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 Statistical Learning


Balanced Multi-Relational Graph Clustering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-relational graph clustering has demonstrated remarkable success in uncovering underlying patterns in complex networks. Representative methods manage to align different views motivated by advances in contrastive learning. Our empirical study finds the pervasive presence of imbalance in real-world graphs, which is in principle contradictory to the motivation of alignment. In this paper, we first propose a novel metric, the Aggregation Class Distance, to empirically quantify structural disparities among different graphs. To address the challenge of view imbalance, we propose Balanced Multi-Relational Graph Clustering (BMGC), comprising unsupervised dominant view mining and dual signals guided representation learning. It dynamically mines the dominant view throughout the training process, synergistically improving clustering performance with representation learning. Theoretical analysis ensures the effectiveness of dominant view mining. Extensive experiments and in-depth analysis on real-world and synthetic datasets showcase that BMGC achieves state-of-the-art performance, underscoring its superiority in addressing the view imbalance inherent in multi-relational graphs. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/zxlearningdeep/BMGC.


Sparse outlier-robust PCA for multi-source data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Principal component analysis (PCA) is undoubtedly one of the most important unsupervised statistical methods available. The basic idea is to project the observations in a given dataset onto a new vector space with orthonormal basis where each basis vector is a linear combination of the original variables constructed to capture the highest variability for the first basis vector, the second highest variability for the second basis vector and so on. The new variables are called Principal Components (PC), the coordinates of the PCs in the original variable space are called loadings and the coordinates of the observations with respect to the PCs are called scores. Often, only the first few PCs that catch a majority of the variance and thus of the available information are analyzed. As such, PCA finds widespread application across numerous areas, such as dimensionality reduction, visualization, clustering, feature engineering and many more. For standard PCA we get loadings that are often a combination of all variables involved. Especially nowadays with datasets consisting of many variables, sensible, efficient and correct interpretation of scores and loadings can get difficult. Moreover, by implicitly (or also explicitly) focusing the interpretation on large (absolute) loading entries and ignoring small ones, misleading interpretation results can be produced as discussed in Cadima and Jolliffe (1995). Therefore, induced sparsity in the loading entries is necessary to ensure correct interpretation of PCA results.


Neural information field filter

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We introduce neural information field filter, a Bayesian state and parameter estimation method for high-dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems given large measurement datasets. Solving such a problem using traditional methods, such as Kalman and particle filters, is computationally expensive. Information field theory is a Bayesian approach that can efficiently reconstruct dynamical model state paths and calibrate model parameters from noisy measurement data. To apply the method, we parameterize the time evolution state path using the span of a finite linear basis. The existing method has to reparameterize the state path by initial states to satisfy the initial condition. Designing an expressive yet simple linear basis before knowing the true state path is crucial for inference accuracy but challenging. Moreover, reparameterizing the state path using the initial state is easy to perform for a linear basis, but is nontrivial for more complex and expressive function parameterizations, such as neural networks. The objective of this paper is to simplify and enrich the class of state path parameterizations using neural networks for the information field theory approach. To this end, we propose a generalized physics-informed conditional prior using an auxiliary initial state. We show the existing reparameterization is a special case. We parameterize the state path using a residual neural network that consists of a linear basis function and a Fourier encoding fully connected neural network residual function. The residual function aims to correct the error of the linear basis function. To sample from the intractable posterior distribution, we develop an optimization algorithm, nested stochastic variational inference, and a sampling algorithm, nested preconditioned stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics. A series of numerical and experimental examples verify and validate the proposed method.


Adaptive Differentially Private Structural Entropy Minimization for Unsupervised Social Event Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Social event detection refers to extracting relevant message clusters from social media data streams to represent specific events in the real world. Social event detection is important in numerous areas, such as opinion analysis, social safety, and decision-making. Most current methods are supervised and require access to large amounts of data. These methods need prior knowledge of the events and carry a high risk of leaking sensitive information in the messages, making them less applicable in open-world settings. Therefore, conducting unsupervised detection while fully utilizing the rich information in the messages and protecting data privacy remains a significant challenge. To this end, we propose a novel social event detection framework, ADP-SEMEvent, an unsupervised social event detection method that prioritizes privacy. Specifically, ADP-SEMEvent is divided into two stages, i.e., the construction stage of the private message graph and the clustering stage of the private message graph. In the first stage, an adaptive differential privacy approach is used to construct a private message graph. In this process, our method can adaptively apply differential privacy based on the events occurring each day in an open environment to maximize the use of the privacy budget. In the second stage, to address the reduction in data utility caused by noise, a novel 2-dimensional structural entropy minimization algorithm based on optimal subgraphs is used to detect events in the message graph. The highlight of this process is unsupervised and does not compromise differential privacy. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that ADP-SEMEvent can achieve detection performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining reasonable privacy budget parameters.


On the Parameter Identifiability of Partially Observed Linear Causal Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Linear causal models are important tools for modeling causal dependencies and yet in practice, only a subset of the variables can be observed. In this paper, we examine the parameter identifiability of these models by investigating whether the edge coefficients can be recovered given the causal structure and partially observed data. Our setting is more general than that of prior research - we allow all variables, including both observed and latent ones, to be flexibly related, and we consider the coefficients of all edges, whereas most existing works focus only on the edges between observed variables. Theoretically, we identify three types of indeterminacy for the parameters in partially observed linear causal models. We then provide graphical conditions that are sufficient for all parameters to be identifiable and show that some of them are provably necessary. Methodologically, we propose a novel likelihood-based parameter estimation method that addresses the variance indeterminacy of latent variables in a specific way and can asymptotically recover the underlying parameters up to trivial indeterminacy. Empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate our identifiability theory and the effectiveness of the proposed method in the finite-sample regime.


