Many existing fairness criteria for machine learning involve equalizing or achieving some metric across \textit{protected groups} such as race or gender groups. However, practitioners trying to audit or enforce such group-based criteria can easily face the problem of noisy or biased protected group information. We study this important practical problem in two ways. First, we study the consequences of na{\"i}vely only relying on noisy protected groups: we provide an upper bound on the fairness violations on the true groups $G$ when the fairness criteria are satisfied on noisy groups $\hat{G}$. Second, we introduce two new approaches using robust optimization that, unlike the na{\"i}ve approach of only relying on $\hat{G}$, are guaranteed to satisfy fairness criteria on the true protected groups $G$ while minimizing a training objective. We provide theoretical guarantees that one such approach converges to an optimal feasible solution. Using two case studies, we empirically show that the robust approaches achieve better true group fairness guarantees than the na{\"i}ve approach.

We study generalised linear regression and classification for a synthetically generated dataset encompassing different problems of interest, such as learning with random features, neural networks in the lazy training regime, and the hidden manifold model. We consider the high-dimensional regime and using the replica method from statistical physics, we provide a closed-form expression for the asymptotic generalisation performance in these problems, valid in both the under- and over-parametrised regimes and for a broad choice of generalised linear model loss functions. In particular, we show how to obtain analytically the so-called double descent behaviour for logistic regression with a peak at the interpolation threshold, we illustrate the superiority of orthogonal against random Gaussian projections in learning with random features, and discuss the role played by correlations in the data generated by the hidden manifold model. Beyond the interest in these particular problems, the theoretical formalism introduced in this manuscript provides a path to further extensions to more complex tasks.

Likelihood-free (a.k.a. simulation-based) inference problems are inverse problems with expensive, or intractable, forward models. ODE inverse problems are commonly treated as likelihood-free, as their forward map has to be numerically approximated by an ODE solver. This, however, is not a fundamental constraint but just a lack of functionality in classic ODE solvers, which do not return a likelihood but a point estimate. To address this shortcoming, we employ Gaussian ODE filtering (a probabilistic numerical method for ODEs) to construct a local Gaussian approximation to the likelihood. This approximation yields tractable estimators for the gradient and Hessian of the (log-)likelihood. Insertion of these estimators into existing gradient-based optimization and sampling methods engenders new solvers for ODE inverse problems. We demonstrate that these methods outperform standard likelihood-free approaches on three benchmark-systems.

In this paper, we propose a machine learning model, which dynamically changes the features during training. Our main motivation is to update the model in a small content during the training process with replacing less descriptive features to new ones from a large pool. The main benefit is coming from the fact that opposite to the common practice we do not start training a new model from the scratch, but can keep the already learned weights. This procedure allows the scan of a large feature pool which together with keeping the complexity of the model leads to an increase of the model accuracy within the same training time. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated in several classic machine learning scenarios including linear regression and neural network-based training. As a specific analysis towards signal processing, we have successfully tested our approach on the database MNIST for digit classification considering single pixel and pixel-pairs intensities as possible features.

We propose a new family of specification tests called kernel conditional moment (KCM) tests. Our tests are built on conditional moment embeddings (CMME)---a novel representation of conditional moment restrictions in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). After transforming the conditional moment restrictions into a continuum of unconditional counterparts, the test statistic is defined as the maximum moment restriction within the unit ball of the RKHS. We show that the CMME fully characterizes the original conditional moment restrictions, leading to consistency in both hypothesis testing and parameter estimation. The proposed test also has an analytic expression that is easy to compute as well as closed-form asymptotic distributions. Our empirical studies show that the KCM test has a promising finite-sample performance compared to existing tests.

