This work is motivated by the needs of predictive analytics on healthcare data as represented by Electronic Medical Records. Such data is invariably problematic: noisy, with missing entries, with imbalance in classes of interests, leading to serious bias in predictive modeling. Since standard data mining methods often produce poor performance measures, we argue for development of specialized techniques of data-preprocessing and classification. In this paper, we propose a new method to simultaneously classify large datasets and reduce the effects of missing values. It is based on a multilevel framework of the cost-sensitive SVM and the expected maximization imputation method for missing values, which relies on iterated regression analyses. We compare classification results of multilevel SVM-based algorithms on public benchmark datasets with imbalanced classes and missing values as well as real data in health applications, and show that our multilevel SVM-based method produces fast, and more accurate and robust classification results.

Structure discovery in graphical models is the determination of the topology of a graph that encodes conditional independence properties of the joint distribution of all variables in the model. For some class of probability distributions, an edge between two variables is present if and only if the corresponding entry in the precision matrix is non-zero. For a finite sample estimate of the precision matrix, entries close to zero may be due to low sample effects, or due to an actual association between variables; these two cases are not readily distinguishable. %Fisher provided a hypothesis test based on a parametric approximation to the distribution of an entry in the precision matrix of a Gaussian distribution, but this may not provide valid upper bounds on $p$-values for non-Gaussian distributions. Many related works on this topic consider potentially restrictive distributional or sparsity assumptions that may not apply to a data sample of interest, and direct estimation of the uncertainty of an estimate of the precision matrix for general distributions remains challenging. Consequently, we make use of results for $U$-statistics and apply them to the covariance matrix. By probabilistically bounding the distortion of the covariance matrix, we can apply Weyl's theorem to bound the distortion of the precision matrix, yielding a conservative, but sound test threshold for a much wider class of distributions than considered in previous works. The resulting test enables one to answer with statistical significance whether an edge is present in the graph, and convergence results are known for a wide range of distributions. The computational complexities is linear in the sample size enabling the application of the test to large data samples for which computation time becomes a limiting factor. We experimentally validate the correctness and scalability of the test on multivariate distributions for which the distributional assumptions of competing tests result in underestimates of the false positive ratio. By contrast, the proposed test remains sound, promising to be a useful tool for hypothesis testing for diverse real-world problems.

Reciprocal processes are acausal generalizations of Markov processes introduced by Bernstein in 1932. In the literature, a significant amount of attention has been focused on developing dynamical models for reciprocal processes. Recently, probabilistic graphical models for reciprocal processes have been provided. This opens the way to the application of efficient inference algorithms in the machine learning literature to solve the smoothing problem for reciprocal processes. Such algorithms are known to converge if the underlying graph is a tree. This is not the case for a reciprocal process, whose associated graphical model is a single loop network. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we introduce belief propagation for Gaussian reciprocal processes. Second, we establish a link between convergence analysis of belief propagation for Gaussian reciprocal processes and stability theory for differentially positive systems.

We investigate the task of building open domain, conversational dialogue systems based on large dialogue corpora using generative models. Generative models produce system responses that are autonomously generated word-by-word, opening up the possibility for realistic, flexible interactions. In support of this goal, we extend the recently proposed hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder neural network to the dialogue domain, and demonstrate that this model is competitive with state-of-the-art neural language models and back-off n-gram models. We investigate the limitations of this and similar approaches, and show how its performance can be improved by bootstrapping the learning from a larger question-answer pair corpus and from pretrained word embeddings.

The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine natural phenomena through the computational lens, i.e., using algorithmic or information processing abstractions of the underlying processes; and our ability to acquire, share, integrate and analyze disparate types of data. However, there is a huge gap between our ability to acquire, store, and process data and our ability to make effective use of the data to advance discovery. Despite successful automation of routine aspects of data management and analytics, most elements of the scientific process currently require considerable human expertise and effort. Accelerating science to keep pace with the rate of data acquisition and data processing calls for the development of algorithmic or information processing abstractions, coupled with formal methods and tools for modeling and simulation of natural processes as well as major innovations in cognitive tools for scientists, i.e., computational tools that leverage and extend the reach of human intellect, and partner with humans on a broad range of tasks in scientific discovery (e.g., identifying, prioritizing formulating questions, designing, prioritizing and executing experiments designed to answer a chosen question, drawing inferences and evaluating the results, and formulating new questions, in a closed-loop fashion). This calls for concerted research agenda aimed at: Development, analysis, integration, sharing, and simulation of algorithmic or information processing abstractions of natural processes, coupled with formal methods and tools for their analyses and simulation; Innovations in cognitive tools that augment and extend human intellect and partner with humans in all aspects of science.

