Regression
A Two-Stage Approach to Multivariate Linear Regression with Sparsely Mismatched Data
Slawski, Martin, Ben-David, Emanuel, Li, Ping
A tacit assumption in linear regression is that (response, predictor)-pairs correspond to identical observational units. A series of recent works have studied scenarios in which this assumption is violated under terms such as ``Unlabeled Sensing and ``Regression with Unknown Permutation''. In this paper, we study the setup of multiple response variables and a notion of mismatches that generalizes permutations in order to allow for missing matches as well as for one-to-many matches. A two-stage method is proposed under the assumption that most pairs are correctly matched. In the first stage, the regression parameter is estimated by handling mismatches as contaminations, and subsequently the generalized permutation is estimated by a basic variant of matching. The approach is both computationally convenient and equipped with favorable statistical guarantees. Specifically, it is shown that the conditions for permutation recovery become considerably less stringent as the number of responses $m$ per observation increase. Particularly, for $m = \Omega(\log n)$, the required signal-to-noise ratio does no longer depend on the sample size $n$. Numerical results on synthetic and real data are presented to support the main findings of our analysis.
The Bregman-Tweedie Classification Model
This work proposes the Bregman-Tweedie classification model and analyzes the domain structure of the extended exponential function, an extension of the classic generalized exponential function with additional scaling parameter, and related high-level mathematical structures, such as the Bregman-Tweedie loss function and the Bregman-Tweedie divergence. The base function of this divergence is the convex function of Legendre type induced from the extended exponential function. The Bregman-Tweedie loss function of the proposed classification model is the regular Legendre transformation of the Bregman-Tweedie divergence. This loss function is a polynomial parameterized function between unhinge loss and the logistic loss function. Actually, we have two sub-models of the Bregman-Tweedie classification model; H-Bregman with hinge-like loss function and L-Bregman with logisticlike loss function. Although the proposed classification model is nonconvex and unbounded, empirically, we have observed that the H-Bregman and L-Bregman outperform, in terms of the Friedman ranking, logistic regression and SVM and show reasonable performance in terms of the classification accuracy in the category of the binary linear classification problem. Keywords: Extended exponential function, convex function of Legendre type, Bregman-Tweedie divergence, Bregman-Tweedie classification model, hinge loss, logistic loss.
Medical Concept Representation Learning from Claims Data and Application to Health Plan Payment Risk Adjustment
Zhong, Qiu-Yue, Fairless, Andrew H., McCammon, Jasmine M., Rahmanian, Farbod
Risk adjustment has become an increasingly important tool in healthcare. It has been extensively applied to payment adjustment for health plans to reflect the expected cost of providing coverage for members. Risk adjustment models are typically estimated using linear regression, which does not fully exploit the information in claims data. Moreover, the development of such linear regression models requires substantial domain expert knowledge and computational effort for data preprocessing. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for risk adjustment that uses semantic embeddings to represent patient medical histories. Embeddings efficiently represent medical concepts learned from diagnostic, procedure, and prescription codes in patients' medical histories. This approach substantially reduces the need for feature engineering. Our results show that models using embeddings had better performance than a commercial risk adjustment model on the task of prospective risk score prediction.
Multi-modal Sentiment Analysis using Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis
Sun, Zhongkai, Sarma, Prathusha K, Sethares, William, Bucy, Erik P.
This paper learns multi-modal embeddings from text, audio, and video views/modes of data in order to improve upon down-stream sentiment classification. The experimental framework also allows investigation of the relative contributions of the individual views in the final multi-modal embedding. Individual features derived from the three views are combined into a multi-modal embedding using Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis (DCCA) in two ways i) One-Step DCCA and ii) Two-Step DCCA. This paper learns text embeddings using BERT, the current state-of-the-art in text encoders. We posit that this highly optimized algorithm dominates over the contribution of other views, though each view does contribute to the final result. Classification tasks are carried out on two benchmark datasets and on a new Debate Emotion data set, and together these demonstrate that the one-Step DCCA outperforms the current state-of-the-art in learning multi-modal embeddings.
A Stratification Approach to Partial Dependence for Codependent Variables
Parr, Terence, Wilson, James D.
Model interpretability is important to machine learning practitioners, and a key component of interpretation is the characterization of partial dependence of the response variable on any subset of features used in the model. The two most common strategies for assessing partial dependence suffer from a number of critical weaknesses. In the first strategy, linear regression model coefficients describe how a unit change in an explanatory variable changes the response, while holding other variables constant. But, linear regression is inapplicable for high dimensional (p>n) data sets and is often insufficient to capture the relationship between explanatory variables and the response. In the second strategy, Partial Dependence (PD) plots and Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) plots give biased results for the common situation of codependent variables and they rely on fitted models provided by the user. When the supplied model is a poor choice due to systematic bias or overfitting, PD/ICE plots provide little (if any) useful information. To address these issues, we introduce a new strategy, called StratPD, that does not depend on a user's fitted model, provides accurate results in the presence codependent variables, and is applicable to high dimensional settings. The strategy works by stratifying a data set into groups of observations that are similar, except in the variable of interest, through the use of a decision tree. Any fluctuations of the response variable within a group is likely due to the variable of interest. We apply StratPD to a collection of simulations and case studies to show that StratPD is a fast, reliable, and robust method for assessing partial dependence with clear advantages over state-of-the-art methods.
