Data Mining with Rattle is a unique course that instructs with respect to both the concepts of data mining, as well as to the "hands-on" use of a popular, contemporary data mining software tool, "Data Miner," also known as the'Rattle' package in R software. Rattle is a popular GUI-based software tool which'fits on top of' R software. The course focuses on life-cycle issues, processes, and tasks related to supporting a'cradle-to-grave' data mining project. These include: data exploration and visualization; testing data for random variable family characteristics and distributional assumptions; transforming data by scale or by data type; performing cluster analyses; creating, analyzing and interpreting association rules; and creating and evaluating predictive models that may utilize: regression; generalized linear modeling (GLMs); decision trees; recursive partitioning; random forests; boosting; and/or support vector machine (SVM) paradigms. It is both a conceptual and a practical course as it teaches and instructs about data mining, and provides ample demonstrations of conducting data mining tasks using the Rattle R package. The course is ideal for undergraduate students seeking to master additional'in-demand' analytical job skills to offer a prospective employer.

Spurred by the enthusiasm surrounding the "Big Data" paradigm, the mathematical and algorithmic tools of online optimization have found widespread use in problems where the trade-off between data exploration and exploitation plays a predominant role. This trade-off is of particular importance to several branches and applications of signal processing, such as data mining, statistical inference, multimedia indexing and wireless communications (to name but a few). With this in mind, the aim of this tutorial paper is to provide a gentle introduction to online optimization and learning algorithms that are asymptotically optimal in hindsight - i.e., they approach the performance of a virtual algorithm with unlimited computational power and full knowledge of the future, a property known as no-regret. Particular attention is devoted to identifying the algorithms' theoretical performance guarantees and to establish links with classic optimization paradigms (both static and stochastic). To allow a better understanding of this toolbox, we provide several examples throughout the tutorial ranging from metric learning to wireless resource allocation problems.

We introduce our Distribution Regression Network (DRN) which performs regression from input probability distributions to output probability distributions. Compared to existing methods, DRN learns with fewer model parameters and easily extends to multiple input and multiple output distributions. On synthetic and real-world datasets, DRN performs similarly or better than the state-of-the-art. The field of regression analysis is largely established with methods ranging from linear least squares to multilayer perceptrons. However, the scope of the regression is mostly limited to real valued inputs and outputs (Fiori et al., 2015; Marquardt, 1963). In this paper, we perform distribution-to- distribution regression where one regresses from input probability distributions to output probability distributions. Distribution-to-distribution regression (see work by Oliva et al. (2013)) has not been as widely studied compared to the related task of functional regression (Ferraty & Vieu, 2006). Nevertheless, regression on distributions has many relevant applications. In the study of human populations, probability distributions capture the collective characteristics of the people.

Experimental determination of protein function is resource-consuming. As an alternative, computational prediction of protein function has received attention. In this context, protein structural classification (PSC) can help, by allowing for determining structural classes of currently unclassified proteins based on their features, and then relying on the fact that proteins with similar structures have similar functions. Existing PSC approaches rely on sequence-based or direct ("raw") 3-dimensional (3D) structure-based protein features. Instead, we first model 3D structures as protein structure networks (PSNs). Then, we use ("processed") network-based features for PSC. We are the first ones to do so. We propose the use of graphlets, state-of-the-art features in many domains of network science, in the task of PSC. Moreover, because graphlets can deal only with unweighted PSNs, and because accounting for edge weights when constructing PSNs could improve PSC accuracy, we also propose a deep learning framework that automatically learns network features from the weighted PSNs. When evaluated on a large set of 9,509 CATH and 11,451 SCOP protein domains, our proposed approaches are superior to existing PSC approaches in terms of both accuracy and running time.

