This paper develops a prediction-based prescriptive model for optimal decision making that (i) predicts the outcome under each action using a robust nonlinear model, and (ii) adopts a randomized prescriptive policy determined by the predicted outcomes. The predictive model combines a new regularized regression technique, which was developed using Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) with an ambiguity set constructed from the Wasserstein metric, with the K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) regression, which helps to capture the nonlinearity embedded in the data. We show theoretical results that guarantee the out-of-sample performance of the predictive model, and prove the optimality of the randomized policy in terms of the expected true future outcome. We demonstrate the proposed methodology on a hypertension dataset, showing that our prescribed treatment leads to a larger reduction in the systolic blood pressure compared to a series of alternatives. A clinically meaningful threshold level used to activate the randomized policy is also derived under a sub-Gaussian assumption on the predicted outcome.

A growing body of research has shown that many classifiers are susceptible to {\em{adversarial examples}} -- small strategic modifications to test inputs that lead to misclassification. In this work, we study general non-parametric methods, with a view towards understanding when they are robust to these modifications. We establish general conditions under which non-parametric methods are r-consistent -- in the sense that they converge to optimally robust and accurate classifiers in the large sample limit. Concretely, our results show that when data is well-separated, nearest neighbors and kernel classifiers are r-consistent, while histograms are not. For general data distributions, we prove that preprocessing by Adversarial Pruning (Yang et. al., 2019) -- that makes data well-separated -- followed by nearest neighbors or kernel classifiers also leads to r-consistency.

A crime is a punishable offence that is harmful for an individual and his society. It is obvious to comprehend the patterns of criminal activity to prevent them. Research can help society to prevent and solve crime activates. Study shows that only 10 percent offenders commits 50 percent of the total offences. The enforcement team can respond faster if they have early information and pre-knowledge about crime activities of the different points of a city. In this paper, supervised learning technique is used to predict crimes with better accuracy. The proposed system predicts crimes by analyzing data-set that contains records of previously committed crimes and their patterns. The system stands on two main algorithms - i) decision tree, and ii) k-nearest neighbor. Random Forest algorithm and Adaboost are used to increase the accuracy of the prediction. Finally, oversampling is used for better accuracy. The proposed system is feed with a criminal-activity data set of twelve years of San Francisco city.

Computing the similarity between two data points plays a vital role in many machine learning algorithms. Metric learning has the aim of learning a good metric automatically from data. Most existing studies on metric learning for tree-structured data have adopted the approach of learning the tree edit distance. However, the edit distance is not amenable for big data analysis because it incurs high computation cost. In this paper, we propose a new metric learning approach for tree-structured data with pq-grams. The pq-gram distance is a distance for ordered labeled trees, and has much lower computation cost than the tree edit distance. In order to perform metric learning based on pq-grams, we propose a new differentiable parameterized distance, weighted pq-gram distance. We also propose a way to learn the proposed distance based on Large Margin Nearest Neighbors (LMNN), which is a well-studied and practical metric learning scheme. We formulate the metric learning problem as an optimization problem and use the gradient descent technique to perform metric learning. We empirically show that the proposed approach not only achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art edit distance-based methods in various classification problems, but also solves the classification problems much more rapidly than the edit distance-based methods.

This paper proposes a new model based on Fuzzy k-Nearest Neighbors for classification with monotonic constraints, Monotonic Fuzzy k-NN (MonFkNN). Real-life data-sets often do not comply with monotonic constraints due to class noise. MonFkNN incorporates a new calculation of fuzzy memberships, which increases robustness against monotonic noise without the need for relabeling. Our proposal has been designed to be adaptable to the different needs of the problem being tackled. In several experimental studies, we show significant improvements in accuracy while matching the best degree of monotonicity obtained by comparable methods. We also show that MonFkNN empirically achieves improved performance compared with Monotonic k-NN in the presence of large amounts of class noise.

