Statistical Learning
Invariant Learning via Diffusion Dreamed Distribution Shifts
Kattakinda, Priyatham, Levine, Alexander, Feizi, Soheil
Though the background is an important signal for image classification, over reliance on it can lead to incorrect predictions when spurious correlations between foreground and background are broken at test time. Training on a dataset where these correlations are unbiased would lead to more robust models. In this paper, we propose such a dataset called Diffusion Dreamed Distribution Shifts (D3S). D3S consists of synthetic images generated through StableDiffusion using text prompts and image guides obtained by pasting a sample foreground image onto a background template image. Using this scalable approach we generate 120K images of objects from all 1000 ImageNet classes in 10 diverse backgrounds. Due to the incredible photorealism of the diffusion model, our images are much closer to natural images than previous synthetic datasets. D3S contains a validation set of more than 17K images whose labels are human-verified in an MTurk study. Using the validation set, we evaluate several popular DNN image classifiers and find that the classification performance of models generally suffers on our background diverse images. Next, we leverage the foreground & background labels in D3S to learn a foreground (background) representation that is invariant to changes in background (foreground) by penalizing the mutual information between the foreground (background) features and the background (foreground) labels. Linear classifiers trained on these features to predict foreground (background) from foreground (background) have high accuracies at 82.9% (93.8%), while classifiers that predict these labels from background and foreground have a much lower accuracy of 2.4% and 45.6% respectively. This suggests that our foreground and background features are well disentangled. We further test the efficacy of these representations by training classifiers on a task with strong spurious correlations.
Fictitious Play with Maximin Initialization
Nash equilibrium is the central solution concept in game theory. While a Nash equilibrium can be computed in polynomial time for two-player zero-sum games, it is PPAD-hard for two-player general-sum and multiplayer games and widely believed that no efficient algorithms exist [6, 7, 8]. The best algorithm for computing an exact Nash equilibrium in multiplayer games is based on a non-convex quadratic program formulation and only scales to relatively small games [10]. For larger games several iterative algorithms have been considered; however, they have no theoretical guarantees and may have an extremely high degree of error. It has recently been shown that fictitious play produces a smaller degree of equilibrium approximation error in these games than regret minimization [11], though the average error still becomes relatively large as the game size increases. For example, for 3-player games with 10 strategies per player and all payoffs uniform random in [0,1], the average equilibrium error from fictitious play is 0.056. The classic version of fictitious play initializes strategies for all players to play all actions with equal probability. In this paper we will explore more sophisticated initialization approaches to improve the algorithm's performance. A strategic-form game consists of a finite set of players N = {1,..., n}, a finite set of pure strategies S
Recent Advances in Algebraic Geometry and Bayesian Statistics
This article is a review of theoretical advances in the research field of algebraic geometry and Bayesian statistics in the last two decades. Many statistical models and learning machines which contain hierarchical structures or latent variables are called nonidentifiable, because the map from a parameter to a statistical model is not one-to-one. In nonidentifiable models, both the likelihood function and the posterior distribution have singularities in general, hence it was difficult to analyze their statistical properties. However, from the end of the 20th century, new theory and methodology based on algebraic geometry have been established which enables us to investigate such models and machines in the real world. In this article, the following results in recent advances are reported. First, we explain the framework of Bayesian statistics and introduce a new perspective from the birational geometry. Second, two mathematical solutions are derived based on algebraic geometry. An appropriate parameter space can be found by a resolution map, which makes the posterior distribution be normal crossing and the log likelihood ratio function be well-defined. Third, three applications to statistics are introduced. The posterior distribution is represented by the renormalized form, the asymptotic free energy is derived, and the universal formula among the generalization loss, the cross validation, and the information criterion is established. Two mathematical solutions and three applications to statistics based on algebraic geometry reported in this article are now being used in many practical fields in data science and artificial intelligence.
Interpretable Local Concept-based Explanation with Human Feedback to Predict All-cause Mortality
EL Shawi, Radwa (a:1:{s:5:"en_US";s:16:"Tartu University";}) | Al-Mallah, Mouaz H.
