection procedures from theoretical and practical point of views. In particular, when deleting an edge from the active support, our study unveils that our test statistic is the order of $\mathcal O(1/n)$ when we overestimate the true support and lower bounded by a positive constant when the estimated support is smaller than the true support. This feature leads to a powerful practical support estimation procedure. Simulated and real life numerical experiments assert our new methodology.

Learning parameters of latent graphical models (GM) is inherently much harder than that of no-latent ones since the latent variables make the corresponding log-likelihood non-concave. Nevertheless, expectation-maximization schemes are popularly used in practice, but they are typically stuck in local optima. In the recent years, the method of moments have provided a refreshing angle for resolving the non-convex issue, but it is applicable to a quite limited class of latent GMs. In this paper, we aim for enhancing its power via enlarging such a class of latent GMs. To this end, we introduce two novel concepts, coined marginalization and conditioning, which can reduce the problem of learning a larger GM to that of a smaller one. More importantly, they lead to a sequential learning framework that repeatedly increases the learning portion of given latent GM, and thus covers a significantly broader and more complicated class of loopy latent GMs which include convolutional and random regular models.

Active search (AS) on graphs focuses on collecting certain labeled nodes (targets) given global knowledge of the network topology and its edge weights under a query budget. However, in most networks, nodes, topology and edge weights are all initially unknown. We introduce selective harvesting, a variant of AS where the next node to be queried must be chosen among the neighbors of the current queried node set; the available training data for deciding which node to query is restricted to the subgraph induced by the queried set (and their node attributes) and their neighbors (without any node or edge attributes). Therefore, selective harvesting is a sequential decision problem, where we must decide which node to query at each step. A classifier trained in this scenario suffers from a tunnel vision effect: without recourse to independent sampling, the urge to query promising nodes forces classifiers to gather increasingly biased training data, which we show significantly hurts the performance of AS methods and standard classifiers. We find that it is possible to collect a much larger set of targets by using multiple classifiers, not by combining their predictions as an ensemble, but switching between classifiers used at each step, as a way to ease the tunnel vision effect. We discover that switching classifiers collects more targets by (a) diversifying the training data and (b) broadening the choices of nodes that can be queried next. This highlights an exploration, exploitation, and diversification trade-off in our problem that goes beyond the exploration and exploitation duality found in classic sequential decision problems. From these observations we propose D3TS, a method based on multi-armed bandits for non-stationary stochastic processes that enforces classifier diversity, matching or exceeding the performance of competing methods on seven real network datasets in our evaluation.

Fifty years ago, I published a paper, "Error bounds for convolutional codes and an asymptotically optimum decoding algorithm," on the important class of convolutional codes, which is particularly effective in preventing errors in digital communication over wireless and other transmission media. The algorithm, which became labeled with my name, was a crucial step in establishing the merits as well as evaluating the performance of these codes. The paper was read and understood by only a few specialists. In the next few years, clarity was provided by two papers, the first by a colleague, G.D. Forney Jr., who introduced the trellis model, and the second by myself based on a state diagram, or Markov model. A.A. Markov was a Russian mathematician who proposed and analyzed a statistical concept regarding the relationship between terms of a sequence or, more generally, of successive events; specifically, that each term (or string of terms) or event is statistically dependent only on the previous one.