In my wandering around the various data science tools and frameworks, I discovered Deepnote, an online framework that allows you to create and run notebooks in Python. Compared to the more famous Jupyterlab and Colab frameworks, Deepnote allows you to write Python notebooks collaboratively and in real time. Your collaborator may even comment your code! Deepnote can be easily integrated with the most popular cloud services, such as Google Drive and Amazon S3, as well as the most popular databases, such as PostgresSQL and MongoDB. In addition, projects can be integrated with Github and published over the Web, since Deepnote provides each user with a dedicated Web page, which can be used as a portfolio.

We present the development of a semi-supervised regression method using variational autoencoders (VAE), which is customized for use in soft sensing applications. We motivate the use of semi-supervised learning considering the fact that process quality variables are not collected at the same frequency as other process variables leading to many unlabelled records in operational datasets. These unlabelled records are not possible to use for training quality variable predictions based on supervised learning methods. Use of VAEs for unsupervised learning is well established and recently they were used for regression applications based on variational inference procedures. We extend this approach of supervised VAEs for regression (SVAER) to make it learn from unlabelled data leading to semi-supervised VAEs for regression (SSVAER), then we make further modifications to their architecture using additional regularization components to make SSVAER well suited for learning from both labelled and unlabelled process data. The probabilistic regressor resulting from the variational approach makes it possible to estimate the variance of the predictions simultaneously, which provides an uncertainty quantification along with the generated predictions. We provide an extensive comparative study of SSVAER with other publicly available semi-supervised and supervised learning methods on two benchmark problems using fixed-size datasets, where we vary the percentage of labelled data available for training. In these experiments, SSVAER achieves the lowest test errors in 11 of the 20 studied cases, compared to other methods where the second best gets 4 lowest test errors out of the 20.

Fingerprints are key tools in climate change detection and attribution (D&A) that are used to determine whether changes in observations are different from internal climate variability (detection), and whether observed changes can be assigned to specific external drivers (attribution). We propose a direct D&A approach based on supervised learning to extract fingerprints that lead to robust predictions under relevant interventions on exogenous variables, i.e., climate drivers other than the target. We employ anchor regression, a distributionally-robust statistical learning method inspired by causal inference that extrapolates well to perturbed data under the interventions considered. The residuals from the prediction achieve either uncorrelatedness or mean independence with the exogenous variables, thus guaranteeing robustness. We define D&A as a unified hypothesis testing framework that relies on the same statistical model but uses different targets and test statistics. In the experiments, we first show that the CO2 forcing can be robustly predicted from temperature spatial patterns under strong interventions on the solar forcing. Second, we illustrate attribution to the greenhouse gases and aerosols while protecting against interventions on the aerosols and CO2 forcing, respectively. Our study shows that incorporating robustness constraints against relevant interventions may significantly benefit detection and attribution of climate change.

Recent studies have found that pain in infancy has a significant impact on infant development, including psychological problems, possible brain injury, and pain sensitivity in adulthood. However, due to the lack of specialists and the fact that infants are unable to express verbally their experience of pain, it is difficult to assess infant pain. Most existing infant pain assessment systems directly apply adult methods to infants ignoring the differences between infant expressions and adult expressions. Meanwhile, as the study of facial action coding system continues to advance, the use of action units (AUs) opens up new possibilities for expression recognition and pain assessment. In this paper, a novel AuE-IPA method is proposed for assessing infant pain by leveraging different engagement levels of AUs. First, different engagement levels of AUs in infant pain are revealed, by analyzing the class activation map of an end-to-end pain assessment model. The intensities of top-engaged AUs are then used in a regression model for achieving automatic infant pain assessment. The model proposed is trained and experimented on YouTube Immunization dataset, YouTube Blood Test dataset, and iCOPEVid dataset. The experimental results show that our AuE-IPA method is more applicable to infants and possesses stronger generalization ability than end-to-end assessment model and the classic PSPI metric.

