In the past decade, there has been much discussion about the issue of biased reporting in clinical research. Despite this attention, there have been limited tools developed for the systematic assessment of qualitative statements made in clinical research, with most studies assessing qualitative statements relying on the use of manual expert raters, which limits their size. Also, previous attempts to develop larger scale tools, such as those using natural language processing, were limited by both their accuracy and the number of categories used for the classification of their findings. With these limitations in mind, this study's goal was to develop a classification algorithm that was both suitably accurate and finely grained to be applied on a large scale for assessing the qualitative sentiment expressed in clinical trial abstracts. Additionally, this study seeks to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm, GAN-BioBERT, to previous studies as well as to expert manual rating of clinical trial abstracts. This study develops a three-class sentiment classification algorithm for clinical trial abstracts using a semi-supervised natural language process model based on the Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) model, from a series of clinical trial abstracts annotated by a group of experts in academic medicine. Results: The use of this algorithm was found to have a classification accuracy of 91.3%, with a macro F1-Score of 0.92, which is a significant improvement in accuracy when compared to previous methods and expert ratings, while also making the sentiment classification finer grained than previous studies. The proposed algorithm, GAN-BioBERT, is a suitable classification model for the large-scale assessment of qualitative statements in clinical trial literature, providing an accurate, reproducible tool for the large-scale study of clinical publication trends.

Leads are the driving force of many businesses today. With the advancement of subscription-based business models particularly in the start-up space, the ability to convert leads into paying customers is key to survival. In simple terms, a "lead" represents a potential customer interested in buying your product/service. A significant amount of time, money, and effort is spent by marketing and sales departments on lead management, a concept that we will take to encompass the three key phases of lead generation, qualification, and monetization. Lead generation is the initiation of customer interest or inquiry into the products or services of your business.

Machine learning based data-driven technologies have shown impressive performances in a variety of application domains. Most enterprises use data from multiple sources to provide quality applications. The reliability of the external data sources raises concerns for the security of the machine learning techniques adopted. An attacker can tamper the training or test datasets to subvert the predictions of models generated by these techniques. Data poisoning is one such attack wherein the attacker tries to degrade the performance of a classifier by manipulating the training data. In this work, we focus on label contamination attack in which an attacker poisons the labels of data to compromise the functionality of the system. We develop Gradient-based Data Subversion strategies to achieve model degradation under the assumption that the attacker has limited-knowledge of the victim model. We exploit the gradients of a differentiable convex loss function (residual errors) with respect to the predicted label as a warm-start and formulate different strategies to find a set of data instances to contaminate. Further, we analyze the transferability of attacks and the susceptibility of binary classifiers. Our experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms the baselines and is computationally efficient.

We present the efficiency of semi-orthogonal embedding for unsupervised anomaly segmentation. The multi-scale features from pre-trained CNNs are recently used for the localized Mahalanobis distances with significant performance. However, the increased feature size is problematic to scale up to the bigger CNNs, since it requires the batch-inverse of multi-dimensional covariance tensor. Here, we generalize an ad-hoc method, random feature selection, into semi-orthogonal embedding for robust approximation, cubically reducing the computational cost for the inverse of multi-dimensional covariance tensor. With the scrutiny of ablation studies, the proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art with significant margins for the MVTec AD, KolektorSDD, KolektorSDD2, and mSTC datasets. The theoretical and empirical analyses offer insights and verification of our straightforward yet cost-effective approach.

Kernel methods are among the most popular models in machine learning. Despite their relative simplicity, they define a powerful framework in which non-linear features can be exploited without leaving the realm of convex optimisation. Kernel methods in machine learning have a long and rich literature dating back to the 60s [1, 2], but have recently made it back to the spotlight as a proxy for studying neural networks in different regimes, e.g. the infinite width limit [3-6] and the lazy regime of training [7]. Despite being defined in terms of a non-parametric optimisation problem, kernel methods can be mathematically understood as a standard parametric linear problem in a (possibly infinite) Hilbert space spanned by the kernel eigenvectors (a.k.a features). This dual picture fully characterizes the asymptotic performance of kernels in terms of a trade-off between two key quantities: the relative decay of the eigenvalues of the kernel (a.k.a.

