We predict credit applications with off-the-shelf, interchangeable black-box classifiers and we explain single predictions with counterfactual explanations. Counterfactual explanations expose the minimal changes required on the input data to obtain a different result e.g., approved vs rejected application. Despite their effectiveness, counterfactuals are mainly designed for changing an undesired outcome of a prediction i.e. loan rejected. Counterfactuals, however, can be difficult to interpret, especially when a high number of features are involved in the explanation. Our contribution is two-fold: i) we propose positive counterfactuals, i.e. we adapt counterfactual explanations to also explain accepted loan applications, and ii) we propose two weighting strategies to generate more interpretable counterfactuals. Experiments on the HELOC loan applications dataset show that our contribution outperforms the baseline counterfactual generation strategy, by leading to smaller and hence more interpretable counterfactuals.

Abstract--Opioid addiction is a severe public health threat in the U.S, causing massive deaths and many social problems. Accurate relapse prediction is of practical importance for recovering patientssince relapse prediction promotes timely relapse preventions that help patients stay clean. In this paper, we introduce a Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) model to predict the addiction relapses based on sentiment images and social influences. Experimental results on real social media data from Reddit.com demonstrate that the GAN model delivers a better performance than comparable alternative techniques. The sentiment images generated by the model show that relapse is closely connected with two emotions'joy' and'negative'. This work is one of the first attempts to predict relapses using massive social media data and generative adversarial nets. The proposed method, combined with knowledge of social media mining, has the potential to revolutionize the practice of opioid addiction prevention and treatment. I. INTRODUCTION Opioid addiction is a severe public health threat in the U.S, causing massive deaths and many social problems [1]. According to the latest statistics of National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA, 2017), more than 115 Americans die after overdosing on opioids on a daily basis, and nearly 64,000 people died of drug overdoses in the US in 2016, the most lethal year of the drug overdose epidemic (NIDA, 2017).

Process capability index (PCI) is a commonly used statistic to measure ability of a process to operate within the given specifications or to produce products which meet the required quality specifications. PCI can be univariate or multivariate depending upon the number of process specifications or quality characteristics of interest. Most PCIs make distributional assumptions which are often unrealistic in practice. This paper proposes a new multivariate non-parametric process capability index. This index can be used when distribution of the process or quality parameters is either unknown or does not follow commonly used distributions such as multivariate normal.

Many successful methods have been proposed for learning low dimensional representations on large-scale networks, while almost all existing methods are designed in inseparable processes, learning embeddings for entire networks even when only a small proportion of nodes are of interest. This leads to great inconvenience, especially on super-large or dynamic networks, where these methods become almost impossible to implement. In this paper, we formalize the problem of separated matrix factorization, based on which we elaborate a novel objective function that preserves both local and global information. We further propose SepNE, a simple and flexible network embedding algorithm which independently learns representations for different subsets of nodes in separated processes. By implementing separability, our algorithm reduces the redundant efforts to embed irrelevant nodes, yielding scalability to super-large networks, automatic implementation in distributed learning and further adaptations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on several real-world networks with different scales and subjects. With comparable accuracy, our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in running times on large networks.

We propose a general theoretical method for analyzing the risk bound in the presence of adversaries. In particular, we try to fit the adversarial learning problem into the minimax framework. We first show that the original adversarial learning problem could be reduced to a minimax statistical learning problem by introducing a transport map between distributions. Then we prove a risk bound for this minimax problem in terms of covering numbers. In contrast to previous minimax bounds in \cite{lee,far}, our bound is informative when the radius of the ambiguity set is small. Our method could be applied to multi-class classification problems and commonly-used loss functions such as hinge loss and ramp loss. As two illustrative examples, we derive the adversarial risk bounds for kernel-SVM and deep neural networks. Our results indicate that a stronger adversary might have a negative impact on the complexity of the hypothesis class and the existence of margin could serve as a defense mechanism to counter adversarial attacks.

