IMAGE: The four newly determined personality types are based on five widely-recognized character traits. The findings challenge existing paradigms in psychology. The new study, led by Luís Amaral of the McCormick School of Engineering, will be published Sept. 17 by the journal Nature Human Behaviour. The findings potentially could be of interest to hiring managers and mental health care providers. "People have tried to classify personality types since Hippocrates' time, but previous scientific literature has found that to be nonsense," said co-author William Revelle, professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

The loss function is the bread and butter of modern Machine Learning; it takes your algorithm from theoretical to practical and transforms neural networks from glorified matrix multiplication into Deep Learning. This post will explain the role of loss functions and how they work, while surveying a few of the most popular of the past decade. At its core, a loss function is incredibly simple: it's a method of evaluating how well your algorithm models your dataset. If your predictions are totally off, your loss function will output a higher number. As you change pieces of your algorithm to try and improve your model, your loss function will tell you if you're getting anywhere.

Machine learning qualifies computers to assimilate with data, without being solely programmed [1, 2]. Machine learning can be classified as supervised and unsupervised learning. In supervised learning, computers learn an objective that portrays an input to an output hinged on training input-output pairs [3]. Most efficient and widely used supervised learning algorithms are K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Large Margin Nearest Neighbor (LMNN), and Extended Nearest Neighbor (ENN). The main contribution of this paper is to implement these elegant learning algorithms on eleven different datasets from the UCI machine learning repository to observe the variation of accuracies for each of the algorithms on all datasets. Analyzing the accuracy of the algorithms will give us a brief idea about the relationship of the machine learning algorithms and the data dimensionality. All the algorithms are developed in Matlab. Upon such accuracy observation, the comparison can be built among KNN, SVM, LMNN, and ENN regarding their performances on each dataset.

With the arrival of the big data era, more and more data are becoming readily available in various real world applications and those data are usually highly heterogeneous. Taking computational medicine as an example, we have both Electronic Health Records (EHR) and medical images for each patient. For complicated diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, both EHR and neuroimaging information are very important for disease understanding because they contain complementary aspects of the disease. However, EHR and neuroimage are completely different. So far the existing research has been mainly focusing on one of them. In this paper, we proposed a framework, Memory-Based Graph Convolution Network (MemGCN), to perform integrative analysis with such multi-modal data. Specifically, GCN is used to extract useful information from the patients' neuroimages. The information contained in the patient EHRs before the acquisition of each brain image is captured by a memory network because of its sequential nature. The information contained in each brain image is combined with the information read out from the memory network to infer the disease state at the image acquisition timestamp. To further enhance the analytical power of MemGCN, we also designed a multi-hop strategy that allows multiple reading and updating on the memory can be performed at each iteration. We conduct experiments using the patient data from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) with the task of classification of Parkinson's Disease (PD) cases versus controls. We demonstrate that superior classification performance can be achieved with our proposed framework, comparing with existing approaches involving a single type of data.

Sliced inverse regression is a popular tool for sufficient dimension reduction, which replaces covariates with a minimal set of their linear combinations without loss of information on the conditional distribution of the response given the covariates. The estimated linear combinations include all covariates, making results difficult to interpret and perhaps unnecessarily variable, particularly when the number of covariates is large. In this paper, we propose a convex formulation for fitting sparse sliced inverse regression in high dimensions. Our proposal estimates the subspace of the linear combinations of the covariates directly and performs variable selection simultaneously. We solve the resulting convex optimization problem via the linearized alternating direction methods of multiplier algorithm, and establish an upper bound on the subspace distance between the estimated and the true subspaces. Through numerical studies, we show that our proposal is able to identify the correct covariates in the high-dimensional setting.

