Statistical Learning
SetConv: A New Approach for Learning from Imbalanced Data
Gao, Yang, Li, Yi-Fan, Lin, Yu, Aggarwal, Charu, Khan, Latifur
For many real-world classification problems, e.g., sentiment classification, most existing machine learning methods are biased towards the majority class when the Imbalance Ratio (IR) is high. To address this problem, we propose a set convolution (SetConv) operation and an episodic training strategy to extract a single representative for each class, so that classifiers can later be trained on a balanced class distribution. We prove that our proposed algorithm is permutation-invariant despite the order of inputs, and experiments on multiple large-scale benchmark text datasets show the superiority of our proposed framework when compared to other SOTA methods.
Generative Locally Linear Embedding
Ghojogh, Benyamin, Ghodsi, Ali, Karray, Fakhri, Crowley, Mark
Locally Linear Embedding (LLE) is a nonlinear spectral dimensionality reduction and manifold learning method. It has two main steps which are linear reconstruction and linear embedding of points in the input space and embedding space, respectively. In this work, we propose two novel generative versions of LLE, named Generative LLE (GLLE), whose linear reconstruction steps are stochastic rather than deterministic. GLLE assumes that every data point is caused by its linear reconstruction weights as latent factors. The proposed GLLE algorithms can generate various LLE embeddings stochastically while all the generated embeddings relate to the original LLE embedding. We propose two versions for stochastic linear reconstruction, one using expectation maximization and another with direct sampling from a derived distribution by optimization. The proposed GLLE methods are closely related to and inspired by variational inference, factor analysis, and probabilistic principal component analysis. Our simulations show that the proposed GLLE methods work effectively in unfolding and generating submanifolds of data.
SimCD: Simultaneous Clustering and Differential expression analysis for single-cell transcriptomic data
Niyakan, Seyednami, Hajiramezanali, Ehsan, Boluki, Shahin, Dadaneh, Siamak Zamani, Qian, Xiaoning
Single-Cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) measurements have facilitated genome-scale transcriptomic profiling of individual cells, with the hope of deconvolving cellular dynamic changes in corresponding cell sub-populations to better understand molecular mechanisms of different development processes. Several scRNA-seq analysis methods have been proposed to first identify cell sub-populations by clustering and then separately perform differential expression analysis to understand gene expression changes. Their corresponding statistical models and inference algorithms are often designed disjointly. We develop a new method -- SimCD -- that explicitly models cell heterogeneity and dynamic differential changes in one unified hierarchical gamma-negative binomial (hGNB) model, allowing simultaneous cell clustering and differential expression analysis for scRNA-seq data. Our method naturally defines cell heterogeneity by dynamic expression changes, which is expected to help achieve better performances on the two tasks compared to the existing methods that perform them separately. In addition, SimCD better models dropout (zero inflation) in scRNA-seq data by both cell- and gene-level factors and obviates the need for sophisticated pre-processing steps such as normalization, thanks to the direct modeling of scRNA-seq count data by the rigorous hGNB model with an efficient Gibbs sampling inference algorithm. Extensive comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods on both simulated and real-world scRNA-seq count data demonstrate the capability of SimCD to discover cell clusters and capture dynamic expression changes. Furthermore, SimCD helps identify several known genes affected by food deprivation in hypothalamic neuron cell subtypes as well as some new potential markers, suggesting the capability of SimCD for bio-marker discovery.
Exponentiated Gradient Reweighting for Robust Training Under Label Noise and Beyond
Majidi, Negin, Amid, Ehsan, Talebi, Hossein, Warmuth, Manfred K.
Many learning tasks in machine learning can be viewed as taking a gradient step towards minimizing the average loss of a batch of examples in each training iteration. When noise is prevalent in the data, this uniform treatment of examples can lead to overfitting to noisy examples with larger loss values and result in poor generalization. Inspired by the expert setting in on-line learning, we present a flexible approach to learning from noisy examples. Specifically, we treat each training example as an expert and maintain a distribution over all examples. We alternate between updating the parameters of the model using gradient descent and updating the example weights using the exponentiated gradient update. Unlike other related methods, our approach handles a general class of loss functions and can be applied to a wide range of noise types and applications. We show the efficacy of our approach for multiple learning settings, namely noisy principal component analysis and a variety of noisy classification problems.