Principal component regression (PCR) is a two-stage procedure: the first stage performs principal component analysis (PCA) and the second stage constructs a regression model whose explanatory variables are replaced by principal components obtained by the first stage. Since PCA is performed by using only explanatory variables, the principal components have no information about the response variable. To address the problem, we propose a one-stage procedure for PCR in terms of singular value decomposition approach. Our approach is based upon two loss functions, a regression loss and a PCA loss, with sparse regularization. The proposed method enables us to obtain principal component loadings that possess information about both explanatory variables and a response variable. An estimation algorithm is developed by using alternating direction method of multipliers. We conduct numerical studies to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In some applications, acquiring covariates comes at a cost which is not negligible. For example in the medical domain, in order to classify whether a patient has diabetes or not, measuring glucose tolerance can be expensive. Assuming that the cost of each covariate, and the cost of misclassification can be specified by the user, our goal is to minimize the (expected) total cost of classification, i.e. the cost of misclassification plus the cost of the acquired covariates. We formalize this optimization goal using the (conditional) Bayes risk and describe the optimal solution using a recursive procedure. Since the procedure is computationally infeasible, we consequently introduce two assumptions: (1) the optimal classifier can be represented by a generalized additive model, (2) the optimal sets of covariates are limited to a sequence of sets of increasing size. We show that under these two assumptions, a computationally efficient solution exists. Furthermore, on several medical datasets, we show that the proposed method achieves in most situations the lowest total costs when compared to various previous methods. Finally, we weaken the requirement on the user to specify all misclassification costs by allowing the user to specify the minimally acceptable recall (target recall). Our experiments confirm that the proposed method achieves the target recall while minimizing the false discovery rate and the covariate acquisition costs better than previous methods.

We study few-shot acoustic event detection (AED) in this paper. Few-shot learning enables detection of new events with very limited labeled data. Compared to other research areas like computer vision, few-shot learning for audio recognition has been under-studied. We formulate few-shot AED problem and explore different ways of utilizing traditional supervised methods for this setting as well as a variety of meta-learning approaches, which are conventionally used to solve few-shot classification problem. Compared to supervised baselines, meta-learning models achieve superior performance, thus showing its effectiveness on generalization to new audio events. Our analysis including impact of initialization and domain discrepancy further validate the advantage of meta-learning approaches in few-shot AED.

Multinomial Logistic Regression is a well-studied tool for classification and has been widely used in fields like image processing, computer vision and, bioinformatics, to name a few. Under a supervised classification scenario, a Multinomial Logistic Regression model learns a weight vector to differentiate between any two classes by optimizing over the likelihood objective. With the advent of big data, the inundation of data has resulted in large dimensional weight vector and has also given rise to a huge number of classes, which makes the classical methods applicable for model estimation not computationally viable. To handle this issue, we here propose a parallel iterative algorithm: Parallel Iterative Algorithm for MultiNomial LOgistic Regression (PIANO) which is based on the Majorization Minimization procedure, and can parallely update each element of the weight vectors. Further, we also show that PIANO can be easily extended to solve the Sparse Multinomial Logistic Regression problem - an extensively studied problem because of its attractive feature selection property. In particular, we work out the extension of PIANO to solve the Sparse Multinomial Logistic Regression problem with l1 and l0 regularizations. We also prove that PIANO converges to a stationary point of the Multinomial and the Sparse Multinomial Logistic Regression problems. Simulations were conducted to compare PIANO with the existing methods, and it was found that the proposed algorithm performs better than the existing methods in terms of speed of convergence.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a form of sleep-disordered breathing characterized by recurrent episodes of partial or complete airway obstruction during sleep, is a serious health problem, affecting an estimated 1-5% of elementary school-aged children [9, 2]. Even mild forms of untreated pediatric OSA may cause high blood pressure, behavioral challenges, or impeded growth. Compared to adults, the symptoms of childhood-onset OSA are more varied and change continuously with development, making diagnosis a difficult challenge. The complexity of the data from surveys, biomedical measurements, 3D facial photos, and time-series data calls for state of the art techniques from mathematics and data science. Clinical data, including that considered in confirming or ruling out a diagnosis of pediatric OSA, consist of high-dimensional multi-mode data with mixtures of variables of disparate types (e.g., nominal and categorical data of different scales, interval data, time-to-event and longitudinal outcomes) also called mixed or noncommensurate data.