Machine learning algorithms have been increasingly deployed in critical automated decision-making systems that directly affect human lives. When these algorithms are only trained to minimize the training/test error, they could suffer from systematic discrimination against individuals based on their sensitive attributes such as gender or race. Recently, there has been a surge in machine learning society to develop algorithms for fair machine learning. In particular, many adversarial learning procedures have been proposed to impose fairness. Unfortunately, these algorithms either can only impose fairness up to first-order dependence between the variables, or they lack computational convergence guarantees. In this paper, we use R\'enyi correlation as a measure of fairness of machine learning models and develop a general training framework to impose fairness. In particular, we propose a min-max formulation which balances the accuracy and fairness when solved to optimality. For the case of discrete sensitive attributes, we suggest an iterative algorithm with theoretical convergence guarantee for solving the proposed min-max problem. Our algorithm and analysis are then specialized to fair classification and the fair clustering problem under disparate impact doctrine. Finally, the performance of the proposed R\'enyi fair inference framework is evaluated on Adult and Bank datasets.

As we know by now, Alexa can play a song, order a pizza or do a quick online search. But now it can do something much more valuable: save your life. According to the results of a new proof-of-concept study, Alexa can accurately identify a specific pattern of breathing known as agonal breathing or gasping for air, that develops in the setting of an impending cardiac arrest, or when your heart stops beating. The research was published yesterday in the npj Digital Medicine. The implications for this novel form of contactless AI monitoring to detect cardiac arrest are broad, and offer the unique possibility to dispatch an ambulance to a victim who may be alone at home.

A substantial portion of the literature on fairness in algorithms proposes, analyzes, and operationalizes simple formulaic criteria for assessing fairness. Two of these criteria, Equalized Odds and Calibration by Group, have gained significant attention for their simplicity and intuitive appeal, but also for their incompatibility. This chapter provides a perspective on the meaning and consequences of these and other fairness criteria using graphical models which reveals Equalized Odds and related criteria to be ultimately misleading. An assessment of various graphical models suggests that fairness criteria should ultimately be case-specific and sensitive to the nature of the information the algorithm processes.

If our models are used in new or unexpected cases, do we know if they will make fair predictions? Previously, researchers developed ways to debias a model for a single problem domain. However, this is often not how models are trained and used in practice. For example, labels and demographics (sensitive attributes) are often hard to observe, resulting in auxiliary or synthetic data to be used for training, and proxies of the sensitive attribute to be used for evaluation of fairness. A model trained for one setting may be picked up and used in many others, particularly as is common with pre-training and cloud APIs. Despite the pervasiveness of these complexities, remarkably little work in the fairness literature has theoretically examined these issues. We frame all of these settings as domain adaptation problems: how can we use what we have learned in a source domain to debias in a new target domain, without directly debiasing on the target domain as if it is a completely new problem? We offer new theoretical guarantees of improving fairness across domains, and offer a modeling approach to transfer to data-sparse target domains. We give empirical results validating the theory and showing that these modeling approaches can improve fairness metrics with less data.

Machine Learning based Quality of Experience (QoE) models potentially suffer from over-fitting due to limitations including low data volume, and limited participant profiles. This prevents models from becoming generic. Consequently, these trained models may under-perform when tested outside the experimented population. One reason for the limited datasets, which we refer in this paper as small QoE data lakes, is due to the fact that often these datasets potentially contain user sensitive information and are only collected throughout expensive user studies with special user consent. Thus, sharing of datasets amongst researchers is often not allowed. In recent years, privacy preserving machine learning models have become important and so have techniques that enable model training without sharing datasets but instead relying on secure communication protocols. Following this trend, in this paper, we present Round-Robin based Collaborative Machine Learning model training, where the model is trained in a sequential manner amongst the collaborated partner nodes. We benchmark this work using our customized Federated Learning mechanism as well as conventional Centralized and Isolated Learning methods.

