Statistical Learning
Identifying Cyber Threats Before They Happen: Deep Learning
Crypto.com, Microsoft, NVidia, and Okta all got hacked this year. In some hacks, attackers are looking to take data, while some are just trying things out. Either way, it is in the interest of companies to patch up the holes in their security systems as more attackers are learning to take advantage of them. The project I am working on now is one to prevent cyber threats like these from happening. When a company is hacked, there is a lot at stake.
Provably Auditing Ordinary Least Squares in Low Dimensions
Measuring the stability of conclusions derived from Ordinary Least Squares linear regression is critically important, but most metrics either only measure local stability (i.e. against infinitesimal changes in the data), or are only interpretable under statistical assumptions. Recent work proposes a simple, global, finite-sample stability metric: the minimum number of samples that need to be removed so that rerunning the analysis overturns the conclusion, specifically meaning that the sign of a particular coefficient of the estimated regressor changes. However, besides the trivial exponential-time algorithm, the only approach for computing this metric is a greedy heuristic that lacks provable guarantees under reasonable, verifiable assumptions; the heuristic provides a loose upper bound on the stability and also cannot certify lower bounds on it. We show that in the low-dimensional regime where the number of covariates is a constant but the number of samples is large, there are efficient algorithms for provably estimating (a fractional version of) this metric. Applying our algorithms to the Boston Housing dataset, we exhibit regression analyses where we can estimate the stability up to a factor of $3$ better than the greedy heuristic, and analyses where we can certify stability to dropping even a majority of the samples.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with Python Examples -- Tutorial
When implementing machine learning algorithms, the inclusion of more features might lead to worsening performance issues. Increasing the number of features will not always improve classification accuracy, which is also known as the curse of dimensionality. Hence, we apply dimensionality reduction to improve classification accuracy by selecting the optimal set of lower dimensionality features. Principal component analysis (PCA) is essential for data science, machine learning, data visualization, statistics, and other quantitative fields. It is essential to know about vector, matrix, and transpose matrix, eigenvalues, eigenvectors, and others to understand the concept of dimensionality reduction.
Top 9 Machine Learning Algorithms for SEO & Marketing
A list of top machine learning algorithms for marketers that can help to understand trends in user behavior, which further assist with SEO and marketing-based decisions on big data. The way to advertise and manage your SEO is changing. The tools of the trade for marketers, product managers, and SMBS are ever-evolving. This next wave of MarTech has been ramping up and might put some of us out of business. We should keep an eye on the cutting-edge machine learning in marketing and SEO and neural network (AI) technologies being used to make our market assessments more accurate, campaigns more successful, and our customers ultimately more satisfied.
Pentagon Calls for New Ideas in 'Third Wave' of AI Evolution
A key research and development agency within the Department of Defense is accepting new contract proposals specifically focused on advancing algorithmic processing within Defense's artificial intelligence projects. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is formally soliciting contracts for its new Enabling Confidence program, a subsect within its Artificial Intelligence Exploration initiative. The AIE focuses on what DARPA defines as its "third wave" of artificial intelligence research, which includes AI theory and application research that examines limitations with rule and statistical learning theories belying AI technologies. "The pace of discovery in AI science and technology is accelerating worldwide," the program announcement says. "AIE will enable DARPA to fund pioneering AI research to discover new areas where R&D programs awarded through this new approach may be able to advance the state of the art."
Weak Convergence of Approximate reflection coupling and its Application to Non-convex Optimization
In this paper, we propose a weak approximation of the reflection coupling (RC) for stochastic differential equations (SDEs), and prove it converges weakly to the desired coupling. In contrast to the RC, the proposed approximate reflection coupling (ARC) need not take the hitting time of processes to the diagonal set into consideration and can be defined as the solution of some SDEs on the whole time interval. Therefore, ARC can work effectively against SDEs with different drift terms. As an application of ARC, an evaluation on the effectiveness of the stochastic gradient descent in a non-convex setting is also described. For the sample size $n$, the step size $\eta$, and the batch size $B$, we derive uniform evaluations on the time with orders $n^{-1}$, $\eta^{1/2}$, and $\sqrt{(n - B) / B (n - 1)}$, respectively.
