Real estate appraisal is a complex and important task, that can be made more precise and faster with the help of automated valuation tools. Usually the value of some property is determined by taking into account both structural and geographical characteristics. However, while geographical information is easily found, obtaining significant structural information requires the intervention of a real estate expert, a professional appraiser. In this paper we propose a Web data acquisition methodology, and a Machine Learning model, that can be used to automatically evaluate real estate properties. This method uses data from previous appraisal documents, from the advertised prices of similar properties found via Web crawling, and from open data describing the characteristics of a corresponding geographical area. We describe a case study, applicable to the whole Italian territory, and initially trained on a data set of individual homes located in the city of Turin, and analyze prediction and practical applicability.

Power load forecast with Machine Learning is a fairly mature application of artificial intelligence and it is indispensable in operation, control and planning. Data selection techniqies have been hardly used in this application. However, the use of such techniques could be beneficial provided the assumption that the data is identically distributed is clearly not true in load forecasting, but it is cyclostationary. In this work we present a fully automatic methodology to determine what are the most adequate data to train a predictor which is based on a full Bayesian probabilistic model. We assess the performance of the method with experiments based on real publicly available data recorded from several years in the United States of America.

Data Science, Business Analytics or Business Intelligence all of these are birds of the same nest and they have some features in common, It is safe to say that they are same same but different. One of the common features is the algorithms and models to compare, analyse and predict stuff. Some of the most commonly used machine learning algorithms with mathematics are explained as follows. Linear regression tries to represent the relationship between two variables by fitting a linear equation. Where, One variable is illustrative, and the other is supposed to be dependent.

Despite impressive performance on many text classification tasks, deep neural networks tend to learn frequent superficial patterns that are specific to the training data and do not always generalize well. In this work, we observe this limitation with respect to the task of native language identification . We find that standard text classifiers which perform well on the test set end up learning topical features which are confounds of the prediction task (e.g., if the input text mentions Sweden, the classifier predicts that the author's native language is Swedish). We propose a method that represents the latent topical confounds and a model which "unlearns" confounding features by predicting both the label of the input text and the confound; but we train the two predictors adversarially in an alternating fashion to learn a text representation that predicts the correct label but is less prone to using information about the confound. We show that this model generalizes better and learns features that are indicative of the writing style rather than the content.

UPDATE: You will always find the latest Python script (with the linear regression class definition and methods) HERE. Use it to build further or experiment. Data scientists often come from a background which is quite far removed from traditional computer science/software engineering -- physics, biology, statistics, economics, electrical engineering, etc. But ultimately, they are expected to pick up a sufficient amount of programming/software engineering to be truly impactful for their organization and business. Being a Data Scientist does not make you a Software Engineer! And, what is at the heart of most modern programming languages and software engineering paradigms?

This course will teach you regression analysis for both statistical data analysis and machine learning in Python in a practical hands-on manner. It explores the relevant concepts in a practical manner from basic to expert level. This course can help you achieve better grades, give you new analysis tools for your academic career, implement your knowledge in a work setting & make business forecasting related decisions...All of this while exploring the wisdom of an Oxford and Cambridge educated researcher. Most statistics and machine learning courses and books only touch upon the basic aspects of regression analysis. This does not teach the students about all the different regression analysis techniques they can apply to their own data in both academic and business setting, resulting in inaccurate modelling.

When the data is distributed across multiple servers, efficient data exchange between the servers (or workers) for solving the distributed learning problem is an important problem and is the focus of this paper. We propose a fast, privacy-aware, and communication-efficient decentralized framework to solve the distributed machine learning (DML) problem. The proposed algorithm, GADMM, is based on Alternating Direct Method of Multiplier (ADMM) algorithm. The key novelty in GADMM is that each worker exchanges the locally trained model only with two neighboring workers, thereby training a global model with lower amount of communication in each exchange. We prove that GADMM converges faster than the centralized batch gradient descent for convex loss functions, and numerically show that it is faster and more communication-efficient than the state-of-the-art communication-efficient centralized algorithms such as the Lazily Aggregated Gradient (LAG), in linear and logistic regression tasks on synthetic and real datasets. Furthermore, we propose Dynamic GADMM (D-GADMM), a variant of GADMM, and prove its convergence under time-varying network topology of the workers.

We consider a crowdsourcing data acquisition scenario, such as federated learning, where a Center collects data points from a set of rational Agents, with the aim of training a model. For linear regression models, we show how a payment structure can be designed to incentivize the agents to provide high-quality data as early as possible, based on a characterization of the influence that data points have on the loss function of the model. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: (a) we prove theoretically that this scheme ensures truthful data reporting as a game-theoretic equilibrium and further demonstrate its robustness against mixtures of truthful and heuristic data reports, (b) we design a procedure according to which the influence computation can be efficiently approximated and processed sequentially in batches over time, (c) we develop a theory that allows correcting the difference between the influence and the overall change in loss and (d) we evaluate our approach on real datasets, confirming our theoretical findings.

This review presents machine learning (ML) approaches from an applied economist's perspective. We first introduce the key ML methods drawing connections to econometric practice. We then identify current limitations of the econometric and simulation model toolbox in applied economics and explore potential solutions afforded by ML. We dive into cases such as inflexible functional forms, unstructured data sources and large numbers of explanatory variables in both prediction and causal analysis, and highlight the challenges of complex simulation models. Finally, we argue that economists have a vital role in addressing the shortcomings of ML when used for quantitative economic analysis. Machine learning (ML) offers great potential for expanding the applied economist's toolbox. ML tools are beginning to be employed in economic analysis (März et al., 2016; Crane-Droesch, 2017; Athey, 2019), while some researchers raise concerns about their transparency, interpretability and use for ...

Now, it's clear that if we use a linear activation function (identity activation function), then the Neural Network will output linear output of the input. This loses much of the representational power of the neural network as often times the output that we are trying to predict has a non-linear relationship with the inputs. It can be shown that if we use a linear activation function for a hidden layer and sigmoid function for an output layer, our model becomes logistic regression model. Due to the fact that a composition of two linear functions is linear function, our area of implementing such Neural Network reduces rapidly. Rare implementation example can be solving regression problem in machine learning (where we use linear activation function in hidden layer).