Hands-on Machine Learning With Python: An online, 12-hour workshop focused on machine learning algorithms and their application. Targeted at: Engineering (all streams) as well as science students, who are looking forward to get started with machine learning. Instructor profile: A certified data scientist, with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Note: We will be limiting the participants to 50. About Us: Founded in 2018, Machine Learning India (MLI), is a thriving community of 350,000 passionate technologists across India and the globe.

We consider the problem of learning the underlying graph of a sparse Ising model with $p$ nodes from $n$ i.i.d. samples. The most recent and best performing approaches combine an empirical loss (the logistic regression loss or the interaction screening loss) with a regularizer (an L1 penalty or an L1 constraint). This results in a convex problem that can be solved separately for each node of the graph. In this work, we leverage the cardinality constraint L0 norm, which is known to properly induce sparsity, and further combine it with an L2 norm to better model the non-zero coefficients. We show that our proposed estimators achieve an improved sample complexity, both (a) theoretically -- by reaching new state-of-the-art upper bounds for recovery guarantees -- and (b) empirically -- by showing sharper phase transitions between poor and full recovery for graph topologies studied in the literature -- when compared to their L1-based counterparts.

While the success of pre-trained language models has largely eliminated the need for high-quality static word vectors in many NLP applications, static word vectors continue to play an important role in tasks where word meaning needs to be modelled in the absence of linguistic context. In this paper, we explore how the contextualised embeddings predicted by BERT can be used to produce high-quality word vectors for such domains, in particular related to knowledge base completion, where our focus is on capturing the semantic properties of nouns. We find that a simple strategy of averaging the contextualised embeddings of masked word mentions leads to vectors that outperform the static word vectors learned by BERT, as well as those from standard word embedding models, in property induction tasks. We notice in particular that masking target words is critical to achieve this strong performance, as the resulting vectors focus less on idiosyncratic properties and more on general semantic properties. Inspired by this view, we propose a filtering strategy which is aimed at removing the most idiosyncratic mention vectors, allowing us to obtain further performance gains in property induction.

A growing attention in the empirical literature has been paid to the incidence of climate shocks and change in migration decisions. Previous literature leads to different results and uses a multitude of traditional empirical approaches. This paper proposes a tree-based Machine Learning (ML) approach to analyze the role of the weather shocks towards an individual's intention to migrate in the six agriculture-dependent-economy countries such as Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. We perform several tree-based algorithms (e.g., XGB, Random Forest) using the train-validation-test workflow to build robust and noise-resistant approaches. Then we determine the important features showing in which direction they are influencing the migration intention. This ML-based estimation accounts for features such as weather shocks captured by the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) for different timescales and various socioeconomic features/covariates. We find that (i) weather features improve the prediction performance although socioeconomic characteristics have more influence on migration intentions, (ii) country-specific model is necessary, and (iii) international move is influenced more by the longer timescales of SPEIs while general move (which includes internal move) by that of shorter timescales.

Recent works have demonstrated that deep learning on graphs is vulnerable to adversarial attacks, in that imperceptible perturbations on input data can lead to dramatic performance deterioration. In this paper, we focus on the underlying problem of learning robust representations on graphs via mutual information. In contrast to previous works measure the task-specific robustness based on the label space, we here take advantage of the representation space to study a task-free robustness measure given the joint input space w.r.t graph topology and node attributes. We formulate this problem as a constrained saddle point optimization problem and solve it efficiently in a reduced search space. Furthermore, we provably establish theoretical connections between our task-free robustness measure and the robustness of downstream classifiers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is able to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks on graphs, yet even increases natural accuracy.

Testing for a difference in means between two groups is fundamental to answering research questions across virtually every scientific area. Classical tests control the Type I error rate when the groups are defined a priori. However, when the groups are instead defined via a clustering algorithm, then applying a classical test for a difference in means between the groups yields an extremely inflated Type I error rate. Notably, this problem persists even if two separate and independent data sets are used to define the groups and to test for a difference in their means. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a selective inference approach to test for a difference in means between two clusters obtained from any clustering method. Our procedure controls the selective Type I error rate by accounting for the fact that the null hypothesis was generated from the data. We describe how to efficiently compute exact p-values for clusters obtained using agglomerative hierarchical clustering with many commonly used linkages. We apply our method to simulated data and to single-cell RNA-seq data.

