Performance Analysis
Towards new cross-validation-based estimators for Gaussian process regression: efficient adjoint computation of gradients
Petit, Sébastien, Bect, Julien, da Veiga, Sébastien, Feliot, Paul, Vazquez, Emmanuel
We consider the problem of estimating the parameters of the covariance function of a Gaussian process by cross-validation. We suggest using new cross-validation criteria derived from the literature of scoring rules. We also provide an efficient method for computing the gradient of a cross-validation criterion. To the best of our knowledge, our method is more efficient than what has been proposed in the literature so far. It makes it possible to lower the complexity of jointly evaluating leave-one-out criteria and their gradients.
Google's AI detects adversarial attacks against image classifiers
Defenses against adversarial attacks, which in the context of AI refer to techniques that fool models through malicious input, are increasingly being broken by "defense-aware" attacks. In fact, most state-of-the-art methods claiming to detect adversarial attacks have been counteracted shortly after their publication. To break the cycle, researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Google Brain, including Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton, recently described in a preprint paper an approach that deflects attacks in the computer vision domain. Their framework either detects attacks accurately or, for undetected attacks, pressures the attackers to produce images that resemble the target class of images. The proposed architecture comprises (1) a network that classifies various input images from a data set and (2) a network that reconstructs the inputs conditioned on parameters of a predicted capsule.
EmbPred30: Assessing 30-days Readmission for Diabetic Patients using Categorical Embeddings
Sarthak, null, Shukla, Shikhar, Tripathi, Surya Prakash
Diabetes is a disease-causing high level of blood sugar. In type 1 Diabetes, body doesn't produce insulin, but if injected from external sources, will use it and in type 2, the body doesn't produce as well as use insulin. It is estimated that 30.3 million people of all ages in the US are suffering from Diabetes as of 2015, out of which 7.2 million are unaware[1]. As of 2016, it is ranked seventh in the list of global causes of mortality. Diabetes can be an underlying cause for many cardiovascular diseases, retinopathy, and nephropathy leading to frequent readmission in the hospital. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services(CMS) labeled a 30-day readmission rate as a measure of healthcare quality offered by the hospital in order to provide the best inpatient care and improve the healthcare quality. Hospitals with high readmission rates will be penalized as per the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act(ACA) of 2010[2]. During the recent studies[19], it was observed that a 30-day readmission rate for patients with Diabetes ranges between 14.4%-22.7%,
Relevant-features based Auxiliary Cells for Energy Efficient Detection of Natural Errors
Aketi, Sai Aparna, Panda, Priyadarshini, Roy, Kaushik
Deep neural networks have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on many classification tasks. However, they have no inherent capability to recognize when their predictions are wrong. There have been several efforts in the recent past to detect natural errors but the suggested mechanisms pose additional energy requirements. To address this issue, we propose an ensemble of classifiers at hidden layers to enable energy efficient detection of natural errors. In particular, we append Relevant-features based Auxiliary Cells (RACs) which are class specific binary linear classifiers trained on relevant features. The consensus of RACs is used to detect natural errors. Based on combined confidence of RACs, classification can be terminated early, thereby resulting in energy efficient detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique on various image classification datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet.
Missing Data Imputation for Classification Problems
Choudhury, Arkopal, Kosorok, Michael R.
Imputation of missing data is a common application in various classification problems where the feature training matrix has missingness. A widely used solution to this imputation problem is based on the lazy learning technique, $k$-nearest neighbor (kNN) approach. However, most of the previous work on missing data does not take into account the presence of the class label in the classification problem. Also, existing kNN imputation methods use variants of Minkowski distance as a measure of distance, which does not work well with heterogeneous data. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative kNN imputation technique based on class weighted grey distance between the missing datum and all the training data. Grey distance works well in heterogeneous data with missing instances. The distance is weighted by Mutual Information (MI) which is a measure of feature relevance between the features and the class label. This ensures that the imputation of the training data is directed towards improving classification performance. This class weighted grey kNN imputation algorithm demonstrates improved performance when compared to other kNN imputation algorithms, as well as standard imputation algorithms such as MICE and missForest, in imputation and classification problems. These problems are based on simulated scenarios and UCI datasets with various rates of missingness.
