Graphs from complex systems often share a partial underlying structure across domains while retaining individual features. Thus, identifying common structures can shed light on the underlying signal, for instance, when applied to scientific discoveries or clinical diagnoses. Furthermore, growing evidence shows that the shared structure across domains boosts the estimation power of graphs, particularly for high-dimensional data. However, building a joint estimator to extract the common structure may be more complicated than it seems, most often due to data heterogeneity across sources. This manuscript surveys recent work on statistical inference of joint Gaussian graphical models, identifying model structures that fit various data generation processes. Simulations under different data generation processes are implemented with detailed discussions on the choice of models.

Machine learning algorithms have become prevalent tools for decision-making in socially sensitive situations, such as determining credit-score ratings or predicting recidivism during parole. It has been recognized that algorithms are capable of learning societal biases, for example with respect to race (Larson, Mattu, Kirchner, and Angwin 2016) or gender (Lambrecht and Tucker 2019; Blau and Kahn 2003), and this realization seeded an important debate in the machine learning community about fairness of algorithms and their impact on decision-making. In order to define and measure discrimination, existing intuitive notions have been statistically formalized, thereby providing fairness metrics. For example, demographic parity (Darlington 1971) requires the protected attribute A (gender/race/religion etc.) to be independent of a constructed classifier or regressor Ŷ, written as Ŷ A. Another notion, termed equality of odds (Hardt, Price, Srebro et al. 2016), requires equal false positive and false negative rates of classifier Ŷ between different groups (females and males for example), written as Ŷ A Y. To this day, various different notions of fairness exist, which are sometimes incompatible (Corbett-Davies and Goel 2018), meaning not of all of them can be achieved for a predictor Ŷ simultaneously. There is still no consensus on which notion of fairness is the correct one. The discussion on algorithmic fairness is, however, not restricted to the machine learning domain. There are many legal and philosophical aspects that have arisen. For example, the legal distinction between disparate impact and disparate treatment (McGinley 2011) is important for assessing fairness from a judicial point of view.

This paper aims to improve the explainability of Autoencoder's (AE) predictions by proposing two explanation methods based on the mean and epistemic uncertainty of log-likelihood estimate, which naturally arise from the probabilistic formulation of the AE called Bayesian Autoencoders (BAE). To quantitatively evaluate the performance of explanation methods, we test them in sensor network applications, and propose three metrics based on covariate shift of sensors : (1) G-mean of Spearman drift coefficients, (2) G-mean of sensitivity-specificity of explanation ranking and (3) sensor explanation quality index (SEQI) which combines the two aforementioned metrics. Surprisingly, we find that explanations of BAE's predictions suffer from high correlation resulting in misleading explanations. To alleviate this, a "Coalitional BAE" is proposed, which is inspired by agent-based system theory. Our comprehensive experiments on publicly available condition monitoring datasets demonstrate the improved quality of explanations using the Coalitional BAE.

Recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and the reduction in the cost of sensors have encouraged the development of smart environments, such as smart homes. Smart homes can offer home assistance services to improve the quality of life, autonomy and health of their residents, especially for the elderly and dependent. To provide such services, a smart home must be able to understand the daily activities of its residents. Techniques for recognizing human activity in smart homes are advancing daily. But new challenges are emerging every day. In this paper, we present recent algorithms, works, challenges and taxonomy of the field of human activity recognition in a smart home through ambient sensors. Moreover, since activity recognition in smart homes is a young field, we raise specific problems, missing and needed contributions. But also propose directions, research opportunities and solutions to accelerate advances in this field.

It has been argued that fake news and the spread of false information pose a threat to societies throughout the world, from influencing the results of elections to hindering the efforts to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. To combat this threat, a number of Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches have been developed. These leverage a number of datasets, feature extraction/selection techniques and machine learning (ML) algorithms to detect fake news before it spreads. While these methods are well-documented, there is less evidence regarding their efficacy in this domain. By systematically reviewing the literature, this paper aims to delineate the approaches for fake news detection that are most performant, identify limitations with existing approaches, and suggest ways these can be mitigated. The analysis of the results indicates that Ensemble Methods using a combination of news content and socially-based features are currently the most effective. Finally, it is proposed that future research should focus on developing approaches that address generalisability issues (which, in part, arise from limitations with current datasets), explainability and bias.