In recent decades, attention has been directed at anemia classification for various medical purposes, such as thalassemia screening and predicting iron deficiency anemia (IDA). In this study, a new method has been successfully tested for discrimination between IDA and \b{eta}-thalassemia trait (\b{eta}-TT). The method is based on a Dynamic Harmony Search (DHS). Complete blood count (CBC), a fast and inexpensive laboratory test, is used as the input of the system. Other models, such as a genetic programming method called structured representation on genetic algorithm in non-linear function fitting (STROGANOFF), an artificial neural network (ANN), an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), a support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and certain traditional methods, are compared with the proposed method.

k-nearest neighbour (kNN) is one of the most prominent, simple and basic algorithm used in machine learning and data mining. However, kNN has limited prediction ability, i.e., kNN cannot predict any instance correctly if it does not belong to any of the predefined classes in the training data set. The purpose of this paper is to suggest an Advanced kNN (A-kNN) algorithm that will be able to classify an instance as unknown, after verifying that it does not belong to any of the predefined classes. Performance of kNN and A-kNN is compared on three different data sets namely iris plant data set, BUPA liver disorder data set, and Alpha Beta detection data set. Results of A-kNN are significantly accurate for detecting unknown instances.

Estimating Kullback-Leibler divergence from identical and independently distributed samples is an important problem in various domains. One simple and effective estimator is based on the k nearest neighbor distances between these samples. In this paper, we analyze the convergence rates of the bias and variance of this estimator. Furthermore, we derive a lower bound of the minimax mean square error and show that kNN method is asymptotically rate optimal. I. INTRODUCTION Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence has a broad range of applications in information theory, statistics and machine learning. For example, KL divergence can be used in hypothesis testing [1], text classification [2], outlying sequence detection [3], multimedia classification [4], speech recognition [5], etc. In many applications, we hope to know the value of KL divergence, but the distributions are unknown. Therefore, it is important to estimate KL divergence based only on some identical and independently distributed (i.i.d) samples. Such problem has been widely studied [6-13]. The estimation method is different depending on whether the underlying distribution is discrete or continuous. For discrete distributions, an intuitive method is called plugin estimator, which first estimates the probability mass function (PMF) by simply counting the number of occurrences at each possible value and then calculates the KL divergence based on the estimated PMF. However, since it is always possible that the number of occurrences at some locations is zero, this method has infinite bias and variance for arbitrarily large sample size. As a result, it is necessary to design some new estimators, such that both the bias and variance converge to zero. Several methods have been proposed in [11-13].

Aspect based Sentiment Analysis is a major subarea of sentiment analysis. Many supervised and unsupervised approaches have been proposed in the past for detecting and analyzing the sentiment of aspect terms. In this paper, a graph-based semi-supervised learning approach for aspect term extraction is proposed. In this approach, every identified token in the review document is classified as aspect or non-aspect term from a small set of labeled tokens using label spreading algorithm. The k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) for graph sparsification is employed in the proposed approach to make it more time and memory efficient. The proposed work is further extended to determine the polarity of the opinion words associated with the identified aspect terms in review sentence to generate visual aspect-based summary of review documents. The experimental study is conducted on benchmark and crawled datasets of restaurant and laptop domains with varying value of labeled instances. The results depict that the proposed approach could achieve good result in terms of Precision, Recall and Accuracy with limited availability of labeled data.

The top-k operation, i.e., finding the k largest or smallest elements from a collection of scores, is an important model component, which is widely used in information retrieval, machine learning, and data mining. However, if the top-k operation is implemented in an algorithmic way, e.g., using bubble algorithm, the resulting model cannot be trained in an end-to-end way using prevalent gradient descent algorithms. This is because these implementations typically involve swapping indices, whose gradient cannot be computed. Moreover, the corresponding mapping from the input scores to the indicator vector of whether this element belongs to the top-k set is essentially discontinuous. To address the issue, we propose a smoothed approximation, namely the SOFT (Scalable Optimal transport-based diFferenTiable) top-k operator. Specifically, our SOFT top-k operator approximates the output of the top-k operation as the solution of an Entropic Optimal Transport (EOT) problem. The gradient of the SOFT operator can then be efficiently approximated based on the optimality conditions of EOT problem. We apply the proposed operator to the k-nearest neighbors and beam search algorithms, and demonstrate improved performance.