Abstract-- As one type of efficient unsupervised learning methods, clustering algorithms have been widely used in data mining and knowledge discovery with noticeable advantages. However, clustering algorithms based on density peak have limited clustering effect on data with varying density distribution (VDD), equilibrium distribution (ED), and multiple domain-density maximums (MDDM), leading to the problems of sparse cluster loss and cluster fragmentation. T o address these problems, we propose a Domain-Adaptive Density Clustering (DADC) algorithm, which consists of three steps: domain-adaptive density measurement, cluster center self-identification, and cluster self-ensemble. For data with VDD features, clusters in sparse regions are often neglected by using uniform density peak thresholds, which results in the loss of sparse clusters. We treat each data point and its KNN neighborhood as a subgroup to better reflect its density distribution in a domain view. In addition, for data with ED or MDDM features, a large number of density peaks with similar values can be identified, which results in cluster fragmentation. We propose a cluster center self-identification and cluster self-ensemble method to automatically extract the initial cluster centers and merge the fragmented clusters. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with other comparative algorithms, the proposed DADC algorithm can obtain more reasonable clustering results on data with VDD, ED and MDDM features. Benefitting from a few parameter requirement and non-iterative nature, DADC achieves low computational complexity and is suitable for large-scale data clustering. Numerous clustering algorithms have been proposed, including the partitioning-based, hierarchical-based, density-based, grid-based, model-based, and density-peak-based methods [3-6]. Among them, density-based methods (e.g., DBSCAN, CLIQUE, and OPTICS) can effectively discover clusters of arbitrary shape using the density connectivity of clusters, and do not require a predefined number of clusters [6]. In recent years, Density-Peak-based Clustering (DPC) algorithms, as a branch of density-based clustering, were introduced in [7, 8], assuming that the cluster centers are surrounded by low-density neighbors and can be detected by efficiently searching for local density peaks. Benefitting from few parameter requirements and non-iterative nature, DPC algorithms can efficiently detect clusters of arbitrarily shape from large-scale datasets with low computational complexity . However, as shown in Figure 1, DPC algorithms have limited clustering effect on data with varying density distribution (VDD), multiple domain-density maximums (MDDM), or equilibrium distribution (ED).

Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting is widely used in various domains, such as meteorology and traffic. Due to limitations on data collection, transmission, and storage, real-world MTS data usually contains missing values, making it infeasible to apply existing MTS forecasting models such as linear regression and recurrent neural networks. Though many efforts have been devoted to this problem, most of them solely rely on local dependencies for imputing missing values, which ignores global temporal dynamics. Local dependencies/patterns would become less useful when the missing ratio is high, or the data have consecutive missing values; while exploring global patterns can alleviate such problem. Thus, jointly modeling local and global temporal dynamics is very promising for MTS forecasting with missing values. However, work in this direction is rather limited. Therefore, we study a novel problem of MTS forecasting with missing values by jointly exploring local and global temporal dynamics. We propose a new framework LGnet, which leverages memory network to explore global patterns given estimations from local perspectives. We further introduce adversarial training to enhance the modeling of global temporal distribution. Experimental results on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of LGnet for MTS forecasting with missing values and its robustness under various missing ratios. Introduction Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting is widely used in many applications such as weather forecasting (Xingjian et al. 2015), clinical diagnosis (Che et al. 2018), sales forecasting (Wu et al. 2018; Wu et al. 2019) and traffic analysis (Y ao et al. 2019b; Y ao et al. 2018; Y ao et al. 2019a; Tang et al. 2019).

Differential privacy is a cryptographically-motivated approach to privacy that has become a very active field of research over the last decade in theoretical computer science and machine learning. In this paradigm one assumes there is a trusted curator who holds the data of individuals in a database and the goal of privacy is to simultaneously protect individual data while allowing the release of global characteristics of the database. In this setting we introduce a general framework for parametric inference with differential privacy guarantees. We first obtain differentially private estimators based on bounded influence M-estimators by leveraging their gross-error sensitivity in the calibration of a noise term added to them in order to ensure privacy. We then show how a similar construction can also be applied to construct differentially private test statistics analogous to the Wald, score and likelihood ratio tests. We provide statistical guarantees for all our proposals via an asymptotic analysis. An interesting consequence of our results is to further clarify the connection between differential privacy and robust statistics. In particular, we demonstrate that differential privacy is a weaker stability requirement than infinitesimal robustness, and show that robust M-estimators can be easily randomized in order to guarantee both differential privacy and robustness towards the presence of contaminated data. We illustrate our results both on simulated and real data.

To acquire a new skill, humans learn better and faster if a tutor, based on their current knowledge level, informs them of how much attention they should pay to particular content or practice problems. Similarly, a machine learning model could potentially be trained better with a scorer that "adapts" to its current learning state and estimates the importance of each training data instance. Training such an adaptive scorer efficiently is a challenging problem; in order to precisely quantify the effect of a data instance at a given time during the training, it is typically necessary to first complete the entire training process. To efficiently optimize data usage, we propose a reinforcement learning approach called Differentiable Data Selection (DDS). In DDS, we formulate a scorer network as a learnable function of the training data, which can be efficiently updated along with the main model being trained. Specifically, DDS updates the scorer with an intuitive reward signal: it should up-weigh the data that has a similar gradient with a dev set upon which we would finally like to perform well. Without significant computing overhead, DDS delivers strong and consistent improvements over several strong baselines on two very different tasks of machine translation and image classification.

