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 Statistical Learning


Predicting Flight Delay with Spatio-Temporal Trajectory Convolutional Network and Airport Situational Awareness Map

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

To model and forecast flight delays accurately, it is crucial to harness various vehicle trajectory and contextual sensor data on airport tarmac areas. These heterogeneous sensor data, if modelled correctly, can be used to generate a situational awareness map. Existing techniques apply traditional supervised learning methods onto historical data, contextual features and route information among different airports to predict flight delay are inaccurate and only predict arrival delay but not departure delay, which is essential to airlines. In this paper, we propose a vision-based solution to achieve a high forecasting accuracy, applicable to the airport. Our solution leverages a snapshot of the airport situational awareness map, which contains various trajectories of aircraft and contextual features such as weather and airline schedules. We propose an end-to-end deep learning architecture, TrajCNN, which captures both the spatial and temporal information from the situational awareness map. Additionally, we reveal that the situational awareness map of the airport has a vital impact on estimating flight departure delay. Our proposed framework obtained a good result (around 18 minutes error) for predicting flight departure delay at Los Angeles International Airport.


Markdowns in E-Commerce Fresh Retail: A Counterfactual Prediction and Multi-Period Optimization Approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, by leveraging abundant observational transaction data, we propose a novel data-driven and interpretable pricing approach for markdowns, consisting of counterfactual prediction and multi-period price optimization. Firstly, we build a semi-parametric structural model to learn individual price elasticity and predict counterfactual demand. This semi-parametric model takes advantage of both the predictability of nonparametric machine learning model and the interpretability of economic model. Secondly, we propose a multi-period dynamic pricing algorithm to maximize the overall profit of a perishable product over its finite selling horizon. Different with the traditional approaches that use the deterministic demand, we model the uncertainty of counterfactual demand since it inevitably has randomness in the prediction process. Based on the stochastic model, we derive a sequential pricing strategy by Markov decision process, and design a two-stage algorithm to solve it. The proposed algorithm is very efficient. It reduces the time complexity from exponential to polynomial. Experimental results show the advantages of our pricing algorithm, and the proposed framework has been successfully deployed to the well-known e-commerce fresh retail scenario - Freshippo.


Machine Learning Models to Predict 30-Day Mortality in Mechanically Ventilated Patients

#artificialintelligence

Previous scoring models, such as the Acute Physiologic Assessment and Chronic Health Evaluation II (APACHE II) score, do not adequately predict the mortality of patients receiving mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit. Therefore, this study aimed to apply machine learning algorithms to improve the prediction accuracy for 30-day mortality of mechanically ventilated patients. The data of 16,940 mechanically ventilated patients were divided into the training-validation (83%, n = 13,988) and test (17%, n = 2952) sets. Machine learning algorithms including balanced random forest, light gradient boosting machine, extreme gradient boost, multilayer perceptron, and logistic regression were used. We compared the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUCs) of machine learning algorithms with those of the APACHE II and ProVent score results. The extreme gradient boost model showed the highest AUC (0.79 (0.77โ€“0.80)) for the 30-day mortality prediction, followed by the balanced random forest model (0.78 (0.76โ€“0.80)). The AUCs of these machine learning models as achieved by APACHE II and ProVent scores were higher than 0.67 (0.65โ€“0.69), and 0.69 (0.67โ€“0.71)), respectively. The most important variables in developing each machine learning model were APACHE II score, Charlson comorbidity index, and norepinephrine. The machine learning models have a higher AUC than conventional scoring systems, and can thus better predict the 30-day mortality of mechanically ventilated patients.



Growing and Pruning Ensembles in Python

#artificialintelligence

Ensemble member selection refers to algorithms that optimize the composition of an ensemble. This may involve growing an ensemble from available models or pruning members from a fully defined ensemble. The goal is often to reduce the model or computational complexity of an ensemble with little or no effect on the performance of an ensemble, and in some cases find a combination of ensemble members that results in better performance than blindly using all contributing models directly. In this tutorial, you will discover how to develop ensemble selection algorithms from scratch. Growing and Pruning Ensembles in Python Photo by FaBio C, some rights reserved. Voting and stacking ensembles typically combine the predictions from a heterogeneous group of model types.