Interpretable Models Capable of Handling Systematic Missingness in Imbalanced Classes and Heterogeneous Datasets
Ghosh, Sreejita, Baranowski, Elizabeth S., Biehl, Michael, Arlt, Wiebke, Tino, Peter, Bunte, Kerstin
Application of interpretable machine learning techniques on medical datasets facilitate early and fast diagnoses, along with getting deeper insight into the data. Furthermore, the transparency of these models increase trust among application domain experts. Medical datasets face common issues such as heterogeneous measurements, imbalanced classes with limited sample size, and missing data, which hinder the straightforward application of machine learning techniques. In this paper we present a family of prototype-based (PB) interpretable models which are capable of handling these issues. The models introduced in this contribution show comparable or superior performance to alternative techniques applicable in such situations. However, unlike ensemble based models, which have to compromise on easy interpretation, the PB models here do not. Moreover we propose a strategy of harnessing the power of ensembles while maintaining the intrinsic interpretability of the PB models, by averaging the model parameter manifolds. All the models were evaluated on a synthetic (publicly available dataset) in addition to detailed analyses of two real-world medical datasets (one publicly available). Results indicated that the models and strategies we introduced addressed the challenges of real-world medical data, while remaining computationally inexpensive and transparent, as well as similar or superior in performance compared to their alternatives.
Interpolating Between Softmax Policy Gradient and Neural Replicator Dynamics with Capped Implicit Exploration
Morrill, Dustin, Saleh, Esra'a, Bowling, Michael, Greenwald, Amy
Neural replicator dynamics (NeuRD) is an alternative to the foundational softmax policy gradient (SPG) algorithm motivated by online learning and evolutionary game theory. The NeuRD expected update is designed to be nearly identical to that of SPG, however, we show that the Monte Carlo updates differ in a substantial way: the importance correction accounting for a sampled action is nullified in the SPG update, but not in the NeuRD update. Naturally, this causes the NeuRD update to have higher variance than its SPG counterpart. Building on implicit exploration algorithms in the adversarial bandit setting, we introduce capped implicit exploration (CIX) estimates that allow us to construct NeuRD-CIX, which interpolates between this aspect of NeuRD and SPG. We show how CIX estimates can be used in a black-box reduction to construct bandit algorithms with regret bounds that hold with high probability and the benefits this entails for NeuRD-CIX in sequential decision-making settings. Our analysis reveals a bias--variance tradeoff between SPG and NeuRD, and shows how theory predicts that NeuRD-CIX will perform well more consistently than NeuRD while retaining NeuRD's advantages over SPG in non-stationary environments.
Uniform Generalization Bound on Time and Inverse Temperature for Gradient Descent Algorithm and its Application to Analysis of Simulated Annealing
In this paper, we propose a novel uniform generalization bound on the time and inverse temperature for stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) in a non-convex setting. While previous works derive their generalization bounds by uniform stability, we use Rademacher complexity to make our generalization bound independent of the time and inverse temperature. Using Rademacher complexity, we can reduce the problem to derive a generalization bound on the whole space to that on a bounded region and therefore can remove the effect of the time and inverse temperature from our generalization bound. As an application of our generalization bound, an evaluation on the effectiveness of the simulated annealing in a non-convex setting is also described. For the sample size $n$ and time $s$, we derive evaluations with orders $\sqrt{n^{-1} \log (n+1)}$ and $|(\log)^4(s)|^{-1}$, respectively. Here, $(\log)^4$ denotes the $4$ times composition of the logarithmic function.
MetaNOR: A Meta-Learnt Nonlocal Operator Regression Approach for Metamaterial Modeling
Zhang, Lu, You, Huaiqian, Yu, Yue
We propose MetaNOR, a meta-learnt approach for transfer-learning operators based on the nonlocal operator regression. The overall goal is to efficiently provide surrogate models for new and unknown material-learning tasks with different microstructures. The algorithm consists of two phases: (1) learning a common nonlocal kernel representation from existing tasks; (2) transferring the learned knowledge and rapidly learning surrogate operators for unseen tasks with a different material, where only a few test samples are required. We apply MetaNOR to model the wave propagation within 1D metamaterials, showing substantial improvements on the sampling efficiency for new materials.