Statistical Learning
Improving Neural Additive Models with Bayesian Principles
Bouchiat, Kouroche, Immer, Alexander, Yèche, Hugo, Rätsch, Gunnar, Fortuin, Vincent
Neural additive models (NAMs) can improve the interpretability of deep neural networks by handling input features in separate additive sub-networks. However, they lack inherent mechanisms that provide calibrated uncertainties and enable selection of relevant features and interactions. Approaching NAMs from a Bayesian perspective, we enhance them in three primary ways, namely by a) providing credible intervals for the individual additive sub-networks; b) estimating the marginal likelihood to perform an implicit selection of features via an empirical Bayes procedure; and c) enabling a ranking of feature pairs as candidates for second-order interaction in fine-tuned models. In particular, we develop Laplace-approximated NAMs (LA-NAMs), which show improved empirical performance on tabular datasets and challenging real-world medical tasks.
Kernel Stein Discrepancy thinning: a theoretical perspective of pathologies and a practical fix with regularization
Bénard, Clément, Staber, Brian, Da Veiga, Sébastien
Stein thinning is a promising algorithm proposed by (Riabiz et al., 2022) for post-processing outputs of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). The main principle is to greedily minimize the kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), which only requires the gradient of the log-target distribution, and is thus well-suited for Bayesian inference. The main advantages of Stein thinning are the automatic remove of the burn-in period, the correction of the bias introduced by recent MCMC algorithms, and the asymptotic properties of convergence towards the target distribution. Nevertheless, Stein thinning suffers from several empirical pathologies, which may result in poor approximations, as observed in the literature. In this article, we conduct a theoretical analysis of these pathologies, to clearly identify the mechanisms at stake, and suggest improved strategies. Then, we introduce the regularized Stein thinning algorithm to alleviate the identified pathologies. Finally, theoretical guarantees and extensive experiments show the high efficiency of the proposed algorithm. An implementation of regularized Stein thinning as the kernax library in python and JAX is available at https://gitlab.com/drti/kernax.
Deeply-Learned Generalized Linear Models with Missing Data
Lim, David K, Rashid, Naim U, Oliva, Junier B, Ibrahim, Joseph G
Deep Learning (DL) methods have dramatically increased in popularity in recent years, with significant growth in their application to supervised learning problems in the biomedical sciences. However, the greater prevalence and complexity of missing data in modern biomedical datasets present significant challenges for DL methods. Here, we provide a formal treatment of missing data in the context of deeply learned generalized linear models, a supervised DL architecture for regression and classification problems. We propose a new architecture, \textit{dlglm}, that is one of the first to be able to flexibly account for both ignorable and non-ignorable patterns of missingness in input features and response at training time. We demonstrate through statistical simulation that our method outperforms existing approaches for supervised learning tasks in the presence of missing not at random (MNAR) missingness. We conclude with a case study of a Bank Marketing dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, in which we predict whether clients subscribed to a product based on phone survey data. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
Robust Covariate Shift Adaptation for Density-Ratio Estimation
Consider a scenario where we have access to train data with both covariates and outcomes while test data only contains covariates. In this scenario, our primary aim is to predict the missing outcomes of the test data. With this objective in mind, we train parametric regression models under a covariate shift, where covariate distributions are different between the train and test data. For this problem, existing studies have proposed covariate shift adaptation via importance weighting using the density ratio. This approach averages the train data losses, each weighted by an estimated ratio of the covariate densities between the train and test data, to approximate the test-data risk. Although it allows us to obtain a test-data risk minimizer, its performance heavily relies on the accuracy of the density ratio estimation. Moreover, even if the density ratio can be consistently estimated, the estimation errors of the density ratio also yield bias in the estimators of the regression model's parameters of interest. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a doubly robust estimator for covariate shift adaptation via importance weighting, which incorporates an additional estimator for the regression function. Leveraging double machine learning techniques, our estimator reduces the bias arising from the density ratio estimation errors. We demonstrate the asymptotic distribution of the regression parameter estimator. Notably, our estimator remains consistent if either the density ratio estimator or the regression function is consistent, showcasing its robustness against potential errors in density ratio estimation. Finally, we confirm the soundness of our proposed method via simulation studies.
A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Graph Representation Learning Methods
Chikwendu, Ijeoma Amuche, Zhang, Xiaoling, Agyemang, Isaac Osei, Adjei-Mensah, Isaac, Chima, Ukwuoma Chiagoziem, Ejiyi, Chukwuebuka Joseph
There has been a lot of activity in graph representation learning in recent years. Graph representation learning aims to produce graph representation vectors to represent the structure and characteristics of huge graphs precisely. This is crucial since the effectiveness of the graph representation vectors will influence how well they perform in subsequent tasks like anomaly detection, connection prediction, and node classification. Recently, there has been an increase in the use of other deep-learning breakthroughs for data-based graph problems. Graph-based learning environments have a taxonomy of approaches, and this study reviews all their learning settings. The learning problem is theoretically and empirically explored. This study briefly introduces and summarizes the Graph Neural Architecture Search (G-NAS), outlines several Graph Neural Networks' drawbacks, and suggests some strategies to mitigate these challenges. Lastly, the study discusses several potential future study avenues yet to be explored.
