Regression
What's Next? Predicting Hamiltonian Dynamics from Discrete Observations of a Vector Field
Khoo, Zi-Yu, Zhang, Delong, Bressan, Stéphane
Each method is either informed or uninformed of the Hamiltonian property. We empirically and comparatively evaluate the methods and observe that information that the system is Hamiltonian can be effectively informed, and that different methods strike different trade-offs between efficiency and effectiveness for different dynamical systems.
Hypothesis Testing for Class-Conditional Noise Using Local Maximum Likelihood
Yang, Weisong, Poyiadzi, Rafael, Twomey, Niall, Rodriguez, Raul Santos
In supervised learning, automatically assessing the quality of the labels before any learning takes place remains an open research question. In certain particular cases, hypothesis testing procedures have been proposed to assess whether a given instance-label dataset is contaminated with class-conditional label noise, as opposed to uniform label noise. The existing theory builds on the asymptotic properties of the Maximum Likelihood Estimate for parametric logistic regression. However, the parametric assumptions on top of which these approaches are constructed are often too strong and unrealistic in practice. To alleviate this problem, in this paper we propose an alternative path by showing how similar procedures can be followed when the underlying model is a product of Local Maximum Likelihood Estimation that leads to more flexible nonparametric logistic regression models, which in turn are less susceptible to model misspecification. This different view allows for wider applicability of the tests by offering users access to a richer model class. Similarly to existing works, we assume we have access to anchor points which are provided by the users. We introduce the necessary ingredients for the adaptation of the hypothesis tests to the case of nonparametric logistic regression and empirically compare against the parametric approach presenting both synthetic and real-world case studies and discussing the advantages and limitations of the proposed approach.
Targeted Machine Learning for Average Causal Effect Estimation Using the Front-Door Functional
Guo, Anna, Benkeser, David, Nabi, Razieh
Evaluating the average causal effect (ACE) of a treatment on an outcome often involves overcoming the challenges posed by confounding factors in observational studies. A traditional approach uses the back-door criterion, seeking adjustment sets to block confounding paths between treatment and outcome. However, this method struggles with unmeasured confounders. As an alternative, the front-door criterion offers a solution, even in the presence of unmeasured confounders between treatment and outcome. This method relies on identifying mediators that are not directly affected by these confounders and that completely mediate the treatment's effect. Here, we introduce novel estimation strategies for the front-door criterion based on the targeted minimum loss-based estimation theory. Our estimators work across diverse scenarios, handling binary, continuous, and multivariate mediators. They leverage data-adaptive machine learning algorithms, minimizing assumptions and ensuring key statistical properties like asymptotic linearity, double-robustness, efficiency, and valid estimates within the target parameter space. We establish conditions under which the nuisance functional estimations ensure the root n-consistency of ACE estimators. Our numerical experiments show the favorable finite sample performance of the proposed estimators. We demonstrate the applicability of these estimators to analyze the effect of early stage academic performance on future yearly income using data from the Finnish Social Science Data Archive.
