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 Statistical Learning


Combining Statistical Depth and Fermat Distance for Uncertainty Quantification

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We measure the Out-of-domain uncertainty in the prediction of Neural Networks using a statistical notion called ``Lens Depth'' (LD) combined with Fermat Distance, which is able to capture precisely the ``depth'' of a point with respect to a distribution in feature space, without any assumption about the form of distribution. Our method has no trainable parameter. The method is applicable to any classification model as it is applied directly in feature space at test time and does not intervene in training process. As such, it does not impact the performance of the original model. The proposed method gives excellent qualitative result on toy datasets and can give competitive or better uncertainty estimation on standard deep learning datasets compared to strong baseline methods.


Persistent Classification: A New Approach to Stability of Data and Adversarial Examples

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

There are a number of hypotheses underlying the existence of adversarial examples for classification problems. These include the high-dimensionality of the data, high codimension in the ambient space of the data manifolds of interest, and that the structure of machine learning models may encourage classifiers to develop decision boundaries close to data points. This article proposes a new framework for studying adversarial examples that does not depend directly on the distance to the decision boundary. Similarly to the smoothed classifier literature, we define a (natural or adversarial) data point to be $(\gamma,\sigma)$-stable if the probability of the same classification is at least $\gamma$ for points sampled in a Gaussian neighborhood of the point with a given standard deviation $\sigma$. We focus on studying the differences between persistence metrics along interpolants of natural and adversarial points. We show that adversarial examples have significantly lower persistence than natural examples for large neural networks in the context of the MNIST and ImageNet datasets. We connect this lack of persistence with decision boundary geometry by measuring angles of interpolants with respect to decision boundaries. Finally, we connect this approach with robustness by developing a manifold alignment gradient metric and demonstrating the increase in robustness that can be achieved when training with the addition of this metric.


$F_\beta$-plot -- a visual tool for evaluating imbalanced data classifiers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

One of the significant problems associated with imbalanced data classification is the lack of reliable metrics. This runs primarily from the fact that for most real-life (as well as commonly used benchmark) problems, we do not have information from the user on the actual form of the loss function that should be minimized. Although it is pretty common to have metrics indicating the classification quality within each class, for the end user, the analysis of several such metrics is then required, which in practice causes difficulty in interpreting the usefulness of a given classifier. Hence, many aggregate metrics have been proposed or adopted for the imbalanced data classification problem, but there is still no consensus on which should be used. An additional disadvantage is their ambiguity and systematic bias toward one class. Moreover, their use in analyzing experimental results in recognition of those classification models that perform well for the chosen aggregated metrics is burdened with the drawbacks mentioned above. Hence, the paper proposes a simple approach to analyzing the popular parametric metric $F_\beta$. We point out that it is possible to indicate for a given pool of analyzed classifiers when a given model should be preferred depending on user requirements.


On adversarial training and the 1 Nearest Neighbor classifier

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The ability to fool deep learning classifiers with tiny perturbations of the input has lead to the development of adversarial training in which the loss with respect to adversarial examples is minimized in addition to the training examples. While adversarial training improves the robustness of the learned classifiers, the procedure is computationally expensive, sensitive to hyperparameters and may still leave the classifier vulnerable to other types of small perturbations. In this paper we analyze the adversarial robustness of the 1 Nearest Neighbor (1NN) classifier and compare its performance to adversarial training. We prove that under reasonable assumptions, the 1 NN classifier will be robust to {\em any} small image perturbation of the training images and will give high adversarial accuracy on test images as the number of training examples goes to infinity. In experiments with 45 different binary image classification problems taken from CIFAR10, we find that 1NN outperform TRADES (a powerful adversarial training algorithm) in terms of average adversarial accuracy. In additional experiments with 69 pretrained robust models for CIFAR10, we find that 1NN outperforms almost all of them in terms of robustness to perturbations that are only slightly different from those seen during training. Taken together, our results suggest that modern adversarial training methods still fall short of the robustness of the simple 1NN classifier. our code can be found at https://github.com/amirhagai/On-Adversarial-Training-And-The-1-Nearest-Neighbor-Classifier


Streaming detection of significant delay changes in public transport systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Public transport systems are expected to reduce pollution and contribute to sustainable development. However, disruptions in public transport such as delays may negatively affect mobility choices. To quantify delays, aggregated data from vehicle locations systems are frequently used. However, delays observed at individual stops are caused inter alia by fluctuations in running times and propagation of delays occurring in other locations. Hence, in this work, we propose both the method detecting significant delays and reference architecture, relying on stream processing engines, in which the method is implemented. The method can complement the calculation of delays defined as deviation from schedules. This provides both online rather than batch identification of significant and repetitive delays, and resilience to the limited quality of location data. The method we propose can be used with different change detectors, such as ADWIN, applied to location data stream shuffled to individual edges of a transport graph. It can detect in an online manner at which edges statistically significant delays are observed and at which edges delays arise and are reduced. Detections can be used to model mobility choices and quantify the impact of repetitive rather than random disruptions on feasible trips with multimodal trip modelling engines. The evaluation performed with the public transport data of over 2000 vehicles confirms the merits of the method and reveals that a limited-size subgraph of a transport system graph causes statistically significant delays


Predictive Modelling of Air Quality Index (AQI) Across Diverse Cities and States of India using Machine Learning: Investigating the Influence of Punjab's Stubble Burning on AQI Variability