We investigate the effect of explicitly enforcing the Lipschitz continuity of neural networks. Our main hypothesis is that constraining the Lipschitz constant of a networks will have a regularising effect. To this end, we provide a simple technique for computing the Lipschitz constant of a feed forward neural network composed of commonly used layer types. This technique is then utilised to formulate training a Lipschitz continuous neural network as a constrained optimisation problem, which can be easily solved using projected stochastic gradient methods. Our evaluation study shows that, in isolation, our method performs comparatively to state-of-the-art regularisation techniques. Moreover, when combined with existing approaches to regularising neural networks the performance gains are cumulative.

With the development of big data technology, Gradient Boosting Decision Tree, i.e. GBDT, becomes one of the most important machine learning algorithms for its accurate output. However, the training process of GBDT needs a lot of computational resources and time. In order to accelerate the training process of GBDT, the asynchronous parallel sampling gradient boosting decision tree, abbr. asynch-SGBDT is proposed in this paper. Via introducing sampling, we adapt the numerical optimization process of traditional GBDT training process into stochastic optimization process and use asynchronous parallel stochastic gradient descent to accelerate the GBDT training process. Meanwhile, the theoretical analysis of asynch-SGBDT is provided by us in this paper. Experimental results show that GBDT training process could be accelerated by asynch-SGBDT. Our asynchronous parallel strategy achieves an almost linear speedup, especially for high-dimensional sparse datasets.

Affinity propagation is one of the most effective algorithms for data clustering in high-dimensional feature space. However the numerous attempts to test its performance for community detection in real complex networks have been attaining results very far from the state of the art methods such as Infomap and Louvain. Yet, all these studies agreed that the crucial problem is to convert the network topology in a 'smart-enough' dissimilarity matrix that is able to properly address the message passing procedure behind affinity propagation clustering. Here we discuss how to leverage network latent geometry notions in order to design dissimilarity matrices for affinity propagation community detection. Our results demonstrate that the dissimilarity measures we designed bring affinity propagation to outperform current state of the art methods for community detection, not only on several original real networks, but also when their structure is corrupted by noise artificially induced by missing or spurious connectivity.

Parameter identification and comparison of dynamical systems is a challenging task in many fields. Bayesian approaches based on Gaussian process regression over time-series data have been successfully applied to infer the parameters of a dynamical system without explicitly solving it. While the benefits in computational cost are well established, a rigorous mathematical framework has been missing. We offer a novel interpretation which leads to a better understanding and improvements in state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy for nonlinear dynamical systems.

The web contains countless semi-structured websites, which can be a rich source of information for populating knowledge bases. Existing methods for extracting relations from the DOM trees of semi-structured webpages can achieve high precision and recall only when manual annotations for each website are available. Although there have been efforts to learn extractors from automatically-generated labels, these methods are not sufficiently robust to succeed in settings with complex schemas and information-rich websites. In this paper we present a new method for automatic extraction from semi-structured websites based on distant supervision. We automatically generate training labels by aligning an existing knowledge base with a web page and leveraging the unique structural characteristics of semi-structured websites. We then train a classifier based on the potentially noisy and incomplete labels to predict new relation instances. Our method can compete with annotation-based techniques in the literature in terms of extraction quality. A large-scale experiment on over 400,000 pages from dozens of multi-lingual long-tail websites harvested 1.25 million facts at a precision of 90%.

The Column Subset Selection Problem provides a natural framework for unsupervised feature selection. Despite being a hard combinatorial optimization problem, there exist efficient algorithms that provide good approximations. The drawback of the problem formulation is that it incorporates no form of regularization, and is therefore very sensitive to noise when presented with scarce data. In this paper we propose a regularized formulation of this problem, and derive a correct greedy algorithm that is similar in efficiency to existing greedy methods for the unregularized problem. We study its adequacy for feature selection and propose suitable formulations. Additionally, we derive a lower bound for the error of the proposed problems. Through various numerical experiments on real and synthetic data, we demonstrate the significantly increased robustness and stability of our method, as well as the improved conditioning of its output, all while remaining efficient for practical use.