Distributed Learning of Mixtures of Experts
Chamroukhi, Faïcel, Pham, Nhat Thien
In modern machine learning problems one has to deal with datasets that are not centralized. This may be related to the application context in which the data can be by nature available at different locations and not accessible in a centralized mode, or distributed for computational issues in case of a large amount of data. Indeed, even if the dataset is fully available in a centralized mode, implementing reasonable learning algorithms may be computationally demanding in case of a large number of examples. The construction of distributed techniques in a Federated Learning setting Yang et al. (2019) in which the model is trained collaboratively under the orchestration of a central server, while keeping the data decentralized, is an increasing area of research. The most attractive strategy is to perform standard inference on local machines to obtain local estimators, then transmits them to a central machine where they are aggregated to produce an overall estimator, while attempting to satisfy some statistical guarantees criteria. There are many successful attempts in this direction of parallelizing the existing learning algorithms and statistical methods. Those that may be mentioned here include, among others, parallelizing stochastic gradient descent (Zinkevich et al., 2010), multiple linear regression (Mingxian et al., 1991), parallel K-means in clustering based on MapReduce (Zhao et al., 2009), distributed learning for heterogeneous data via model integration (Merugu and Ghosh, 2005), split-and-conquer approach for penalized regressions (Chen and ge Xie, 2014), for logistic regression (Shofiyah and Sofro, 2018), for k-clustering with heavy noise Li and Guo (2018). It is only very recently that a distributed learning approach has been proposed for mixture distributions, specifically for finite Gaussian mixtures (Zhang and Chen, 2022a). In this paper we focus on mixtures of experts (MoE) models (Jacobs et al., 1991; Jordan and Xu, 1995) which extend the standard unconditional mixture distributions that are typically used for clustering purposes, to model complex non-linear relationships of a response Y conditionally on some predictors X, for prediction purposes, while enjoying denseness results, e.g.
The irruption of cryptocurrencies into Twitter cashtags: a classifying solution
Vilas, Ana Fernández, Redondo, Rebeca Díaz, García, Antón Lorenzo
There is a consensus about the good sensing characteristics of Twitter to mine and uncover knowledge in financial markets, being considered a relevant feeder for taking decisions about buying or holding stock shares and even for detecting stock manipulation. Although Twitter hashtags allow to aggregate topic-related content, a specific mechanism for financial information also exists: Cashtag. However, the irruption of cryptocurrencies has resulted in a significant degradation on the cashtag-based aggregation of posts. Unfortunately, Twitter' users may use homonym tickers to refer to cryptocurrencies and to companies in stock markets, which means that filtering by cashtag may result on both posts referring to stock companies and cryptocurrencies. This research proposes automated classifiers to distinguish conflicting cashtags and, so, their container tweets by analyzing the distinctive features of tweets referring to stock companies and cryptocurrencies. As experiment, this paper analyses the interference between cryptocurrencies and company tickers in the London Stock Exchange (LSE), specifically, companies in the main and alternative market indices FTSE-100 and AIM-100. Heuristic-based as well as supervised classifiers are proposed and their advantages and drawbacks, including their ability to self-adapt to Twitter usage changes, are discussed. The experiment confirms a significant distortion in collected data when colliding or homonym cashtags exist, i.e., the same \$ acronym to refer to company tickers and cryptocurrencies. According to our results, the distinctive features of posts including cryptocurrencies or company tickers support accurate classification of colliding tweets (homonym cashtags) and Independent Models, as the most detached classifiers from training data, have the potential to be trans-applicability (in different stock markets) while retaining performance.
Prediction of rare events in the operation of household equipment using co-evolving time series
Mecheri, Hadia, Benamirouche, Islam, Fass, Feriel, Ziou, Djemel, Kadri, Nassima
In this study, we propose an approach for predicting rare events by exploiting time series in coevolution. Our approach involves a weighted autologistic regression model, where we leverage the temporal behavior of the data to enhance predictive capabilities. By addressing the issue of imbalanced datasets, we establish constraints leading to weight estimation and to improved performance. Evaluation on synthetic and real-world datasets confirms that our approach outperform state-of-the-art of predicting home equipment failure methods.
Modeling and Predicting Epidemic Spread: A Gaussian Process Regression Approach
She, Baike, Xin, Lei, Paré, Philip E., Hale, Matthew
Modeling and prediction of epidemic spread are critical to assist in policy-making for mitigation. Therefore, we present a new method based on Gaussian Process Regression to model and predict epidemics, and it quantifies prediction confidence through variance and high probability error bounds. Gaussian Process Regression excels in using small datasets and providing uncertainty bounds, and both of these properties are critical in modeling and predicting epidemic spreading processes with limited data. However, the derivation of formal uncertainty bounds remains lacking when using Gaussian Process Regression in the setting of epidemics, which limits its usefulness in guiding mitigation efforts. Therefore, in this work, we develop a novel bound on the variance of the prediction that quantifies the impact of the epidemic data on the predictions we make. Further, we develop a high probability error bound on the prediction, and we quantify how the epidemic spread, the infection data, and the length of the prediction horizon all affect this error bound. We also show that the error stays below a certain threshold based on the length of the prediction horizon. To illustrate this framework, we leverage Gaussian Process Regression to model and predict COVID-19 using real-world infection data from the United Kingdom.
