Statistical Learning
Many could be better than all: A novel instance-oriented algorithm for Multi-modal Multi-label problem
Zhang, Yi, Zeng, Cheng, Cheng, Hao, Wang, Chongjun, Zhang, Lei
With the emergence of diverse data collection techniques, objects in real applications can be represented as multi-modal features. What's more, objects may have multiple semantic meanings. Multi-modal and Multi-label (MMML) problem becomes a universal phenomenon. The quality of data collected from different channels are inconsistent and some of them may not benefit for prediction. In real life, not all the modalities are needed for prediction. As a result, we propose a novel instance-oriented Multi-modal Classifier Chains (MCC) algorithm for MMML problem, which can make convince prediction with partial modalities. MCC extracts different modalities for different instances in the testing phase. Extensive experiments are performed on one real-world herbs dataset and two public datasets to validate our proposed algorithm, which reveals that it may be better to extract many instead of all of the modalities at hand.
Towards Effective Rebuttal: Listening Comprehension using Corpus-Wide Claim Mining
Lavee, Tamar, Orbach, Matan, Kotlerman, Lili, Kantor, Yoav, Gretz, Shai, Dankin, Lena, Mirkin, Shachar, Jacovi, Michal, Bilu, Yonatan, Aharonov, Ranit, Slonim, Noam
Engaging in a live debate requires, among other things, the ability to effectively rebut arguments claimed by your opponent. In particular, this requires identifying these arguments. Here, we suggest doing so by automatically mining claims from a corpus of news articles containing billions of sentences, and searching for them in a given speech. This raises the question of whether such claims indeed correspond to those made in spoken speeches. To this end, we collected a large dataset of $400$ speeches in English discussing $200$ controversial topics, mined claims for each topic, and asked annotators to identify the mined claims mentioned in each speech. Results show that in the vast majority of speeches debaters indeed make use of such claims. In addition, we present several baselines for the automatic detection of mined claims in speeches, forming the basis for future work. All collected data is freely available for research.
Understanding Adversarial Robustness: The Trade-off between Minimum and Average Margin
Deep models, while being extremely versatile and accurate, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks: slight perturbations that are imperceptible to humans can completely flip the prediction of deep models. Many attack and defense mechanisms have been proposed, although a satisfying solution still largely remains elusive. In this work, we give strong evidence that during training, deep models maximize the minimum margin in order to achieve high accuracy, but at the same time decrease the \emph{average} margin hence hurting robustness. Our empirical results highlight an intrinsic trade-off between accuracy and robustness for current deep model training. To further address this issue, we propose a new regularizer to explicitly promote average margin, and we verify through extensive experiments that it does lead to better robustness. Our regularized objective remains Fisher-consistent, hence asymptotically can still recover the Bayes optimal classifier.
A Strategy for Adaptive Sampling of Multi-fidelity Gaussian Process to Reduce Predictive Uncertainty
Ghosh, Sayan, Kristensen, Jesper, Zhang, Yiming, Subber, Waad, Wang, Liping
Multi-fidelity Gaussian process is a common approach to address the extensive computationally demanding algorithms such as optimization, calibration and uncertainty quantification. Adaptive sampling for multi-fidelity Gaussian process is a changing task due to the fact that not only we seek to estimate the next sampling location of the design variable, but also the level of the simulator fidelity. This issue is often addressed by including the cost of the simulator as an another factor in the searching criterion in conjunction with the uncertainty reduction metric. In this work, we extent the traditional design of experiment framework for the multi-fidelity Gaussian process by partitioning the prediction uncertainty based on the fidelity level and the associated cost of execution. In addition, we utilize the concept of Believer which quantifies the effect of adding an exploratory design point on the Gaussian process uncertainty prediction. We demonstrated our framework using academic examples as well as a industrial application of steady-state thermodynamic operation point of a fluidized bed process
A close-up comparison of the misclassification error distance and the adjusted Rand index for external clustering evaluation
Indeed, it was the recommended choice in the seminal paper of Milligan and Cooper (1986), where five criteria were examined regarding the task of comparison of hierarchical clustering algorithms across different hierarchy levels. Their recommendation is based on the fact that, for the null case data (i.e., for a synthetic sample with randomly assigned class labels, showing no significant cluster structure), the ARI was the only index that produced a flat response curve across hierarchy levels, with mean values close to zero, hence indicating that the agreement between the randomly assigned labels and the algorithm solution was due to chance. Another popular measure for clustering validation, not included in Milligan and Cooper's study, is the misclassification error distance (MED). Its first appearance in the literature dates back at least to R egnier (1965), where it was introduced as a distance between partitions of a finite set, and it was called transfer distance. It is also referred to as partition distance (Gusfield, 2002) or maximum matching distance (Rossi, 2015).