Histopathology image analysis can be considered as a Multiple instance learning (MIL) problem, where the whole slide histopathology image (WSI) is regarded as a bag of instances (i.e., patches) and the task is to predict a single class label to the WSI. However, in many reallife applications such as computational pathology, discovering the key instances that trigger the bag label is of great interest because it provides reasons for the decision made by the system. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model that addresses the primary task of a bag classification on a histopathology image and also learns to identify the response of each instance to provide interpretable results to the final prediction. We incorporate the attention mechanism into the proposed model to operate the transformation of instances and learn attention weights to allow us to find key patches. To perform a balanced training, we introduce adaptive weighing in each training bag to explicitly adjust the weight distribution in order to concentrate more on the contribution of hard samples. Based on the learned attention weights, we further develop a solution to boost the classification performance by generating the bags with hard negative instances. We conduct extensive experiments on colon and breast cancer histopathology data and show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance.

This article summarizes the lessons learned after two years of our team engaging with dozens of enterprise clients from different industries including manufacturing, financial services, retail, entertainment, and healthcare, among others. What are the most common ML problems faced by the enterprise? What is beyond training an ML model? How to address data preparation? How to scale to large datasets?

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that often impairs a child's normal development of the brain. According to CDC, it is estimated that 1 in 6 children in the US suffer from development disorders, and 1 in 68 children in the US suffer from ASD. This condition has a negative impact on a person's ability to hear, socialize and communicate. Overall, ASD has a broad range of symptoms and severity; hence the term spectrum is used. One of the main contributors to ASD is known to be genetics. Up to date, no suitable cure for ASD has been found. Early diagnosis is crucial for the long-term treatment of ASD, but this is challenging due to the lack of a proper objective measures. Subjective measures often take more time, resources, and have false positives or false negatives. There is a need for efficient objective measures that can help in diagnosing this disease early as possible with less effort. EEG measures the electric signals of the brain via electrodes placed on various places on the scalp. These signals can be used to study complex neuropsychiatric issues. Studies have shown that EEG has the potential to be used as a biomarker for various neurological conditions including ASD. This chapter will outline the usage of EEG measurement for the classification of ASD using machine learning algorithms.

The hedonic approach based on a regression model has been widely adopted for the prediction of real estate property price and rent. In particular, a spatial regression technique called Kriging, a method of interpolation that was advanced in the field of spatial statistics, are known to enable high accuracy prediction in light of the spatial dependence of real estate property data. Meanwhile, there has been a rapid increase in machine learning-based prediction using a large (big) dataset and its effectiveness has been demonstrated in previous studies. However, no studies have ever shown the extent to which predictive accuracy differs for Kriging and machine learning techniques using big data. Thus, this study compares the predictive accuracy of apartment rent price in Japan between the nearest neighbor Gaussian processes (NNGP) model, which enables application of Kriging to big data, and the deep neural network (DNN), a representative machine learning technique, with a particular focus on the data sample size (n = 10^4, 10^5, 10^6) and differences in predictive performance. Our analysis showed that, with an increase in sample size, the out-of-sample predictive accuracy of DNN approached that of NNGP and they were nearly equal on the order of n = 10^6. Furthermore, it is suggested that, for both higher and lower end properties whose rent price deviates from the median, DNN may have a higher predictive accuracy than that of NNGP.

Statistical Learning is the process of estimating an unknown probabilistic input-output relationship of a system using a limited number of observations; and a statistical learning machine (SLM) is the machine that learned such a process. While their roots grow deeply in Probability Theory, SLMs are ubiquitous in the modern world. Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) in military applications, Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) in medical imaging, DNA microarrays in Genomics, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Speech Recognition (SR), spam email filtering, stock market prediction, etc., are few examples and applications for SLM; diverse fields but one theory. The field of Statistical Learning can be decomposed to two basic subfields, Design and Assessment. Three main groups of specializations-namely statisticians, engineers, and computer scientists (ordered ascendingly by programming capabilities and descendingly by mathematical rigor)-exist on the venue of this field and each takes its elephant bite. Exaggerated rigorous analysis of statisticians sometimes deprives them from considering new ML techniques and methods that, yet, have no "complete" mathematical theory. On the other hand, immoderate add-hoc simulations of computer scientists sometimes derive them towards unjustified and immature results. A prudent approach is needed that has the enough flexibility to utilize simulations and trials and errors without sacrificing any rigor. If this prudent attitude is necessary for this field it is necessary, as well, in other fields of Engineering.