Regionalization is the task of dividing up a landscape into homogeneous patches with similar properties. Although this task has a wide range of applications, it has two notable challenges. First, it is assumed that the resulting regions are both homogeneous and spatially contiguous. Second, it is well-recognized that landscapes are hierarchical such that fine-scale regions are nested wholly within broader-scale regions. To address these two challenges, first, we develop a spatially constrained spectral clustering framework for region delineation that incorporates the tradeoff between region homogeneity and spatial contiguity. The framework uses a flexible, truncated exponential kernel to represent the spatial contiguity constraints, which is integrated with the landscape feature similarity matrix for region delineation. To address the second challenge, we extend the framework to create fine-scale regions that are nested within broader-scaled regions using a greedy, recursive bisection approach. We present a case study of a terrestrial ecology data set in the United States that compares the proposed framework with several baseline methods for regionalization. Experimental results suggest that the proposed framework for regionalization outperforms the baseline methods, especially in terms of balancing region contiguity and homogeneity, as well as creating regions of more similar size, which is often a desired trait of regions.

Learning in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) takes place by minimizing a non-convex high-dimensional loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strategy. The learning process is observed to be able to find good minimizers without getting stuck in local critical points, and that such minimizers are often satisfactory at avoiding overfitting. How these two features can be kept under control in nonlinear devices composed of millions of tunable connections is a profound and far reaching open question. In this paper we study basic non-convex neural network models which learn random patterns, and derive a number of basic geometrical and algorithmic features which suggest some answers. We first show that the error loss function presents few extremely wide flat minima (WFM) which coexist with narrower minima and critical points. We then show that the minimizers of the cross-entropy loss function overlap with the WFM of the error loss. We also show examples of learning devices for which WFM do not exist. From the algorithmic perspective we derive entropy driven greedy and message passing algorithms which focus their search on wide flat regions of minimizers. In the case of SGD and cross-entropy loss, we show that a slow reduction of the norm of the weights along the learning process also leads to WFM. We corroborate the results by a numerical study of the correlations between the volumes of the minimizers, their Hessian and their generalization performance on real data.

The increasing accessibility of data provides substantial opportunities for understanding user behaviors. Unearthing anomalies in user behaviors is of particular importance as it helps signal harmful incidents such as network intrusions, terrorist activities, and financial frauds. Many visual analytics methods have been proposed to help understand user behavior-related data in various application domains. In this work, we survey the state of art in visual analytics of anomalous user behaviors and classify them into four categories including social interaction, travel, network communication, and transaction. We further examine the research works in each category in terms of data types, anomaly detection techniques, and visualization techniques, and interaction methods. Finally, we discuss the findings and potential research directions.

Logistic regression was once the most popular machine learning algorithm, but the advent of more accurate algorithms for classification such as support vector machines, random forest, and neural networks has induced some machine learning engineers to view logistic regression as obsolete. Though it may have been overshadowed by more advanced methods, its simplicity makes it the ideal algorithm to use as an introduction to the study of machine learning. Like most machine learning algorithms, logistic regression creates a boundary edge between binary labels. The purpose of a training process is to place this edge in such a way that most of the labels are divided so as to maximize the accuracy of predictions. The training process requires correct model architecture and fine-tuned hyperparameters, whereas data play the most significant role in determining the prediction accuracy.

The scikit-learnthe library has functions that enable us to build these pipelines by concatenating various modules together. We just need to specify the modules along with the corresponding parameters. It will then build a pipeline using these modules that processes the data and trains the system. The pipeline can include modules that perform various functions like feature selection, preprocessing, random forests, clustering, and so on. In this section, we will see how to build a pipeline to select the top K features from an input data point and then classify them using an Extremely Random Forest classifier.

In Machine learning, classification problems with high-dimensional data are really challenging. Sometimes, very simple problems become extremely complex due this'curse of dimensionality' problem. In this article, we will see how accuracy and performance vary across different classifiers. We will also see how, when we don't have the freedom to choose a classifier independently, we can do feature engineering to make a poor classifier perform well. For this article, we will use the "EEG Brainwave Dataset" from Kaggle.

As a teacher of Data Science (Data Science for Internet of Things course at the University of Oxford), I am always fascinated in cross connection between concepts. To recap, Logistic regression is a binary classification method. It can be modelled as a function that can take in any number of inputs and constrain the output to be between 0 and 1. This means, we can think of Logistic Regression as a one-layer neural network. For a binary output, if the true label is y (y 0 or y 1) and y_hat is the predicted output – then y_hat represents the probability that y 1 - given inputs w and x. Therefore, the probability that y 0 given inputs w and x is (1 - y_hat), as shown below.

The multi-armed bandit problem is a prototypical model for optimizing the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We consider a pure-exploration version of the bandit problem known as the best-arm identification problem, where the goal is to minimize the number of arm pulls required to select an arm that is - with sufficiently high probability - sufficiently close to the best arm. We assume that each arm has an observable vector of covariates or features, and there is an unknown vector of parameters (of the same dimension as the vector of features) that is common across arms. Whereas in a linear bandit the mean reward of an arm is the linear predictor (i.e., the inner product of the parameter vector and the feature vector), in our generalized linear model the mean reward is related to the linear predictor via a link function, which allows for mean rewards that are nonlinear in the linear predictor, as well as binary or integer rewards (via, e.g., logistic or

In this paper we take a problem of unsupervised nodes clustering on graphs and show how recent advances in attention models can be applied successfully in a "hard" regime of the problem. We propose an unsupervised algorithm that encodes Bethe Hessian embeddings by optimizing soft modularity loss and argue that our model is competitive to both classical and Graph Neural Network (GNN) models while it can be trained on a single graph.

Build-to-order (BTO) supply chains have become common-place in industries such as electronics, automotive and fashion. They enable building products based on individual requirements with a short lead time and minimum inventory and production costs. Due to their nature, they differ significantly from traditional supply chains. However, there have not been studies dedicated to demand forecasting methods for this type of setting. This work makes two contributions. First, it presents a new and unique data set from a manufacturer in the BTO sector. Second, it proposes a novel data transformation technique for demand forecasting of BTO products. Results from thirteen forecasting methods show that the approach compares well to the state-of-the-art while being easy to implement and to explain to decision-makers.