COHORTNEY: Deep Clustering for Heterogeneous Event Sequences
Zhuzhel, Vladislav, Rivera-Castro, Rodrigo, Kaploukhaya, Nina, Mironova, Liliya, Zaytsev, Alexey, Burnaev, Evgeny
There is emerging attention towards working with event sequences. In particular, clustering of event sequences is widely applicable in domains such as healthcare, marketing, and finance. Use cases include analysis of visitors to websites, hospitals, or bank transactions. Unlike traditional time series, event sequences tend to be sparse and not equally spaced in time. As a result, they exhibit different properties, which are essential to account for when developing state-of-the-art methods. The community has paid little attention to the specifics of heterogeneous event sequences. Existing research in clustering primarily focuses on classic times series data. It is unclear if proposed methods in the literature generalize well to event sequences. Here we propose COHORTNEY as a novel deep learning method for clustering heterogeneous event sequences. Our contributions include (i) a novel method using a combination of LSTM and the EM algorithm and code implementation; (ii) a comparison of this method to previous research on time series and event sequence clustering; (iii) a performance benchmark of different approaches on a new dataset from the finance industry and fourteen additional datasets. Our results show that COHORTNEY vastly outperforms in speed and cluster quality the state-of-the-art algorithm for clustering event sequences.
Joint Geometric and Topological Analysis of Hierarchical Datasets
Aloni, Lior, Bobrowski, Omer, Talmon, Ronen
In a world abundant with diverse data arising from complex acquisition techniques, there is a growing need for new data analysis methods. In this paper we focus on high-dimensional data that are organized into several hierarchical datasets. We assume that each dataset consists of complex samples, and every sample has a distinct irregular structure modeled by a graph. The main novelty in this work lies in the combination of two complementing powerful data-analytic approaches: topological data analysis (TDA) and geometric manifold learning. Geometry primarily contains local information, while topology inherently provides global descriptors. Based on this combination, we present a method for building an informative representation of hierarchical datasets. At the finer (sample) level, we devise a new metric between samples based on manifold learning that facilitates quantitative structural analysis. At the coarser (dataset) level, we employ TDA to extract qualitative structural information from the datasets. We showcase the applicability and advantages of our method on simulated data and on a corpus of hyper-spectral images. We show that an ensemble of hyper-spectral images exhibits a hierarchical structure that fits well the considered setting. In addition, we show that our new method gives rise to superior classification results compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Random Features for the Neural Tangent Kernel
Han, Insu, Avron, Haim, Shoham, Neta, Kim, Chaewon, Shin, Jinwoo
The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) has discovered connections between deep neural networks and kernel methods with insights of optimization and generalization. Motivated by this, recent works report that NTK can achieve better performances compared to training neural networks on small-scale datasets. However, results under large-scale settings are hardly studied due to the computational limitation of kernel methods. In this work, we propose an efficient feature map construction of the NTK of fully-connected ReLU network which enables us to apply it to large-scale datasets. We combine random features of the arc-cosine kernels with a sketching-based algorithm which can run in linear with respect to both the number of data points and input dimension. We show that dimension of the resulting features is much smaller than other baseline feature map constructions to achieve comparable error bounds both in theory and practice. We additionally utilize the leverage score based sampling for improved bounds of arc-cosine random features and prove a spectral approximation guarantee of the proposed feature map to the NTK matrix of two-layer neural network. We benchmark a variety of machine learning tasks to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme. In particular, our algorithm can run tens of magnitude faster than the exact kernel methods for large-scale settings without performance loss.
Mitigating Gradient-based Adversarial Attacks via Denoising and Compression
Mahfuz, Rehana, Sahay, Rajeev, Gamal, Aly El
Gradient-based adversarial attacks on deep neural networks pose a serious threat, since they can be deployed by adding imperceptible perturbations to the test data of any network, and the risk they introduce cannot be assessed through the network's original training performance. Denoising and dimensionality reduction are two distinct methods that have been independently investigated to combat such attacks. While denoising offers the ability to tailor the defense to the specific nature of the attack, dimensionality reduction offers the advantage of potentially removing previously unseen perturbations, along with reducing the training time of the network being defended. We propose strategies to combine the advantages of these two defense mechanisms. First, we propose the cascaded defense, which involves denoising followed by dimensionality reduction. To reduce the training time of the defense for a small trade-off in performance, we propose the hidden layer defense, which involves feeding the output of the encoder of a denoising autoencoder into the network. Further, we discuss how adaptive attacks against these defenses could become significantly weak when an alternative defense is used, or when no defense is used. In this light, we propose a new metric to evaluate a defense which measures the sensitivity of the adaptive attack to modifications in the defense. Finally, we present a guideline for building an ordered repertoire of defenses, a.k.a. a defense infrastructure, that adjusts to limited computational resources in presence of uncertainty about the attack strategy.
Starting guide to artificial intelligence part 2
So in Python Machine learning we have a lot of libraries that makes the implementation process a lot easier. First of all, Pandas library is one of the most useful libraries in Python. The main use of this library is in data preprocessing and manipulation. In addition, the great documentation offered on their website makes it easier and faster in preprocessing and cleaning the data. It is also one of the most significant libraries.