A fundamental challenge in contextual bandits is to develop flexible, general-purpose algorithms with computational requirements no worse than classical supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. Algorithms based on regression have shown promising empirical success, but theoretical guarantees have remained elusive except in special cases. We provide the first universal and optimal reduction from contextual bandits to online regression. We show how to transform any oracle for online regression with a given value function class into an algorithm for contextual bandits with the induced policy class, with no overhead in runtime or memory requirements. We characterize the minimax rates for contextual bandits with general, potentially nonparametric function classes, and show that our algorithm is minimax optimal whenever the oracle obtains the optimal rate for regression. Compared to previous results, our algorithm requires no distributional assumptions beyond realizability, and works even when contexts are chosen adversarially.

Cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) are at the center of health economic decision making. While these analyses help policy analysts and economists determine coverage, inform policy, and guide resource allocation, they are statistically challenging for several reasons. Cost and effectiveness are correlated and follow complex joint distributions which cannot be captured parametrically. Effectiveness (often measured as increased survival time) and cost both tend to be right-censored. Moreover, CEAs are often conducted using observational data with non-random treatment assignment. Policy-relevant causal estimation therefore requires robust confounding control. Finally, current CEA methods do not address cost-effectiveness heterogeneity in a principled way - opting to either present marginal results or cost-effectiveness results for pre-specified subgroups. Motivated by these challenges, we develop a nonparametric Bayesian model for joint cost-survival distributions in the presence of censoring. Our approach utilizes an Enriched Dirichlet Process prior on the covariate effects of cost and survival time, while using a separate Gamma Process prior on the baseline survival time hazard. Causal CEA estimands are identified and estimated via a Bayesian nonparametric g-computation procedure. Finally, we propose leveraging the induced clustering of the Enriched Dirichlet Process to adaptively discover subgroups of patients with different cost-effectiveness profiles. We outline an MCMC procedure for full posterior inference, evaluate frequentist properties via simulations, and apply our model to an observational study of endometrial cancer therapies using medical insurance claims data.

We consider the problem of learning a coefficient vector $x_{0}$ in $R^{N}$ from noisy linear observations $y=Fx_{0}+w$ in $R^{M}$ in the high dimensional limit $M,N$ to infinity with $\alpha=M/N$ fixed. We provide a rigorous derivation of an explicit formula -- first conjectured using heuristic methods from statistical physics -- for the asymptotic mean squared error obtained by penalized convex regression estimators such as the LASSO or the elastic net, for a class of very generic random matrices corresponding to rotationally invariant data matrices with arbitrary spectrum. The proof is based on a convergence analysis of an oracle version of vector approximate message-passing (oracle-VAMP) and on the properties of its state evolution equations. Our method leverages on and highlights the link between vector approximate message-passing, Douglas-Rachford splitting and proximal descent algorithms, extending previous results obtained with i.i.d. matrices for a large class of problems. We illustrate our results on some concrete examples and show that even though they are asymptotic, our predictions agree remarkably well with numerics even for very moderate sizes.

Complex black-box predictive models may have high performance, but lack of interpretability causes problems like lack of trust, lack of stability, sensitivity to concept drift. On the other hand, achieving satisfactory accuracy of interpretable models require more time-consuming work related to feature engineering. Can we train interpretable and accurate models, without timeless feature engineering? We propose a method that uses elastic black-boxes as surrogate models to create a simpler, less opaque, yet still accurate and interpretable glass-box models. New models are created on newly engineered features extracted with the help of a surrogate model. We supply the analysis by a large-scale benchmark on several tabular data sets from the OpenML database. There are two results 1) extracting information from complex models may improve the performance of linear models, 2) questioning a common myth that complex machine learning models outperform linear models.

I am avoiding repeating same models with Python but included linear regression & logistic regression for continuation purpose. Going forward, I will cover other techniques with Python like image recognition, sentiment analysis etc. Image recognition is in progress & course will be updated soon with it. Unlike most machine learning courses out there, the Complete Machine Learning & Data Science with R-2019 is comprehensive. We are not only covering popular machine learning techniques but also additional techniques like ANOVA & CART techniques. Course is structured into various parts like R programming, data selection & manipulation, applied statistics & data visualization. This will help you with the structure of data science and machine learning.

