Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods are typically deployed to explain and debug black-box machine learning models. However, most proposed XAI methods are black-boxes themselves and designed for images. Thus, they rely on visual interpretability to evaluate and prove explanations. In this work, we apply XAI methods previously used in the image and text-domain on time series. We present a methodology to test and evaluate various XAI methods on time series by introducing new verification techniques to incorporate the temporal dimension. We further conduct preliminary experiments to assess the quality of selected XAI method explanations with various verification methods on a range of datasets and inspecting quality metrics on it. We demonstrate that in our initial experiments, SHAP works robust for all models, but others like DeepLIFT, LRP, and Saliency Maps work better with specific architectures.

Big data and data science are concepts often heard together. It is believed that nowadays there are large amounts of data and that data science can draw valuable insights from all these terabytes of information. However, in a practical scenario, you will often have limited data to solve a problem. Gathering a big dataset can be prohibitively expensive or simply impossible (e.g., only having records from a certain time period when doing time series analysis). As a result, there is often no choice but to work with a small dataset, trying to get as accurate predictions as possible.

For many of these steps, there are no real short cuts to be taken. The only way to build a minimum viable product, for example, is to roll up your sleeves and start coding. However, in a few cases, tools exist to automate tedious manual processes and make your life much easier. In Python, this is the situation for steps 4, 8 and 10, thanks to the unittest, flake8 and sphinx packages. Let's look at each of these packages one by one.

A robust model for time series forecasting is highly important in many domains, including but not limited to financial forecast, air temperature and electricity consumption. To improve forecasting performance, traditional approaches usually require additional feature sets. However, adding more feature sets from different sources of data is not always feasible due to its accessibility limitation. In this paper, we propose a novel self-boosted mechanism in which the original time series is decomposed into multiple time series. These time series played the role of additional features in which the closely related time series group is used to feed into multi-task learning model, and the loosely related group is fed into multi-view learning part to utilize its complementary information. We use three real-world datasets to validate our model and show the superiority of our proposed method over existing state-of-the-art baseline methods.

In Ben-David et al.'s "Learnability Can Be Undecidable," they prove an independence result in theoretical machine learning. In particular, they define a new type of learnability, called Estimating The Maximum (EMX) learnability. They argue that this type of learnability fits in with other notions such as PAC learnability, Vapnik's statistical learning setting, and other general learning settings. However, using some set-theoretic techniques, they show that some learning problems in the EMX setting are independent of ZFC. Specifically they prove that ZFC cannot prove or disprove EMX learnability of the finite subsets on the [0,1] interval. Moreover, the way they prove it shows that there can be no characteristic dimension for EMX; and, hence, for general learning settings. Here, I will explain their findings, discuss some limitations on those findings, and offer some suggestions about how to excise that undecidability. Parts 2-3 will explain the results of the paper, part 4-5 will discuss some limitations and next steps, and I will conclude in part 6.

-- Accurate volume segmentation from the Computed T omography (CT) scan is a common prerequisite for preoperative planning, intra-operative guidance and quantitative assessment of therapeutic outcomes in robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). The use of 3D Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) is a viable solution for this task but is memory intensive. The use of patch division can mitigate this issue in practice, but can cause discontinuities between the adjacent patches and severe class-imbalances within individual sub-volumes. This paper presents a new patch division approach - Patch-512 to tackle the class-imbalance issue by preserving a full field-of-view of the objects in the XY planes. T o achieve better segmentation results based on these asymmetric patches, a 3D DCNN architecture using asymmetrical separable convolutions is proposed. The proposed network, called Z-Net, can be seamlessly integrated into existing 3D DCNNs such as 3D U-Net and V-Net, for improved volume segmentation. Detailed validation of the method is provided for CT aortic, liver and lung segmentation, demonstrating the effectiveness and practical value of the method for intra-operative 3D navigation in robot-assisted MIS. Medical volume segmentation, which labels the class of each voxel in a 3D volume, is a fundamental task in medical image analysis.

Manifold learning now plays a very important role in machine learning and many relevant applications. Although its superior performance in dealing with nonlinear data distribution, data sparsity is always a thorny knot. There are few researches to well handle it in manifold learning. In this paper, we propose Hierarchic Neighbors Embedding (HNE), which enhance local connection by the hierarchic combination of neighbors. After further analyzing topological connection and reconstruction performance, three different versions of HNE are given. The experimental results show that our methods work well on both synthetic data and high-dimensional real-world tasks. HNE develops the outstanding advantages in dealing with general data. Furthermore, comparing with other popular manifold learning methods, the performance on sparse samples and weak-connected manifolds is better for HNE.

In recent years, multi object tracking (MOT) problem has drawn attention to it and has been studied in various research areas. However, some of the challenging problems including time dependent cardinality, unordered measurement set, and object labeling remain unclear. In this paper, we propose robust nonparametric methods to model the state prior for MOT problem. These models are shown to be more flexible and robust compared to existing methods. In particular, the overall approach estimates time dependent object cardinality, provides object labeling, and identifies object associated measurements. Moreover, our proposed framework dynamically contends with the birth/death and survival of the objects through dependent nonparametric processes. We present Inference algorithms that demonstrate the utility of the dependent nonparametric models for tracking. We employ Monte Carlo sampling methods to demonstrate the proposed algorithms efficiently learn the trajectory of objects from noisy measurements. The computational results display the performance of the proposed algorithms and comparison not only between one another, but also between proposed algorithms and labeled multi Bernoulli tracker.

Transfer learning aims to learn robust classifiers for the target domain by leveraging knowledge from a source domain. Since the source and the target domains are usually from different distributions, existing methods mainly focus on adapting the cross-domain marginal or conditional distributions. However, in real applications, the marginal and conditional distributions usually have different contributions to the domain discrepancy. Existing methods fail to quantitatively evaluate the different importance of these two distributions, which will result in unsatisfactory transfer performance. In this paper, we propose a novel concept called Dynamic Distribution Adaptation (DDA), which is capable of quantitatively evaluating the relative importance of each distribution. DDA can be easily incorporated into the framework of structural risk minimization to solve transfer learning problems. On the basis of DDA, we propose two novel learning algorithms: (1) Manifold Dynamic Distribution Adaptation (MDDA) for traditional transfer learning, and (2) Dynamic Distribution Adaptation Network (DDAN) for deep transfer learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDDA and DDAN significantly improve the transfer learning performance and setup a strong baseline over the latest deep and adversarial methods on digits recognition, sentiment analysis, and image classification. More importantly, it is shown that marginal and conditional distributions have different contributions to the domain divergence, and our DDA is able to provide good quantitative evaluation of their relative importance which leads to better performance. We believe this observation can be helpful for future research in transfer learning.

Many problems in real life can be converted to combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) on graphs, that is to find a best node state configuration or a network structure such that the designed objective function is optimized under some constraints. However, these problems are notorious for their hardness to solve because most of them are NP-hard or NP-complete. Although traditional general methods such as simulated annealing (SA), genetic algorithms (GA) and so forth have been devised to these hard problems, their accuracy and time consumption are not satisfying in practice. In this work, we proposed a simple, fast, and general algorithm framework called Gumbel-softmax Optimization (GSO) for COPs. By introducing Gumbel-softmax technique which is developed in machine learning community, we can optimize the objective function directly by gradient descent algorithm regardless of the discrete nature of variables. We test our algorithm on four different problems including Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model, maximum independent set (MIS) problem, modularity optimization, and structural optimization problem. High-quality solutions can be obtained with much less time consuming compared to traditional approaches.