Causal Discovery with Generalized Linear Models through Peeling Algorithms
Wang, Minjie, Shen, Xiaotong, Pan, Wei
This article presents a novel method for causal discovery with generalized structural equation models suited for analyzing diverse types of outcomes, including discrete, continuous, and mixed data. Causal discovery often faces challenges due to unmeasured confounders that hinder the identification of causal relationships. The proposed approach addresses this issue by developing two peeling algorithms (bottom-up and top-down) to ascertain causal relationships and valid instruments. This approach first reconstructs a super-graph to represent ancestral relationships between variables, using a peeling algorithm based on nodewise GLM regressions that exploit relationships between primary and instrumental variables. Then, it estimates parent-child effects from the ancestral relationships using another peeling algorithm while deconfounding a child's model with information borrowed from its parents' models. The article offers a theoretical analysis of the proposed approach, which establishes conditions for model identifiability and provides statistical guarantees for accurately discovering parent-child relationships via the peeling algorithms. Furthermore, the article presents numerical experiments showcasing the effectiveness of our approach in comparison to state-of-the-art structure learning methods without confounders. Lastly, it demonstrates an application to Alzheimer's disease (AD), highlighting the utility of the method in constructing gene-to-gene and gene-to-disease regulatory networks involving Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) for healthy and AD subjects.
Joint Multi-View Collaborative Clustering
Khalafaoui, Yasser, Matei, Basarab, Grozavu, Nistor, Lovisetto, Martino
Data is increasingly being collected from multiple sources and described by multiple views. These multi-view data provide richer information than traditional single-view data. Fusing the former for specific tasks is an essential component of multi-view clustering. Since the goal of multi-view clustering algorithms is to discover the common latent structure shared by multiple views, the majority of proposed solutions overlook the advantages of incorporating knowledge derived from horizontal collaboration between multi-view data and the final consensus. To fill this gap, we propose the Joint Multi-View Collaborative Clustering (JMVCC) solution, which involves the generation of basic partitions using Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and the horizontal collaboration principle, followed by the fusion of these local partitions using ensemble clustering. Furthermore, we propose a weighting method to reduce the risk of negative collaboration (i.e., views with low quality) during the generation and fusion of local partitions. The experimental results, which were obtained using a variety of data sets, demonstrate that JMVCC outperforms other multi-view clustering algorithms and is robust to noisy views.
Transformers Learn Higher-Order Optimization Methods for In-Context Learning: A Study with Linear Models
Fu, Deqing, Chen, Tian-Qi, Jia, Robin, Sharan, Vatsal
Transformers are remarkably good at in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from demonstrations without parameter updates -- but how they perform ICL remains a mystery. Recent work suggests that Transformers may learn in-context by internally running Gradient Descent, a first-order optimization method. In this paper, we instead demonstrate that Transformers learn to implement higher-order optimization methods to perform ICL. Focusing on in-context linear regression, we show that Transformers learn to implement an algorithm very similar to Iterative Newton's Method, a higher-order optimization method, rather than Gradient Descent. Empirically, we show that predictions from successive Transformer layers closely match different iterations of Newton's Method linearly, with each middle layer roughly computing 3 iterations. In contrast, exponentially more Gradient Descent steps are needed to match an additional Transformers layer; this suggests that Transformers have an comparable rate of convergence with high-order methods such as Iterative Newton, which are exponentially faster than Gradient Descent. We also show that Transformers can learn in-context on ill-conditioned data, a setting where Gradient Descent struggles but Iterative Newton succeeds. Finally, we show theoretical results which support our empirical findings and have a close correspondence with them: we prove that Transformers can implement $k$ iterations of Newton's method with $\mathcal{O}(k)$ layers.
Strategizing EV Charging and Renewable Integration in Texas
Mohammadi, Mohammad, Thornburg, Jesse
Exploring the convergence of electric vehicles (EVs), renewable energy, and smart grid technologies in the context of Texas, this study addresses challenges hindering the widespread adoption of EVs. Acknowledging their environmental benefits, the research focuses on grid stability concerns, uncoordinated charging patterns, and the complicated relationship between EVs and renewable energy sources. Dynamic time warping (DTW) clustering and k-means clustering methodologies categorize days based on total load and net load, offering nuanced insights into daily electricity consumption and renewable energy generation patterns. By establishing optimal charging and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) windows tailored to specific load characteristics, the study provides a sophisticated methodology for strategic decision-making in energy consumption and renewable integration. The findings contribute to the ongoing discourse on achieving a sustainable and resilient energy future through the seamless integration of EVs into smart grids.
StochGradAdam: Accelerating Neural Networks Training with Stochastic Gradient Sampling
In the rapidly advancing domain of deep learning optimization, this paper unveils the StochGradAdam optimizer, a novel adaptation of the well-regarded Adam algorithm. Central to StochGradAdam is its gradient sampling technique. This method not only ensures stable convergence but also leverages the advantages of selective gradient consideration, fostering robust training by potentially mitigating the effects of noisy or outlier data and enhancing the exploration of the loss landscape for more dependable convergence. In both image classification and segmentation tasks, StochGradAdam has demonstrated superior performance compared to the traditional Adam optimizer. By judiciously sampling a subset of gradients at each iteration, the optimizer is optimized for managing intricate models. The paper provides a comprehensive exploration of StochGradAdam's methodology, from its mathematical foundations to bias correction strategies, heralding a promising advancement in deep learning training techniques.