Deep Neural Network (DNN) has been largely demonstrated to be effective for closed-world classification problems where the total number of classes are known in advance. However, when the total number of classes that may occur during test time is unknown, DNNs notorious fail, i.e., DNN will make incorrect label prediction on instances from novel or unseen classes. This severely limits its utility in many real-world web applications, particularly when data occurs as a continuous stream. In this paper, we focus on addressing this key challenge by developing a two-channel DNN based co-representation learning framework that not only predicts instances from known classes, but also detects and adapts to the occurrence of novel class instances over time. Concretely, we propose a metric learning method using pairwise-constraint loss (PCL) function to learn a feature representation where intra-class compactness and inter-class separation is achieved. Moreover, we apply the temperature scaling scheme on the softmax function to replace traditional softmax output and design an open-world classifier. Our extensive empirical evaluation on benchmark datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our framework compared to other competing techniques.

Neural message passing algorithms for semi-supervised classification on graphs have recently achieved great success. However, these methods only consider nodes that are a few propagation steps away and the size of this utilized neighborhood cannot be easily extended. In this paper, we use the relationship between graph convolutional networks (GCN) and PageRank to derive an improved propagation scheme based on personalized PageRank. We utilize this propagation procedure to construct personalized propagation of neural predictions (PPNP) and its approximation, APPNP. Our model's training time is on par or faster and its number of parameters on par or lower than previous models. It leverages a large, adjustable neighborhood for classification and can be combined with any neural network. We show that this model outperforms several recently proposed methods for semi-supervised classification on multiple graphs in the most thorough study done so far for GCN-like models. Graphs are ubiquitous in the real world and its description through scientific models. They are used to study the spread of information, to optimize delivery, to recommend new books, to suggest friends, or to find a party's potential voters.

Abstract--Machine Learning has been steadily gaining traction for its use in Anomaly-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems (A-NIDS). Research into this domain is frequently performed using the KDD CUP 99 dataset as a benchmark. Several studies question its usability while constructing a contemporary NIDS, due to the skewed response distribution, nonstationarity, and failure to incorporate modern attacks. In this paper, we compare the performance for KDD-99 alternatives when trained using classification models commonly found in literature: Neural Network, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Naive Bayes and K-Means. Applying the SMOTE oversampling technique and random undersampling, we create a balanced version of NSL-KDD and prove that skewed target classes in KDD-99 and NSL-KDD hamper the efficacy of classifiers on minority classes (U2R and R2L), leading to possible security risks. We explore UNSW-NB15, a modern substitute to KDD-99 with greater uniformity of pattern distribution. We benchmark this dataset before and after SMOTE oversampling to observe the effect on minority performance. Our results indicate that classifiers trained on UNSW-NB15 match or better the Weighted F1-Score of those trained on NSL-KDD and KDD-99 in the binary case, thus advocating UNSW-NB15 as a modern substitute to these datasets. Network security is an ever-evolving discipline where new types of attacks manifest and must be mitigated on a daily basis.

Machine learning has long ceased to be futuristic hype and become ever more commonplace in the tech world. An array of companies are currently capitalizing on ML to quickly adapt to tectonic shifts in clients' expectations and craft more personalized offerings. Such a burning need for machine learning solutions leads to a high demand in adept data scientists. Not for nothing Glassdoor ranked this career #1 in their yearly list of 25 best jobs in the U.S. However, to outsmart rivals and become an odds-on favorite for leading positions in high-profile companies, you should be well-versed in advanced ML-powered techs.

While Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning provide ample possibilities for businesses to improve their operations and maximize their revenues, there is no such thing as a "free lunch." The "no free lunch" problem is the AI/ML industry adaptation of the age-old "no one-size-fits-all" problem. The array of problems the businesses face is huge, and the variety of ML models used to solve these problems is quite wide, as some algorithms are better at dealing with certain types of problems than the others. We will explain the basic features and areas of application for all these algorithms below. However, we have to explain the basic principle of Machine Learning beforehand.