Google Open Sources TFCO to Help Build Fair Machine Learning Models
Fairness is a highly subjective concept and is not different when comes to machine learning. We typically feels that the referees are "unfair" to our favorite team when they lose a close match or that any outcome is extremely "fair" when it goes our way. Given that machine learning models cannot rely on subjectivity, we need an efficient way to quantify fairness. A lot of research has been done in this area mostly framing fairness as an outcome optimization problem. Recently, Google AI research open sourced the Tensor Flow Constrained Optimization Library(TFCO), an optimization framework that can be used for optimizing different objectives of a machine learning model including fairness.
Building Machine Learning Models by Integrating Python and SAS Viya
SAS Scripting Wrapper for Analytics Transfer (SWAT), a powerful Python interface, enables you to integrate your Python code with SAS Cloud Analytic Services (CAS). Using SWAT, you can execute CAS analytic actions, including feature engineering, machine learning modeling, and model testing, and then analyze the results locally. This article demonstrates how you can predict the survival rates of Titanic passengers with a combination of both Python and CAS using SWAT. You can then see how well the models performed with some visual statistics. After you install and configure these resources, start a Jupyter Notebook session to get started!
A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Models for Predicting the State of Reactive Mixing
Ahmmed, B., Mudunuru, M. K., Karra, S., James, S. C., Vesselinov, V. V.
Accurate predictions of reactive mixing are critical for many Earth and environmental science problems. To investigate mixing dynamics over time under different scenarios, a high-fidelity, finite-element-based numerical model is built to solve the fast, irreversible bimolecular reaction-diffusion equations to simulate a range of reactive-mixing scenarios. A total of 2,315 simulations are performed using different sets of model input parameters comprising various spatial scales of vortex structures in the velocity field, time-scales associated with velocity oscillations, the perturbation parameter for the vortex-based velocity, anisotropic dispersion contrast, and molecular diffusion. Outputs comprise concentration profiles of the reactants and products. The inputs and outputs of these simulations are concatenated into feature and label matrices, respectively, to train 20 different machine learning (ML) emulators to approximate system behavior. The 20 ML emulators based on linear methods, Bayesian methods, ensemble learning methods, and multilayer perceptron (MLP), are compared to assess these models. The ML emulators are specifically trained to classify the state of mixing and predict three quantities of interest (QoIs) characterizing species production, decay, and degree of mixing. Linear classifiers and regressors fail to reproduce the QoIs; however, ensemble methods (classifiers and regressors) and the MLP accurately classify the state of reactive mixing and the QoIs. Among ensemble methods, random forest and decision-tree-based AdaBoost faithfully predict the QoIs. At run time, trained ML emulators are $\approx10^5$ times faster than the high-fidelity numerical simulations. Speed and accuracy of the ensemble and MLP models facilitate uncertainty quantification, which usually requires 1,000s of model run, to estimate the uncertainty bounds on the QoIs.
Self-Adaptive Training: beyond Empirical Risk Minimization
Huang, Lang, Zhang, Chao, Zhang, Hongyang
We propose self-adaptive training---a new training algorithm that dynamically corrects problematic training labels by model predictions without incurring extra computational cost---to improve generalization of deep learning for potentially corrupted training data. This problem is crucial towards robustly learning from data that are corrupted by, e.g., label noises and out-of-distribution samples. The standard empirical risk minimization (ERM) for such data, however, may easily overfit noises and thus suffers from sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we observe that model predictions can substantially benefit the training process: self-adaptive training significantly improves generalization over ERM under various levels of noises, and mitigates the overfitting issue in both natural and adversarial training. We evaluate the error-capacity curve of self-adaptive training: the test error is monotonously decreasing w.r.t. model capacity. This is in sharp contrast to the recently-discovered double-descent phenomenon in ERM which might be a result of overfitting of noises. Experiments on CIFAR and ImageNet datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach in two applications: classification with label noise and selective classification. We release our code at \url{https://github.com/LayneH/self-adaptive-training}.
TrojanNet: Embedding Hidden Trojan Horse Models in Neural Networks
Guo, Chuan, Wu, Ruihan, Weinberger, Kilian Q.
The complexity of large-scale neural networks can lead to poor understanding of their internal details. We show that this opaqueness provides an opportunity for adversaries to embed unintended functionalities into the network in the form of Trojan horses. Our novel framework hides the existence of a Trojan network with arbitrary desired functionality within a benign transport network. We prove theoretically that the Trojan network's detection is computationally infeasible and demonstrate empirically that the transport network does not compromise its disguise. Our paper exposes an important, previously unknown loophole that could potentially undermine the security and trustworthiness of machine learning.