Sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) using distance covariance (DCOV) was recently proposed as an approach to dimension-reduction problems. Compared with other SDR methods, it is model-free without estimating link function and does not require any particular distributions on predictors (see Sheng and Yin, 2013, 2016). However, the DCOV-based SDR method involves optimizing a nonsmooth and nonconvex objective function over the Stiefel manifold. To tackle the numerical challenge, we novelly formulate the original objective function equivalently into a DC (Difference of Convex functions) program and construct an iterative algorithm based on the majorization-minimization (MM) principle. At each step of the MM algorithm, we inexactly solve the quadratic subproblem on the Stiefel manifold by taking one iteration of Riemannian Newton's method. The algorithm can also be readily extended to sufficient variable selection (SVS) using distance covariance. We establish the convergence property of the proposed algorithm under some regularity conditions. Simulation studies show our algorithm drastically improves the computation efficiency and is robust across various settings compared with the existing method. Supplemental materials for this article are available.

Evidential clustering is an approach to clustering in which cluster-membership uncertainty is represented by a collection of Dempster-Shafer mass functions forming an evidential partition. In this paper, we propose to construct these mass functions by bootstrapping finite mixture models. In the first step, we compute bootstrap percentile confidence intervals for all pairwise probabilities (the probabilities for any two objects to belong to the same class). We then construct an evidential partition such that the pairwise belief and plausibility degrees approximate the bounds of the confidence intervals. This evidential partition is calibrated, in the sense that the pairwise belief-plausibility intervals contain the true probabilities "most of the time", i.e., with a probability close to the defined confidence level. This frequentist property is verified by simulation, and the practical applicability of the method is demonstrated using several real datasets.

Machine learning-based lithography hotspot detection has been deeply studied recently, from varies feature extraction techniques to efficient learning models. It has been observed that such machine learning-based frameworks are providing satisfactory metal layer hotspot prediction results on known public metal layer benchmarks. In this work, we seek to evaluate how these machine learning-based hotspot detectors generalize to complicated patterns. We first introduce a automatic layout generation tool that can synthesize varies layout patterns given a set of design rules. The tool currently supports both metal layer and via layer generation. As a case study, we conduct hotspot detection on the generated via layer layouts with representative machine learning-based hotspot detectors, which shows that continuous study on model robustness and generality is necessary to prototype and integrate the learning engines in DFM flows. The source code of the layout generation tool will be available at https://github. com/phdyang007/layout-generation.

A key requirement for supervised machine learning is labeled training data, which is created by annotating unlabeled data with the appropriate class. Because this process can in many cases not be done by machines, labeling needs to be performed by human domain experts. This process tends to be expensive both in time and money, and is prone to errors. Additionally, reviewing an entire labeled dataset manually is often prohibitively costly, so many real world datasets contain mislabeled instances. To address this issue, we present in this paper a non-parametric end-to-end pipeline to find mislabeled instances in numerical, image and natural language datasets. We evaluate our system quantitatively by adding a small number of label noise to 29 datasets, and show that we find mislabeled instances with an average precision of more than 0.84 when reviewing our system's top 1\% recommendation. We then apply our system to publicly available datasets and find mislabeled instances in CIFAR-100, Fashion-MNIST, and others. Finally, we publish the code and an applicable implementation of our approach.

