Statistical Learning
Manifold-regression to predict from MEG/EEG brain signals without source modeling
Sabbagh, David, Ablin, Pierre, Varoquaux, Gael, Gramfort, Alexandre, Engemann, Denis A.
Magnetoencephalography and electroencephalography (M/EEG) can reveal neuronal dynamics non-invasively in real-time and are therefore appreciated methods in medicine and neuroscience. Recent advances in modeling brain-behavior relationships have highlighted the effectiveness of Riemannian geometry for summarizing the spatially correlated time-series from M/EEG in terms of their covariance. However, after artefact-suppression, M/EEG data is often rank deficient which limits the application of Riemannian concepts. In this article, we focus on the task of regression with rank-reduced covariance matrices. We study two Riemannian approaches that vectorize the M/EEG covariance between-sensors through projection into a tangent space. The Wasserstein distance readily applies to rank-reduced data but lacks affine-invariance. This can be overcome by finding a common subspace in which the covariance matrices are full rank, enabling the affine-invariant geometric distance. We investigated the implications of these two approaches in synthetic generative models, which allowed us to control estimation bias of a linear model for prediction. We show that Wasserstein and geometric distances allow perfect out-of-sample prediction on the generative models. We then evaluated the methods on real data with regard to their effectiveness in predicting age from M/EEG covariance matrices. The findings suggest that the data-driven Riemannian methods outperform different sensor-space estimators and that they get close to the performance of biophysics-driven source-localization model that requires MRI acquisitions and tedious data processing. Our study suggests that the proposed Riemannian methods can serve as fundamental building-blocks for automated large-scale analysis of M/EEG.
Data Sampling for Graph Based Unsupervised Learning: Convex and Greedy Optimization
Vahidian, Saeed, Cloninger, Alexander, Mirzasoleiman, Baharan
In a number of situations, collecting a function value for every data point may be prohibitively expensive, and random sampling ignores any structure in the underlying data. We introduce a scalable optimization algorithm with no correction steps (in contrast to Frank-Wolfe and its variants), a variant of gradient ascent for coreset selection in graphs, that greedily selects a weighted subset of vertices that are deemed most important to sample. Our algorithm estimates the mean of the function by taking a weighted sum only at these vertices, and we provably bound the estimation error in terms of the location and weights of the selected vertices in the graph. In addition, we consider the case where nodes have different selection costs and provide bounds on the quality of the low-cost selected coresets. We demonstrate the benefits of our algorithm on point clouds and structured graphs, as well as sensor placement where the cost of placing sensors depends on the location of the placement. We also elucidate that the empirical convergence of our proposed method is faster than random selection and various clustering methods while still respecting sensor placement cost. The paper concludes with validation of the developed algorithm on both synthetic and real datasets, demonstrating that it performs very well compared to the current state of the art.
Global Semantic Description of Objects based on Prototype Theory
Pino, Omar Vidal, Nascimento, Erickson Rangel, Campos, Mario Fernando Montenegro
In this paper, we introduce a novel semantic description approach inspired on Prototype Theory foundations. We propose a Computational Prototype Model (CPM) that encodes and stores the central semantic meaning of objects category: the semantic prototype. Also, we introduce a Prototype-based Description Model that encodes the semantic meaning of an object while describing its features using our CPM model. Our description method uses semantic prototypes computed by CNN-classifications models to create discriminative signatures that describe an object highlighting its most distinctive features within the category. Our experiments show that: i) our CPM model (semantic prototype + distance metric) is able to describe the internal semantic structure of objects categories; ii) our semantic distance metric can be understood as the object visual typicality score within a category; iii) our descriptor encoding is semantically interpretable and significantly outperforms other image global encodings in clustering and classification tasks.
10 Best Machine Learning & Deep Learning Courses [2019] [UPDATED]
With over 25 courses, this set of training covers almost every possible knowledge that could be required to get started with machine learning and put your skills to practical use. There are lectures based on various platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and you can take your pick as per your convenience. Get a basic understanding of artificial intelligence and machine learning concepts with the essential training and take lessons such as NLP with Python to get hands-on with projects. By the end of the classes, you will be well equipped with the skills covered in the videos and ready to take on more challenging specializations.
Clustered Reinforcement Learning
Ma, Xiao, Zhao, Shen-Yi, Li, Wu-Jun
Exploration strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or high reward~(quality) areas. In most existing methods, the novelty and quality in the neighboring area of the current state are not well utilized to guide the exploration of the agent. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel RL framework, called \underline{c}lustered \underline{r}einforcement \underline{l}earning~(CRL), for efficient exploration in RL. CRL adopts clustering to divide the collected states into several clusters, based on which a bonus reward reflecting both novelty and quality in the neighboring area~(cluster) of the current state is given to the agent. Experiments on a continuous control task and several \emph{Atari 2600} games show that CRL can outperform other state-of-the-art methods to achieve the best performance in most cases.
