The intended audience for this short blog post are data science practitioners who seek to implement predictive algorithms in a business-project-based setting, with special focus on presenting the work process flow. We will briefly introduce the k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) algorithm, and put more emphasis on the key phases, as opposed to walking through the technical theory behind the algorithm and its prediction performance. The example business project here is a typical sales forecasting problem where we want to accurately predict the quantity sold of a number of products in the future, in order to manage our inventory more wisely. The k-NN algorithm is probably better known for its classifier application, where we use a number of nearby points to determine the outcome of our target. The rationale is straight-forward; if we use height and age as our input, and gender as our target, then it makes sense to say that if a person is at age 25 and 6 feet tall, he is more likely to be male, because 5 other people who are at around the same age and with similar height happen to be male. However, k-NN could also be applied in a non-supervised setting, where we find the similar data points instead.

Extracting information about entities remains an important research area. This paper addresses the problem of corpus-level entity typing, i.e., inferring from a large corpus that an entity is a member of a class, such as "food" or "artist". The application of entity typing we are interested in is knowledge base completion, specifically, to learn which classes an entity is a member of. We propose FIGMENT to tackle this problem. FIGMENT is embedding-based and combines (i) a global model that computes scores based on global information of an entity and (ii) a context model that first evaluates the individual occurrences of an entity and then aggregates the scores. Each of the two proposed models has specific properties. For the global model, learning high-quality entity representations is crucial because it is the only source used for the predictions. Therefore, we introduce representations using the name and contexts of entities on the three levels of entity, word, and character. We show that each level provides complementary information and a multi-level representation performs best. For the context model, we need to use distant supervision since there are no context-level labels available for entities. Distantly supervised labels are noisy and this harms the performance of models. Therefore, we introduce and apply new algorithms for noise mitigation using multi-instance learning. We show the effectiveness of our models on a large entity typing dataset built from Freebase.

Ensembles are popular methods for solving practical supervised learning problems. They reduce the risk of having underperforming models in production-grade software. Although critical, methods for learning heterogeneous regression ensembles have not been proposed at large scale, whereas in classical ML literature, stacking, cascading and voting are mostly restricted to classification problems. Regression poses distinct learning challenges that may result in poor performance, even when using well established homogeneous ensemble schemas such as bagging or boosting. In this paper, we introduce MetaBags, a novel, practically useful stacking framework for regression. MetaBags is a meta-learning algorithm that learns a set of meta-decision trees designed to select one base model (i.e. expert) for each query, and focuses on inductive bias reduction. A set of meta-decision trees are learned using different types of meta-features, specially created for this purpose - to then be bagged at meta-level. This procedure is designed to learn a model with a fair bias-variance trade-off, and its improvement over base model performance is correlated with the prediction diversity of different experts on specific input space subregions. The proposed method and meta-features are designed in such a way that they enable good predictive performance even in subregions of space which are not adequately represented in the available training data. An exhaustive empirical testing of the method was performed, evaluating both generalization error and scalability of the approach on synthetic, open and real-world application datasets. The obtained results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Recent studies utilize multiple kernel learning to deal with incomplete-data problem. In this study, we introduce new methods that do not only complete multiple incomplete kernel matrices simultaneously, but also allow control of the flexibility of the model by parameterizing the model matrix. By imposing restrictions on the model covariance, overfitting of the data is avoided. A limitation of kernel matrix estimations done via optimization of an objective function is that the positive definiteness of the result is not guaranteed. In view of this limitation, our proposed methods employ the LogDet divergence, which ensures the positive definiteness of the resulting inferred kernel matrix. We empirically show that our proposed restricted covariance models, employed with LogDet divergence, yield significant improvements in the generalization performance of previous completion methods.

With the increasing demand for large amount of labeled data, crowdsourcing has been used in many large-scale data mining applications. However, most existing works in crowdsourcing mainly focus on label inference and incentive design. In this paper, we address a different problem of adaptive crowd teaching, which is a sub-area of machine teaching in the context of crowdsourcing. Compared with machines, human beings are extremely good at learning a specific target concept (e.g., classifying the images into given categories) and they can also easily transfer the learned concepts into similar learning tasks. Therefore, a more effective way of utilizing crowdsourcing is by supervising the crowd to label in the form of teaching. In order to perform the teaching and expertise estimation simultaneously, we propose an adaptive teaching framework named JEDI to construct the personalized optimal teaching set for the crowdsourcing workers. In JEDI teaching, the teacher assumes that each learner has an exponentially decayed memory. Furthermore, it ensures comprehensiveness in the learning process by carefully balancing teaching diversity and learner's accurate learning in terms of teaching usefulness.

