Twitter provides an open and rich source of data for studying human behaviour at scale and is widely used in social and network sciences. However, a major criticism of Twitter data is that demographic information is largely absent. Enhancing Twitter data with user ages would advance our ability to study social network structures, information flows and the spread of contagions. Approaches toward age detection of Twitter users typically focus on specific properties of tweets, e.g., linguistic features, which are language dependent. In this paper, we devise a language-independent methodology for determining the age of Twitter users from data that is native to the Twitter ecosystem. The key idea is to use a Bayesian framework to generalise ground-truth age information from a few Twitter users to the entire network based on what/whom they follow. Our approach scales to inferring the age of 700 million Twitter accounts with high accuracy.

These are just a few data-driven ways to overcome the everyday challenges of practical machine learning. Alyssa Frazee is a machine learning engineer at Stripe, where she builds models to detect fraud in online credit card payments. Before Stripe, she did a PhD in biostatistics and fell in love with programming at the Recurse Center. Find her on Twitter at @acfrazee. Machine learning has long powered many products we interact with daily–from "intelligent" assistants like Apple's Siri and Google Now, to recommendation engines like Amazon's that suggest new products to buy, to the ad ranking systems used by Google and Facebook.

The method of "random Fourier features (RFF)" has become a popular tool for approximating the "radial basis function (RBF)" kernel. The variance of RFF is actually large. Interestingly, the variance can be substantially reduced by a simple normalization step as we theoretically demonstrate. We name the improved scheme as the "normalized RFF (NRFF)". We also propose the "generalized min-max (GMM)" kernel as a measure of data similarity. GMM is positive definite as there is an associated hashing method named "generalized consistent weighted sampling (GCWS)" which linearizes this nonlinear kernel. We provide an extensive empirical evaluation of the RBF kernel and the GMM kernel on more than 50 publicly available datasets. For a majority of the datasets, the (tuning-free) GMM kernel outperforms the best-tuned RBF kernel. We conduct extensive experiments for comparing the linearized RBF kernel using NRFF with the linearized GMM kernel using GCWS. We observe that, to reach a comparable classification accuracy, GCWS typically requires substantially fewer samples than NRFF, even on datasets where the original RBF kernel outperforms the original GMM kernel. The empirical success of GCWS (compared to NRFF) can also be explained from a theoretical perspective. Firstly, the relative variance (normalized by the squared expectation) of GCWS is substantially smaller than that of NRFF, except for the very high similarity region (where the variances of both methods are close to zero). Secondly, if we make a model assumption on the data, we can show analytically that GCWS exhibits much smaller variance than NRFF for estimating the same object (e.g., the RBF kernel), except for the very high similarity region.

In this paper, we focus on online representation learning in non-stationary environments which may require continuous adaptation of model architecture. We propose a novel online dictionary-learning (sparse-coding) framework which incorporates the addition and deletion of hidden units (dictionary elements), and is inspired by the adult neurogenesis phenomenon in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, known to be associated with improved cognitive function and adaptation to new environments. In the online learning setting, where new input instances arrive sequentially in batches, the neuronal-birth is implemented by adding new units with random initial weights (random dictionary elements); the number of new units is determined by the current performance (representation error) of the dictionary, higher error causing an increase in the birth rate. Neuronal-death is implemented by imposing l1/l2-regularization (group sparsity) on the dictionary within the block-coordinate descent optimization at each iteration of our online alternating minimization scheme, which iterates between the code and dictionary updates. Finally, hidden unit connectivity adaptation is facilitated by introducing sparsity in dictionary elements. Our empirical evaluation on several real-life datasets (images and language) as well as on synthetic data demonstrates that the proposed approach can considerably outperform the state-of-art fixed-size (nonadaptive) online sparse coding of Mairal et al. (2009) in the presence of nonstationary data. Moreover, we identify certain properties of the data (e.g., sparse inputs with nearly non-overlapping supports) and of the model (e.g., dictionary sparsity) associated with such improvements.

We present a new variable selection method based on model-based gradient boosting and randomly permuted variables. Model-based boosting is a tool to fit a statistical model while performing variable selection at the same time. A drawback of the fitting lies in the need of multiple model fits on slightly altered data (e.g. cross-validation or bootstrap) to find the optimal number of boosting iterations and prevent overfitting. In our proposed approach, we augment the data set with randomly permuted versions of the true variables, so called shadow variables, and stop the step-wise fitting as soon as such a variable would be added to the model. This allows variable selection in a single fit of the model without requiring further parameter tuning. We show that our probing approach can compete with state-of-the-art selection methods like stability selection in a high-dimensional classification benchmark and apply it on gene expression data for the estimation of riboflavin production of Bacillus subtilis.