Not submitted to the 30th International Conference on Automated Planning and SchedulingNeural-Symbolic Descriptive Action Model from Images: The Search for STRIPS Masataro Asai MIT -IBM Watson AI Lab, Cambridge USA IBM Research Abstract Recent work on Neural-Symbolic systems that learn the discrete planning model from images has opened a promising direction for expanding the scope of Automated Planning and Scheduling to the raw, noisy data. However, previous work only partially addressed this problem, utilizing the black-box neural model as the successor generator. In this work, we propose Double-Stage Action Model Acquisition (DSAMA), a system that obtains a descriptive PDDL action model with explicit preconditions and effects over the propositional variables unsupervised-learned from images. DSAMA trains a set of Random Forest rule-based classifiers and compiles them into logical formulae in PDDL. While we obtained a competitively accurate PDDL model compared to a black-box model, we observed that the resulting PDDL is too large and complex for the state-of-the-art standard planners such as Fast Downward primarily due to the PDDL-SAS translator bottleneck. From this negative result, we show that this translator bottleneck cannot be addressed just by using a different, existing rule-based learning method, and we point to the potential future directions. 1 Introduction Recently, Latplan system (Asai and Fukunaga 2018) successfully connected a subsymbolic neural network (NN) system and a symbolic Classical Planning system to solve various visually presented puzzle domains. The system consists of four parts: 1) The State AutoEncoder (SAE) neural network learns a bidirectional mapping between images and propositional states with unsupervised training. The proposed framework opened a promising direction for applying a variety of symbolic methods to the real world -- For example, the search space generated by Latplan was shown to be compatible with a symbolic Goal Recognition system (Amado et al. 2018a; 2018b). Several variations replacing the state encoding modules have also been proposed: Causal InfoGAN (Kurutach et al. 2018) uses a GAN-based framework, First-Order SAE (Asai 2019) learns the First Order Logic symbols (instead of the propositional ones), and Zero-Suppressed SAE (Asai (:action a0:parameters ():precondition [D0]:effect (and (when [E00] (z0)) (when (not [E00]) (not (z0))) (when [E01] (z1)) (when (not [E01]) (not (z1))) ...)) Figure 1: An example DSAMA compilation result for the first action (i.e. Despite these efforts, Latplan is missing a critical feature of the traditional Classical Planning systems: The use of State-of-the-Art heuristic functions.

In this article we look at an interesting data problem – making decisions about the algorithms used for image segmentation, or separating one qualitatively different part of an image from another. Example code for this article may be found at the Kite Github repository. We have provided tips on how to use the code throughout. As our example, we work through the process of differentiating vascular tissue in images, produced by Knife-edge Scanning Microscopy (KESM). While this may seem like a specialized use-case, there are far-reaching implications, especially regarding preparatory steps for statistical analysis and machine learning.

This post will be the first post on the series. The content is based on: the tutorial on fairness given by Solon Bacrocas and Moritz Hardt at NIPS2017, day1 and day4 from CS 294: Fairness in Machine Learning taught by Moritz Hardt at UC Berkeley and my own understanding of fairness literatures. I highly encourage interested readers to check out the linked NIPS tutorial and the course website. Fairness is becoming one of the most popular topics in machine learning in recent years. Publications explode in this field (see Fig1). The research community has invested a large amount of effort in this field.

Neural networks have recently been established as a viable classification method for imaging mass spectrometry data for tumor typing. For multi-laboratory scenarios however, certain confounding factors may strongly impede their performance. In this work, we introduce Deep Relevance Regularization, a method of restricting what the neural network can focus on during classification, in order to improve the classification performance. We demonstrate how Deep Relevance Regularization robustifies neural networks against confounding factors on a challenging inter-lab dataset consisting of breast and ovarian carcinoma. We further show that this makes the relevance map - a way of visualizing the discriminative parts of the mass spectrum - sparser, thereby making the classifier easier to interpret.

FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges. Peter Kairouz and H. Brendan McMahan conceived, coordinated, and edited this work.

Advances in machine learning technologies have led to increasingly powerful models in particular in the context of big data. Yet, many application scenarios demand for robustly interpretable models rather than optimum model accuracy; as an example, this is the case if potential biomarkers or causal factors should be discovered based on a set of given measurements. In this contribution, we focus on feature selection paradigms, which enable us to uncover relevant factors of a given regularity based on a sparse model. We focus on the important specific setting of linear ordinal regression, i.e.\ data have to be ranked into one of a finite number of ordered categories by a linear projection. Unlike previous work, we consider the case that features are potentially redundant, such that no unique minimum set of relevant features exists. We aim for an identification of all strongly and all weakly relevant features as well as their type of relevance (strong or weak); we achieve this goal by determining feature relevance bounds, which correspond to the minimum and maximum feature relevance, respectively, if searched over all equivalent models. In addition, we discuss how this setting enables us to substitute some of the features, e.g.\ due to their semantics, and how to extend the framework of feature relevance intervals to the setting of privileged information, i.e.\ potentially relevant information is available for training purposes only, but cannot be used for the prediction itself.