Current adoption of machine learning in industrial, societal and economical activities has raised concerns about the fairness, equity and ethics of automated decisions. Predictive models are often developed using biased datasets and thus retain or even exacerbate biases in their decisions and recommendations. Removing the sensitive covariates, such as gender or race, is insufficient to remedy this issue since the biases may be retained due to other related covariates. We present a regularization approach to this problem that trades off predictive accuracy of the learned models (with respect to biased labels) for the fairness in terms of statistical parity, i.e. independence of the decisions from the sensitive covariates. In particular, we consider a general framework of regularized empirical risk minimization over reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and impose an additional regularizer of dependence between predictors and sensitive covariates using kernel-based measures of dependence, namely the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) and its normalized version. This approach leads to a closed-form solution in the case of squared loss, i.e. ridge regression. Moreover, we show that the dependence regularizer has an interpretation as modifying the corresponding Gaussian process (GP) prior. As a consequence, a GP model with a prior that encourages fairness to sensitive variables can be derived, allowing principled hyperparameter selection and studying of the relative relevance of covariates under fairness constraints. Experimental results in synthetic examples and in real problems of income and crime prediction illustrate the potential of the approach to improve fairness of automated decisions.

We investigate a framework for machine reading, inspired by real world information-seeking problems, where a meta question answering system interacts with a black box environment. The environment encapsulates a competitive machine reader based on BERT, providing candidate answers to questions, and possibly some context. To validate the realism of our formulation, we ask humans to play the role of a meta-answerer. With just a small snippet of text around an answer, humans can outperform the machine reader, improving recall. Similarly, a simple machine meta-answerer outperforms the environment, improving both precision and recall on the Natural Questions dataset. The system relies on joint training of answer scoring and the selection of conditioning information.

Tens of millions of women suffer from infertility worldwide each year. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is the best choice for many such patients. However, IVF is expensive, time-consuming, and both physically and emotionally demanding. The first question that a patient usually asks before the IVF is how likely she will conceive, given her basic medical examination information. This paper proposes three approaches to predict the cumulative pregnancy rate after multiple oocyte pickup cycles. Experiments on 11,190 patients showed that first clustering the patients into different groups and then building a support vector machine model for each group can achieve the best overall performance. Our model could be a quick and economic approach for reliably estimating the cumulative pregnancy rate for a patient, given only her basic medical examination information, well before starting the actual IVF procedure. The predictions can help the patient make optimal decisions on whether to use her own oocyte or donor oocyte, how many oocyte pickup cycles she may need, whether to use embryo frozen, etc. They will also reduce the patient's cost and time to pregnancy, and improve her quality of life.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of machine learning based anonymization on anomalous subgroup preservation. In particular, we train a binary classifier to discover the most anomalous subgroup in a dataset by maximizing the bias between the group's predicted odds ratio from the model and observed odds ratio from the data. We then perform anonymization using a variational autoencoder (VAE) to synthesize an entirely new dataset that would ideally be drawn from the distribution of the original data. We repeat the anomalous subgroup discovery task on the new data and compare it to what was identified pre-anonymization. We evaluated our approach using publicly available datasets from the financial industry. Our evaluation confirmed that the approach was able to produce synthetic datasets that preserved a high level of subgroup differentiation as identified initially in the original dataset. Such a distinction was maintained while having distinctly different records between the synthetic and original dataset. Finally, we packed the above end to end process into what we call Utility Guaranteed Deep Privacy (UGDP) system. UGDP can be easily extended to onboard alternative generative approaches such as GANs to synthesize tabular data.

In real-world applications, we can encounter situations when a well-trained model has to be used to predict from a damaged dataset. The damage caused by missing or corrupted values can be either on the level of individual instances or on the level of entire features. Both situations have a negative impact on the usability of the model on such a dataset. This paper focuses on the scenario where entire features are missing which can be understood as a specific case of transfer learning. Our aim is to experimentally research the influence of various imputation methods on the performance of several classification models. The imputation impact is researched on a combination of traditional methods such as k-NN, linear regression, and MICE compared to modern imputation methods such as multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and gradient boosted trees (XGBT). For linear regression, MLP, and XGBT we also propose two approaches to using them for multiple features imputation. The experiments were performed on both real world and artificial datasets with continuous features where different numbers of features, varying from one feature to 50%, were missing. The results show that MICE and linear regression are generally good imputers regardless of the conditions. On the other hand, the performance of MLP and XGBT is strongly dataset dependent. Their performance is the best in some cases, but more often they perform worse than MICE or linear regression.

Stochastic Gradient Descent has been widely studied with classification accuracy as a performance measure. However, these stochastic algorithms cannot be directly used when non-decomposable pairwise performance measures are used such as Area under the ROC curve (AUC) which is a common performance metric when the classes are imbalanced. There have been several algorithms proposed for optimizing AUC as a performance metric, and one of the recent being a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm (SPAM). But the downside of the stochastic methods is that they suffer from high variance leading to slower convergence. To combat this issue, several variance reduced methods have been proposed with faster convergence guarantees than vanilla stochastic gradient descent. Again, these variance reduced methods are not directly applicable when non-decomposable performance measures are used. In this paper, we develop a Variance Reduced Stochastic Proximal algorithm for AUC Maximization (\textsc{VRSPAM}) and perform a theoretical analysis as well as empirical analysis to show that our algorithm converges faster than SPAM which is the previous state-of-the-art for the AUC maximization problem.

--Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is one of the most effective solutions for providing primary security services. IDSs are generally working based on attack signatures or by detecting anomalies. In this paper, we have presented AutoIDS, a novel yet efficient solution for IDS, based on a semi-supervised machine learning technique. AutoIDS can distinguish abnormal packet flows from normal ones by taking advantage of cascading two efficient detectors. These detectors are two encoder-decoder neural networks that are forced to provide a compressed and a sparse representation from the normal flows. In the test phase, failing these neural networks on providing compressed or sparse representation from an incoming packet flow, means such flow does not comply with the normal traffic and thus it is considered as an intrusion. For lowering the computational cost along with preserving the accuracy, a large number of flows are just processed by the first detector . In fact, the second detector is only used for difficult samples which the first detector is not confident about them. We have evaluated AutoIDS on the NSL-KDD benchmark as a widely-used and well-known dataset. The accuracy of AutoIDS is 90.17% showing its superiority compared to the other state-of-the-art methods. OW ADA YS, providing security services in different computer networks is an issue of paramount significance. The principal security services required by almost all of the communication networks, irrespective of their types, are confidentiality, authenticity, non-repudiation, integrity, and availability.

What do we want to optimize for? Most of the businesses fail to answer this simple question. Every business problem is a little different, and it should be optimized differently. We all have created classification models. A lot of time we try to increase evaluate our models on accuracy.

There are many metrics to measure the performance of your model depending on the type of machine learning you are looking to conduct. In this article, we take a look at performance measures for classification and regression models and discuss which is better optimized. Sometimes the metric to look at will vary according to the problem that is initially being solved. The True Positive Rate also called Recall is the go-to performance measure in binary/non-binary classification problems. Most if not all the time, we are only interested in correctly predicting one class.

There are many metrics to measure the performance of your model depending on the type of machine learning you are looking to conduct. In this article, we take a look at performance measures for classification and regression models and discuss which is better optimized. Sometimes the metric to look at will vary according to the problem that is initially being solved. The True Positive Rate also called Recall is the go-to performance measure in binary/non-binary classification problems. Most if not all the time, we are only interested in correctly predicting one class.