Building Machine Learning models is fun, making sure we build the best ones is what makes a difference! RMSE is a good measure to evaluate how a machine learning model is performing. If RMSE is significantly higher in test set than training-set -- There is a good chance model is overfitting. You must be wondering'Can't we just use accuracy of the model as the holy grail metric?' Accuracy is very important, but it might not be the best metric all the time. Let's look at why with an example -: Let's have a dummy model which always predicts that a loan will not default.

Calculating the average of a variable or a list of numbers is a common operation in machine learning. It is an operation you may use every day either directly, such as when summarizing data, or indirectly, such as a smaller step in a larger procedure when fitting a model. The average is a synonym for the mean, a number that represents the most likely value from a probability distribution. As such, there are multiple different ways to calculate the mean based on the type of data that you're working with. This can trip you up if you use the wrong mean for your data.

Social Media has seen a tremendous growth in the last decade and is continuing to grow at a rapid pace. With such adoption, it is increasingly becoming a rich source of data for opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The detection and analysis of sentiment in social media is thus a valuable topic and attracts a lot of research efforts. Most of the earlier efforts focus on supervised learning approaches to solve this problem, which require expensive human annotations and therefore limits their practical use. In our work, we propose a semi-supervised approach to predict user-level sentiments for specific topics. We define and utilize a heterogeneous graph built from the social networks of the users with the knowledge that connected users in social networks typically share similar sentiments. Compared with the previous works, we have several novelties: (1) we incorporate the influences/authoritativeness of the users into the model, 2) we include comment-based and like-based user-user links to the graph, 3) we superimpose multiple heterogeneous graphs into one thereby allowing multiple types of links to exist between two users.

This paper formulates the problem of building a context-aware predictive model based on user diverse behavioral activities with smartphones. In the area of machine learning and data science, a tree-like model as that of decision tree is considered as one of the most popular classification techniques, which can be used to build a data-driven predictive model. The traditional decision tree model typically creates a number of leaf nodes as decision nodes that represent context-specific rigid decisions, and consequently may cause overfitting problem in behavior modeling. However, in many practical scenarios within the context-aware environment, the generalized outcomes could play an important role to effectively capture user behavior. In this paper, we propose a behavioral decision tree, "BehavDT" context-aware model that takes into account user behavior-oriented generalization according to individual preference level. The BehavDT model outputs not only the generalized decisions but also the context-specific decisions in relevant exceptional cases. The effectiveness of our BehavDT model is studied by conducting experiments on individual user real smartphone datasets. Our experimental results show that the proposed BehavDT context-aware model is more effective when compared with the traditional machine learning approaches, in predicting user diverse behaviors considering multi-dimensional contexts.

The confusion matrix is capable of giving the researchers detailed information about how a machine learning classifier has performed with respect to the target classes in the dataset. A confusion matrix will demonstrate display examples that have been properly classified against misclassified examples. Let's take a deeper look at how a confusion matrix is structured and how it can be interpreted. What Is A Confusion Matrix? Let's start by giving a simple definition of a confusion matrix.

In supervised learning, algorithms learn from labeled data. After understanding the data, the algorithm determines which label should be given to new data by associating patterns to the unlabeled new data. Supervised learning can be divided into two categories: classification and regression. Some examples of classification include spam detection, churn prediction, sentiment analysis, dog breed detection and so on. Some examples of regression include house price prediction, stock price prediction, height-weight prediction and so on.

App classification is useful in a number of applications such as adding apps to an app store or building a user model based on the installed apps. Presently there are a number of existing methods to classify apps based on a given taxonomy on the basis of their text metadata. However, text based methods for app classification may not work in all cases, such as when the text descriptions are in a different language, or missing, or inadequate to classify the app. One solution in such cases is to utilize the app images to supplement the text description. In this paper, we evaluate a number of approaches in which app images can be used to classify the apps. In one approach, we use Optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from images, which is then used to supplement the text description of the app. In another, we use pic2vec to convert the app images into vectors, then train an SVM to classify the vectors to the correct app label. In another, we use the captionbot.ai tool to generate natural language descriptions from the app images. Finally, we use a method to detect and label objects in the app images and use a voting technique to determine the category of the app based on all the images. We compare the performance of our image-based techniques to classify a number of apps in our dataset. We use a text based SVM app classifier as our base and obtained an improved classification accuracy of 96% for some classes when app images are added.

In this study, machine learning models were constructed to predict whether judgments made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) would lead to a violation of an Article in the Convention on Human Rights. The problem is framed as a binary classification task where a judgment can lead to a "violation" or "non-violation" of a particular Article. Using auto-sklearn, an automated algorithm selection package, models were constructed for 12 Articles in the Convention. To train these models, textual features were obtained from the ECHR Judgment documents using N-grams, word embeddings and paragraph embeddings. Additional documents, from the ECHR, were incorporated into the models through the creation of a word embedding (echr2vec) and a doc2vec model. The features obtained using the echr2vec embedding provided the highest cross-validation accuracy for 5 of the Articles. The overall test accuracy, across the 12 Articles, was 68.83%. As far as we could tell, this is the first estimate of the accuracy of such machine learning models using a realistic test set. This provides an important benchmark for future work. As a baseline, a simple heuristic of always predicting the most common outcome in the past was used. The heuristic achieved an overall test accuracy of 86.68% which is 29.7% higher than the models. Again, this was seemingly the first study that included such a heuristic with which to compare model results. The higher accuracy achieved by the heuristic highlights the importance of including such a baseline.

Fantasy Premier League (FPL) performance predictors tend to base their algorithms purely on historical statistical data. The main problems with this approach is that external factors such as injuries, managerial decisions and other tournament match statistics can never be factored into the final predictions. In this paper, we present a new method for predicting future player performances by automatically incorporating human feedback into our model. Through statistical data analysis such as previous performances, upcoming fixture difficulty ratings, betting market analysis, opinions of the general-public and experts alike via social media and web articles, we can improve our understanding of who is likely to perform well in upcoming matches. When tested on the English Premier League 2018/19 season, the model outperformed regular statistical predictors by over 300 points, an average of 11 points per week, ranking within the top 0.5% of players rank 30,000 out of over 6.5 million players.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an important driving force for the development and transformation of the financial industry. However, with the fast-evolving AI technology and application, unintentional bias, insufficient model validation, immature contingency plan and other underestimated threats may expose the company to operational and reputational risks. In this paper, we focus on fairness evaluation, one of the key components of AI Governance, through a quantitative lens. Statistical methods are reviewed for imbalanced data treatment and bias mitigation. These methods and fairness evaluation metrics are then applied to a credit card default payment example.