Machine learning models are incorporated in different fields and disciplines in which some of them require a high level of accountability and transparency, for example, the healthcare sector. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the importance for plausibility and verifiability of the predictions made by machine learning models has become essential. A widely used category of explanation techniques attempts to explain models’ predictions by quantifying the importance score of each input feature. However, summarizing such scores to provide human-interpretable explanations is challenging. Another category of explanation techniques focuses on learning a domain representation in terms of high-level human-understandable concepts and then utilizing them to explain predictions. These explanations are hampered by how concepts are constructed, which is not intrinsically interpretable. To this end, we propose Concept-based Local Explanations with Feedback (CLEF), a novel local model agnostic explanation framework for learning a set of high-level transparent concept definitions in high-dimensional tabular data that uses clinician-labeled concepts rather than raw features. CLEF maps the raw input features to high-level intuitive concepts and then decompose the evidence of prediction of the instance being explained into concepts. In addition, the proposed framework generates counterfactual explanations, suggesting the minimum changes in the instance’s concept based explanation that will lead to a different prediction. We demonstrate with simulated user feedback on predicting the risk of mortality. Such direct feedback is more effective than other techniques, that rely on hand-labelled or automatically extracted concepts, in learning concepts that align with ground truth concept definitions.
Modeling chronic pain experiences from online reports using the Reddit Reports of Chronic Pain dataset
Nunes, Diogo A. P., Ferreira-Gomes, Joana, Neto, Fani, de Matos, David Martins
Objective: Reveal and quantify qualities of reported experiences of chronic pain on social media, from multiple pathological backgrounds, by means of the novel Reddit Reports of Chronic Pain (RRCP) dataset, using Natural Language Processing techniques. Materials and Methods: Define and validate the RRCP dataset for a set of subreddits related to chronic pain. Identify the main concerns discussed in each subreddit. Model each subreddit according to their main concerns. Compare subreddit models. Results: The RRCP dataset comprises 86,537 Reddit submissions from 12 subreddits related to chronic pain (each related to one pathological background). Each RRCP subreddit has various main concerns. Some of these concerns are shared between multiple subreddits (e.g., the subreddit Sciatica semantically entails the subreddit backpain in their various concerns, but not the other way around), whilst some concerns are exclusive to specific subreddits (e.g., Interstitialcystitis and CrohnsDisease). Discussion: These results suggest that the reported experience of chronic pain, from multiple pathologies (i.e., subreddits), has concerns relevant to all, and concerns exclusive to certain pathologies. Our analysis details each of these concerns and their similarity relations. Conclusion: Although limited by intrinsic qualities of the Reddit platform, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first research work attempting to model the linguistic expression of various chronic pain-inducing pathologies and comparing these models to identify and quantify the similarities and differences between the corresponding emergent chronic pain experiences.
Hierarchical Clustering in Machine Learning - Analytics Vidhya
This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon. Hierarchical clustering is one of the most famous clustering techniques used in unsupervised machine learning. K-means and hierarchical clustering are the two most popular and effective clustering algorithms. The working mechanism they apply in the backend allows them to provide such a high level of performance. In this article, we will discuss hierarchical clustering and its types, its working mechanisms, its core intuition, the pros and cons of using this clustering strategy and conclude with some fundamentals to remember for this practice.
Everything You Need To Know About Mathematics for Machine Learning
This Edureka video on'Mathematics for Machine Learning' teaches you all the math needed to get started with mastering Machine Learning. It teaches you all the necessary topics and concepts of Linear Algebra, Multivariate Calculus, Statistics, and Probability and also dives into the actual implementation of these topics. Are you an aspiring data scientist who is fascinated by how things workaround in the world of data science and machine learning? Well, congrats on choosing the right career path that is best suited for you at this point in time. However, did you know that you need to ace mathematics for machine learning and data science?
