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 Statistical Learning


Federated Boosted Decision Trees with Differential Privacy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

There is great demand for scalable, secure, and efficient privacy-preserving machine learning models that can be trained over distributed data. While deep learning models typically achieve the best results in a centralized non-secure setting, different models can excel when privacy and communication constraints are imposed. Instead, tree-based approaches such as XGBoost have attracted much attention for their high performance and ease of use; in particular, they often achieve state-of-the-art results on tabular data. Consequently, several recent works have focused on translating Gradient Boosted Decision Tree (GBDT) models like XGBoost into federated settings, via cryptographic mechanisms such as Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC). However, these do not always provide formal privacy guarantees, or consider the full range of hyperparameters and implementation settings. In this work, we implement the GBDT model under Differential Privacy (DP). We propose a general framework that captures and extends existing approaches for differentially private decision trees. Our framework of methods is tailored to the federated setting, and we show that with a careful choice of techniques it is possible to achieve very high utility while maintaining strong levels of privacy.


Bayesian Nonlocal Operator Regression (BNOR): A Data-Driven Learning Framework of Nonlocal Models with Uncertainty Quantification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We consider the problem of modeling heterogeneous materials where micro-scale dynamics and interactions affect global behavior. In the presence of heterogeneities in material microstructure it is often impractical, if not impossible, to provide quantitative characterization of material response. The goal of this work is to develop a Bayesian framework for uncertainty quantification (UQ) in material response prediction when using nonlocal models. Our approach combines the nonlocal operator regression (NOR) technique and Bayesian inference. Specifically, we use a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to sample the posterior probability distribution on parameters involved in the nonlocal constitutive law, and associated modeling discrepancies relative to higher fidelity computations. As an application, we consider the propagation of stress waves through a one-dimensional heterogeneous bar with randomly generated microstructure. Several numerical tests illustrate the construction, enabling UQ in nonlocal model predictions. Although nonlocal models have become popular means for homogenization, their statistical calibration with respect to high-fidelity models has not been presented before. This work is a first step towards statistical characterization of nonlocal model discrepancy in the context of homogenization.


When not to use machine learning: a perspective on potential and limitations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The unparalleled success of artificial intelligence (AI) in the technology sector has catalyzed an enormous amount of research in the scientific community. It has proven to be a powerful tool, but as with any rapidly developing field, the deluge of information can be overwhelming, confusing and sometimes misleading. This can make it easy to become lost in the same hype cycles that have historically ended in the periods of scarce funding and depleted expectations known as AI Winters. Furthermore, while the importance of innovative, high-risk research cannot be overstated, it is also imperative to understand the fundamental limits of available techniques, especially in young fields where the rules appear to be constantly rewritten and as the likelihood of application to high-stakes scenarios increases. In this perspective, we highlight the guiding principles of data-driven modeling, how these principles imbue models with almost magical predictive power, and how they also impose limitations on the scope of problems they can address. Particularly, understanding when not to use data-driven techniques, such as machine learning, is not something commonly explored, but is just as important as knowing how to apply the techniques properly. We hope that the discussion to follow provides researchers throughout the sciences with a better understanding of when said techniques are appropriate, the pitfalls to watch for, and most importantly, the confidence to leverage the power they can provide.


Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present 3DiM, a diffusion model for 3D novel view synthesis, which is able to translate a single input view into consistent and sharp completions across many views. The core component of 3DiM is a pose-conditional image-to-image diffusion model, which takes a source view and its pose as inputs, and generates a novel view for a target pose as output. The output views are generated autoregressively, and during the generation of each novel view, one selects a random conditioning view from the set of available views at each denoising step. We demonstrate that stochastic conditioning significantly improves the 3D consistency of a naïve sampler for an image-to-image diffusion model, which involves conditioning on a single fixed view. We compare 3DiM to prior work on the SRN ShapeNet dataset, demonstrating that 3DiM's generated completions from a single view achieve much higher fidelity, while being approximately 3D consistent. We also introduce a new evaluation methodology, 3D consistency scoring, to measure the 3D consistency of a generated object by training a neural field on the model's output views. Given a single input image on the left, 3DiM performs novel view synthesis and generates the four views on the right. We trained a single 471M parameter 3DiM on all of ShapeNet (without classconditioning) and sample frames with 256 steps (512 score function evaluations with classifier-free guidance). See the Supplementary Website for video outputs.


Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Gated Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As an important part of intelligent transportation systems, traffic forecasting has attracted tremendous attention from academia and industry. Despite a lot of methods being proposed for traffic forecasting, it is still difficult to model complex spatial-temporal dependency. Temporal dependency includes short-term dependency and long-term dependency, and the latter is often overlooked. Spatial dependency can be divided into two parts: distance-based spatial dependency and hidden spatial dependency. To model complex spatial-temporal dependency, we propose a novel framework for traffic forecasting, named Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Gated Recurrent Network (STGCGRN). We design an attention module to capture long-term dependency by mining periodic information in traffic data. We propose a Double Graph Convolution Gated Recurrent Unit (DGCGRU) to capture spatial dependency, which integrates graph convolutional network and GRU. The graph convolution part models distance-based spatial dependency with the distance-based predefined adjacency matrix and hidden spatial dependency with the self-adaptive adjacency matrix, respectively. Specially, we employ the multi-head mechanism to capture multiple hidden dependencies. In addition, the periodic pattern of each prediction node may be different, which is often ignored, resulting in mutual interference of periodic information among nodes when modeling spatial dependency. For this, we explore the architecture of model and improve the performance. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model.