We frequently come out with resources for aspirants and job seekers in data science to help them make a career in this vibrant field. Cracking interviews especially where understating of machine learning is needed can be tricky. Here are 60 most commonly asked interview questions for data scientists, broken into linear regression, logistic regression and clustering.

Tree-based algorithms for supervised learning, such as Classification and Regression Trees (CART) (Breiman et al., 1984), random forests (Breiman, 1996, 2001), adaBoost (Freund and Schapire, 1997), and gradient boosting (Breiman, 1997; Friedman, 2001, 2002), are widely used for applied supervised learning. As a whole, these methods are popular in applied settings due to their speed and accuracy in mean estimation and out-of-sample prediction tasks. One limitation of such methods is their well-known sensitivity to tuning parameters, which require costly cross-validation to optimize. Bayesian additive regression trees (BART) (Chipman et al., 2007, 2010) is a popular model-based alternative that is often more accurate than other treebased methods; specifically, BART boasts valuable robustness to the choice of tuning-parameters. However, relative to random forests and boosting, BART's wider adoption has been slowed by its more severe computational demands, owing to its reliance on a random walk Metropolis-Hastings Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Despite this limitation, BART has inspired a considerable body of research in recent years.

We provide a methodology for learning sparse statistical models that use as features all possible multiplicative interactions among an underlying atomic set of features. While the resulting optimization problems are exponentially sized, our methodology leads to algorithms that can often solve these problems exactly or provide approximate solutions based on combining highly correlated features. We also introduce an algorithmic paradigm, the Fine Control Kernel framework, so named because it is based on Fenchel Duality and is reminiscent of kernel methods. Its theory is tailored to large sparse learning problems, and it leads to efficient feature screening rules for interactions. These rules are inspired by the Apriori algorithm for market basket analysis -- which also falls under the purview of Fine Control Kernels, and can be applied to a plurality of learning problems including the Lasso and sparse matrix estimation. Experiments on biomedical datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our methodology in deriving algorithms that efficiently produce interactions models which achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and are interpretable.

Let's review the concepts underlying Bayesian statistical analysis by walking through a simple classification model. The data come from the 1988 Bangladesh Fertility Survey, where 1934 observations were taken from women in urban and rural areas. The authors of the dataset, Mn and Cleland aimed to determine trends and causes of fertility as well as differences in fertility and child mortality. We will use the data in order to train a Bayesian logistic regression model that can predict if a given woman uses contraception. The dataset is well suited to Bayesian logistic regression because being able to quantify uncertainty when analyzing fertility is the major component of population dynamics that decide the size, structure, and composition of populations (source 1, source 2).

Feature selection from a large number of covariates (aka features) in a regression analysis remains a challenge in data science, especially in terms of its potential of scaling to ever-enlarging data and finding a group of scientifically meaningful features. For example, to develop new, responsive drug targets for ovarian cancer, the actual false discovery rate (FDR) of a practical feature selection procedure must also match the target FDR. The popular approach to feature selection, when true features are sparse, is to use a penalized likelihood or a shrinkage estimation, such as a LASSO, SCAD, Elastic Net, or MCP procedure (call them benchmark procedures). We present a different approach using a new subsampling method, called the Subsampling Winner algorithm (SWA). The central idea of SWA is analogous to that used for the selection of US national merit scholars. SWA uses a "base procedure" to analyze each of the subsamples, computes the scores of all features according to the performance of each feature from all subsample analyses, obtains the "semifinalist" based on the resulting scores, and then determines the "finalists," i.e., the most important features. Due to its subsampling nature, SWA can scale to data of any dimension in principle. The SWA also has the best-controlled actual FDR in comparison with the benchmark procedures and the randomForest, while having a competitive true-feature discovery rate. We also suggest practical add-on strategies to SWA with or without a penalized benchmark procedure to further assure the chance of "true" discovery. Our application of SWA to the ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma specimens from the Broad Institute revealed functionally important genes and pathways, which we verified by additional genomics tools. This second-stage investigation is essential in the current discussion of the proper use of P-values.