An ensemble technique is characterized by the mechanism that generates the components and by the mechanism that combines them. A common way to achieve the consensus is to enable each component to equally participate in the aggregation process. A problem with this approach is that poor components are likely to negatively affect the quality of the consensus result. To address this issue, alternatives have been explored in the literature to build selective classifier and cluster ensembles, where only a subset of the components contributes to the computation of the consensus. Of the family of ensemble methods, outlier ensembles are the least studied. Only recently, the selection problem for outlier ensembles has been discussed. In this work we define a new graph-based class of ranking selection methods. A method in this class is characterized by two main steps: (1) Mapping the rankings onto a graph structure; and (2) Mining the resulting graph to identify a subset of rankings. We define a specific instance of the graph-based ranking selection class. Specifically, we map the problem of selecting ensemble components onto a mining problem in a graph. An extensive evaluation was conducted on a variety of heterogeneous data and methods. Our empirical results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art selective outlier ensemble techniques.

There has been growing interest in extending traditional vector-based machine learning techniques to their tensor forms. An example is the support tensor machine (STM) that utilizes a rank-one tensor to capture the data structure, thereby alleviating the overfitting and curse of dimensionality problems in the conventional support vector machine (SVM). However, the expressive power of a rank-one tensor is restrictive for many real-world data. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a support tensor train machine (STTM) by replacing the rank-one tensor in an STM with a tensor train. Experiments validate and confirm the superiority of an STTM over the SVM and STM. 1 Introduction Classification algorithm design has been a popular topic in machine learning, pattern recognition and computer vision for decades. One of the most representative and successful classification algorithms is the support vector machines (SVM) [ V apnik, 2013], which achieves an enormous success in pattern classification by minimizing the V apnik-Chervonenkis dimensions and structural risk. However, a standard SVM model is based on vector inputs and cannot directly deal with matrices or higher dimensional data structures, namely, tensors, which are very common in real-life applications.

Big data analytics is gaining massive momentum in the last few years. Applying machine learning models to big data has become an implicit requirement or an expectation for most analysis tasks, especially on high-stakes applications.Typical applications include sentiment analysis against reviews for analyzing on-line products, image classification in food logging applications for monitoring user's daily intake and stock movement prediction. Extending traditional database systems to support the above analysis is intriguing but challenging. First, it is almost impossible to implement all machine learning models in the database engines. Second, expertise knowledge is required to optimize the training and inference procedures in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, which imposes heavy burden on the system users. In this paper, we develop and present a system, called Rafiki, to provide the training and inference service of machine learning models, and facilitate complex analytics on top of cloud platforms. Rafiki provides distributed hyper-parameter tuning for the training service, and online ensemble modeling for the inference service which trades off between latency and accuracy. Experimental results confirm the efficiency, effectiveness, scalability and usability of Rafiki.

Adding attributes for nodes to network embedding helps to improve the ability of the learned joint representation to depict features from topology and attributes simultaneously. Recent research on the joint embedding has exhibited a promising performance on a variety of tasks by jointly embedding the two spaces. However, due to the indispensable requirement of globality based information, present approaches contain a flaw of in-scalability. Here we propose \emph{SANE}, a scalable attribute-aware network embedding algorithm with locality, to learn the joint representation from topology and attributes. By enforcing the alignment of a local linear relationship between each node and its K-nearest neighbors in topology and attribute space, the joint embedding representations are more informative comparing with a single representation from topology or attributes alone. And we argue that the locality in \emph{SANE} is the key to learning the joint representation at scale. By using several real-world networks from diverse domains, We demonstrate the efficacy of \emph{SANE} in performance and scalability aspect. Overall, for performance on label classification, SANE successfully reaches up to the highest F1-score on most datasets, and even closer to the baseline method that needs label information as extra inputs, compared with other state-of-the-art joint representation algorithms. What's more, \emph{SANE} has an up to 71.4\% performance gain compared with the single topology-based algorithm. For scalability, we have demonstrated the linearly time complexity of \emph{SANE}. In addition, we intuitively observe that when the network size scales to 100,000 nodes, the "learning joint embedding" step of \emph{SANE} only takes $\approx10$ seconds.

In many sequential decision making tasks, it is challenging to design reward functions that help an RL agent efficiently learn behavior that is considered good by the agent designer. A number of different formulations of the reward-design problem, or close variants thereof, have been proposed in the literature. In this paper we build on the Optimal Rewards Framework of Singh et.al. that defines the optimal intrinsic reward function as one that when used by an RL agent achieves behavior that optimizes the task-specifying or extrinsic reward function. Previous work in this framework has shown how good intrinsic reward functions can be learned for lookahead search based planning agents. Whether it is possible to learn intrinsic reward functions for learning agents remains an open problem. In this paper we derive a novel algorithm for learning intrinsic rewards for policy-gradient based learning agents. We compare the performance of an augmented agent that uses our algorithm to provide additive intrinsic rewards to an A2C-based policy learner (for Atari games) and a PPO-based policy learner (for Mujoco domains) with a baseline agent that uses the same policy learners but with only extrinsic rewards. Our results show improved performance on most but not all of the domains.