Effective Metaheuristic Based Classifiers for Multiclass Intrusion Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Network security has become the biggest concern in the area of cyber security because of the exponential growth in computer networks and applications. Intrusion detection plays an important role in the security of information systems or networks devices. The purpose of an intrusion detection system (IDS) is to detect malicious activities and then generate an alarm against these activities. Having a large amount of data is one of the key problems in detecting attacks. Most of the intrusion detection systems use all features of datasets to evaluate the models and result in is, low detection rate, high computational time and uses of many computer resources. For fast attacks detection IDS needs a lightweight data. A feature selection method plays a key role to select best features to achieve maximum accuracy. This research work conduct experiments by considering on two updated attacks datasets, UNSW-NB15 and CICDDoS2019. This work suggests a wrapper based Genetic Algorithm (GA) features selection method with ensemble classifiers. GA select the best feature subsets and achieve high accuracy, detection rate (DR) and low false alarm rate (FAR) compared to existing approaches. This research focuses on multi-class classification. Implements two ensemble methods: stacking and bagging to detect different types of attacks. The results show that GA improve the accuracy significantly with stacking ensemble classifier.


Rethink Decision Tree Traversal

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

QuickScorer[12] and RapidScorer[21] are proposed based on bit-vectors of the false nodes in order to speed up the additive ensemble of regression trees in learning to rank. Inspired by [12], more works, such as [2; 11; 13; 15], focus on the application and acceleration of additive tree models while we will pay attention to the theory of algorithms specially the representation of binary decision tree in the language of matrix computation. Based on so-called Tree Supervision Loss, a hierarchical classifier is built from the weights of the softmax layer in convolutional neural networks in [18]. In [20; 19], tree regularization is used to enhance the interpretability of deep neural networks. A generalized tree representation termed TART is based on transition matrix shown in [22].


Few-Shot Calibration of Set Predictors via Meta-Learned Cross-Validation-Based Conformal Prediction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Conventional frequentist learning is known to yield poorly calibrated models that fail to reliably quantify the uncertainty of their decisions. Bayesian learning can improve calibration, but formal guarantees apply only under restrictive assumptions about correct model specification. Conformal prediction (CP) offers a general framework for the design of set predictors with calibration guarantees that hold regardless of the underlying data generation mechanism. However, when training data are limited, CP tends to produce large, and hence uninformative, predicted sets. This paper introduces a novel meta-learning solution that aims at reducing the set prediction size. Unlike prior work, the proposed meta-learning scheme, referred to as meta-XB, (i) builds on cross-validation-based CP, rather than the less efficient validation-based CP; and (ii) preserves formal per-task calibration guarantees, rather than less stringent task-marginal guarantees. Finally, meta-XB is extended to adaptive non-conformal scores, which are shown empirically to further enhance marginal per-input calibration.


Data-driven Approach to Differentiating between Depression and Dementia from Noisy Speech and Language Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A significant number of studies apply acoustic and linguistic characteristics of human speech as prominent markers of dementia and depression. However, studies on discriminating depression from dementia are rare. Co-morbid depression is frequent in dementia and these clinical conditions share many overlapping symptoms, but the ability to distinguish between depression and dementia is essential as depression is often curable. In this work, we investigate the ability of clustering approaches in distinguishing between depression and dementia from human speech. We introduce a novel aggregated dataset, which combines narrative speech data from multiple conditions, i.e., Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, healthy control, and depression. We compare linear and non-linear clustering approaches and show that non-linear clustering techniques distinguish better between distinct disease clusters. Our interpretability analysis shows that the main differentiating symptoms between dementia and depression are acoustic abnormality, repetitiveness (or circularity) of speech, word finding difficulty, coherence impairment, and differences in lexical complexity and richness.


To Softmax, or not to Softmax: that is the question when applying Active Learning for Transformer Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite achieving state-of-the-art results in nearly all Natural Language Processing applications, fine-tuning Transformer-based language models still requires a significant amount of labeled data to work. A well known technique to reduce the amount of human effort in acquiring a labeled dataset is \textit{Active Learning} (AL): an iterative process in which only the minimal amount of samples is labeled. AL strategies require access to a quantified confidence measure of the model predictions. A common choice is the softmax activation function for the final layer. As the softmax function provides misleading probabilities, this paper compares eight alternatives on seven datasets. Our almost paradoxical finding is that most of the methods are too good at identifying the true most uncertain samples (outliers), and that labeling therefore exclusively outliers results in worse performance. As a heuristic we propose to systematically ignore samples, which results in improvements of various methods compared to the softmax function.