Imbalanced classification tasks are widespread in many real-world applications. For such classification tasks, in comparison with the accuracy rate, it is usually much more appropriate to use non-decomposable performance measures such as the Area Under the receiver operating characteristic Curve (AUC) and the $F_\beta$ measure as the classification criterion since the label class is imbalanced. On the other hand, the minimax probability machine is a popular method for binary classification problems and aims at learning a linear classifier by maximizing the accuracy rate, which makes it unsuitable to deal with imbalanced classification tasks. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new minimax probability machine for the $F_\beta$ measure, called MPMF, which can be used to deal with imbalanced classification tasks. A brief discussion is also given on how to extend the MPMF model for several other non-decomposable performance measures listed in the paper. To solve the MPMF model effectively, we derive its equivalent form which can then be solved by an alternating descent method to learn a linear classifier. Further, the kernel trick is employed to derive a nonlinear MPMF model to learn a nonlinear classifier. Several experiments on real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our new model.

Conditional quantile estimation is a key statistical learning challenge motivated by the need to quantify uncertainty in predictions or to model a diverse population without being overly reductive. As such, many models have been developed for this problem. Adopting a meta viewpoint, we propose a general framework (inspired by neural network optimization) for aggregating any number of conditional quantile models in order to boost predictive accuracy. We consider weighted ensembling strategies of increasing flexibility where the weights may vary over individual models, quantile levels, and feature values. An appeal of our approach is its portability: we ensure that estimated quantiles at adjacent levels do not cross by applying simple transformations through which gradients can be backpropagated, and this allows us to leverage the modern deep learning toolkit for building quantile ensembles. Our experiments confirm that ensembling can lead to big gains in accuracy, even when the constituent models are themselves powerful and flexible.

Conventional Endoscopy (CE) and Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) are known tools for diagnosing gastrointestinal (GI) tract disorders. Localizing frames provide valuable information about the anomaly location and also can help clinicians determine a more appropriate treatment plan. There are many automated algorithms to detect the anomaly. However, very few of the existing works address the issue of localization. In this study, we present a combination of meta-learning and deep learning for localizing both endoscopy images and video. A dataset is collected from 10 different anatomical positions of human GI tract. In the meta-learning section, the system was trained using 78 CE and 27 WCE annotated frames with a modified Siamese Neural Network (SNN) to predict the location of one single image/frame. Then, a postprocessing section using bidirectional long short-term memory is proposed for localizing a sequence of frames. Here, we have employed feature vector, distance and predicted location obtained from a trained SNN. The postprocessing section is trained and tested on 1,028 and 365 seconds of CE and WCE videos using hold-out validation (50%), and achieved F1-score of 86.3% and 83.0%, respectively. In addition, we performed subjective evaluation using nine gastroenterologists. The results show that the computer-aided methods can outperform gastroenterologists assessment of localization. The proposed method is compared with various approaches, such as support vector machine with hand-crafted features, convolutional neural network and the transfer learning-based methods, and showed better results. Therefore, it can be used in frame localization, which can help in video summarization and anomaly detection.

We introduce a framework for reasoning about what meaning is captured by the neurons in a trained neural network. We provide a strategy for discovering meaning by training a second model (referred to as an observer model) to classify the state of the model it observes (an object model) in relation to attributes of the underlying dataset. We implement and evaluate observer models in the context of a specific set of classification problems, employ heat maps for visualizing the relevance of components of an object model in the context of linear observer models, and use these visualizations to extract insights about the manner in which neural networks identify salient characteristics of their inputs. We identify important properties captured decisively in trained neural networks; some of these properties are denoted by individual neurons. Finally, we observe that the label proportion of a property denoted by a neuron is dependent on the depth of a neuron within a network; we analyze these dependencies, and provide an interpretation of them.

This paper proposes a meta-learning approach to evolving a parametrized loss function, which is called Meta-Loss Network (MLN), for training the image classification learning on small datasets. In our approach, the MLN is embedded in the framework of classification learning as a differentiable objective function. The MLN is evolved with the Evolutionary Strategy algorithm (ES) to an optimized loss function, such that a classifier, which optimized to minimize this loss, will achieve a good generalization effect. A classifier learns on a small training dataset to minimize MLN with Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and then the MLN is evolved with the precision of the small-dataset-updated classifier on a large validation dataset. In order to evaluate our approach, the MLN is trained with a large number of small sample learning tasks sampled from FashionMNIST and tested on validation tasks sampled from FashionMNIST and CIFAR10. Experiment results demonstrate that the MLN effectively improved generalization compared to classical cross-entropy error and mean squared error.