Pitfalls of Climate Network Construction: A Statistical Perspective
Haas, Moritz, Goswami, Bedartha, von Luxburg, Ulrike
Network-based analyses of dynamical systems have become increasingly popular in climate science. Here we address network construction from a statistical perspective and highlight the often ignored fact that the calculated correlation values are only empirical estimates. To measure spurious behaviour as deviation from a ground truth network, we simulate time-dependent isotropic random fields on the sphere and apply common network construction techniques. We find several ways in which the uncertainty stemming from the estimation procedure has major impact on network characteristics. When the data has locally coherent correlation structure, spurious link bundle teleconnections and spurious high-degree clusters have to be expected. Anisotropic estimation variance can also induce severe biases into empirical networks. We validate our findings with ERA5 reanalysis data. Moreover we explain why commonly applied resampling procedures are inappropriate for significance evaluation and propose a statistically more meaningful ensemble construction framework. By communicating which difficulties arise in estimation from scarce data and by presenting which design decisions increase robustness, we hope to contribute to more reliable climate network construction in the future.
Machine Learning-Assisted Recurrence Prediction for Early-Stage Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer Patients
Janik, Adrianna, Torrente, Maria, Costabello, Luca, Calvo, Virginia, Walsh, Brian, Camps, Carlos, Mohamed, Sameh K., Ortega, Ana L., Nováček, Vít, Massutí, Bartomeu, Minervini, Pasquale, Campelo, M. Rosario Garcia, del Barco, Edel, Bosch-Barrera, Joaquim, Menasalvas, Ernestina, Timilsina, Mohan, Provencio, Mariano
Background: Stratifying cancer patients according to risk of relapse can personalize their care. In this work, we provide an answer to the following research question: How to utilize machine learning to estimate probability of relapse in early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer patients? Methods: For predicting relapse in 1,387 early-stage (I-II), non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients from the Spanish Lung Cancer Group data (65.7 average age, 24.8% females, 75.2% males) we train tabular and graph machine learning models. We generate automatic explanations for the predictions of such models. For models trained on tabular data, we adopt SHAP local explanations to gauge how each patient feature contributes to the predicted outcome. We explain graph machine learning predictions with an example-based method that highlights influential past patients. Results: Machine learning models trained on tabular data exhibit a 76% accuracy for the Random Forest model at predicting relapse evaluated with a 10-fold cross-validation (model was trained 10 times with different independent sets of patients in test, train and validation sets, the reported metrics are averaged over these 10 test sets). Graph machine learning reaches 68% accuracy over a 200-patient, held-out test set, calibrated on a held-out set of 100 patients. Conclusions: Our results show that machine learning models trained on tabular and graph data can enable objective, personalised and reproducible prediction of relapse and therefore, disease outcome in patients with early-stage NSCLC. With further prospective and multisite validation, and additional radiological and molecular data, this prognostic model could potentially serve as a predictive decision support tool for deciding the use of adjuvant treatments in early-stage lung cancer. Keywords: Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer, Tumor Recurrence Prediction, Machine Learning
Machine Learning for Software Engineering: A Tertiary Study
Kotti, Zoe, Galanopoulou, Rafaila, Spinellis, Diomidis
Through ML we can address SE problems that cannot be completely algorithmically modeled, or for which existing solutions do not provide satisfactory results yet (e.g., defect/fault detection [16, 165, 180]). In addition, ML finds application in SE tasks where data cannot be easily analyzed with other algorithms (e.g., software requirements, code comments, code reviews, issues [9, 91, 174]). Another important aspect of ML is that it can significantly reduce manual effort in common SE tasks (e.g., automatic program repair [157], code suggestion [61], defect prediction [19], malware detection [147], feature location [40]) with great accuracy results [146, 164]. In fields such as health informatics ML and SE are considered complementary disciplines, since the growing scale and complexity of healthcare datasets have posed a challenge for clinical practice and medical research, requiring new engineering approaches from both fields [38]. In the early nineties, Huff and Selfridge [68] recognized the need for creating software systems that partially take some responsibility for their own evolution, offering the ability to implement, measure, and assess changes easily. These changes should also contribute to the overall improvement of the corresponding systems [142].