Bayesian Robustness: A Nonasymptotic Viewpoint
Bhatia, Kush, Ma, Yi-An, Dragan, Anca D., Bartlett, Peter L., Jordan, Michael I.
The goal is to capture the sensitivity of inferential proc edures to the presence of outliers in the data and misspecifications in the modelling a ssumptions, and to mitigate overly large sensitivity. The Bayesian approach has been fo cused on capturing possible anomalies in the observed data via the model and in choosing p riors that have minimal effect on inferences. The frequentist approach, on the other hand, has focused on the development of estimators that identify and guard against o utliers in the data. We refer the reader to [ Hub11, Chap 15] for a comprehensive discussion.
Scalable Dictionary Classifiers for Time Series Classification
Middlehurst, Matthew, Vickers, William, Bagnall, Anthony
Dictionary based classifiers are a family of algorithms for time series classification (TSC), that focus on capturing the frequency of pattern occurrences in a time series. The ensemble based Bag of Symbolic Fourier Approximation Symbols (BOSS) was found to be a top performing TSC algorithm in a recent evaluation, as well as the best performing dictionary based classifier. A recent addition to the category, the Word Extraction for Time Series Classification (WEASEL), claims an improvement on this performance. Both of these algorithms however have non-trivial scalability issues, taking a considerable amount of build time and space on larger datasets. We evaluate changes to the way BOSS chooses classifiers for its ensemble, replacing its parameter search with random selection. This change allows for the easy implementation of contracting, setting a build time limit for the classifier and check-pointing, saving progress during the classifiers build. To differentiate between the two BOSS ensemble methods we refer to our randomised version as RBOSS. Additionally we test the application of common ensembling techniques to help retain accuracy from the loss of the BOSS parameter search. We achieve a significant reduction in build time without a significant change in accuracy on average when compared to BOSS by creating a size $n$ weighted ensemble selecting the best performers from $k$ randomly chosen parameter sets. Our experiments are conducted on datasets from the recently expanded UCR time series archive. We demonstrate the usability improvements to RBOSS with a case study using a large whale acoustics dataset for which BOSS proved infeasible.
An Encoder-Decoder Based Approach for Anomaly Detection with Application in Additive Manufacturing
Jin, Baihong, Tan, Yingshui, Nettekoven, Alexander, Chen, Yuxin, Topcu, Ufuk, Yue, Yisong, Vincentelli, Alberto Sangiovanni
We present a novel unsupervised deep learning approach that utilizes the encoder-decoder architecture for detecting anomalies in sequential sensor data collected during industrial manufacturing. Our approach is designed not only to detect whether there exists an anomaly at a given time step, but also to predict what will happen next in the (sequential) process. We demonstrate our approach on a dataset collected from a real-world testbed. The dataset contains images collected under both normal conditions and synthetic anomalies. We show that the encoder-decoder model is able to identify the injected anomalies in a modern manufacturing process in an unsupervised fashion. In addition, it also gives hints about the temperature non-uniformity of the testbed during manufacturing, which is what we are not aware of before doing the experiment.
Bias of Homotopic Gradient Descent for the Hinge Loss
Molitor, Denali, Needell, Deanna, Ward, Rachel
Gradient descent is a simple and widely used optimization method for machine learning. For homogeneous linear classifiers applied to separable data, gradient descent has been shown to converge to the maximal margin (or equivalently, the minimal norm) solution for various smooth loss functions. The previous theory does not, however, apply to non-smooth functions such as the hinge loss which is widely used in practice. Here, we study the convergence of a homotopic variant of gradient descent applied to the hinge loss and provide explicit convergence rates to the max-margin solution for linearly separable data.
Notes on Computational Hardness of Hypothesis Testing: Predictions using the Low-Degree Likelihood Ratio
Kunisky, Dmitriy, Wein, Alexander S., Bandeira, Afonso S.
These notes survey and explore an emerging method, which we call the low-degree method, for predicting and understanding statistical-versus-computational tradeoffs in high-dimensional inference problems. In short, the method posits that a certain quantity -- the second moment of the low-degree likelihood ratio -- gives insight into how much computational time is required to solve a given hypothesis testing problem, which can in turn be used to predict the computational hardness of a variety of statistical inference tasks. While this method originated in the study of the sum-of-squares (SoS) hierarchy of convex programs, we present a self-contained introduction that does not require knowledge of SoS. In addition to showing how to carry out predictions using the method, we include a discussion investigating both rigorous and conjectural consequences of these predictions. These notes include some new results, simplified proofs, and refined conjectures. For instance, we point out a formal connection between spectral methods and the low-degree likelihood ratio, and we give a sharp low-degree lower bound against subexponential-time algorithms for tensor PCA.