Statistical Learning
Self-Adapting Noise-Contrastive Estimation for Energy-Based Models
Training energy-based models (EBMs) with noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) is theoretically feasible but practically challenging. Effective learning requires the noise distribution to be approximately similar to the target distribution, especially in high-dimensional domains. Previous works have explored modelling the noise distribution as a separate generative model, and then concurrently training this noise model with the EBM. While this method allows for more effective noise-contrastive estimation, it comes at the cost of extra memory and training complexity. Instead, this thesis proposes a self-adapting NCE algorithm which uses static instances of the EBM along its training trajectory as the noise distribution. During training, these static instances progressively converge to the target distribution, thereby circumventing the need to simultaneously train an auxiliary noise model. Moreover, we express this self-adapting NCE algorithm in the framework of Bregman divergences and show that it is a generalization of maximum likelihood learning for EBMs. The performance of our algorithm is evaluated across a range of noise update intervals, and experimental results show that shorter update intervals are conducive to higher synthesis quality.
Machine Learning Methods for Device Identification Using Wireless Fingerprinting
Šobot, Srđan, Ninković, Vukan, Vukobratović, Dejan, Pavlović, Milan, Radovanović, Miloš
ML module using commonly used RESTful framework. Explosion in the number of connected IoT devices brought Comprehensive ML module based on both classical and increasing concerns for IoT systems security [1]. Industrial deep learning methods is implemented as a cloud-based service. IoT systems are particularly vulnerable, since IoT devices The ML module employs representative methods for may participate in mission-critical industrial control processes supervised device identification due to the availability of [2]. In recent years, the IoT security methods that exploit a device IDs in the collected WF data sets. Due to different WFs combination of specific features unique to the device, called collected from NB-IoT and Wi-Fi devices, different MLAs fingerprints, and machine learning (ML) algorithms, became are considered for the two scenarios. The system is integrated increasingly popular [3]-[10]. In particular, wireless fingerprints and tested in our labs and an extensive device identification (WF) may be extracted at the physical (PHY) layer of a performance is presented and visualised. The setup is currently wireless receiver, based on the signals received from different being migrated to a real-world industrial IoT scenario, where wireless IoT devices [3], [4].
Using Signal Processing in Tandem With Adapted Mixture Models for Classifying Genomic Signals
Jaiswal, Saish, Nema, Shreya, Murthy, Hema A, Narayanan, Manikandan
Genomic signal processing has been used successfully in bioinformatics to analyze biomolecular sequences and gain varied insights into DNA structure, gene organization, protein binding, sequence evolution, etc. But challenges remain in finding the appropriate spectral representation of a biomolecular sequence, especially when multiple variable-length sequences need to be handled consistently. In this study, we address this challenge in the context of the well-studied problem of classifying genomic sequences into different taxonomic units (strain, phyla, order, etc.). We propose a novel technique that employs signal processing in tandem with Gaussian mixture models to improve the spectral representation of a sequence and subsequently the taxonomic classification accuracies. The sequences are first transformed into spectra, and projected to a subspace, where sequences belonging to different taxons are better distinguishable. Our method outperforms a similar state-of-the-art method on established benchmark datasets by an absolute margin of 6.06% accuracy.
A Convergence Theory for Federated Average: Beyond Smoothness
Li, Xiaoxiao, Song, Zhao, Tao, Runzhou, Zhang, Guangyi
With the growing of computational power on edge devices, such as mobile phones, wearable devices, smart watches, self-driving cars, and so on, developing distributed optimization methods to address the needs of those applications is increasingly demanded. There are three core challenges existing in the distributed computing applications, including expensive communication, privacy concerns, and heterogeneity. To tackle the above-mentioned challenges, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an important paradigm in today's machine learning for distributed learning that enables different clients (also known as nodes) to collaboratively learn a model while keeping their private data. To train an FL algorithm in a distributed manner, the clients must transmit their training parameters to a central server. Typically, the central server has the same model architecture as the local clients. Similar to centralized parallel optimization, FL lets the clients do most of the computation while the central server updates the model parameters using the descending directions returned by the local clients. However, learning with FL significantly differs from the traditional parallel optimization in distributed learning in the various needs, including piracy requirements, large-scale machine learning and efficiency.
Machine Learning Simulates Agent-Based Model Towards Policy
Furtado, Bernardo Alves, Andreão, Gustavo Onofre
Public Policies are not intrinsically positive or negative. Rather, policies provide varying levels of effects across different recipients. Methodologically, computational modeling enables the application of multiple influences on empirical data, thus allowing for heterogeneous response to policies. We use a random forest machine learning algorithm to emulate an agent-based model (ABM) and evaluate competing policies across 46 Metropolitan Regions (MRs) in Brazil. In doing so, we use input parameters and output indicators of 11,076 actual simulation runs and one million emulated runs. As a result, we obtain the optimal (and non-optimal) performance of each region over the policies. Optimum is defined as a combination of GDP production and the Gini coefficient inequality indicator for the full ensemble of Metropolitan Regions. Results suggest that MRs already have embedded structures that favor optimal or non-optimal results, but they also illustrate which policy is more beneficial to each place. In addition to providing MR-specific policies' results, the use of machine learning to simulate an ABM reduces the computational burden, whereas allowing for a much larger variation among model parameters. The coherence of results within the context of larger uncertainty--vis-\`a-vis those of the original ABM--reinforces robustness of the model. At the same time the exercise indicates which parameters should policymakers intervene on, in order to work towards precise policy optimal instruments.
