Every year, around 1.3 million people all over the world are killed by road mishaps with approximately 20 to 50 million life-threatening injuries(International Transport Forum, 2018; World Health Organisation, 2018). Notwithstanding, there is a disparity in road traffic death from 9.3 to 26.6 per 100,000 population among countries based on their income level, while the global rate is still 18.2 per 100,000 population (World Health Organisation, 2018). Moreover, traffic collision at intersections is a significant threat to upholding road safety. As a whole, 45% of severe injuries occur at intersections, including 22% of fatal crashes (Li, Jia, et al., 2016). Drivers often inadvertently fail to break immediately at the onset of red light or deliberately run through the red light signal and also miscalculate the motif of the right angle vehicle [in a right-hand driving condition] while crossing the intersection (Zhang et al., 2018). Especially at the onset of yellow signal, drivers get confused with decision measurement either to stop or to run and to get involved in rear-end collision or right-angle collision or uncomfortable hard brake, often resulting in injuries or death (Gazis et al., 1960; Majhi & Senathipathi, 2019).

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE), which evaluates the performance of a new policy from observed data collected from previous experiments, without requiring the execution of the new policy. This finds important applications in areas with high execution cost or safety concerns, such as medical diagnosis, recommendation systems and robotics. In practice, due to the limited information from off-policy data, it is highly desirable to construct rigorous confidence intervals, not just point estimation, for the policy performance. In this work, we propose a new variational framework which reduces the problem of calculating tight confidence bounds in OPE into an optimization problem on a feasible set that catches the true state-action value function with high probability. The feasible set is constructed by leveraging statistical properties of a recently proposed kernel Bellman loss (Feng et al., 2019). We design an efficient computational approach for calculating our bounds, and extend it to perform post-hoc diagnosis and correction for existing estimators. Empirical results show that our method yields tight confidence intervals in different settings.

Regularization for optimization is a crucial technique to avoid overfitting in machine learning. In order to obtain the best performance, we usually train a model by tuning the regularization parameters. It becomes costly, however, when a single round of training takes significant amount of time. Very recently, Neu and Rosasco show that if we run stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on linear regression problems, then by averaging the SGD iterates properly, we obtain a regularized solution. It left open whether the same phenomenon can be achieved for other optimization problems and algorithms. In this paper, we establish an averaging scheme that provably converts the iterates of SGD on an arbitrary strongly convex and smooth objective function to its regularized counterpart with an adjustable regularization parameter. Our approaches can be used for accelerated and preconditioned optimization methods as well. We further show that the same methods work empirically on more general optimization objectives including neural networks. In sum, we obtain adjustable regularization for free for a large class of optimization problems and resolve an open question raised by Neu and Rosasco.

In 2014, the DBSCAN algorithm was awarded the test of time award (an award given to algorithms which have received substantial attention in theory and practice) at the leading data mining conference, ACM SIGKDD. Clustering analysis is an unsupervised learning method that separates the data points into several specific bunches or groups, such that the data points in the same groups have similar properties and data points in different groups have different properties in some sense. It comprises of many different methods based on different distance measures. Centrally, all clustering methods use the same approach i.e. first we calculate similarities and then we use it to cluster the data points into groups or batches. Here we will focus on the Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) clustering method. If you are unfamiliar with the clustering algorithms, I advise you to read the Introduction to Image Segmentation with K-Means clustering.

AdaBoost Algorithm is a boosting method that works by combining weak learners into strong learners. A good way for a prediction model to correct its predecessor is to give more attention to the training samples where the predecessor did not fit well. This can result in a new prediction model which will focus much on the hard instances. This technique is used by an AdaBoost Algorithm. In this article, I will take you through the AdaBoost Algorithm in Machine Learning.

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Classification algorithms learn how to assign class labels to examples, although their decisions can appear opaque. A popular diagnostic for understanding the decisions made by a classification algorithm is the decision surface. This is a plot that shows how a fit machine learning algorithm predicts a coarse grid across the input feature space. A decision surface plot is a powerful tool for understanding how a given model "sees" the prediction task and how it has decided to divide the input feature space by class label. In this tutorial, you will discover how to plot a decision surface for a classification machine learning algorithm.

In the traditional hard-coded approach, we program a computer to perform a certain task. We tell it exactly what to do when it receives a certain input. In mathematical terms, this is like saying that we write the f(x) such that when users feed the input x into f(x), it gives the correct output y. In machine learning, however, we have a large set of inputs x and corresponding outputs y but not the function f(x). The goal here is to find the f(x) that transforms the input x into the output y.

Classifying images taken from indoor scenes is an important area of research. The development of an accurate indoor scene classifier has the potential to improve indoor localization and decision-making for domestic robots, offer new applications for wearable computer users, and generally result in better vision-based situation awareness thus impacting a wide variety of applications. The introduction of deep learning methods, the creation of numerous large-scale datasets, and the development of specialized computing hardware have all contributed to the rapid improvement in image classification performance. One reason for deep learning's success has been the ability to learn multiple layers of generic image features that can then be used on other related computer vision problems. For instance, features from object trained image classifiers have been used to train indoor scene classifiers [27]. Yet, indoor scene classification is a challenging problem on its own.

We consider three different variants of differential privacy (DP), namely approximate DP, R\'enyi DP (RDP), and hypothesis test DP. In the first part, we develop a machinery for optimally relating approximate DP to RDP based on the joint range of two $f$-divergences that underlie the approximate DP and RDP. In particular, this enables us to derive the optimal approximate DP parameters of a mechanism that satisfies a given level of RDP. As an application, we apply our result to the moments accountant framework for characterizing privacy guarantees of noisy stochastic gradient descent (SGD). When compared to the state-of-the-art, our bounds may lead to about 100 more stochastic gradient descent iterations for training deep learning models for the same privacy budget. In the second part, we establish a relationship between RDP and hypothesis test DP which allows us to translate the RDP constraint into a tradeoff between type I and type II error probabilities of a certain binary hypothesis test. We then demonstrate that for noisy SGD our result leads to tighter privacy guarantees compared to the recently proposed $f$-DP framework for some range of parameters.