We derive new bounds for a notion of adversarial risk, characterizing the robustness of binary classifiers. Specifically, we study the cases of linear classifiers and neural network classifiers, and introduce transformations with the property that the risk of the transformed functions upper-bounds the adversarial risk of the original functions. This reduces the problem of deriving adversarial risk bounds to the problem of deriving risk bounds using standard learning-theoretic techniques. We then derive bounds on the Rademacher complexities of the transformed function classes, obtaining error rates on the same order as the generalization error of the original function classes. Finally, we provide two algorithms for optimizing the adversarial risk bounds in the linear case, and discuss connections to regularization and distributional robustness.

Precision medicine aims for personalized prognosis and therapeutics by utilizing recent genome-scale high-throughput profiling techniques, including next-generation sequencing (NGS). However, translating NGS data faces several challenges. First, NGS count data are often overdispersed, requiring appropriate modeling. Second, compared to the number of involved molecules and system complexity, the number of available samples for studying complex disease, such as cancer, is often limited, especially considering disease heterogeneity. The key question is whether we may integrate available data from all different sources or domains to achieve reproducible disease prognosis based on NGS count data. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian Multi-Domain Learning (BMDL) model that derives domain-dependent latent representations of overdispersed count data based on hierarchical negative binomial factorization for accurate cancer subtyping even if the number of samples for a specific cancer type is small. Experimental results from both our simulated and NGS datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) demonstrate the promising potential of BMDL for effective multi-domain learning without "negative transfer" effects often seen in existing multi-task learning and transfer learning methods.

Let $\varepsilon\in(0,1)$ and $X\subset\mathbb R^d$ be arbitrary with $|X|$ having size $n>1$. The Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma states there exists $f:X\rightarrow\mathbb R^m$ with $m = O(\varepsilon^{-2}\log n)$ such that $$ \forall x\in X\ \forall y\in X, \|x-y\|_2 \le \|f(x)-f(y)\|_2 \le (1+\varepsilon)\|x-y\|_2 . $$ We show that a strictly stronger version of this statement holds, answering one of the main open questions of [MMMR18]: "$\forall y\in X$" in the above statement may be replaced with "$\forall y\in\mathbb R^d$", so that $f$ not only preserves distances within $X$, but also distances to $X$ from the rest of space. Previously this stronger version was only known with the worse bound $m = O(\varepsilon^{-4}\log n)$. Our proof is via a tighter analysis of (a specific instantiation of) the embedding recipe of [MMMR18].

We propose a novel approach for learning node representations in directed graphs, which maintains separate views or embedding spaces for the two distinct node roles induced by the directionality of the edges. In order to achieve this, we propose a novel alternating random walk strategy to generate training samples from the directed graph while preserving the role information. These samples are then trained using Skip-Gram with Negative Sampling (SGNS) with nodes retaining their source/target semantics. We conduct extensive experimental evaluation to showcase our effectiveness on several real-world datasets on link prediction, multi-label classification and graph reconstruction tasks. We show that the embeddings from our approach are indeed robust, generalizable and well performing across multiple kinds of tasks and networks. We show that we consistently outperform all random-walk based neural embedding methods for link prediction and graph reconstruction tasks. In addition to providing a theoretical interpretation of our method we also show that we are more considerably robust than the other directed graph approaches.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to construct multiclass clasifiers by means of arrangements of hyperplanes. We propose different mixed integer non linear programming formulations for the problem by using extensions of widely used measures for misclassifying observations. We prove that kernel tools can be extended to these models. Some strategies are detailed that help solving the associated mathematical programming problems more efficiently. An extensive battery of experiments has been run which reveal the powerfulness of our proposal in contrast to other previously proposed methods.

Many economic applications including optimal pricing and inventory management requires prediction of demand based on sales data and estimation of sales reaction to a price change. There is a wide range of econometric approaches which are used to correct a bias in estimates of demand parameters on censored sales data. These approaches can also be applied to various classes of machine learning models to reduce the prediction error of sales volume. In this study we construct two ensemble models for demand prediction with and without accounting for demand censorship. Accounting for sales censorship is based on the idea of censored quantile regression method where the model estimation is splitted on two separate parts: a) prediction of zero sales by classification model; and b) prediction of non-zero sales by regression model. Models with and without accounting for censorship are based on the predictions aggregations of Least squares, Ridge and Lasso regressions and Random Forest model. Having estimated the predictive properties of both models, we empirically test the best predictive power of the model that takes into account the censored nature of demand. We also show that machine learning method with censorship accounting provide bias corrected estimates of demand sensitivity for price change similar to econometric models.

At this moment, databanks worldwide contain brain images of previously unimaginable numbers. Combined with developments in data science, these massive data provide the potential to better understand the genetic underpinnings of brain diseases. However, different datasets, which are stored at different institutions, cannot always be shared directly due to privacy and legal concerns, thus limiting the full exploitation of big data in the study of brain disorders. Here we propose a federated learning framework for securely accessing and meta-analyzing any biomedical data without sharing individual information. We illustrate our framework by investigating brain structural relationships across diseases and clinical cohorts. The framework is first tested on synthetic data and then applied to multi-centric, multi-database studies including ADNI, PPMI, MIRIAD and UK Biobank, showing the potential of the approach for further applications in distributed analysis of multi-centric cohorts

Document clustering is a text mining technique used to provide better document search and browsing in digital libraries or online corpora. A lot of research has been done on biomedical document clustering that is based on using existing ontology. But, associations and co-occurrences of the medical concepts are not well represented by using ontology. In this research, a vector representation of concepts of diseases and similarity measurement between concepts are proposed. They identify the closest concepts of diseases in the context of a corpus. Each document is represented by using the vector space model. A weight scheme is proposed to consider both local content and associations between concepts. A Self-Organizing Map is used as document clustering algorithm. The vector projection and visualization features of SOM enable visualization and analysis of the clusters distributions and relationships on the two dimensional space. The experimental results show that the proposed document clustering framework generates meaningful clusters and facilitate visualization of the clusters based on the concepts of diseases.

Abstract--Violence is an epidemic in Brazil and a problem on the rise worldwide. Mobile devices provide communication technologies which can be used to monitor and alert about violent situations. However, current solutions, like panic buttons or safe words, might increase the loss of life in violent situations. We propose an embedded artificial intelligence solution, using natural language and speech processing technology, to silently alert someone who can help in this situation. The corpus used contains 400 positive phrases and 800 negative phrases, totaling 1,200 sentences which are classified using two well-known extraction methods for natural language processing tasks: bag-of-words and word embeddings and classified with a support vector machine. We describe the proof-of-concept product in development with promising results, indicating a path towards a commercial product. More importantly we show that model improvements via word embeddings and data augmentation techniques provide an intrinsically robust model. The final embedded solution also has a small footprint of less than 10 MB.

Interpretable classification models are built with the purpose of providing a comprehensible description of the decision logic to an external oversight agent. When considered in isolation, a decision tree, a set of classification rules, or a linear model, are widely recognized as human-interpretable. However, such models are generated as part of a larger analytical process, which, in particular, comprises data collection and filtering. Selection bias in data collection or in data pre-processing may affect the model learned. Although model induction algorithms are designed to learn to generalize, they pursue optimization of predictive accuracy. It remains unclear how interpretability is instead impacted. We conduct an experimental analysis to investigate whether interpretable models are able to cope with data selection bias as far as interpretability is concerned.