Supervised Dimensionality Reduction and Image Classification Utilizing Convolutional Autoencoders
Nellas, Ioannis A., Tasoulis, Sotiris K., Plagianakos, Vassilis P., Georgakopoulos, Spiros V.
The joint optimization of the reconstruction and classification error is a hard non convex problem, especially when a non linear mapping is utilized. In order to overcome this obstacle, a novel optimization strategy is proposed, in which a Convolutional Autoencoder for dimensionality reduction and a classifier composed by a Fully Connected Network, are combined to simultaneously produce supervised dimensionality reduction and predictions. It turned out that this methodology can also be greatly beneficial in enforcing explainability of deep learning architectures. Additionally, the resulting Latent Space, optimized for the classification task, can be utilized to improve traditional, interpretable classification algorithms. The experimental results, showed that the proposed methodology achieved competitive results against the state of the art deep learning methods, while being much more efficient in terms of parameter count. Finally, it was empirically justified that the proposed methodology introduces advanced explainability regarding, not only the data structure through the produced latent space, but also about the classification behaviour.
Communication Efficient Generalized Tensor Factorization for Decentralized Healthcare Networks
Ma, Jing, Zhang, Qiuchen, Lou, Jian, Xiong, Li, Bhavani, Sivasubramanium, Ho, Joyce C.
Tensor factorization has been proved as an efficient unsupervised learning approach for health data analysis, especially for computational phenotyping, where the high-dimensional Electronic Health Records (EHRs) with patients' history of medical procedures, medications, diagnosis, lab tests, etc., are converted to meaningful and interpretable medical concepts. Federated tensor factorization distributes the tensor computation to multiple workers under the coordination of a central server, which enables jointly learning the phenotypes across multiple hospitals while preserving the privacy of the patient information. However, existing federated tensor factorization algorithms encounter the single-point-failure issue with the involvement of the central server, which is not only easily exposed to external attacks but also limits the number of clients sharing information with the server under restricted uplink bandwidth. In this paper, we propose CiderTF, a communication-efficient decentralized generalized tensor factorization, which reduces the uplink communication cost by leveraging a four-level communication reduction strategy designed for a generalized tensor factorization, which has the flexibility of modeling different tensor distribution with multiple kinds of loss functions. Experiments on two real-world EHR datasets demonstrate that CiderTF achieves comparable convergence with a communication reduction up to 99.99%.
Off-Policy Confidence Interval Estimation with Confounded Markov Decision Process
Shi, Chengchun, Zhu, Jin, Shen, Ye, Luo, Shikai, Zhu, Hongtu, Song, Rui
This paper is concerned with constructing a confidence interval for a target policy's value offline based on a pre-collected observational data in infinite horizon settings. Most of the existing works assume no unmeasured variables exist that confound the observed actions. This assumption, however, is likely to be violated in real applications such as healthcare and technological industries. In this paper, we show that with some auxiliary variables that mediate the effect of actions on the system dynamics, the target policy's value is identifiable in a confounded Markov decision process. Based on this result, we develop an efficient off-policy value estimator that is robust to potential model misspecification and provide rigorous uncertainty quantification. Our method is justified by theoretical results, simulated and real datasets obtained from ridesharing companies. A Python implementation of the proposed procedure is available at https://github.com/Mamba413/cope.
Advancing the dimensionality reduction of speaker embeddings for speaker diarisation: disentangling noise and informing speech activity
Kim, You Jin, Heo, Hee-Soo, Jung, Jee-weon, Kwon, Youngki, Lee, Bong-Jin, Chung, Joon Son
The objective of this work is to train noise-robust speaker embeddings adapted for speaker diarisation. Speaker embeddings play a crucial role in the performance of diarisation systems, but they often capture spurious information such as noise, adversely affecting performance. Our previous work has proposed an auto-encoder-based dimensionality reduction module to help remove the redundant information. However, they do not explicitly separate such information and have also been found to be sensitive to hyper-parameter values. To this end, we propose two contributions to overcome these issues: (i) a novel dimensionality reduction framework that can disentangle spurious information from the speaker embeddings; (ii) the use of speech activity vector to prevent the speaker code from representing the background noise. Through a range of experiments conducted on four datasets, our approach consistently demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance among models without system fusion.
Predicting Lexical Complexity in English Texts: The Complex 2.0 Dataset
Shardlow, Matthew, Evans, Richard, Zampieri, Marcos
Identifying words which may cause difficulty for a reader is an essential step in most lexical text simplification systems prior to lexical substitution and can also be used for assessing the readability of a text. This task is commonly referred to as Complex Word Identification (CWI) and is often modelled as a supervised classification problem. For training such systems, annotated datasets in which words and sometimes multi-word expressions are labelled regarding complexity are required. In this paper we analyze previous work carried out in this task and investigate the properties of CWI datasets for English. We develop a protocol for the annotation of lexical complexity and use this to annotate a new dataset, CompLex 2.0. We present experiments using both new and old datasets to investigate the nature of lexical complexity. We found that a Likert-scale annotation protocol provides an objective setting that is superior for identifying the complexity of words compared to a binary annotation protocol. We release a new dataset using our new protocol to promote the task of Lexical Complexity Prediction.