Machine learning models that first learn a representation of a domain in terms of human-understandable concepts, then use it to make predictions, have been proposed to facilitate interpretation and interaction with models trained on high-dimensional data. However these methods have important limitations: the way they define concepts are not inherently interpretable, and they assume that concept labels either exist for individual instances or can easily be acquired from users. These limitations are particularly acute for high-dimensional tabular features. We propose an approach for learning a set of transparent concept definitions in high-dimensional tabular data that relies on users labeling concept features instead of individual instances. Our method produces concepts that both align with users' intuitive sense of what a concept means, and facilitate prediction of the downstream label by a transparent machine learning model. This ensures that the full model is transparent and intuitive, and as predictive as possible given this constraint. We demonstrate with simulated user feedback on real prediction problems, including one in a clinical domain, that this kind of direct feedback is much more efficient at learning solutions that align with ground truth concept definitions than alternative transparent approaches that rely on labeling instances or other existing interaction mechanisms, while maintaining similar predictive performance.

There has been an increasing interest from the scientific community in using likelihood-free inference (LFI) to determine which parameters of a given simulator model could best describe a set of experimental data. Despite exciting recent results and a wide range of possible applications, an important bottleneck of LFI when applied to time series data is the necessity of defining a set of summary features, often hand-tailored based on domain knowledge. In this work, we present a data-driven strategy for automatically learning summary features from univariate time series and apply it to signals generated from autoregressive-moving-average (ARMA) models and the Van der Pol Oscillator. Our results indicate that learning summary features from data can compete and even outperform LFI methods based on hand-crafted values such as autocorrelation coefficients even in the linear case.

The K-means algorithm is among the most commonly used data clustering methods. However, the regular K-means can only be applied in the input space and it is applicable when clusters are linearly separable. The kernel K-means, which extends K-means into the kernel space, is able to capture nonlinear structures and identify arbitrarily shaped clusters. However, kernel methods often operate on the kernel matrix of the data, which scale poorly with the size of the matrix or suffer from the high clustering cost due to the repetitive calculations of kernel values. Another issue is that algorithms access the data only through evaluations of $K(x_i, x_j)$, which limits many processes that can be done on data through the clustering task. This paper proposes a method to combine the advantages of the linear and nonlinear approaches by using driven corresponding approximate finite-dimensional feature maps based on spectral analysis. Applying approximate finite-dimensional feature maps were only discussed in the Support Vector Machines (SVM) problems before. We suggest using this method in kernel K-means era as alleviates storing huge kernel matrix in memory, further calculating cluster centers more efficiently and access the data explicitly in feature space. These explicit feature maps enable us to access the data in the feature space explicitly and take advantage of K-means extensions in that space. We demonstrate our Explicit Kernel Minkowski Weighted K-mean (Explicit KMWK-mean) method is able to be more adopted and find best-fitting values in new space by applying additional Minkowski exponent and feature weights parameter. Moreover, it can reduce the impact of concentration on nearest neighbour search by suggesting investigate among other norms instead of Euclidean norm, includes Minkowski norms and fractional norms (as an extension of the Minkowski norms with p<1).

Among the many ways of quantifying uncertainty in a regression setting, specifying the full quantile function is attractive, as quantiles are amenable to interpretation and evaluation. A model that predicts the true conditional quantiles for each input, at all quantile levels, presents a correct and efficient representation of the underlying uncertainty. To achieve this, many current quantile-based methods focus on optimizing the so-called pinball loss. However, this loss restricts the scope of applicable regression models, limits the ability to target many desirable properties (e.g. calibration, sharpness, centered intervals), and may produce poor conditional quantiles. In this work, we develop new quantile methods that address these shortcomings. In particular, we propose methods that can apply to any class of regression model, allow for selecting a Pareto-optimal trade-off between calibration and sharpness, optimize for calibration of centered intervals, and produce more accurate conditional quantiles. We provide a thorough experimental evaluation of our methods, which includes a high dimensional uncertainty quantification task in nuclear fusion.