Big Data - Supply Chain Management Framework for Forecasting: Data Preprocessing and Machine Learning Techniques
Jahin, Md Abrar, Shovon, Md Sakib Hossain, Shin, Jungpil, Ridoy, Istiyaque Ahmed, Tomioka, Yoichi, Mridha, M. F.
This article intends to systematically identify and comparatively analyze state-of-the-art supply chain (SC) forecasting strategies and technologies. A novel framework has been proposed incorporating Big Data Analytics in SC Management (problem identification, data sources, exploratory data analysis, machine-learning model training, hyperparameter tuning, performance evaluation, and optimization), forecasting effects on human-workforce, inventory, and overall SC. Initially, the need to collect data according to SC strategy and how to collect them has been discussed. The article discusses the need for different types of forecasting according to the period or SC objective. The SC KPIs and the error-measurement systems have been recommended to optimize the top-performing model. The adverse effects of phantom inventory on forecasting and the dependence of managerial decisions on the SC KPIs for determining model performance parameters and improving operations management, transparency, and planning efficiency have been illustrated. The cyclic connection within the framework introduces preprocessing optimization based on the post-process KPIs, optimizing the overall control process (inventory management, workforce determination, cost, production and capacity planning). The contribution of this research lies in the standard SC process framework proposal, recommended forecasting data analysis, forecasting effects on SC performance, machine learning algorithms optimization followed, and in shedding light on future research.
Fair Active Learning in Low-Data Regimes
Camilleri, Romain, Wagenmaker, Andrew, Morgenstern, Jamie, Jain, Lalit, Jamieson, Kevin
In critical machine learning applications, ensuring fairness is essential to avoid perpetuating social inequities. In this work, we address the challenges of reducing bias and improving accuracy in data-scarce environments, where the cost of collecting labeled data prohibits the use of large, labeled datasets. In such settings, active learning promises to maximize marginal accuracy gains of small amounts of labeled data. However, existing applications of active learning for fairness fail to deliver on this, typically requiring large labeled datasets, or failing to ensure the desired fairness tolerance is met on the population distribution. To address such limitations, we introduce an innovative active learning framework that combines an exploration procedure inspired by posterior sampling with a fair classification subroutine. We demonstrate that this framework performs effectively in very data-scarce regimes, maximizing accuracy while satisfying fairness constraints with high probability. We evaluate our proposed approach using well-established real-world benchmark datasets and compare it against state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in producing fair models, and improvement over existing methods.
The Relative Value of Prediction in Algorithmic Decision Making
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly used to inform the allocations of goods and interventions in the public sphere. In these domains, predictions serve as a means to an end. They provide stakeholders with insights into likelihood of future events as a means to improve decision making quality, and enhance social welfare. However, if maximizing welfare is the ultimate goal, prediction is only a small piece of the puzzle. There are various other policy levers a social planner might pursue in order to improve bottom-line outcomes, such as expanding access to available goods, or increasing the effect sizes of interventions. Given this broad range of design decisions, a basic question to ask is: What is the relative value of prediction in algorithmic decision making? How do the improvements in welfare arising from better predictions compare to those of other policy levers? The goal of our work is to initiate the formal study of these questions. Our main results are theoretical in nature. We identify simple, sharp conditions determining the relative value of prediction vis-\`a-vis expanding access, within several statistical models that are popular amongst quantitative social scientists. Furthermore, we illustrate how these theoretical insights may be used to guide the design of algorithmic decision making systems in practice.