Understanding dimensionality reduction in machine learning models

#artificialintelligence

Machine learning algorithms have gained fame for being able to ferret out relevant information from datasets with many features, such as tables with dozens of rows and images with millions of pixels. Thanks to advances in cloud computing, you can often run very large machine learning models without noticing how much computational power works behind the scenes. But every new feature that you add to your problem adds to its complexity, making it harder to solve it with machine learning algorithms. Data scientists use dimensionality reduction, a set of techniques that remove excessive and irrelevant features from their machine learning models. Dimensionality reduction slashes the costs of machine learning and sometimes makes it possible to solve complicated problems with simpler models. Machine learning models map features to outcomes.


Statistical Optimality and Computational Efficiency of Nystr\"om Kernel PCA

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Kernel methods provide an elegant framework for developing nonlinear learning algorithms from simple linear methods. Though these methods have superior empirical performance in several real data applications, their usefulness is inhibited by the significant computational burden incurred in large sample situations. Various approximation schemes have been proposed in the literature to alleviate these computational issues, and the approximate kernel machines are shown to retain the empirical performance. However, the theoretical properties of these approximate kernel machines are less well understood. In this work, we theoretically study the trade-off between computational complexity and statistical accuracy in Nystr\"om approximate kernel principal component analysis (KPCA), wherein we show that the Nystr\"om approximate KPCA matches the statistical performance of (non-approximate) KPCA while remaining computationally beneficial. Additionally, we show that Nystr\"om approximate KPCA outperforms the statistical behavior of another popular approximation scheme, the random feature approximation, when applied to KPCA.


Optimal radial basis for density-based atomic representations

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The input of almost every machine learning algorithm targeting the properties of matter at the atomic scale involves a transformation of the list of Cartesian atomic coordinates into a more symmetric representation. Many of these most popular representations can be seen as an expansion of the symmetrized correlations of the atom density, and differ mainly by the choice of basis. Here we discuss how to build an adaptive, optimal numerical basis that is chosen to represent most efficiently the structural diversity of the dataset at hand. For each training dataset, this optimal basis is unique, and can be computed at no additional cost with respect to the primitive basis by approximating it with splines. We demonstrate that this construction yields representations that are accurate and computationally efficient, presenting examples that involve both molecular and condensed-phase machine-learning models.


Conformal histogram regression

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper develops a conformal method to compute prediction intervals for non-parametric regression that can automatically adapt to skewed data. Leveraging black-box machine learning algorithms to estimate the conditional distribution of the outcome using histograms, it translates their output into the shortest prediction intervals with approximate conditional coverage. The resulting prediction intervals provably have marginal coverage in finite samples, while asymptotically achieving conditional coverage and optimal length if the black-box model is consistent. Numerical experiments with simulated and real data demonstrate improved performance compared to state-of-the-art alternatives, including conformalized quantile regression and other distributional conformal prediction approaches.


Nonparametric Modeling of Higher-Order Interactions via Hypergraphons

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Let V {1,..., n} be a set of n items that could represent for example, people in a social network, genes in a biological network or researchers in academic networks. Models of interaction among the n items could be conveniently represented in the form of a graph or a hypergraph, G(V, E), where the items form the nodes of the graph and the hyperedge set E represents the interactions among the items. Network datasets that capture such complex interactions between a set of objects are becoming increasingly prevalent in several scientific fields. Developing realistic generative models for such networks is a challenging problem that has been an active subject of research across diverse fields spanning from statistics, physics, computer science; see Kolaczyk (2009); Goldenberg et al. (2010); Battiston et al. (2020) for comprehensive overview. A majority of the existing work has focussed on the case of modeling pairwise interactions.