Statistical Learning
When regression coefficients change over time: A proposal
A common approach in forecasting problems is to estimate a least-squares regression (or other statistical learning models) from past data, which is then applied to predict future outcomes. An underlying assumption is that the same correlations that were observed in the past still hold for the future. We propose a model for situations when this assumption is not met: adopting methods from the state space literature, we model how regression coefficients change over time. Our approach can shed light on the large uncertainties associated with forecasting the future, and how much of this is due to changing dynamics of the past. Our simulation study shows that accurate estimates are obtained when the outcome is continuous, but the procedure fails for binary outcomes.
PhysioMTL: Personalizing Physiological Patterns using Optimal Transport Multi-Task Regression
Zhu, Jiacheng, Darnell, Gregory, Kumar, Agni, Zhao, Ding, Li, Bo, Nguyen, Xuanlong, Ren, Shirley You
Heart rate variability (HRV) is a practical and noninvasive measure of autonomic nervous system activity, which plays an essential role in cardiovascular health. However, using HRV to assess physiology status is challenging. Even in clinical settings, HRV is sensitive to acute stressors such as physical activity, mental stress, hydration, alcohol, and sleep. Wearable devices provide convenient HRV measurements, but the irregularity of measurements and uncaptured stressors can bias conventional analytical methods. To better interpret HRV measurements for downstream healthcare applications, we learn a personalized diurnal rhythm as an accurate physiological indicator for each individual. We develop Physiological Multitask-Learning (PhysioMTL) by harnessing Optimal Transport theory within a Multitask-learning (MTL) framework. The proposed method learns an individual-specific predictive model from heterogeneous observations, and enables estimation of an optimal transport map that yields a push forward operation onto the demographic features for each task. Our model outperforms competing MTL methodologies on unobserved predictive tasks for synthetic and two real-world datasets. Specifically, our method provides remarkable prediction results on unseen held-out subjects given only $20\%$ of the subjects in real-world observational studies. Furthermore, our model enables a counterfactual engine that generates the effect of acute stressors and chronic conditions on HRV rhythms.
Logistic Regression with Example
Logistic Regression is a Supervised Machine Learning Algorithm utilized for classification. Examples for classification include: Email spam or ham, will buy or not buy a product, disease predictions such as cancerous or noncancerous cells. Logistic regression is a Probability problem. Meaning that the outcome of the algorithm is between 0 and 1. It maintains a threshold value to classify the data points(samples).
Convergence Error Analysis of Reflected Gradient Langevin Dynamics for Globally Optimizing Non-Convex Constrained Problems
Sato, Kanji, Takeda, Akiko, Kawai, Reiichiro, Suzuki, Taiji
Non-convex optimization problems have various important applications, whereas many algorithms have been proven only to converge to stationary points. Meanwhile, gradient Langevin dynamics (GLD) and its variants have attracted increasing attention as a framework to provide theoretical convergence guarantees for a global solution in non-convex settings. The studies on GLD initially treated unconstrained convex problems and very recently expanded to convex constrained non-convex problems by Lamperski (2021). In this work, we can deal with non-convex problems with some kind of non-convex feasible region. This work analyzes reflected gradient Langevin dynamics (RGLD), a global optimization algorithm for smoothly constrained problems, including non-convex constrained ones, and derives a convergence rate to a solution with $\epsilon$-sampling error. The convergence rate is faster than the one given by Lamperski (2021) for convex constrained cases. Our proofs exploit the Poisson equation to effectively utilize the reflection for the faster convergence rate.
Proximal Policy Optimization with Adaptive Threshold for Symmetric Relative Density Ratio
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is one of the promising approaches for introducing robots into complicated environments. The recent remarkable progress of DRL stands on regularization of policy, which allows the policy to improve stably and efficiently. A popular method, so-called proximal policy optimization (PPO), and its variants constrain density ratio of the latest and baseline policies when the density ratio exceeds a given threshold. This threshold can be designed relatively intuitively, and in fact its recommended value range has been suggested. However, the density ratio is asymmetric for its center, and the possible error scale from its center, which should be close to the threshold, would depend on how the baseline policy is given. In order to maximize the values of regularization of policy, this paper proposes a new PPO derived using relative Pearson (RPE) divergence, therefore so-called PPO-RPE, to design the threshold adaptively. In PPO-RPE, the relative density ratio, which can be formed with symmetry, replaces the raw density ratio. Thanks to this symmetry, its error scale from center can easily be estimated, hence, the threshold can be adapted for the estimated error scale. From three simple benchmark simulations, the importance of algorithm-dependent threshold design is revealed. By simulating additional four locomotion tasks, it is verified that the proposed method statistically contributes to task accomplishment by appropriately restricting the policy updates.