Failures detection at directional drilling using real-time analogues search
Gurina, Ekaterina, Klyuchnikov, Nikita, Zaytsev, Alexey, Romanenkova, Evgenya, Antipova, Ksenia, Simon, Igor, Makarov, Victor, Koroteev, Dmitry
One of the main challenges in the construction of oil and gas wells is the need to detect and avoid abnormal situations, which can lead to accidents. Accidents have some indicators that help to find them during the drilling process. In this article, we present a data-driven model trained on historical data from drilling accidents that can detect different types of accidents using real-time signals. The results show that using the time-series comparison, based on aggregated statistics and gradient boosting classification, it is possible to detect an anomaly and identify its type by comparing current measurements while drilling with the stored ones from the database of accidents.
Counterfactual Inference for Consumer Choice Across Many Product Categories
Donnelly, Rob, Ruiz, Francisco R., Blei, David, Athey, Susan
This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category, but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer's utility is additive in the different categories. Her preferences about product attributes as well as her price sensitivity vary across products and are in general correlated across products. We build on techniques from the machine learning literature on probabilistic models of matrix factorization, extending the methods to account for time-varying product attributes and products going out of stock. We evaluate the performance of the model using held-out data from weeks with price changes or out of stock products. We show that our model improves over traditional modeling approaches that consider each category in isolation. One source of the improvement is the ability of the model to accurately estimate heterogeneity in preferences (by pooling information across categories); another source of improvement is its ability to estimate the preferences of consumers who have rarely or never made a purchase in a given category in the training data. Using held-out data, we show that our model can accurately distinguish which consumers are most price sensitive to a given product. We consider counterfactuals such as personally targeted price discounts, showing that using a richer model such as the one we propose substantially increases the benefits of personalization in discounts.
Bad Global Minima Exist and SGD Can Reach Them
Liu, Shengchao, Papailiopoulos, Dimitris, Achlioptas, Dimitris
Several recent works have aimed to explain why severely overparameterized models, generalize well when trained by Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The emergent consensus explanation has two parts: the first is that there are "no bad local minima", while the second is that SGD performs implicit regularization by having a bias towards low complexity models. We revisit both of these ideas in the context of image classification with common deep neural network architectures. Our first finding is that there exist bad global minima, i.e., models that fit the training set perfectly, yet have poor generalization. Our second finding is that given only unlabeled training data, we can easily construct initializations that will cause SGD to quickly converge to such bad global minima. For example, on CIFAR, CINIC10, and (Restricted) ImageNet, this can be achieved by starting SGD at a model derived by fitting random labels on the training data: while subsequent SGD training (with the correct labels) will reach zero training error, the resulting model will exhibit a test accuracy degradation of up to 40% compared to training from a random initialization. Finally, we show that regularization seems to provide SGD with an escape route: once heuristics such as data augmentation are used, starting from a complex model (adversarial initialization) has no effect on the test accuracy.
Multi-Frequency Vector Diffusion Maps
We introduce multi-frequency vector diffusion maps (MFVDM), a new framework for organizing and analyzing high dimensional datasets. The new method is a mathematical and algorithmic generalization of vector diffusion maps (VDM) and other non-linear dimensionality reduction methods. MFVDM combines different nonlinear embeddings of the data points defined with multiple unitary irreducible representations of the alignment group that connect two nodes in the graph. We illustrate the efficacy of MFVDM on synthetic data generated according to a random graph model and cryo-electron microscopy image dataset. The new method achieves better nearest neighbor search and alignment estimation than the state-of-the-arts VDM and diffusion maps (DM) on extremely noisy data.
Machine Learning and Visualization in Clinical Decision Support: Current State and Future Directions
Levy-Fix, Gal, Kuperman, Gilad J., Elhadad, Noémie
Deep learning, an area of machine learning, is set to revolutionize patient care. But it is not yet part of standard of care, especially when it comes to individual patient care. In fact, it is unclear to what extent data-driven techniques are being used to support clinical decision making (CDS). Heretofore, there has not been a review of ways in which research in machine learning and other types of data-driven techniques can contribute effectively to clinical care and the types of support they can bring to clinicians. In this paper, we consider ways in which two data driven domains - machine learning and data visualizations - can contribute to the next generation of clinical decision support systems. We review the literature regarding the ways heuristic knowledge, machine learning, and visualization are - and can be - applied to three types of CDS. There has been substantial research into the use of predictive modeling for alerts, however current CDS systems are not utilizing these methods. Approaches that leverage interactive visualizations and machine-learning inferences to organize and review patient data are gaining popularity but are still at the prototype stage and are not yet in use. CDS systems that could benefit from prescriptive machine learning (e.g., treatment recommendations for specific patients) have not yet been developed. We discuss potential reasons for the lack of deployment of data-driven methods in CDS and directions for future research.