There are five main schools of thought in machine learning, and each has its own master algorithm – a general-purpose learner that can in principle be applied to any domain. The symbolists have inverse deduction, the connectionists have backpropagation, the evolutionaries have genetic programming, the Bayesians have probabilistic inference, and the analogizers have support vector machines. What we really need, however, is a single algorithm combining the key features of all of them. In this webinar I will summarize the five paradigms and describe my work toward unifying them, including in particular Markov logic networks. I will conclude by speculating on the new applications that a universal learner will enable, and how society will change as a result.

The first step to before being able to do Image or audio analyses would be to extract relevant frames from the video streams in real time. This is crucial to a smart interactive device and requires extensive down sizing of the data to run the models on the features identified most relevant. One also needs the device to identify and react to certain events (owner coming home, break-in etc) through a frame by frame comparative analysis. Let us start with the event that there is a disturbance and the image frames and audio data is fed into the trained model to classify the event into pre-defined classes (simplest cast being intrusion vs non intrusion). Given a frame, let us start with the features that we would extract from it to first look for faces within the scenario and then if we find one, to match it with the available "registered" face repository. Given pictures of the home-owner/family, we will have an extensively pre trained model.

Feature extraction has gained increasing attention in the field of machine learning, as in order to detect patterns, extract information, or predict future observations from big data, the urge of informative features is crucial. The process of extracting features is highly linked to dimensionality reduction as it implies the transformation of the data from a sparse high-dimensional space, to higher level meaningful abstractions. This dissertation employs Neural Networks for distributed paragraph representations, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation to capture higher level features of paragraph vectors. Although Neural Networks for distributed paragraph representations are considered the state of the art for extracting paragraph vectors, we show that a quick topic analysis model such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation can provide meaningful features too. We evaluate the two methods on the CMU Movie Summary Corpus, a collection of 25,203 movie plot summaries extracted from Wikipedia. Finally, for both approaches, we use K-Nearest Neighbors to discover similar movies, and plot the projected representations using T-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding to depict the context similarities. These similarities, expressed as movie distances, can be used for movies recommendation. The recommended movies of this approach are compared with the recommended movies from IMDB, which use a collaborative filtering recommendation approach, to show that our two models could constitute either an alternative or a supplementary recommendation approach.

This paper presents a novel latent variable recurrent neural network architecture for jointly modeling sequences of words and (possibly latent) discourse relations between adjacent sentences. A recurrent neural network generates individual words, thus reaping the benefits of discriminatively-trained vector representations. The discourse relations are represented with a latent variable, which can be predicted or marginalized, depending on the task. The resulting model can therefore employ a training objective that includes not only discourse relation classification, but also word prediction. As a result, it outperforms state-of- the-art alternatives for two tasks: implicit discourse relation classification in the Penn Discourse Treebank, and dialog act classification in the Switchboard corpus. Furthermore, by marginalizing over latent discourse relations at test time, we obtain a discourse informed language model, which improves over a strong LSTM baseline.

Researchers often summarize their work in the form of posters. Posters provide a coherent and efficient way to convey core ideas from scientific papers. Generating a good scientific poster, however, is a complex and time consuming cognitive task, since such posters need to be readable, informative, and visually aesthetic. In this paper, for the first time, we study the challenging problem of learning to generate posters from scientific papers. To this end, a data-driven framework, that utilizes graphical models, is proposed. Specifically, given content to display, the key elements of a good poster, including panel layout and attributes of each panel, are learned and inferred from data. Then, given inferred layout and attributes, composition of graphical elements within each panel is synthesized. To learn and validate our model, we collect and make public a Poster-Paper dataset, which consists of scientific papers and corresponding posters with exhaustively labelled panels and attributes. Qualitative and quantitative results indicate the effectiveness of our approach.