Unsupervised machine learning approaches to the $q$-state Potts model
Tirelli, Andrea, Carvalho, Danyella O., Oliveira, Lucas A., Lima, J. P., Costa, Natanael C., Santos, Raimundo R. dos
In this paper with study phase transitions of the $q$-state Potts model, through a number of unsupervised machine learning techniques, namely Principal Component Analysis (PCA), $k$-means clustering, Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP), and Topological Data Analysis (TDA). Even though in all cases we are able to retrieve the correct critical temperatures $T_c(q)$, for $q = 3, 4$ and $5$, results show that non-linear methods as UMAP and TDA are less dependent on finite size effects, while still being able to distinguish between first and second order phase transitions. This study may be considered as a benchmark for the use of different unsupervised machine learning algorithms in the investigation of phase transitions.
A Class of Two-Timescale Stochastic EM Algorithms for Nonconvex Latent Variable Models
Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a popular choice for learning latent variable models. Variants of the EM have been initially introduced by Neal and Hinton (1998), using incremental updates to scale to large datasets, and by Wei and Tanner (1990); Delyon et al. (1999), using Monte Carlo (MC) approximations to bypass the intractable conditional expectation of the latent data for most nonconvex models. In this paper, we propose a general class of methods called Two-Timescale EM Methods based on a two-stage approach of stochastic updates to tackle an essential nonconvex optimization task for latent variable models. We motivate the choice of a double dynamic by invoking the variance reduction virtue of each stage of the method on both sources of noise: the index sampling for the incremental update and the MC approximation. We establish finite-time and global convergence bounds for nonconvex objective functions. Numerical applications on various models such as deformable template for image analysis or nonlinear models for pharmacokinetics are also presented to illustrate our findings.
Wide and Deep Graph Neural Network with Distributed Online Learning
Gao, Zhan, Gama, Fernando, Ribeiro, Alejandro
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are naturally distributed architectures for learning representations from network data. This renders them suitable candidates for decentralized tasks. In these scenarios, the underlying graph often changes with time due to link failures or topology variations, creating a mismatch between the graphs on which GNNs were trained and the ones on which they are tested. Online learning can be leveraged to retrain GNNs at testing time to overcome this issue. However, most online algorithms are centralized and usually offer guarantees only on convex problems, which GNNs rarely lead to. This paper develops the Wide and Deep GNN (WD-GNN), a novel architecture that can be updated with distributed online learning mechanisms. The WD-GNN consists of two components: the wide part is a linear graph filter and the deep part is a nonlinear GNN. At training time, the joint wide and deep architecture learns nonlinear representations from data. At testing time, the wide, linear part is retrained, while the deep, nonlinear one remains fixed. This often leads to a convex formulation. We further propose a distributed online learning algorithm that can be implemented in a decentralized setting. We also show the stability of the WD-GNN to changes of the underlying graph and analyze the convergence of the proposed online learning procedure. Experiments on movie recommendation, source localization and robot swarm control corroborate theoretical findings and show the potential of the WD-GNN for distributed online learning.
How I'm using Machine Learning to Trade in the Stock Market
Disclaimer: This article is about a simple strategy that I have used to create a trading bot. While back-testing shows that the trading bot is profitable, the trading bot is not capable of handling "black swan" events such as market crashes. Also I am not a financial advisor nor a professional trader. I am simply sharing this for entertainment purposes. So trade & read at your own risk.
Modeling Intensification for Sign Language Generation: A Computational Approach
İnan, Mert, Zhong, Yang, Hassan, Sabit, Quandt, Lorna, Alikhani, Malihe
End-to-end sign language generation models do not accurately represent the prosody in sign language. A lack of temporal and spatial variations leads to poor-quality generated presentations that confuse human interpreters. In this paper, we aim to improve the prosody in generated sign languages by modeling intensification in a data-driven manner. We present different strategies grounded in linguistics of sign language that inform how intensity modifiers can be represented in gloss annotations. To employ our strategies, we first annotate a subset of the benchmark PHOENIX-14T, a German Sign Language dataset, with different levels of intensification. We then use a supervised intensity tagger to extend the annotated dataset and obtain labels for the remaining portion of it. This enhanced dataset is then used to train state-of-the-art transformer models for sign language generation. We find that our efforts in intensification modeling yield better results when evaluated with automatic metrics. Human evaluation also indicates a higher preference of the videos generated using our model.