This course gives you a comprehensive introduction to both the theory and practice of machine learning. You will learn to use Python along with industry-standard libraries and tools, including Pandas, Scikit-learn, and Tensorflow, to ingest, explore, and prepare data for modeling and then train and evaluate models using a wide variety of techniques. Those techniques include linear regression with ordinary least squares, logistic regression, support vector machines, decision trees and ensembles, clustering, principal component analysis, hidden Markov models, and deep learning. A key feature of this course is that you not only learn how to apply these techniques, you also learn the conceptual basis underlying them so that you understand how they work, why you are doing what you are doing, and what your results mean. The course also features real-world datasets, drawn primarily from the realm of public policy.

Explainable artificial intelligence has received limited attention in construction despite its growing importance in various other industrial sectors. In this paper, we provide a narrative review of XAI to raise awareness about its potential in construction. Our review develops a taxonomy of the XAI literature comprising its precepts and approaches. Opportunities for future XAI research focusing on stakeholder desiderata and data and information fusion are identified and discussed. We hope the opportunities we suggest stimulate new lines of inquiry to help alleviate the scepticism and hesitancy toward AI adoption and integration in construction.

Conflict prediction in communication is integral to the design of virtual agents that support successful teamwork by providing timely assistance. The aim of our research is to analyze discourse to predict collaboration success. Unfortunately, resource scarcity is a problem that teamwork researchers commonly face since it is hard to gather a large number of training examples. To alleviate this problem, this paper introduces a multi-feature embedding (MFeEmb) that improves the generalizability of conflict prediction models trained on dialogue sequences. MFeEmb leverages textual, structural, and semantic information from the dialogues by incorporating lexical, dialogue acts, and sentiment features. The use of dialogue acts and sentiment features reduces performance loss from natural distribution shifts caused mainly by changes in vocabulary. This paper demonstrates the performance of MFeEmb on domain adaptation problems in which the model is trained on discourse from one task domain and applied to predict team performance in a different domain. The generalizability of MFeEmb is quantified using the similarity measure proposed by Bontonou et al. (2021). Our results show that MFeEmb serves as an excellent domain-agnostic representation for meta-pretraining a few-shot model on collaborative multiparty dialogues.

Instrumental variables (IV) have become standard tools for economists, epidemiologists, and social scientists to uncover causal relationships from observational data [3, 46]. Randomization of treatments or policies has been perceived as the gold standard for such tasks, but is generally prohibitive in many real-world scenarios due to time constraints or ethical concerns. When treatment assignment is not randomized, it is generally impossible to discern between the causal effect of treatments and spurious correlations that are induced by unobserved factors. Instead, IVs enable the investigators to incorporate natural variation through an IV that is associated with the treatments, but not with the outcome variable, other than through its effect on the treatments. In economics, for instance, the season-of-birth was used as an IV to study the return from schooling, which measures causal effect of education on labor market earning [16]. In genetic epidemiology, the idea to use genetic variants as IVs, known as Mendelian randomization, has also gained increasing popularity [13, 14].

Off-policy evaluation is critical in a number of applications where new policies need to be evaluated offline before online deployment. Most existing methods focus on the expected return, define the target parameter through averaging and provide a point estimator only. In this paper, we develop a novel procedure to produce reliable interval estimators for a target policy's return starting from any initial state. Our proposal accounts for the variability of the return around its expectation, focuses on the individual effect and offers valid uncertainty quantification. Our main idea lies in designing a pseudo policy that generates subsamples as if they were sampled from the target policy so that existing conformal prediction algorithms are applicable to prediction interval construction. Our methods are justified by theories, synthetic data and real data from short-video platforms.