In the age of digital interaction, person-to-person relationships existing on social media may be different from the very same interactions that exist offline. Examining potential or spurious relationships between members in a social network is a fertile area of research for computer scientists -- here we examine how relationships can be predicted between two unconnected people in a social network by using area under Precison-Recall curve and ROC. Modeling the social network as a signed graph, we compare Triadic model,Latent Information model and Sentiment model and use them to predict peer to peer interactions, first using a plain signed network, and second using a signed network with comments as context. We see that our models are much better than random model and could complement each other in different cases.

Given two data distributions and a test score function, the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve shows how well such a score separates two distributions. However, can the ROC curve be used as a measure of discrepancy between two distributions? This paper shows that when the data likelihood ratio is used as the test score, the arc length of the ROC curve gives rise to a novel $f$-divergence measuring the differences between two data distributions. Approximating this arc length using a variational objective and empirical samples leads to empirical risk minimization with previously unknown loss functions. We provide a Lagrangian dual objective and introduce kernel models into the estimation problem. We study the non-parametric convergence rate of this estimator and show under mild smoothness conditions of the real arctangent density ratio function, the rate of convergence is $O_p(n^{-\beta/4})$ ($\beta \in (0,1]$ depends on the smoothness).

A single-PDF version of Model Evaluation parts 1-4 is available on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.12808 Almost every machine learning algorithm comes with a large number of settings that we, the machine learning researchers and practitioners, need to specify. These tuning knobs, the so-called hyperparameters, help us control the behavior of machine learning algorithms when optimizing for performance, finding the right balance between bias and variance. Hyperparameter tuning for performance optimization is an art in itself, and there are no hard-and-fast rules that guarantee best performance on a given dataset. In Part I and Part II, we saw different holdout and bootstrap techniques for estimating the generalization performance of a model. We learned about the bias-variance trade-off, and we computed the uncertainty of our estimates. In this third part, we will focus on different methods of cross-validation for model evaluation and model selection. We will use these cross-validation techniques to rank models from several hyperparameter configurations and estimate how well they generalize to independent datasets.

Automated vehicles require a comprehensive understanding of traffic situations to ensure safe and anticipatory driving. In this context, the prediction of pedestrians is particularly challenging as pedestrian behavior can be influenced by multiple factors. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze the requirements on pedestrian behavior prediction for automated driving via a system-level approach. To this end we investigate real-world pedestrian-vehicle interactions with human drivers. Based on human driving behavior we then derive appropriate reaction patterns of an automated vehicle and determine requirements for the prediction of pedestrians. This includes a novel metric tailored to measure prediction performance from a system-level perspective. The proposed metric is evaluated on a large-scale dataset comprising thousands of real-world pedestrian-vehicle interactions. We furthermore conduct an ablation study to evaluate the importance of different contextual cues and compare these results to ones obtained using established performance metrics for pedestrian prediction. Our results highlight the importance of a system-level approach to pedestrian behavior prediction.

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is a principle in statistical learning. Through ERM, we can measure the performance of a family of learning algorithms based on a set of observed training data empirically without knowing the true distribution of the data and derive theoretical bounds on the performance. ERM is routinely applied in a wide range of learning problems such as regression, classification, and clustering. In recent years, with the increasing popularity in privacy-preserving machine learning that satisfies formal privacy guarantees such as differential privacy (DP) [10], the topic of privacy-preserving ERM has also been investigated. Generally speaking, differentially private empirical risk minimization (DP-ERM) can be realized by perturbing the output (estimation or prediction), the objective function (input), or iteratively during the algorithmic optimization, given an ERM problem. For output perturbation, randomization mechanisms need to be applied every time a new output is released; for iterative algorithmic perturbation, each iteration incurs a privacy loss, careful planning and implementation of privacy accounting methods to minimize the overall privacy loss is critical. In this paper, we focus on differentially private perturbation of objective functions. Once an objective function is perturbed, the subsequent optimization does not incur additional privacy loss and all outputs generated from the optimization are also differentially private.