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Air pollution is a common and serious problem nowadays and it cannot be ignored as it has harmful impacts on human health. To address this issue proactively, people should be aware of their surroundings, which means the environment where they survive. With this motive, this research has predicted the AQI based on different air pollutant concentrations in the atmosphere. The dataset used for this research has been taken from the official website of CPCB. The dataset has the air pollutant concentration from 22 different monitoring stations in different cities of Delhi, Haryana, and Punjab. This data is checked for null values and outliers. But, the most important thing to note is the correct understanding and imputation of such values rather than ignoring or doing wrong imputation. The time series data has been used in this research which is tested for stationarity using The Dickey-Fuller test. Further different ML models like CatBoost, XGBoost, Random Forest, SVM regressor, time series model SARIMAX, and deep learning model LSTM have been used to predict AQI. For the performance evaluation of different models, I used MSE, RMSE, MAE, and R2. It is observed that Random Forest performed better as compared to other models. NTRODUCTION Putting all the life threats aside, air pollution is the deadliest health threat to all species. In other words, it can be called a silent killer. It is estimated by WHO, that around 7 million people die every year this is because of the presence of deadly fine particles in the air, which lead to diseases such as stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and respiratory infections, including pneumonia.


Machine Learning-based Approach for Ex-post Assessment of Community Risk and Resilience Based on Coupled Human-infrastructure Systems Performance

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

There is a limitation in the literature of data-driven analyses for the ex-post evaluation of community risk and resilience, particularly using features related to the performance of coupled human-infrastructure systems. To address this gap, in this study we created a machine learning-based method for the ex-post assessment of community risk and resilience and their interplay based on features related to the coupled human-infrastructure systems performance. Utilizing feature groups related to population protective actions, infrastructure/building performance features, and recovery features, we examined the risk and resilience performance of communities in the context of the 2017 Hurricane Harvey in Harris County, Texas. These features related to the coupled human-infrastructure systems performance were processed using the K-means clustering method to classify census block groups into four distinct clusters then, based on feature analysis, these clusters were labeled and designated into four quadrants of risk-resilience archetypes. Finally, we analyzed the disparities in risk-resilience status of spatial areas across different clusters as well as different income groups. The findings unveil the risk-resilience status of spatial areas shaped by their coupled human-infrastructure systems performance and their interactions. The results also inform about features that contribute to high resilience in high-risk areas. For example, the results indicate that in high-risk areas, evacuation rates contributed to a greater resilience, while in low-risk areas, preparedness contributed to greater resilience.


Parameter Hierarchical Optimization for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-reID) aims at matching cross-modality pedestrian images captured by disjoint visible or infrared cameras. Existing methods alleviate the cross-modality discrepancies via designing different kinds of network architectures. Different from available methods, in this paper, we propose a novel parameter optimizing paradigm, parameter hierarchical optimization (PHO) method, for the task of VI-ReID. It allows part of parameters to be directly optimized without any training, which narrows the search space of parameters and makes the whole network more easier to be trained. Specifically, we first divide the parameters into different types, and then introduce a self-adaptive alignment strategy (SAS) to automatically align the visible and infrared images through transformation. Considering that features in different dimension have varying importance, we develop an auto-weighted alignment learning (AAL) module that can automatically weight features according to their importance. Importantly, in the alignment process of SAS and AAL, all the parameters are immediately optimized with optimization principles rather than training the whole network, which yields a better parameter training manner. Furthermore, we establish the cross-modality consistent learning (CCL) loss to extract discriminative person representations with translation consistency. We provide both theoretical justification and empirical evidence that our proposed PHO method outperform existing VI-reID approaches.


Enhancing Policy Gradient with the Polyak Step-Size Adaption

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Policy gradient is a widely utilized and foundational algorithm in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Renowned for its convergence guarantees and stability compared to other RL algorithms, its practical application is often hindered by sensitivity to hyper-parameters, particularly the step-size. In this paper, we introduce the integration of the Polyak step-size in RL, which automatically adjusts the step-size without prior knowledge. To adapt this method to RL settings, we address several issues, including unknown f* in the Polyak step-size. Additionally, we showcase the performance of the Polyak step-size in RL through experiments, demonstrating faster convergence and the attainment of more stable policies.


The OxMat dataset: a multimodal resource for the development of AI-driven technologies in maternal and newborn child health

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare presents a unique opportunity for advancements in obstetric care, particularly through the analysis of cardiotocography (CTG) for fetal monitoring. However, the effectiveness of such technologies depends upon the availability of large, high-quality datasets that are suitable for machine learning. This paper introduces the Oxford Maternity (OxMat) dataset, the world's largest curated dataset of CTGs, featuring raw time series CTG data and extensive clinical data for both mothers and babies, which is ideally placed for machine learning. The OxMat dataset addresses the critical gap in women's health data by providing over 177,211 unique CTG recordings from 51,036 pregnancies, carefully curated and reviewed since 1991. The dataset also comprises over 200 antepartum, intrapartum and postpartum clinical variables, ensuring near-complete data for crucial outcomes such as stillbirth and acidaemia. While this dataset also covers the intrapartum stage, around 94% of the constituent CTGS are antepartum. This allows for a unique focus on the underserved antepartum period, in which early detection of at-risk fetuses can significantly improve health outcomes. Our comprehensive review of existing datasets reveals the limitations of current datasets: primarily, their lack of sufficient volume, detailed clinical data and antepartum data. The OxMat dataset lays a foundation for future AI-driven prenatal care, offering a robust resource for developing and testing algorithms aimed at improving maternal and fetal health outcomes.