In a mixed generalized linear model, the objective is to learn multiple signals from unlabeled observations: each sample comes from exactly one signal, but it is not known which one. We consider the prototypical problem of estimating two statistically independent signals in a mixed generalized linear model with Gaussian covariates. Spectral methods are a popular class of estimators which output the top two eigenvectors of a suitable data-dependent matrix. However, despite the wide applicability, their design is still obtained via heuristic considerations, and the number of samples $n$ needed to guarantee recovery is super-linear in the signal dimension $d$. In this paper, we develop exact asymptotics on spectral methods in the challenging proportional regime in which $n, d$ grow large and their ratio converges to a finite constant. By doing so, we are able to optimize the design of the spectral method, and combine it with a simple linear estimator, in order to minimize the estimation error. Our characterization exploits a mix of tools from random matrices, free probability and the theory of approximate message passing algorithms. Numerical simulations for mixed linear regression and phase retrieval display the advantage enabled by our analysis over existing designs of spectral methods.

Datacenter operators ensure fair and regular server maintenance by using automated processes to schedule maintenance jobs to complete within a strict time budget. Automating this scheduling problem is challenging because maintenance job duration varies based on both job type and hardware. While it is tempting to use prior machine learning techniques for predicting job duration, we find that the structure of the maintenance job scheduling problem creates a unique challenge. In particular, we show that prior machine learning methods that produce the lowest error predictions do not produce the best scheduling outcomes due to asymmetric costs. Specifically, underpredicting maintenance job duration has results in more servers being taken offline and longer server downtime than overpredicting maintenance job duration. The system cost of underprediction is much larger than that of overprediction. We present Acela, a machine learning system for predicting maintenance job duration, which uses quantile regression to bias duration predictions toward overprediction. We integrate Acela into a maintenance job scheduler and evaluate it on datasets from large-scale, production datacenters. Compared to machine learning based predictors from prior work, Acela reduces the number of servers that are taken offline by 1.87-4.28X, and reduces the server offline time by 1.40-2.80X.

There are many low-quality free courses and YouTube courses that provide no help in building strong machine learning fundamentals. You will end up even more confused and quit pursuing the career. I am a big advocate of paid courses, but you can also learn a lot from interactive free courses by Udacty, Coursera, and FastAI. These courses cover fundamentals and introduce you to supervised, unsupervised, and deep learning algorithms. You will be introduced to machine learning applications, examples, and building your first linear and logistic regression model on Jupyter Notebook.

When applying for a programming or data science job, machine learning certifications and certificates have the potential to help you stand out from the crowded pool of candidates. Whether you've just completed a course of study or passed an exam offered by a respected institution, obtaining a certificate or certification is a real accomplishment that indicates your knowledge, experience, and expertise in the field of machine learning. But, what certificates and certifications are right for you? In this article, you'll learn more about the difference between certificates and certifications and explore five of the most popular ones for machine learning available today. Though they are often confused, certificates and certifications are not the same.

Model explanation is an essential task in supervised machine learning. Explaining how a model can represent the information is crucial to understanding the dynamics that rule our data. Let's see some models that are easy to interpret. Data Scientists have the role to extract information from raw data. They aren't engineers, nor they are software developers.

Regression is often associated with the task of curve fitting -- given data samples for pairs of random variables (X, Y), find a function y = F (x) that captures the relationship between X and Y as well as possible. As the underlying population for the (X, Y) pairs becomes increasingly complex, much efforts have been devoted to learning more complex models for the (regression) function F; see [20, 49, 15] for some recent examples. In many data domains, however, due to the heterogeneity of the behavior of the response variable Y with respect to covariate X, no single function F can fit the data pairs well, no matter how complex F is. Many authors noticed this challenge and adopted a mixture modeling framework into the regression problem, starting with some earlier work of [51, 6, 14]. To capture the uncertain and highly heterogeneous behavior of response variable Y given covariate X, one needs more than one single regression model. Suppose that there are k different regression behaviors, one can represent the conditional distribution of Y given X by a mixture of k conditional density functions associated with k underlying (latent) subpopulations. One can draw from the existing modeling tools of conditional densities such as generalized linear models [39], or more complex components [28, 63, 22] to increase the model fitness for the regression task. Recently, mixture of regression models (alternatively, regression mixture models) have found their applications in a vast range of domains, including risk estimation [2], education [7], medicine [34, 43, 56] and transportation analysis [46, 47, 64]. Making inferences in mixture of regression models can be done in a classical frequentist framework (e.g., maximum conditional likelihood estimation [6]), or a Bayesian framework [27].