Proponents of explainable AI have often argued that it constitutes an essential path towards algorithmic fairness. Prior works examining these claims have primarily evaluated explanations based on their effects on humans' perceptions, but there is scant research on the relationship between explanations and distributive fairness of AI-assisted decisions. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to examine the relationship between feature-based explanations and distributive fairness, mediated by human perceptions and reliance on AI recommendations. Our findings show that explanations influence fairness perceptions, which, in turn, relate to humans' tendency to adhere to AI recommendations. However, our findings suggest that such explanations do not enable humans to discern correct and wrong AI recommendations. Instead, we show that they may affect reliance irrespective of the correctness of AI recommendations. Depending on which features an explanation highlights, this can foster or hinder distributive fairness: when explanations highlight features that are task-irrelevant and evidently associated with the sensitive attribute, this prompts overrides that counter stereotype-aligned AI recommendations. Meanwhile, if explanations appear task-relevant, this induces reliance behavior that reinforces stereotype-aligned errors. These results show that feature-based explanations are not a reliable mechanism to improve distributive fairness, as their ability to do so relies on a human-in-the-loop operationalization of the flawed notion of "fairness through unawareness". Finally, our study design provides a blueprint to evaluate the suitability of other explanations as pathways towards improved distributive fairness of AI-assisted decisions.

Linear model trees are regression trees that incorporate linear models in the leaf nodes. This preserves the intuitive interpretation of decision trees and at the same time enables them to better capture linear relationships, which is hard for standard decision trees. But most existing methods for fitting linear model trees are time consuming and therefore not scalable to large data sets. In addition, they are more prone to overfitting and extrapolation issues than standard regression trees. In this paper we introduce PILOT, a new algorithm for linear model trees that is fast, regularized, stable and interpretable. PILOT trains in a greedy fashion like classic regression trees, but incorporates an $L^2$ boosting approach and a model selection rule for fitting linear models in the nodes. The abbreviation PILOT stands for $PI$ecewise $L$inear $O$rganic $T$ree, where `organic' refers to the fact that no pruning is carried out. PILOT has the same low time and space complexity as CART without its pruning. An empirical study indicates that PILOT tends to outperform standard decision trees and other linear model trees on a variety of data sets. Moreover, we prove its consistency in an additive model setting under weak assumptions. When the data is generated by a linear model, the convergence rate is polynomial.

We create a mixed-integer optimization (MIO) approach for doing cluster-aware regression, i.e. linear regression that takes into account the inherent clustered structure of the data. We compare to the linear mixed effects regression (LMEM) which is the most used current method, and design simulation experiments to show superior performance to LMEM in terms of both predictive and inferential metrics in silico. Furthermore, we show how our method is formulated in a very interpretable way; LMEM cannot generalize and make cluster-informed predictions when the cluster of new data points is unknown, but we solve this problem by training an interpretable classification tree that can help decide cluster effects for new data points, and demonstrate the power of this generalizability on a real protein expression dataset.

Machine learning models are widely used to solve real-world problems in science and industry. To build robust models, we should quantify the uncertainty of the model's predictions on new data. This study proposes a new method for uncertainty estimation based on the surrogate Gaussian process model. Our method can equip any base model with an accurate uncertainty estimate produced by a separate surrogate. Compared to other approaches, the estimate remains computationally effective with training only one additional model and doesn't rely on data-specific assumptions. The only requirement is the availability of the base model as a black box, which is typical. Experiments for challenging time-series forecasting data show that surrogate model-based methods provide more accurate confidence intervals than bootstrap-based methods in both medium and small-data regimes and different families of base models, including linear regression, ARIMA, and gradient boosting.

The Machine Learning Specialization is a foundational online program created in collaboration between DeepLearning.AI and Stanford Online. In this beginner-friendly program, you will learn the fundamentals of machine learning and how to use these techniques to build real-world AI applications. This Specialization is taught by Andrew Ng, an AI visionary who has led critical research at Stanford University and groundbreaking work at Google Brain, Baidu, and Landing.AI to advance the AI field. This 3-course Specialization is an updated and expanded version of Andrew's pioneering Machine Learning course, rated 4.9 out of 5 and taken by over 4.8 million learners since it launched in 2012. It provides a broad introduction to modern machine learning, including supervised learning (multiple linear regression, logistic regression, neural networks, and decision trees), unsupervised learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems), and some of the best practices used in Silicon Valley for artificial intelligence and machine learning innovation (evaluating and tuning models, taking a data-centric approach to improving performance, and more.)