Representation Magnitude has a Liability to Privacy Vulnerability

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The privacy-preserving approaches to machine learning (ML) models have made substantial progress in recent years. However, it is still opaque in which circumstances and conditions the model becomes privacy-vulnerable, leading to a challenge for ML models to maintain both performance and privacy. In this paper, we first explore the disparity between member and non-member data in the representation of models under common training frameworks. We identify how the representation magnitude disparity correlates with privacy vulnerability and address how this correlation impacts privacy vulnerability. Based on the observations, we propose Saturn Ring Classifier Module (SRCM), a plug-in model-level solution to mitigate membership privacy leakage. Through a confined yet effective representation space, our approach ameliorates models' privacy vulnerability while maintaining generalizability. The code of this work can be found here: \url{https://github.com/JEKimLab/AIES2024_SRCM}


Artificial Intelligence-based Decision Support Systems for Precision and Digital Health

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Precision health, increasingly supported by digital technologies, is a domain of research that broadens the paradigm of precision medicine, advancing everyday healthcare. This vision goes hand in hand with the groundbreaking advent of artificial intelligence (AI), which is reshaping the way we diagnose, treat, and monitor both clinical subjects and the general population. AI tools powered by machine learning have shown considerable improvements in a variety of healthcare domains. In particular, reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for sequential and dynamic problems such as dynamic treatment regimes and just-in-time adaptive interventions in digital health. In this work, we discuss the opportunity offered by AI, more specifically RL, to current trends in healthcare, providing a methodological survey of RL methods in the context of precision and digital health. Focusing on the area of adaptive interventions, we expand the methodological survey with illustrative case studies that used RL in real practice. This invited article has undergone anonymous review and is intended as a book chapter for the volume "Frontiers of Statistics and Data Science" edited by Subhashis Ghoshal and Anindya Roy for the International Indian Statistical Association Series on Statistics and Data Science, published by Springer. It covers the material from a short course titled "Artificial Intelligence in Precision and Digital Health" taught by the author Bibhas Chakraborty at the IISA 2022 Conference, December 26-30 2022, at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.


MiranDa: Mimicking the Learning Processes of Human Doctors to Achieve Causal Inference for Medication Recommendation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

To enhance therapeutic outcomes from a pharmacological perspective, we propose MiranDa, designed for medication recommendation, which is the first actionable model capable of providing the estimated length of stay in hospitals (ELOS) as counterfactual outcomes that guide clinical practice and model training. In detail, MiranDa emulates the educational trajectory of doctors through two gradient-scaling phases shifted by ELOS: an Evidence-based Training Phase that utilizes supervised learning and a Therapeutic Optimization Phase grounds in reinforcement learning within the gradient space, explores optimal medications by perturbations from ELOS. Evaluation of the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III dataset and IV dataset, showcased the superior results of our model across five metrics, particularly in reducing the ELOS. Surprisingly, our model provides structural attributes of medication combinations proved in hyperbolic space and advocated "procedure-specific" medication combinations. These findings posit that MiranDa enhanced medication efficacy. Notably, our paradigm can be applied to nearly all medical tasks and those with information to evaluate predicted outcomes. The source code of the MiranDa model is available at https://github.com/azusakou/MiranDa.


Estimating Distributional Treatment Effects in Randomized Experiments: Machine Learning for Variance Reduction

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We propose a novel regression adjustment method designed for estimating distributional treatment effect parameters in randomized experiments. Randomized experiments have been extensively used to estimate treatment effects in various scientific fields. However, to gain deeper insights, it is essential to estimate distributional treatment effects rather than relying solely on average effects. Our approach incorporates pre-treatment covariates into a distributional regression framework, utilizing machine learning techniques to improve the precision of distributional treatment effect estimators. The proposed approach can be readily implemented with off-the-shelf machine learning methods and remains valid as long as the nuisance components are reasonably well estimated. Also, we establish the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator and present a uniformly valid inference method. Through simulation results and real data analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating machine learning techniques in reducing the variance of distributional treatment effect estimators in finite samples.


GraphScale: A Framework to Enable Machine Learning over Billion-node Graphs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for supervised machine learning over graph-structured data, while sampling-based node representation learning is widely utilized in unsupervised learning. However, scalability remains a major challenge in both supervised and unsupervised learning for large graphs (e.g., those with over 1 billion nodes). The scalability bottleneck largely stems from the mini-batch sampling phase in GNNs and the random walk sampling phase in unsupervised methods. These processes often require storing features or embeddings in memory. In the context of distributed training, they require frequent, inefficient random access to data stored across different workers. Such repeated inter-worker communication for each mini-batch leads to high communication overhead and computational inefficiency. We propose GraphScale, a unified framework for both supervised and unsupervised learning to store and process large graph data distributedly. The key insight in our design is the separation of workers who store data and those who perform the training. This separation allows us to decouple computing and storage in graph training, thus effectively building a pipeline where data fetching and data computation can overlap asynchronously. Our experiments show that GraphScale outperforms state-of-the-art methods for distributed training of both GNNs and node embeddings. We evaluate GraphScale both on public and proprietary graph datasets and observe a reduction of at least 40% in end-to-end training times compared to popular distributed frameworks, without any loss in performance. While most existing methods don't support billion-node graphs for training node embeddings, GraphScale is currently deployed in production at TikTok enabling efficient learning over such large graphs.