Statistical Learning
Improving S&P stock prediction with time series stock similarity
Stock market prediction with forecasting algorithms is a popular topic these days where most of the forecasting algorithms train only on data collected on a particular stock. In this paper, we enriched the stock data with related stocks just as a professional trader would have done to improve the stock prediction models. We tested five different similarities functions and found co-integration similarity to have the best improvement on the prediction model. We evaluate the models on seven S&P stocks from various industries over five years period. The prediction model we trained on similar stocks had significantly better results with 0.55 mean accuracy, and 19.782 profit compare to the state of the art model with an accuracy of 0.52 and profit of 6.6.
On the Complexity of Minimizing Convex Finite Sums Without Using the Indices of the Individual Functions
Arjevani, Yossi, Daniely, Amit, Jegelka, Stefanie, Lin, Hongzhou
Recent advances in randomized incremental methods for minimizing $L$-smooth $\mu$-strongly convex finite sums have culminated in tight complexity of $\tilde{O}((n+\sqrt{n L/\mu})\log(1/\epsilon))$ and $O(n+\sqrt{nL/\epsilon})$, where $\mu>0$ and $\mu=0$, respectively, and $n$ denotes the number of individual functions. Unlike incremental methods, stochastic methods for finite sums do not rely on an explicit knowledge of which individual function is being addressed at each iteration, and as such, must perform at least $\Omega(n^2)$ iterations to obtain $O(1/n^2)$-optimal solutions. In this work, we exploit the finite noise structure of finite sums to derive a matching $O(n^2)$-upper bound under the global oracle model, showing that this lower bound is indeed tight. Following a similar approach, we propose a novel adaptation of SVRG which is both \emph{compatible with stochastic oracles}, and achieves complexity bounds of $\tilde{O}((n^2+n\sqrt{L/\mu})\log(1/\epsilon))$ and $O(n\sqrt{L/\epsilon})$, for $\mu>0$ and $\mu=0$, respectively. Our bounds hold w.h.p. and match in part existing lower bounds of $\tilde{\Omega}(n^2+\sqrt{nL/\mu}\log(1/\epsilon))$ and $\tilde{\Omega}(n^2+\sqrt{nL/\epsilon})$, for $\mu>0$ and $\mu=0$, respectively.
Local Nonparametric Meta-Learning
A central goal of meta-learning is to find a learning rule that enables fast adaptation across a set of tasks, by learning the appropriate inductive bias for that set. Most meta-learning algorithms try to find a \textit{global} learning rule that encodes this inductive bias. However, a global learning rule represented by a fixed-size representation is prone to meta-underfitting or -overfitting since the right representational power for a task set is difficult to choose a priori. Even when chosen correctly, we show that global, fixed-size representations often fail when confronted with certain types of out-of-distribution tasks, even when the same inductive bias is appropriate. To address these problems, we propose a novel nonparametric meta-learning algorithm that utilizes a meta-trained local learning rule, building on recent ideas in attention-based and functional gradient-based meta-learning. In several meta-regression problems, we show improved meta-generalization results using our local, nonparametric approach and achieve state-of-the-art results in the robotics benchmark, Omnipush.
Privacy-Preserving Image Classification in the Local Setting
Image data has been greatly produced by individuals and commercial vendors in the daily life, and it has been used across various domains, like advertising, medical and traffic analysis. Recently, image data also appears to be greatly important in social utility, like emergency response. However, the privacy concern becomes the biggest obstacle that prevents further exploration of image data, due to that the image could reveal sensitive information, like the personal identity and locations. The recent developed Local Differential Privacy (LDP) brings us a promising solution, which allows the data owners to randomly perturb their input to provide the plausible deniability of the data before releasing. In this paper, we consider a two-party image classification problem, in which data owners hold the image and the untrustworthy data user would like to fit a machine learning model with these images as input. To protect the image privacy, we propose to locally perturb the image representation before revealing to the data user. Subsequently, we analyze how the perturbation satisfies {\epsilon}-LDP and affect the data utility regarding count-based and distance-based machine learning algorithm, and propose a supervised image feature extractor, DCAConv, which produces an image representation with scalable domain size. Our experiments show that DCAConv could maintain a high data utility while preserving the privacy regarding multiple image benchmark datasets.
