Statistical Learning
A Probit Tensor Factorization Model For Relational Learning
Liu, Ye, Song, Rui, Lu, Wenbin, Xiao, Yanghua
With the proliferation of knowledge graphs, modeling data with complex multirelational structure has gained increasing attention in the area of statistical relational learning. One of the most important goals of statistical relational learning is link prediction, i.e., predicting whether certain relations exist in the knowledge graph. A large number of models and algorithms have been proposed to perform link prediction, among which tensor factorization method has proven to achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of computation efficiency and prediction accuracy. However, a common drawback of the existing tensor factorization models is that the missing relations and non-existing relations are treated in the same way, which results in a loss of information. To address this issue, we propose a binary tensor factorization model with probit link, which not only inherits the computation efficiency from the classic tensor factorization model but also accounts for the binary nature of relational data. Our proposed probit tensor factorization (PTF) model shows advantages in both the prediction accuracy and interpretability
American Hate Crime Trends Prediction with Event Extraction
Han, Songqiao, Huang, Hailiang, Liu, Jiangwei, Xiao, Shengsheng
Social media platforms may provide potential space for discourses that contain hate speech, and even worse, can act as a propagation mechanism for hate crimes. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program collects hate crime data and releases statistic report yearly. These statistics provide information in determining national hate crime trends. The statistics can also provide valuable holistic and strategic insight for law enforcement agencies or justify lawmakers for specific legislation. However, the reports are mostly released next year and lag behind many immediate needs. Recent research mainly focuses on hate speech detection in social media text or empirical studies on the impact of a confirmed crime. This paper proposes a framework that first utilizes text mining techniques to extract hate crime events from New York Times news, then uses the results to facilitate predicting American national-level and state-level hate crime trends. Experimental results show that our method can significantly enhance the prediction performance compared with time series or regression methods without event-related factors. Our framework broadens the methods of national-level and state-level hate crime trends prediction.
Dense Representative Tooth Landmark/axis Detection Network on 3D Model
Wei, Guangshun, Cui, Zhiming, Zhu, Jie, Yang, Lei, Zhou, Yuanfeng, Singh, Pradeep, Gu, Min, Wang, Wenping
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is increasingly used for digital orthodontics, but one of the challenges is to automatically and accurately detect tooth landmarks and axes. This is partly because of sophisticated geometric definitions of them, and partly due to large variations among individual tooth and across different types of tooth. As such, we propose a deep learning approach with a labeled dataset by professional dentists to the tooth landmark/axis detection on tooth model that are crucial for orthodontic treatments. Our method can extract not only tooth landmarks in the form of point (e.g. cusps), but also axes that measure the tooth angulation and inclination. The proposed network takes as input a 3D tooth model and predicts various types of the tooth landmarks and axes. Specifically, we encode the landmarks and axes as dense fields defined on the surface of the tooth model. This design choice and a set of added components make the proposed network more suitable for extracting sparse landmarks from a given 3D tooth model. Extensive evaluation of the proposed method was conducted on a set of dental models prepared by experienced dentists. Results show that our method can produce tooth landmarks with high accuracy. Our method was examined and justified via comparison with the state-of-the-art methods as well as the ablation studies.
Epidemic inference through generative neural networks
Biazzo, Indaco, Braunstein, Alfredo, Dall'Asta, Luca, Mazza, Fabio
Reconstructing missing information in epidemic spreading on contact networks can be essential in prevention and containment strategies. For instance, identifying and warning infective but asymptomatic individuals (e.g., manual contact tracing) helped contain outbreaks in the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of possible epidemic cascades typically grows exponentially with the number of individuals involved. The challenge posed by inference problems in the epidemics processes originates from the difficulty of identifying the almost negligible subset of those compatible with the evidence (for instance, medical tests). Here we present a new generative neural networks framework that can sample the most probable infection cascades compatible with observations. Moreover, the framework can infer the parameters governing the spreading of infections. The proposed method obtains better or comparable results with existing methods on the patient zero problem, risk assessment, and inference of infectious parameters in synthetic and real case scenarios like spreading infections in workplaces and hospitals.
How No-Code Platforms Can Bring AI to Small and Midsize Businesses
Technology often follows a familiar progression. First, it's used by a small core of scientists, then the user base expands to engineers who can navigate technical nuance and jargon until finally it's made user-friendly enough that almost anyone can use it. Right now, the process for building software is making that final leap. Just as the clickable icons of Windows and Mac OS replaced obscure DOS commands, new "no-code" platforms are replacing programming languages with simple drag and drop interfaces. The implications are huge: Where it used to require a team of engineers to build a piece of software, now users with a web browser and an idea have the power to bring that idea to life themselves.
Sampling from Log-Concave Distributions with Infinity-Distance Guarantees and Applications to Differentially Private Optimization
Mangoubi, Oren, Vishnoi, Nisheeth K.
