Off-policy evaluation (OPE) attempts to predict the performance of counterfactual policies using log data from a different policy. We extend its applicability by developing an OPE method for a class of both full support and deficient support logging policies in contextual-bandit settings. This class includes deterministic bandit (such as Upper Confidence Bound) as well as deterministic decision-making based on supervised and unsupervised learning. We prove that our method's prediction converges in probability to the true performance of a counterfactual policy as the sample size increases. We validate our method with experiments on partly and entirely deterministic logging policies. Finally, we apply it to evaluate coupon targeting policies by a major online platform and show how to improve the existing policy.

Machine learning algorithms have revolutionized different fields, including natural language processing, computer vision, signal processing, and medical data processing. Despite the excellent capabilities of machine learning algorithms in various tasks and areas, the performance of these models mainly deteriorates when there is a shift in the test and training data distributions. This gap occurs due to the violation of the fundamental assumption that the training and test data are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d). In real-world scenarios where collecting data from all possible domains for training is costly and even impossible, the i.i.d assumption can hardly be satisfied. The problem is even more severe in the case of medical images and signals because it requires either expensive equipment or a meticulous experimentation setup to collect data, even for a single domain. Additionally, the decrease in performance may have severe consequences in the analysis of medical records. As a result of such problems, the ability to generalize and adapt under distribution shifts (domain generalization (DG) and domain adaptation (DA)) is essential for the analysis of medical data. This paper provides the first systematic review of DG and DA on functional brain signals to fill the gap of the absence of a comprehensive study in this era. We provide detailed explanations and categorizations of datasets, approaches, and architectures used in DG and DA on functional brain images. We further address the attention-worthy future tracks in this field.

Some recent pieces of work in the Machine Learning (ML) literature have demonstrated the usefulness of assessing which observations are hardest to have their label predicted accurately. By identifying such instances, one may inspect whether they have any quality issues that should be addressed. Learning strategies based on the difficulty level of the observations can also be devised. This paper presents a set of meta-features that aim at characterizing which instances of a dataset are hardest to have their label predicted accurately and why they are so, aka instance hardness measures. Both classification and regression problems are considered. Synthetic datasets with different levels of complexity are built and analyzed. A Python package containing all implementations is also provided.

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has recently drawn much research interest for learning generalizable node representations in a self-supervised manner. In general, the contrastive learning process in GCL is performed on top of the representations learned by a graph neural network (GNN) backbone, which transforms and propagates the node contextual information based on its local neighborhoods. However, nodes sharing similar characteristics may not always be geographically close, which poses a great challenge for unsupervised GCL efforts due to their inherent limitations in capturing such global graph knowledge. In this work, we address their inherent limitations by proposing a simple yet effective framework -- Simple Neural Networks with Structural and Semantic Contrastive Learning} (S^3-CL). Notably, by virtue of the proposed structural and semantic contrastive learning algorithms, even a simple neural network can learn expressive node representations that preserve valuable global structural and semantic patterns. Our experiments demonstrate that the node representations learned by S^3-CL achieve superior performance on different downstream tasks compared with the state-of-the-art unsupervised GCL methods. Implementation and more experimental details are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/kaize0409/S-3-CL.}

Federated learning has burgeoned recently in machine learning, giving rise to a variety of research topics. Popular optimization algorithms are based on the frameworks of the (stochastic) gradient descent methods or the alternating direction method of multipliers. In this paper, we deploy an exact penalty method to deal with federated learning and propose an algorithm, FedEPM, that enables to tackle four critical issues in federated learning: communication efficiency, computational complexity, stragglers' effect, and data privacy. Moreover, it is proven to be convergent and testified to have high numerical performance.

Combinatorial optimization (CO) layers in machine learning (ML) pipelines are a powerful tool to tackle data-driven decision tasks, but they come with two main challenges. First, the solution of a CO problem often behaves as a piecewise constant function of its objective parameters. Given that ML pipelines are typically trained using stochastic gradient descent, the absence of slope information is very detrimental. Second, standard ML losses do not work well in combinatorial settings. A growing body of research addresses these challenges through diverse methods. Unfortunately, the lack of well-maintained implementations slows down the adoption of CO layers. In this paper, building upon previous works, we introduce a probabilistic perspective on CO layers, which lends itself naturally to approximate differentiation and the construction of structured losses. We recover many approaches from the literature as special cases, and we also derive new ones. Based on this unifying perspective, we present InferOpt.jl, an open-source Julia package that 1) allows turning any CO oracle with a linear objective into a differentiable layer, and 2) defines adequate losses to train pipelines containing such layers. Our library works with arbitrary optimization algorithms, and it is fully compatible with Julia's ML ecosystem. We demonstrate its abilities using a pathfinding problem on video game maps as guiding example, as well as three other applications from operations research.

Link prediction (LP) has been recognized as an important task in graph learning with its broad practical applications. A typical application of LP is to retrieve the top scoring neighbors for a given source node, such as the friend recommendation. These services desire the high inference scalability to find the top scoring neighbors from many candidate nodes at low latencies. There are two popular decoders that the recent LP models mainly use to compute the edge scores from node embeddings: the HadamardMLP and Dot Product decoders. After theoretical and empirical analysis, we find that the HadamardMLP decoders are generally more effective for LP. However, HadamardMLP lacks the scalability for retrieving top scoring neighbors on large graphs, since to the best of our knowledge, there does not exist an algorithm to retrieve the top scoring neighbors for HadamardMLP decoders in sublinear complexity. To make HadamardMLP scalable, we propose the Flashlight algorithm to accelerate the top scoring neighbor retrievals for HadamardMLP: a sublinear algorithm that progressively applies approximate maximum inner product search (MIPS) techniques with adaptively adjusted query embeddings. Empirical results show that Flashlight improves the inference speed of LP by more than 100 times on the large OGBL-CITATION2 dataset without sacrificing effectiveness. Our work paves the way for large-scale LP applications with the effective HadamardMLP decoders by greatly accelerating their inference.

In this paper, we consider incorporating data associated with the sun's north and south polar field strengths to improve solar flare prediction performance using machine learning models. When used to supplement local data from active regions on the photospheric magnetic field of the sun, the polar field data provides global information to the predictor. While such global features have been previously proposed for predicting the next solar cycle's intensity, in this paper we propose using them to help classify individual solar flares. We conduct experiments using HMI data employing four different machine learning algorithms that can exploit polar field information. Additionally, we propose a novel probabilistic mixture of experts model that can simply and effectively incorporate polar field data and provide on-par prediction performance with state-of-the-art solar flare prediction algorithms such as the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Our experimental results indicate the usefulness of the polar field data for solar flare prediction, which can improve Heidke Skill Score (HSS2) by as much as 10.1%.

From the perspective of constructing the classification model, this paper uses the weight coefficient (influencing factors) in the model to analyze the sales impact on different brands of electric vehicles, and optimizes the existing sales strategy.

Efficient and accurate detection of subtle motion generated from small objects in noisy environments, as needed for vital sign monitoring, is challenging, but can be substantially improved with magnification. We developed a complex Gabor filter-based decomposition method to amplify phases at different spatial wavelength levels to magnify motion and extract 1D motion signals for fundamental frequency estimation. The phase-based complex Gabor filter outputs are processed and then used to train machine learning models that predict respiration and heart rate with greater accuracy. We show that our proposed technique performs better than the conventional temporal FFT-based method in clinical settings, such as sleep laboratories and emergency departments, as well for a variety of human postures.