A key problem in location-based modeling and forecasting lies in identifying suitable spatial and temporal resolutions. In particular, judicious spatial partitioning can play a significant role in enhancing the performance of location-based forecasting models. In this work, we investigate two widely used tessellation strategies for partitioning city space, in the context of real-time taxi demand forecasting. Our study compares (i) Geohash tessellation, and (ii) Voronoi tessellation, using two distinct taxi demand datasets, over multiple time scales. For the purpose of comparison, we employ classical time-series tools to model the spatio-temporal demand. Our study finds that the performance of each tessellation strategy is highly dependent on the city geography, spatial distribution of the data, and the time of the day, and that neither strategy is found to perform optimally across the forecast horizon. We propose a hybrid tessellation algorithm that picks the best tessellation strategy at each instant, based on their performance in the recent past. Our hybrid algorithm is a non-stationary variant of the well-known HEDGE algorithm for choosing the best advice from multiple experts. We show that the hybrid tessellation strategy performs consistently better than either of the two strategies across the data sets considered, at multiple time scales, and with different performance metrics. We achieve an average accuracy of above 80% per km^2 for both data sets considered at 60 minute aggregation levels.

The adoption of machine learning in high-stakes applicatio ns such as healthcare and law has lagged in part because predictions are not accomp anied by explanations comprehensible to the domain user, who often holds ult imate responsibility for decisions and outcomes. In this paper, we propose an appr oach to generate such explanations in which training data is augmented to inc lude, in addition to features and labels, explanations elicited from domain use rs. A joint model is then learned to produce both labels and explanations from the inp ut features. This simple idea ensures that explanations are tailored to the compl exity expectations and domain knowledge of the consumer. Evaluation spans multipl e modeling techniques on a simple game dataset, an image dataset, and a chemi cal odor dataset, showing that our approach is generalizable across domains a nd algorithms. Results demonstrate that meaningful explanations can be reli ably taught to machine learning algorithms, and in some cases, improve modeling ac curacy.

As an Applied Data Scientist at Civis, I implement the latest data science research to solve real-world problems. We recently worked with a global tool manufacturing company to reduce churn among their most loyal customers. A newly proposed tool, called SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanation) values, allowed us to build a complex time-series XGBoost model capable of making highly accurate predictions for which customers were at risk, while still allowing for an individual-level interpretation of the factors that made each of these customers more or less likely to churn. To understand why this is important, we need to take a closer look at the concepts of model accuracy and interpretability. Until recently, we always had to choose between an accurate model that was hard to interpret, or a simple model that was easy to explain but sacrificed some accuracy.

This course is for you If you are being fascinated by the field of Machine Learning? This course is designed to cover one of the most interesting areas of machine learning called classification. I will take you step-by-step in this course and will first cover the basics of MATLAB. Following that we will look into the details of how to use different machine learning algorithms using MATLAB. Specifically, we will be looking at the MATLAB toolbox called statistic and machine learning toolbox.We will implement some of the most commonly used classification algorithms such as K-Nearest Neighbor, Naive Bayes, Discriminant Analysis, Decision Tress, Support Vector Machines, Error Correcting Ouput Codes and Ensembles. Following that we will be looking at how to cross validate these models and how to evaluate their performances.

The reconstruction and analyzation of high energy particle physics data is just as important as the analyzation of the structure in real world networks. In a previous study it was explored how hierarchical clustering algorithms can be combined with kt cluster algorithms to provide a more generic clusterization method. Building on that, this paper explores the possibilities to involve deep learning in the process of cluster computation, by applying reinforcement learning techniques. The result is a model, that by learning on a modest dataset of 10; 000 nodes during 70 epochs can reach 83; 77% precision in predicting the appropriate clusters.

Technical analysis is used to discover investment opportunities. To test this hypothesis we propose an hybrid system using machine learning techniques together with genetic algorithms. Using technical analysis there are more ways to represent a currency exchange time series than the ones it is possible to test computationally, i.e., it is unfeasible to search the whole input feature space thus a genetic algorithm is an alternative. In this work, an architecture for automatic feature selection is proposed to optimize the cross validated performance estimation of a Naive Bayes model using a genetic algorithm. The proposed architecture improves the return on investment of the unoptimized system from 0,43% to 10,29% in the validation set. The features selected and the model decision boundary are visualized using the algorithm t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor embedding.

We consider the task of aligning two sets of points in high dimension, which has many applications in natural language processing and computer vision. As an example, it was recently shown that it is possible to infer a bilingual lexicon, without supervised data, by aligning word embeddings trained on monolingual data. These recent advances are based on adversarial training to learn the mapping between the two embeddings. In this paper, we propose to use an alternative formulation, based on the joint estimation of an orthogonal matrix and a permutation matrix. While this problem is not convex, we propose to initialize our optimization algorithm by using a convex relaxation, traditionally considered for the graph isomorphism problem. We propose a stochastic algorithm to minimize our cost function on large scale problems. Finally, we evaluate our method on the problem of unsupervised word translation, by aligning word embeddings trained on monolingual data.

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density function, explicit or not, as long as independent random samples can be generated via reparameterization. Not only does SIVI expand the variational family to incorporate highly flexible variational distributions, including implicit ones that have no analytic density functions, but also sandwiches the evidence lower bound (ELBO) between a lower bound and an upper bound, and further derives an asymptotically exact surrogate ELBO that is amenable to optimization via stochastic gradient ascent. With a substantially expanded variational family and a novel optimization algorithm, SIVI is shown to closely match the accuracy of MCMC in inferring the posterior in a variety of Bayesian inference tasks.

Phylogenetic tree inference using deep DNA sequencing is reshaping our understanding of rapidly evolving systems, such as the within-host battle between viruses and the immune system. Densely sampled phylogenetic trees can contain special features, including "sampled ancestors" in which we sequence a genotype along with its direct descendants, and "polytomies" in which multiple descendants arise simultaneously. These features are apparent after identifying zero-length branches in the tree. However, current maximum-likelihood based approaches are not capable of revealing such zero-length branches. In this paper, we find these zero-length branches by introducing adaptive-LASSO-type regularization estimators to phylogenetics, deriving their properties, and showing regularization to be a practically useful approach for phylogenetics.

We study the tradeoff between computational effort and accuracy in a cascade of deep neural networks. During inference, early termination in the cascade is controlled by confidence levels derived directly from the softmax outputs of intermediate classifiers. The advantage of early termination is that classification is performed using less computation, thus adjusting the computational effort to the complexity of the input. Moreover, dynamic modification of confidence thresholds allow one to trade accuracy for computational effort without requiring retraining. Basing of early termination on softmax classifier outputs is justified by experimentation that demonstrates an almost linear relation between confidence levels in intermediate classifiers and accuracy. Our experimentation with architectures based on ResNet obtained the following results.