For a $d$-dimensional log-concave distribution $\pi(\theta)\propto e^{-f(\theta)}$ on a polytope $K$, we consider the problem of outputting samples from a distribution $\nu$ which is $O(\varepsilon)$-close in infinity-distance $\sup_{\theta\in K}|\log\frac{\nu(\theta)}{\pi(\theta)}|$ to $\pi$. Such samplers with infinity-distance guarantees are specifically desired for differentially private optimization as traditional sampling algorithms which come with total-variation distance or KL divergence bounds are insufficient to guarantee differential privacy. Our main result is an algorithm that outputs a point from a distribution $O(\varepsilon)$-close to $\pi$ in infinity-distance and requires $O((md+dL^2R^2)\times(LR+d\log(\frac{Rd+LRd}{\varepsilon r}))\times md^{\omega-1})$ arithmetic operations, where $f$ is $L$-Lipschitz, $K$ is defined by $m$ inequalities, is contained in a ball of radius $R$ and contains a ball of smaller radius $r$, and $\omega$ is the matrix-multiplication constant. In particular this runtime is logarithmic in $\frac{1}{\varepsilon}$ and significantly improves on prior works. Technically, we depart from the prior works that construct Markov chains on a $\frac{1}{\varepsilon^2}$-discretization of $K$ to achieve a sample with $O(\varepsilon)$ infinity-distance error, and present a method to convert continuous samples from $K$ with total-variation bounds to samples with infinity bounds. To achieve improved dependence on $d$, we present a "soft-threshold" version of the Dikin walk which may be of independent interest. Plugging our algorithm into the framework of the exponential mechanism yields similar improvements in the running time of $\varepsilon$-pure differentially private algorithms for optimization problems such as empirical risk minimization of Lipschitz-convex functions and low-rank approximation, while still achieving the tightest known utility bounds.
Cross-modal Zero-shot Hashing by Label Attributes Embedding
Wang, Runmin, Yu, Guoxian, Liu, Lei, Cui, Lizhen, Domeniconi, Carlotta, Zhang, Xiangliang
Cross-modal hashing (CMH) is one of the most promising methods in cross-modal approximate nearest neighbor search. Most CMH solutions ideally assume the labels of training and testing set are identical. However, the assumption is often violated, causing a zero-shot CMH problem. Recent efforts to address this issue focus on transferring knowledge from the seen classes to the unseen ones using label attributes. However, the attributes are isolated from the features of multi-modal data. To reduce the information gap, we introduce an approach called LAEH (Label Attributes Embedding for zero-shot cross-modal Hashing). LAEH first gets the initial semantic attribute vectors of labels by word2vec model and then uses a transformation network to transform them into a common subspace. Next, it leverages the hash vectors and the feature similarity matrix to guide the feature extraction network of different modalities. At the same time, LAEH uses the attribute similarity as the supplement of label similarity to rectify the label embedding and common subspace. Experiments show that LAEH outperforms related representative zero-shot and cross-modal hashing methods.
ARISE: ApeRIodic SEmi-parametric Process for Efficient Markets without Periodogram and Gaussianity Assumptions
Zhang, Shao-Qun, Zhou, Zhi-Hua
Mimicking and learning the long-term memory of efficient markets is a fundamental problem in the interaction between machine learning and financial economics to sequential data. Despite the prominence of this issue, current treatments either remain largely limited to heuristic techniques or rely significantly on periodogram or Gaussianty assumptions. In this paper, we present the ApeRIodic SEmi-parametric (ARISE) process for investigating efficient markets. The ARISE process is formulated as an infinite-sum function of some known processes and employs the aperiodic spectrum estimation to determine the key hyper-parameters, thus possessing the power and potential of modeling the price data with long-term memory, non-stationarity, and aperiodic spectrum. We further theoretically show that the ARISE process has the mean-square convergence, consistency, and asymptotic normality without periodogram and Gaussianity assumptions. In practice, we apply the ARISE process to identify the efficiency of real-world markets. Besides, we also provide two alternative ARISE applications: studying the long-term memorability of various machine-learning models and developing a latent state-space model for inference and forecasting of time series. The numerical experiments confirm the superiority of our proposed approaches.
High-order joint embedding for multi-level link prediction
Link prediction infers potential links from observed networks, and is one of the essential problems in network analyses. In contrast to traditional graph representation modeling which only predicts two-way pairwise relations, we propose a novel tensor-based joint network embedding approach on simultaneously encoding pairwise links and hyperlinks onto a latent space, which captures the dependency between pairwise and multi-way links in inferring potential unobserved hyperlinks. The major advantage of the proposed embedding procedure is that it incorporates both the pairwise relationships and subgroup-wise structure among nodes to capture richer network information. In addition, the proposed method introduces a hierarchical dependency among links to infer potential hyperlinks, and leads to better link prediction. In theory we establish the estimation consistency for the proposed embedding approach, and provide a faster convergence rate compared to link prediction utilizing pairwise links or hyperlinks only. Numerical studies on both simulation settings and Facebook ego-networks indicate that the proposed method improves both hyperlink and pairwise link prediction accuracy compared to existing link prediction algorithms.
Uncertainty Calibration for Ensemble-Based Debiasing Methods
Xiong, Ruibin, Chen, Yimeng, Pang, Liang, Chen, Xueqi, Lan, Yanyan
Ensemble-based debiasing methods have been shown effective in mitigating the reliance of classifiers on specific dataset bias, by exploiting the output of a bias-only model to adjust the learning target. In this paper, we focus on the bias-only model in these ensemble-based methods, which plays an important role but has not gained much attention in the existing literature. Theoretically, we prove that the debiasing performance can be damaged by inaccurate uncertainty estimations of the bias-only model. Empirically, we show that existing bias-only models fall short in producing accurate uncertainty estimations. Motivated by these findings, we propose to conduct calibration on the bias-only model, thus achieving a three-stage ensemble-based debiasing framework, including bias modeling, model calibrating, and debiasing. Experimental results on NLI and fact verification tasks show that our proposed three-stage debiasing framework consistently outperforms the traditional two-stage one in out-of-distribution accuracy.