Conjoined Dirichlet Process
Ngo, Michelle N., Pluta, Dustin S., Ngo, Alexander N., Shahbaba, Babak
Biclustering is a class of techniques that simultaneously clusters the rows and columns of a matrix to sort heterogeneous data into homogeneous blocks. Although many algorithms have been proposed to find biclusters, existing methods suffer from the pre-specification of the number of biclusters or place constraints on the model structure. To address these issues, we develop a novel, non-parametric probabilistic biclustering method based on Dirichlet processes to identify biclusters with strong co-occurrence in both rows and columns. The proposed method utilizes dual Dirichlet process mixture models to learn row and column clusters, with the number of resulting clusters determined by the data rather than pre-specified. Probabilistic biclusters are identified by modeling the mutual dependence between the row and column clusters. We apply our method to two different applications, text mining and gene expression analysis, and demonstrate that our method improves bicluster extraction in many settings compared to existing approaches.
Ninja Skills of Modern Data Scientist
If you think you would like to become a DATA SCIENTIST, then you're at the perfect place to get all the skills that actual data scientists hold. In layman's terms, a rocket scientist is a person who has knowledge of (and amazing experience in) rocket science. Becoming a data scientist is not that difficult. Becoming a jet pilot isn't rocket science, but it still requires lots of effort to become a jet pilot.) After talking with many data scientists on LinkedIn, I am writing this blog as a collection of more than 30 years of experience from someone else's life.
Underfitting vs. Overfitting in Machine Learning - Analytics Vidhya
Can you explain what is underfitting and overfitting in the context of machine learning? Describe it in a way even a non-technical person will grasp. Your ability to explain this in a non-technical and easy-to-understand manner might well decide your fit for the data science role! Even when we're working on a machine learning project, we often face situations where we are encountering unexpected performance or error rate differences between the training set and the test set (as shown below). How can a model perform so well over the training set and just as poorly on the test set?
Extrapolation Towards Imaginary $0$-Nearest Neighbour and Its Improved Convergence Rate
Okuno, Akifumi, Shimodaira, Hidetoshi
$k$-nearest neighbour ($k$-NN) is one of the simplest and most widely-used methods for supervised classification, that predicts a query's label by taking weighted ratio of observed labels of $k$ objects nearest to the query. The weights and the parameter $k \in \mathbb{N}$ regulate its bias-variance trade-off, and the trade-off implicitly affects the convergence rate of the excess risk for the $k$-NN classifier; several existing studies considered selecting optimal $k$ and weights to obtain faster convergence rate. Whereas $k$-NN with non-negative weights has been developed widely, it was proved that negative weights are essential for eradicating the bias terms and attaining optimal convergence rate. However, computation of the optimal weights requires solving entangled equations. Thus, other simpler approaches that can find optimal real-valued weights are appreciated in practice. In this paper, we propose multiscale $k$-NN (MS-$k$-NN), that extrapolates unweighted $k$-NN estimators from several $k \ge 1$ values to $k=0$, thus giving an imaginary 0-NN estimator. MS-$k$-NN implicitly corresponds to an adaptive method for finding favorable real-valued weights, and we theoretically prove that the MS-$k$-NN attains the improved rate, that coincides with the existing optimal rate under some conditions.
Certified Robustness to Label-Flipping Attacks via Randomized Smoothing
Rosenfeld, Elan, Winston, Ezra, Ravikumar, Pradeep, Kolter, J. Zico
Machine learning algorithms are known to be susceptible to data poisoning attacks, where an adversary manipulates the training data to degrade performance of the resulting classifier. While many heuristic defenses have been proposed, few defenses exist which are certified against worst-case corruption of the training data. In this work, we propose a strategy to build linear classifiers that are certifiably robust against a strong variant of label-flipping, where each test example is targeted independently. In other words, for each test point, our classifier makes a prediction and includes a certification that its prediction would be the same had some number of training labels been changed adversarially. Our approach leverages randomized smoothing, a technique that has previously been used to guarantee---with high probability---test-time robustness to adversarial manipulation of the input to a classifier. We derive a variant which provides a deterministic, analytical bound, sidestepping the probabilistic certificates that traditionally result from the sampling subprocedure. Further, we obtain these certified bounds with no additional runtime cost over standard classification. We generalize our results to the multi-class case, providing what we believe to be the first multi-class classification algorithm that is certifiably robust to label-flipping attacks.
Extended Stochastic Gradient MCMC for Large-Scale Bayesian Variable Selection
Song, Qifan, Sun, Yan, Ye, Mao, Liang, Faming
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have received much attention in Bayesian computing for big data problems, but they are only applicable to a small class of problems for which the parameter space has a fixed dimension and the log-posterior density is differentiable with respect to the parameters. This paper proposes an extended stochastic gradient MCMC lgoriathm which, by introducing appropriate latent variables, can be applied to more general large-scale Bayesian computing problems, such as those involving dimension jumping and missing data. Numerical studies show that the proposed algorithm is highly scalable and much more efficient than traditional MCMC algorithms. The proposed algorithms have much alleviated the pain of Bayesian methods in big data computing.