--We consider the problem of reinforcing federated learning with formal privacy guarantees. We propose to employ Bayesian differential privacy, a relaxation of differential privacy for similarly distributed data, to provide sharper privacy loss bounds. We adapt the Bayesian privacy accounting method to the federated setting and suggest multiple improvements for more efficient privacy budgeting at different levels. Our experiments show significant advantage over the state-of-the-art differential privacy bounds for federated learning on image classification tasks, including a medical application, bringing the privacy budget below ε 1 at the client level, and below ε 0 .1 at the instance level. Lower amounts of noise also benefit the model accuracy and reduce the number of communication rounds. I NTRODUCTION The rise of data analytics and machine learning (ML) presents countless opportunities for companies, governments and individuals to benefit from the accumulated data. At the same time, their ability to capture fine levels of detail potentially compromises privacy of data providers. Recent research [1], [2] suggests that even in a black-box setting it is possible to argue about the presence of individual records in the training set or recover certain features of these records. To tackle this problem a number of solutions has been proposed. They vary in how privacy is achieved and to what extent data is protected. One approach that assumes privacy at its core is federated learning (FL) [3]. In the FL setting, a central entity ( server) trains a model on user data without actually copying data from user devices. Instead, users ( clients) update models locally, and the server aggregates these updates. In spite of all the advantages, federated learning does not provide theoretical privacy guarantees, like it is done by differential privacy (DP) [4], which is viewed by many researchers as the privacy gold standard.

Learning models with discrete latent variables using stochastic gradient descent remains a challenge due to the high variance of gradient estimates. Modern variance reduction techniques mostly consider categorical distributions and have limited applicability when the number of possible outcomes becomes large. In this work, we consider models with latent permutations and propose control variates for the Plackett-Luce distribution. In particular, the control variates allow us to optimize black-box functions over permutations using stochastic gradient descent. To illustrate the approach, we consider a variety of causal structure learning tasks for continuous and discrete data. We show that our method outperforms competitive relaxation-based optimization methods and is also applicable to non-differentiable score functions.

Maximum Entropy Models from Phase Harmonic Covariances Sixin Zhang 1, 4, St ephane Mallat 1, 2,3 1 ENS, PSL University, Paris, France 2 Coll ege de France, Paris, France 3 Flatiron Institute, New York, USA 4 Center for Data Science, Peking University, Beijing, China November 25, 2019 Abstract We define maximum entropy models of non-Gaussian stationary random vectors from covariances of nonlinear representations. These representations are calculated by multiplying the phase of Fourier or wavelet coefficients with harmonic integers, which amounts to compute a windowed Fourier transform along their phase. Rectifiers in neural networks compute such phase windowing. The covariance of these harmonic coefficients capture dependencies of Fourier and wavelet coefficients across frequencies, by canceling their random phase. We introduce maximum entropy models conditioned by such covariances over a graph of local interactions. These models are approximated by transporting an initial maximum ...

Loss functions play a crucial role in deep metric learning thus a variety of them have been proposed. Some supervise the learning process by pairwise or tripletwise similarity constraints while others take advantage of structured similarity information among multiple data points. In this work, we approach deep metric learning from a novel perspective. We propose instance cross entropy (ICE) which measures the difference between an estimated instance-level matching distribution and its ground-truth one. ICE has three main appealing properties. Firstly, similar to categorical cross entropy (CCE), ICE has clear probabilistic interpretation and exploits structured semantic similarity information for learning supervision. Secondly, ICE is scalable to infinite training data as it learns on mini-batches iteratively and is independent of the training set size. Thirdly, motivated by our relative weight analysis, seamless sample reweighting is incorporated. It rescales samples' gradients to control the differentiation degree over training examples instead of truncating them by sample mining. In addition to its simplicity and intuitiveness, extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ICE.

This loss discrepancy across groups is especially problematic in critical applications that impact people's lives (Berk, 2012; Chouldechova, 2017). Despite the vast literature on removing loss discrepancy (Hardt et al., 2016; Khani et al., 2019; Agarwal et al., 2018; Zafar et al., 2017), the direct removal of loss discrepancy might introduce other problems such as intragroup loss discrepancy (Lipton et al., 2018) and adverse long-term impacts (Liu et al., 2018). Therefore, it is important to understand the source of loss discrepancy. Why do such loss discrepancies exist? The literature generally studies sources of loss discrepancy due to an "information deficiency" of one group--that is, one group has, for example, more noise (Corbett-Davies et al., 2017), lessPreliminary work, under review.

In the area of credit risk analytics, current Bankruptcy Prediction Models (BPMs) struggle with (a) the availability of comprehensive and real-world data sets and (b) the presence of extreme class imbalance in the data (i.e., very few samples for the minority class) that degrades the performance of the prediction model. Moreover, little research has compared the relative performance of well-known BPM's on public datasets addressing the class imbalance problem. In this work, we apply eight classes of well-known BPMs, as suggested by a review of decades of literature, on a new public dataset named Freddie Mac Single-Family Loan-Level Dataset with resampling (i.e., adding synthetic minority samples) of the minority class to tackle class imbalance. Additionally, we apply some recent AI techniques (e.g., tree-based ensemble techniques) that demonstrate potentially better results on models trained with resampled data. In addition, from the analysis of 19 years (1999-2017) of data, we discover that models behave differently when presented with sudden changes in the economy (e.g., a global financial crisis) resulting in abrupt fluctuations in the national default rate. In summary, this study should aid practitioners/researchers in determining the appropriate model with respect to data that contains a class imbalance and various economic stages.