Regardless of where you stand on the matter of Data Science sexiness, it's simply impossible to ignore the continuing importance of data, and our ability to analyze, organize, and contextualize it. Drawing on their vast stores of employment data and employee feedback, Glassdoor ranked Data Scientist #1 in their 25 Best Jobs in America list. So the role is here to stay, but unquestionably, the specifics of what a Data Scientist does will evolve. With technologies like Machine Learning becoming ever-more common place, and emerging fields like Deep Learning gaining significant traction amongst researchers and engineers -- and the companies that hire them -- Data Scientists continue to ride the crest of an incredible wave of innovation and technological progress. While having a strong coding ability is important, data science isn't all about software engineering (in fact, have a good familiarity with Python and you're good to go).

We propose a new method for input variable selection in nonlinear regression. The method is embedded into a kernel regression machine that can model general nonlinear functions, not being a priori limited to additive models. This is the first kernel-based variable selection method applicable to large datasets. It sidesteps the typical poor scaling properties of kernel methods by mapping the inputs into a relatively low-dimensional space of random features. The algorithm discovers the variables relevant for the regression task together with learning the prediction model through learning the appropriate nonlinear random feature maps. We demonstrate the outstanding performance of our method on a set of large-scale synthetic and real datasets.

We describe two applications of machine learning in the context of IP/Optical networks. The first one allows agile management of resources at a core IP/Optical network by using machine learning for short-term and long-term prediction of traffic flows and joint global optimization of IP and optical layers using colorless/directionless (CD) flexible ROADMs. Multilayer coordination allows for significant cost savings, flexible new services to meet dynamic capacity needs, and improved robustness by being able to proactively adapt to new traffic patterns and network conditions. The second application is important as we migrate our metro networks to Open ROADM networks, to allow physical routing without the need for detailed knowledge of optical parameters. We discuss a proof-of-concept study, where detailed performance data for wavelengths on a current flexible ROADM network is used for machine learning to predict the optical performance of each wavelength. Both applications can be efficiently implemented by using a SDN (Software Defined Network) controller.

In statistics, Logistic Regression, or logit regression, or logit model is a regression model where the dependent variable (DV) is categorical. This article covers the case of a binary dependent variable--that is, where the output can take only two values, "0" and "1", which represent outcomes such as pass/fail, win/lose, alive/dead or healthy/sick. Cases where the dependent variable has more than two outcome categories may be analysed in multinomial logistic regression, or, if the multiple categories are ordered, in ordinal logistic regression. In the terminology of economics, logistic regression is an example of a qualitative response/discrete choice model. Logistic Regression was developed by statistician David Cox in 1958.

In real world systems, the predictions of deployed Machine Learned models affect the training data available to build subsequent models. This introduces a bias in the training data that needs to be addressed. Existing solutions to this problem attempt to resolve the problem by either casting this in the reinforcement learning framework or by quantifying the bias and re-weighting the loss functions. In this work, we develop a novel Adversarial Neural Network (ANN) model, an alternative approach which creates a representation of the data that is invariant to the bias. We take the Paid Search auction as our working example and ad display position features as the confounding features for this setting. We show the success of this approach empirically on both synthetic data as well as real world paid search auction data from a major search engine.

In this paper, we study the efficiency of a {\bf R}estarted {\bf S}ub{\bf G}radient (RSG) method that periodically restarts the standard subgradient method (SG). We show that, when applied to a broad class of convex optimization problems, RSG method can find an $\epsilon$-optimal solution with a low complexity than SG method. In particular, we first show that RSG can reduce the dependence of SG's iteration complexity on the distance between the initial solution and the optimal set to that between the $\epsilon$-level set and the optimal set. In addition, we show the advantages of RSG over SG in solving three different families of convex optimization problems. (a) For the problems whose epigraph is a polyhedron, RSG is shown to converge linearly. (b) For the problems with local quadratic growth property, RSG has an $O(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\log(\frac{1}{\epsilon}))$ iteration complexity. (c) For the problems that admit a local Kurdyka-\L ojasiewicz property with a power constant of $\beta\in[0,1)$, RSG has an $O(\frac{1}{\epsilon^{2\beta}}\log(\frac{1}{\epsilon}))$ iteration complexity. On the contrary, with only the standard analysis, the iteration complexity of SG is known to be $O(\frac{1}{\epsilon^2})$ for these three classes of problems. The novelty of our analysis lies at exploiting the lower bound of the first-order optimality residual at the $\epsilon$-level set. It is this novelty that allows us to explore the local properties of functions (e.g., local quadratic growth property, local Kurdyka-\L ojasiewicz property, more generally local error bounds) to develop the improved convergence of RSG. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms on several machine learning tasks including regression and classification.

US army researchers have developed a convolutional neural network and a range of algorithms to recognise faces in the dark. "This technology enables matching between thermal face images and existing biometric face databases or watch lists that only contain visible face imagery," explained Benjamin Riggan on Monday, co-author of the study and an electronics engineer at the US army laboratory. "The technology provides a way for humans to visually compare visible and thermal facial imagery through thermal-to-visible face synthesis." The thermal images are processed and passed to a convolutional neural network to extract facial features using landmarks that mark the corners of the eyes, nose and lips to determine its overall shape. The system, dubbed "multi-region synthesis" is trained with a loss function so that the error between the thermal images and the visible ones is minimized, creating an accurate portrayal of what someone's face looks like despite only glimpsing it in the dark.

Ensembles are popular methods for solving practical supervised learning problems. They reduce the risk of having underperforming models in production-grade software. Although critical, methods for learning heterogeneous regression ensembles have not been proposed at large scale, whereas in classical ML literature, stacking, cascading and voting are mostly restricted to classification problems. Regression poses distinct learning challenges that may result in poor performance, even when using well established homogeneous ensemble schemas such as bagging or boosting. In this paper, we introduce MetaBags, a novel, practically useful stacking framework for regression. MetaBags is a meta-learning algorithm that learns a set of meta-decision trees designed to select one base model (i.e. expert) for each query, and focuses on inductive bias reduction. A set of meta-decision trees are learned using different types of meta-features, specially created for this purpose - to then be bagged at meta-level. This procedure is designed to learn a model with a fair bias-variance trade-off, and its improvement over base model performance is correlated with the prediction diversity of different experts on specific input space subregions. The proposed method and meta-features are designed in such a way that they enable good predictive performance even in subregions of space which are not adequately represented in the available training data. An exhaustive empirical testing of the method was performed, evaluating both generalization error and scalability of the approach on synthetic, open and real-world application datasets. The obtained results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Thermal cameras like FLIR, or Forward Looking Infrared, sensors are actively deployed on aerial and ground vehicles, in watch towers and at check points for surveillance purposes. More recently, thermal cameras are becoming available for use as body-worn cameras. The ability to perform automatic face recognition at nighttime using such thermal cameras is beneficial for informing a Soldier that an individual is someone of interest, like someone who may be on a watch list. The motivations for this technology -- developed by Drs. Benjamin S. Riggan, Nathaniel J. Short and Shuowen "Sean" Hu, from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory -- are to enhance both automatic and human-matching capabilities.

Machine Learning Practitioners have different personalities. While some of them are "I am an expert in X and X can train on any type of data", where X some algorithm, some others are "Right tool for the right job people". A lot of them also subscribe to "Jack of all trades. Master of one" strategy, where they have one area of deep expertise and know slightly about different fields of Machine Learning. That said, no one can deny the fact that as practicing Data Scientists, we will have to know basics of some common machine learning algorithms, which would help us engage with a new-domain problem we come across.