In recent years, fairness has become an important topic in the machine learning research community. In particular, counterfactual fairness aims at building prediction models which ensure fairness at the most individual level. Rather than globally considering equity over the entire population, the idea is to imagine what any individual would look like with a variation of a given attribute of interest, such as a different gender or race for instance. Existing approaches rely on Variational Auto-encoding of individuals, using Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) penalization to limit the statistical dependence of inferred representations with their corresponding sensitive attributes. This enables the simulation of counterfactual samples used for training the target fair model, the goal being to produce similar outcomes for every alternate version of any individual. In this work, we propose to rely on an adversarial neural learning approach, that enables more powerful inference than with MMD penalties, and is particularly better fitted for the continuous setting, where values of sensitive attributes cannot be exhaustively enumerated. Experiments show significant improvements in term of counterfactual fairness for both the discrete and the continuous settings.

Advancements in modern technology and computer software have dramatically increased the demand and feasibility to collect high-dimensional data sets. Such data possess challenges which require the creation of new and adaptation of existing statistical methods. One such challenge is that we may observe many more predictors, p, than the number of observations, n, especially in small sample size studies. These data structures are known as high-dimensional, low sample size (HDLSS) data sets, or "small n, big p ". HDLSS data emerge frequently in many health-related fields. For example, in genomic studies, a single microarray experiment might produce tens of thousands of gene expressions compared to the few samples studied, often being less than a hundred (Alag, 2019).

Active learning (AL) attempts to maximize the performance gain of the model by marking the fewest samples. Deep learning (DL) is greedy for data and requires a large amount of data supply to optimize massive parameters, so that the model learns how to extract high-quality features. In recent years, due to the rapid development of internet technology, we are in an era of information torrents and we have massive amounts of data. In this way, DL has aroused strong interest of researchers and has been rapidly developed. Compared with DL, researchers have relatively low interest in AL. This is mainly because before the rise of DL, traditional machine learning requires relatively few labeled samples. Therefore, early AL is difficult to reflect the value it deserves. Although DL has made breakthroughs in various fields, most of this success is due to the publicity of the large number of existing annotation datasets. However, the acquisition of a large number of high-quality annotated datasets consumes a lot of manpower, which is not allowed in some fields that require high expertise, especially in the fields of speech recognition, information extraction, medical images, etc. Therefore, AL has gradually received due attention. A natural idea is whether AL can be used to reduce the cost of sample annotations, while retaining the powerful learning capabilities of DL. Therefore, deep active learning (DAL) has emerged. Although the related research has been quite abundant, it lacks a comprehensive survey of DAL. This article is to fill this gap, we provide a formal classification method for the existing work, and a comprehensive and systematic overview. In addition, we also analyzed and summarized the development of DAL from the perspective of application. Finally, we discussed the confusion and problems in DAL, and gave some possible development directions for DAL.

With the increasing computational power of current supercomputers, the size of data produced by scientific simulations is rapidly growing. To reduce the storage footprint and facilitate scalable post-hoc analyses of such scientific data sets, various data reduction/summarization methods have been proposed over the years. Different flavors of sampling algorithms exist to sample the high-resolution scientific data, while preserving important data properties required for subsequent analyses. However, most of these sampling algorithms are designed for univariate data and cater to post-hoc analyses of single variables. In this work, we propose a multivariate sampling strategy which preserves the original variable relationships and enables different multivariate analyses directly on the sampled data. Our proposed strategy utilizes principal component analysis to capture the variance of multivariate data and can be built on top of any existing state-of-the-art sampling algorithms for single variables. In addition, we also propose variants of different data partitioning schemes (regular and irregular) to efficiently model the local multivariate relationships. Using two real-world multivariate data sets, we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed multivariate sampling strategy with respect to its data reduction capabilities as well as the ease of performing efficient post-hoc multivariate analyses.

This paper explores hierarchical clustering in the case where pairs of points have dissimilarity scores (e.g. distances) as a part of the input. The recently introduced objective for points with dissimilarity scores results in every tree being a 1/2 approximation if the distances form a metric. This shows the objective does not make a significant distinction between a good and poor hierarchical clustering in metric spaces. Motivated by this, the paper develops a new global objective for hierarchical clustering in Euclidean space. The objective captures the criterion that has motivated the use of divisive clustering algorithms: that when a split happens, points in the same cluster should be more similar than points in different clusters. Moreover, this objective gives reasonable results on ground-truth inputs for hierarchical clustering. The paper builds a theoretical connection between this objective and the bisecting k-means algorithm. This paper proves that the optimal 2-means solution results in a constant approximation for the objective. This is the first paper to show the bisecting k-means algorithm optimizes a natural global objective over the entire tree.