The size of publicly available data in cognitive neuro-imaging has increased a lot in recent years, thanks to strong research and community efforts. Exploiting this wealth of data demands new methods to turn the heterogeneous cognitive information held in different task-fMRI studies into common-universal-cognitive models. In this paper, we pool data from large fMRI repositories to predict psychological conditions from statistical brain maps across different studies and subjects. We leverage advances in deep learning, intermediate representations and multi-task learning to learn universal interpretable low-dimensional representations of brain images, usable for predicting psychological stimuli in all input studies. The method improves decoding performance for 80% of studies, by permitting cognitive information to flow from every study to the others: it notably gives a strong performance boost when decoding studies of small size. The trained low-dimensional representation-task-optimized networks-is interpretable as a set of basis cognitive dimensions relevant to meaningful categories of cognitive stimuli. Our approach opens new ways of extracting information from brain maps, overcoming the low power of typical fMRI studies.

Weighted SVM (or fuzzy SVM) is the most widely used SVM variant owning its effectiveness to the use of instance weights. Proper selection of the instance weights can lead to increased generalization performance. In this work, we extend the span error bound theory to weighted SVM and we introduce effective hyperparameter selection methods for the weighted SVM algorithm. The significance of the presented work is that enables the application of span bound and span-rule with weighted SVM. The span bound is an upper bound of the leave-one-out error that can be calculated using a single trained SVM model. This is important since leave-one-out error is an almost unbiased estimator of the test error. Similarly, the span-rule gives the actual value of the leave-one-out error. Thus, one can apply span bound and span-rule as computationally lightweight alternatives of leave-one-out procedure for hyperparameter selection. The main theoretical contributions are: (a) we prove the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the span of a support vector in weighted SVM; and (b) we prove the extension of span bound and span-rule to weighted SVM. We experimentally evaluate the span bound and the span-rule for hyperparameter selection and we compare them with other methods that are applicable to weighted SVM: the $K$-fold cross-validation and the ${\xi}-{\alpha}$ bound. Experiments on 14 benchmark data sets and data sets with importance scores for the training instances show that: (a) the condition for the existence of span in weighted SVM is satisfied almost always; (b) the span-rule is the most effective method for weighted SVM hyperparameter selection; (c) the span-rule is the best predictor of the test error in the mean square error sense; and (d) the span-rule is efficient and, for certain problems, it can be calculated faster than $K$-fold cross-validation.

In this paper, we propose a random projection approach to estimate variance in kernel ridge regression. Our approach leads to a consistent estimator of the true variance, while being computationally more efficient. Our variance estimator is optimal for a large family of kernels, including cubic splines and Gaussian kernels. Simulation analysis is conducted to support our theory.

Abstract--Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) is a data clustering algorithm which has the high-performance rate for dataset where clusters have the constant density of data points. One of the significant attributes of this algorithm is noise cancellation. However, DBSCAN demonstrates reduced performances for clusters with different densities. Therefore, in this paper, an adaptive DBSCAN is proposed which can work significantly well for identifying clusters with varying densities. Keywords--Data mining, Clustering algorithms, Adaptive DBSCAN, Spatial clustering, Density-based methods, Eps, MinPts, Core point, Border point, Eps-neighborhood, density connected.

Coordinating agents to complete a set of tasks with intercoupled temporal and resource constraints is computationally challenging, yet human domain experts can solve these difficult scheduling problems using paradigms learned through years of apprenticeship. A process for manually codifying this domain knowledge within a computational framework is necessary to scale beyond the "single-expert, single-trainee" apprenticeship model. However, human domain experts often have difficulty describing their decision-making processes. We propose a new approach for capturing this decision-making process through counterfactual reasoning in pairwise comparisons. Our approach is model-free and does not require iterating through the state space. We demonstrate that this approach accurately learns multifaceted heuristics on a synthetic and real world data sets. We also demonstrate that policies learned from human scheduling demonstration via apprenticeship learning can substantially improve the efficiency of schedule optimization. We employ this human-machine collaborative optimization technique on a variant of the weapon-to-target assignment problem. We demonstrate that this technique generates optimal solutions up to 9.5 times faster than a state-of-the-art optimization algorithm.