Diabetes is currently one of the most common, dangerous, and costly diseases in the world that is caused by an increase in blood sugar or a decrease in insulin in the body. Diabetes can have detrimental effects on people's health if diagnosed late. Today, diabetes has become one of the challenges for health and government officials. Prevention is a priority, and taking care of people's health without compromising their comfort is an essential need. In this study, the Ensemble training methodology based on genetic algorithms are used to accurately diagnose and predict the outcomes of diabetes mellitus. In this study, we use the experimental data, real data on Indian diabetics on the University of California website. Current developments in ICT, such as the Internet of Things, machine learning, and data mining, allow us to provide health strategies with more intelligent capabilities to accurately predict the outcomes of the disease in daily life and the hospital and prevent the progression of this disease and it's many complications. The results show the high performance of the proposed method in diagnosing the disease, which has reached 98.8%, and 99% accuracy in this study.

Bayesian experimental design (BED) aims at designing an experiment to maximize the information gathering from the collected data. The optimal design is usually achieved by maximizing the mutual information (MI) between the data and the model parameters. When the analytical expression of the MI is unavailable, e.g., having implicit models with intractable data distributions, a neural network-based lower bound of the MI was recently proposed and a gradient ascent method was used to maximize the lower bound. However, the approach in Kleinegesse et al., 2020 requires a pathwise sampling path to compute the gradient of the MI lower bound with respect to the design variables, and such a pathwise sampling path is usually inaccessible for implicit models. In this work, we propose a hybrid gradient approach that leverages recent advances in variational MI estimator and evolution strategies (ES) combined with black-box stochastic gradient ascent (SGA) to maximize the MI lower bound. This allows the design process to be achieved through a unified scalable procedure for implicit models without sampling path gradients. Several experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the scalability of BED for implicit models in high-dimensional design space.

Bayesian experimental design (BED) is to answer the question that how to choose designs that maximize the information gathering. For implicit models, where the likelihood is intractable but sampling is possible, conventional BED methods have difficulties in efficiently estimating the posterior distribution and maximizing the mutual information (MI) between data and parameters. Recent work proposed the use of gradient ascent to maximize a lower bound on MI to deal with these issues. However, the approach requires a sampling path to compute the pathwise gradient of the MI lower bound with respect to the design variables, and such a pathwise gradient is usually inaccessible for implicit models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages recent advances in stochastic approximate gradient ascent incorporated with a smoothed variational MI estimator for efficient and robust BED. Without the necessity of pathwise gradients, our approach allows the design process to be achieved through a unified procedure with an approximate gradient for implicit models. Several experiments show that our approach outperforms baseline methods, and significantly improves the scalability of BED in high-dimensional problems.

A large class of modern probabilistic learning systems assumes symmetric distributions, however, real-world data tend to obey skewed distributions and are thus not always adequately modelled through symmetric distributions. To address this issue, elliptical distributions are increasingly used to generalise symmetric distributions, and further improvements to skewed elliptical distributions have recently attracted much attention. However, existing approaches are either hard to estimate or have complicated and abstract representations. To this end, we propose to employ the von-Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution to obtain an explicit and simple probability representation of the skewed elliptical distribution. This is shown not only to allow us to deal with non-symmetric learning systems, but also to provide a physically meaningful way of generalising skewed distributions. For rigour, our extension is proved to share important and desirable properties with its symmetric counterpart. We also demonstrate that the proposed vMF distribution is both easy to generate and stable to estimate, both theoretically and through examples.

Bug reports (BR) contain vital information that can help triaging teams prioritize and assign bugs to developers who will provide the fixes. However, studies have shown that BR fields often contain incorrect information that need to be reassigned, which delays the bug fixing process. There exist approaches for predicting whether a BR field should be reassigned or not. These studies use mainly BR descriptions and traditional machine learning algorithms (SVM, KNN, etc.). As such, they do not fully benefit from the sequential order of information in BR data, such as function call sequences in BR stack traces, which may be valuable for improving the prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called EnHMM, for predicting the reassignment of BR fields using ensemble Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), trained on stack traces. EnHMM leverages the natural ability of HMMs to represent sequential data to model the temporal order of function calls in BR stack traces. When applied to Eclipse and Gnome BR repositories, EnHMM achieves an average precision, recall, and F-measure of 54%, 76%, and 60% on Eclipse dataset and 41%, 69%, and 51% on Gnome dataset. We also found that EnHMM improves over the best single HMM by 36% for Eclipse and 76% for Gnome. Finally, when comparing EnHMM to Im.ML.KNN, a recent approach in the field, we found that the average F-measure score of EnHMM improves the average F-measure of Im.ML.KNN by 6.80% and improves the average recall of Im.ML.KNN by 36.09%. However, the average precision of EnHMM is lower than that of Im.ML.KNN (53.93% as opposed to 56.71%).