Opencv object detectors which are built using Haar feature-based cascade classifiers is at least a decade old. OpenCV framework provides a default pre-built haar and lbp based cascade classifiers for face and eye detection which are very good quality detectors. However, I had never measured the accuracy of these face and eye detectors. I recently discovered that pre-built haar/lbp cascades have a relatively higher false positive rates which might make them unsuitable for many use-cases. It's possible to build an eye detector with very high accuracy and low false positive rates for many cases with OpenCV.

The number of "feature values" is the total number of key-value pairs found, including the small unstable ones, regardless as to whether they are classified as good or bad. Any article with a pv above the arbitrary value pv_threshold 7.1 (see source code) is considered as good. This corresponds to articles having about 1.3 times more traffic than average, since we use a log scale and the average pv is 6.81. The traffic for articles classified as good by the algorithm (pv 8.23) is about 4.2 times above the traffic that an average article receives. Also note that we correctly identify the vast majority of good articles, but this is because we work with small nodes. Finally an article is marked as good if it triggers at least one node marked as good (that is, satisfying the criterion defined in the next sub-section.) Besides pv_threshold, the algorithm uses 12 parameters to identify a usable, stable node classified as good.

Multivariate count data are pervasive in science in the form of histograms, contingency tables and others. Previous work on modeling this type of distributions do not allow for fast and tractable inference. In this paper we present a novel Poisson graphical model, the first based on sum product networks, called PSPN, allowing for positive as well as negative dependencies. We present algorithms for learning tree PSPNs from data as well as for tractable inference via symbolic evaluation. With these, information-theoretic measures such as entropy, mutual information, and distances among count variables can be computed without resorting to approximations. Additionally, we show a connection between PSPNs and LDA, linking the structure of tree PSPNs to a hierarchy of topics. The experimental results on several synthetic and real world datasets demonstrate that PSPN often outperform state-of-the-art while remaining tractable.

Targeted socio-economic policies require an accurate understanding of a country’s demographic makeup. To that end, the United States spends more than 1 billion dollars a year gathering census data such as race, gender, education, occupation and unemployment rates. Compared to the traditional method of collecting surveys across many years which is costly and labor intensive, data-driven, machine learning-driven approaches are cheaper and faster—with the potential ability to detect trends in close to real time. In this work, we leverage the ubiquity of Google Street View images and develop a computer vision pipeline to predict income, per capita carbon emission, crime rates and other city attributes from a single source of publicly available visual data. We first detect cars in 50 million images across 200 of the largest US cities and train a model to predict demographic attributes using the detected cars. To facilitate our work, we have collected the largest and most challenging fine-grained dataset reported to date consisting of over 2600 classes of cars comprised of images from Google Street View and other web sources, classified by car experts to account for even the most subtle of visual differences. We use this data to construct the largest scale fine-grained detection system reported to date. Our prediction results correlate well with ground truth income data (r=0.82), Massachusetts department of vehicle registration, and sources investigating crime rates, income segregation, per capita carbon emission, and other market research. Finally, we learn interesting relationships between cars and neighborhoods allowing us to perform the first large scale sociological analysis of cities using computer vision techniques.

Feature selection aims to select a small subset from the high-dimensional features which can lead to better learning performance, lower computational complexity, and better model readability. The class imbalance problem has been neglected by traditional feature selection methods, therefore the selected features will be biased towards the majority classes. Because of the superiority of F-measure to accuracy for imbalanced data, we propose to use F-measure as the performance measure for feature selection algorithms. As a pseudo-linear function, the optimization of F-measure can be achieved by minimizing the total costs. In this paper, we present a novel cost-sensitive feature selection (CSFS) method which optimizes F-measure instead of accuracy to take class imbalance issue into account. The features will be selected according to optimal F-measure classifier after solving a series of cost-sensitive feature selection sub-problems. The features selected by our method will fully represent the characteristics of not only majority classes, but also minority classes. Extensive experimental results conducted on synthetic, multi-class and multi-label datasets validate the efficiency and significance of our feature selection method.