Best Split Nodes for Regression Trees
Decision trees with binary splits are popularly constructed using Classification and Regression Trees (CART) methodology. For regression models, this approach recursively divides the data into two near-homogenous daughter nodes according to a split point that maximizes the reduction in sum of squares error (the impurity) along a particular variable. This paper aims to study the bias and adaptive properties of regression trees constructed with CART. In doing so, we derive an interesting connection between the bias and the mean decrease in impurity (MDI) measure of variable importance---a tool widely used for model interpretability---defined as the sum of impurity reductions over all non-terminal nodes in the tree. In particular, we show that the size of a terminal subnode for a variable is small when the MDI for that variable is large and that this relationship is exponential---confirming theoretically that decision trees with CART have small bias and are adaptive to signal strength and direction. Finally, we apply these individual tree bounds to tree ensembles and show consistency of Breiman's random forests. The context is surprisingly general and applies to a wide variety of multivariable data generating distributions and regression functions. The main technical tool is an exact characterization of the conditional probability content of the daughter nodes arising from an optimal split, in terms of the partial dependence function and reduction in impurity.
Ten Machine Learning Algorithms You Should Know to Become a Data Scientist
Let's say I am given an Excel sheet with data about various fruits and I have to tell which look like Apples. What I will do is ask a question "Which fruits are red and round?" and divide all fruits which answer yes and no to the question. Now, All Red and Round fruits might not be apples and all apples won't be red and round. So I will ask a question "Which fruits have red or yellow colour hints on them? " on red and round fruits and will ask "Which fruits are green and round?" on not red and round fruits. Based on these questions I can tell with considerable accuracy which are apples. This cascade of questions is what a decision tree is. However, this is a decision tree based on my intuition.
Estimation and Feature Selection in Mixtures of Generalized Linear Experts Models
Huynh, Bao Tuyen, Chamroukhi, Faicel
Mixtures-of-Experts (MoE) are conditional mixture models that have shown their performance in modeling heterogeneity in data in many statistical learning approaches for prediction, including regression and classification, as well as for clustering. Their estimation in high-dimensional problems is still however challenging. We consider the problem of parameter estimation and feature selection in MoE models with different generalized linear experts models, and propose a regularized maximum likelihood estimation that efficiently encourages sparse solutions for heterogeneous data with high-dimensional predictors. The developed proximal-Newton EM algorithm includes proximal Newton-type procedures to update the model parameter by monotonically maximizing the objective function and allows to perform efficient estimation and feature selection. An experimental study shows the good performance of the algorithms in terms of recovering the actual sparse solutions, parameter estimation, and clustering of heterogeneous regression data, compared to the main state-of-the art competitors.
Heart of Darkness: Logistic Regression vs. Random Forest
The'functional needs repair' category of the target variable only makes up about 7% of the whole set. The implication is that whatever algorithm you end up using it's probably going to learn the other two balanced classes a lot better than this one. Such is data science: the struggle is real. The first thing we're going to do is create an'age' variable for the waterpoints as that seems highly relevant. The'population' variable also has a highly right-skewed distribution so we're going to change that as well: The zeros inside of the'amount_tsh' are also probably NaNs so we're going to do something drastic and simplify it into 0s and 1s: One of the most important points we learned from the week before and something that will stay with me is the idea of coming up with a baseline model as fast as one can.
Mid-price Prediction Based on Machine Learning Methods with Technical and Quantitative Indicators
Ntakaris, Adamantios, Kanniainen, Juho, Gabbouj, Moncef, Iosifidis, Alexandros
Stock price prediction is a challenging task, but machine learning methods have recently been used successfully for this purpose. In this paper, we extract over 270 hand-crafted features (factors) inspired by technical and quantitative analysis and tested their validity on short-term mid-price movement prediction. We focus on a wrapper feature selection method using entropy, least-mean squares, and linear discriminant analysis. We also build a new quantitative feature based on adaptive logistic regression for online learning, which is constantly selected first among the majority of the proposed feature selection methods. This study examines the best combination of features using high frequency limit order book data from Nasdaq Nordic. Our results suggest that sorting methods and classifiers can be used in such a way that one can reach the best performance with a combination of only very few advanced hand-crafted features.