Spectral methods have gained a lot of recent attention due to the simplicity of their implementation and their solid mathematical background. We revisit spectral graph clustering, and reformulate in the $p$-norm the continuous problem of minimizing the graph Laplacian Rayleigh quotient. The value of $p \in (1,2]$ is reduced, promoting sparser solution vectors that correspond to optimal clusters as $p$ approaches one. The computation of multiple $p$-eigenvectors of the graph $p$-Laplacian, a nonlinear generalization of the standard graph Laplacian, is achieved by the minimization of our objective function on the Grassmann manifold, hence ensuring the enforcement of the orthogonality constraint between them. Our approach attempts to bridge the fields of graph clustering and nonlinear numerical optimization, and employs a robust algorithm to obtain clusters of high quality. The benefits of the suggested method are demonstrated in a plethora of artificial and real-world graphs. Our results are compared against standard spectral clustering methods and the current state-of-the-art algorithm for clustering using the graph $p$-Laplacian variant.

Software testing is one of the important ways to ensure the quality of software. It is found that testing cost more than 50% of overall project cost. Effective and efficient software testing utilizes the minimum resources of software. Therefore, it is important to construct the procedure which is not only able to perform the efficient testing but also minimizes the utilization of project resources. The goal of software testing is to find maximum defects in the software system. More the defects found in the software ensure more efficiency is the software testing Different techniques have been proposed to detect the defects in software and to utilize the resources and achieve good results. As world is continuously moving toward data driven approach for making important decision. Therefore, in this research paper we performed the machine learning analysis on the publicly available datasets and tried to achieve the maximum accuracy. The major focus of the paper is to apply different machine learning techniques on the datasets and find out which technique produce efficient result. Particularly, we proposed an ensemble learning models and perform comparative analysis among KNN, Decision tree, SVM and Na\"ive Bayes on different datasets and it is demonstrated that performance of Ensemble method is more than other methods in term of accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score. The classification accuracy of ensemble model trained on CM1 is 98.56%, classification accuracy of ensemble model trained on KM2 is 98.18% similarly, the classification accuracy of ensemble learning model trained on PC1 is 99.27%. This reveals that Ensemble is more efficient method for making the defect prediction as compared other techniques.

This Specialization will master you in fundamentals of probabilistic graphical models. Probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) are a rich framework for encoding probability distributions over complex domains.

Abstract--Smart Manufacturing refers to optimization techniques that are implemented in production operations by utilizing advanced analytics approaches. With the widespread increase in deploying Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors in manufacturing processes, there is a progressive need for optimal and effective approaches to data management. Embracing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to take advantage of manufacturing data can lead to efficient and intelligent automation. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis based on Evolutionary Computing and Deep Learning algorithms toward making semiconductor manufacturing smart. Computing, in manufacturing, provides access to valuable data at different levels, i.e., manufacturing enterprise, manufacturing equipment, and manufacturing processes. VER recent decades, the manufacturing industry witnessed tremendous advances in the form of four major manufacturing insights. Manufacturing, then, can be controlled paradigm shifts. In the latest industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, by leading-edge CI and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and tasks manufacturing has embraced the Industrial Internet of Things are modelled based on experimental observations, to enhance (IIoT) [1]-[3] and Machine Learning (ML) to enable machinery productivity while reducing costs. In doing so, it is of so can make industry processes smart. Broadly speaking, Smart great importance to identify which factors play a pivotal role in Manufacturing (SM) can be defined as a data-driven approach process outcomes.

Response process data collected from human-computer interactive items contain rich information about respondents' behavioral patterns and cognitive processes. Their irregular formats as well as their large sizes make standard statistical tools difficult to apply. This paper develops a computationally efficient method for exploratory analysis of such process data. The new approach segments a lengthy individual process into a sequence of short subprocesses to achieve complexity reduction, easy clustering and meaningful interpretation. Each subprocess is considered a subtask. The segmentation is based on sequential action predictability using a parsimonious predictive model combined with the Shannon entropy. Simulation studies are conducted to assess performance of the new methods. We use the process data from PIAAC 2012 to demonstrate how exploratory analysis of process data can be done with the new approach.