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) play a key role in issue identification and resolution. After an issue is reported, SREs come together in a virtual room (collaboration platform) to triage the issue. While doing so, they leave behind a wealth of information which can be used later for triaging similar issues. However, usability of the conversations offer challenges due to them being i) noisy and ii) unlabelled. This paper presents a novel approach for issue artefact extraction from the noisy conversations with minimal labelled data. We propose a combination of unsupervised and supervised model with minimum human intervention that leverages domain knowledge to predict artefacts for a small amount of conversation data and use that for fine-tuning an already pretrained language model for artefact prediction on a large amount of conversation data. Experimental results on our dataset show that the proposed ensemble of unsupervised and supervised model is better than using either one of them individually.

Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has worked with other federal agencies to identify counties with increasing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) incidence (hotspots) and offers support to local health departments to limit the spread of the disease. Understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics of hotspot events is of great importance to support policy decisions and prevent large-scale outbreaks. This paper presents a spatio-temporal Bayesian framework for early detection of COVID-19 hotspots (at the county level) in the United States. We assume both the observed number of cases and hotspots depend on a class of latent random variables, which encode the underlying spatio-temporal dynamics of the transmission of COVID-19. Such latent variables follow a zero-mean Gaussian process, whose covariance is specified by a non-stationary kernel function. The most salient feature of our kernel function is that deep neural networks are introduced to enhance the model's representative power while still enjoying the interpretability of the kernel. We derive a sparse model and fit the model using a variational learning strategy to circumvent the computational intractability for large data sets. Our model demonstrates better interpretability and superior hotspot-detection performance compared to other baseline methods.

Group-fairness in classification aims for equality of a predictive utility across different sensitive sub-populations, e.g., race or gender. Equality or near-equality constraints in group-fairness often worsen not only the aggregate utility but also the utility for the least advantaged sub-population. In this paper, we apply the principles of Pareto-efficiency and least-difference to the utility being accuracy, as an illustrative example, and arrive at the Rawls classifier that minimizes the error rate on the worst-off sensitive sub-population. Our mathematical characterization shows that the Rawls classifier uniformly applies a threshold to an ideal score of features, in the spirit of fair equality of opportunity. In practice, such a score or a feature representation is often computed by a black-box model that has been useful but unfair. Our second contribution is practical Rawlsian fair adaptation of any given black-box deep learning model, without changing the score or feature representation it computes. Given any score function or feature representation and only its second-order statistics on the sensitive sub-populations, we seek a threshold classifier on the given score or a linear threshold classifier on the given feature representation that achieves the Rawls error rate restricted to this hypothesis class. Our technical contribution is to formulate the above problems using ambiguous chance constraints, and to provide efficient algorithms for Rawlsian fair adaptation, along with provable upper bounds on the Rawls error rate. Our empirical results show significant improvement over state-of-the-art group-fair algorithms, even without retraining for fairness.

Time series classification (TSC) aims to predict the class label of a given time series, which is critical to a rich set of application areas such as economics and medicine. State-of-the-art TSC methods have mostly focused on classification accuracy and efficiency, without considering the interpretability of their classifications, which is an important property required by modern applications such as appliance modeling and legislation such as the European General Data Protection Regulation. To address this gap, we propose a novel TSC method - the Randomized-Supervised Time Series Forest (r-STSF). r-STSF is highly efficient, achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy and enables interpretability. r-STSF takes an efficient interval-based approach to classify time series according to aggregate values of discriminatory sub-series (intervals). To achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, r-STSF builds an ensemble of randomized trees using the discriminatory sub-series. It uses four time series representations, nine aggregation functions and a supervised binary-inspired search combined with a feature ranking metric to identify highly discriminatory sub-series. The discriminatory sub-series enable interpretable classifications. Experiments on extensive datasets show that r-STSF achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while being orders of magnitude faster than most existing TSC methods. It is the only classifier from the state-of-the-art group that enables interpretability. Our findings also highlight that r-STSF is the best TSC method when classifying complex time series datasets.

The increased digitalisation and monitoring of the energy system opens up numerous opportunities % and solutions which can help to decarbonise the energy system. Applications on low voltage (LV), localised networks, such as community energy markets and smart storage will facilitate decarbonisation, but they will require advanced control and management. Reliable forecasting will be a necessary component of many of these systems to anticipate key features and uncertainties. Despite this urgent need, there has not yet been an extensive investigation into the current state-of-the-art of low voltage level forecasts, other than at the smart meter level. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the landscape, current approaches, core applications, challenges and recommendations. Another aim of this paper is to facilitate the continued improvement and advancement in this area. To this end, the paper also surveys some of the most relevant and promising trends. It establishes an open, community-driven list of the known LV level open datasets to encourage further research and development.