We present a new model-based integrative method for clustering objects given both vectorial data, which describes the feature of each object, and network data, which indicates the similarity of connected objects. The proposed general model is able to cluster the two types of data simultaneously within one integrative probabilistic model, while traditional methods can only handle one data type or depend on transforming one data type to another. Bayesian inference of the clustering is conducted based on a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. A special case of the general model combining the Gaussian mixture model and the stochastic block model is extensively studied. We used both synthetic data and real data to evaluate this new method and compare it with alternative methods. The results show that our simultaneous clustering method performs much better. This improvement is due to the power of the model-based probabilistic approach for efficiently integrating information.

We propose a novel adaptive test of goodness-of-fit, with computational cost linear in the number of samples. We learn the test features that best indicate the differences between observed samples and a reference model, by minimizing the false negative rate. These features are constructed via Stein's method, meaning that it is not necessary to compute the normalising constant of the model. We analyse the asymptotic Bahadur efficiency of the new test, and prove that under a mean-shift alternative, our test always has greater relative efficiency than a previous linear-time kernel test, regardless of the choice of parameters for that test. In experiments, the performance of our method exceeds that of the earlier linear-time test, and matches or exceeds the power of a quadratic-time kernel test. In high dimensions and where model structure may be exploited, our goodness of fit test performs far better than a quadratic-time two-sample test based on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy, with samples drawn from the model.

In this work, we addressed the issue of applying a stochastic classifier and a local, fuzzy confusion matrix under the framework of multi-label classification. We proposed a novel solution to the problem of correcting label pairwise ensembles. The main step of the correction procedure is to compute classifier- specific competence and cross-competence measures, which estimates error pattern of the underlying classifier. We considered two improvements of the method of obtaining confusion matrices. The first one is aimed to deal with imbalanced labels. The other utilizes double labelled instances which are usually removed during the pairwise transformation. The proposed methods were evaluated using 29 benchmark datasets. In order to assess the efficiency of the introduced models, they were compared against 1 state-of-the-art approach and the correction scheme based on the original method of confusion matrix estimation. The comparison was performed using four different multi-label evaluation measures: macro and micro-averaged F1 loss, zero-one loss and Hamming loss. Additionally, we investigated relations between classification quality, which is expressed in terms of different quality criteria, and characteristics of multi-label datasets such as average imbalance ratio or label density. The experimental study reveals that the correction approaches significantly outperforms the reference method only in terms of zero-one loss.

We revisit the stochastic limited-memory BFGS (L-BFGS) algorithm. By proposing a new framework for the convergence analysis, we prove improved convergence rates and computational complexities of the stochastic L-BFGS algorithms compared to previous works. In addition, we propose several practical acceleration strategies to speed up the empirical performance of such algorithms. We also provide theoretical analyses for most of the strategies. Experiments on large-scale logistic and ridge regression problems demonstrate that our proposed strategies yield significant improvements vis-\`a-vis competing state-of-the-art algorithms.

These question can make you think THRICE! Machine learning and data science are being looked as the drivers of the next industrial revolution happening in the world today. This also means that there are numerous exciting startups looking for data scientists. What could be a better start for your aspiring career! However, still, getting into these roles is not easy. You obviously need to get excited about the idea, team and the vision of the company. You might also find some real difficult techincal questions on your way. The set of questions asked depend on what does the startup do. Do they build ML products? You should always find this out prior to beginning your interview preparation. To help you prepare for your next interview, I've prepared a list of 40 plausible & tricky questions which are likely to come across your way in interviews. If you can answer and understand these question, rest assured, you will give a tough fight in your job interview. Note: A key to answer these questions is to have concrete practical understanding on ML and related statistical concepts.

In recent machine learning posts, I've been concentrating on supervised learning algorithms such as Naive Bayes or SVM where you train a model with pre-classified data. This model is then used to predict outcomes on future data. In this post I will be looking at an Unsupervised algorithm called K-Means. K-Means is used to cluster data together useful in a number of situations such as grouping people together. I will be using Spark streaming to show how you can stream events in from a website, run them through a K-Means algorithm and also update the model on the fly.

DBSCAN is a different type of clustering algorithm with some unique advantages. As the name indicates, this method focuses more on the proximity and density of observations to form clusters. This is very different from KMeans, where an observation becomes a part of cluster represented by nearest centroid. DBSCAN clustering can identify outliers, observations which won't belong to any cluster. Since DBSCAN clustering identifies the number of clusters as well, it is very useful with unsupervised learning of the data when we don't know how many clusters could be there in the data.

Tree boosting has empirically proven to be efficient for predictive mining for both classification and regression. For many years, MART (multiple additive regression trees) has been the tree boosting method of choice. But a starting from 2015, a first to try, always winning algorithm surged to the surface: XGBoost. This algorithm re-implements the tree boosting and gained popularity by winning Kaggle and other data science competition. The paper introduce in first place the supervised learning task and discuss the model selection techniques.

We establish novel generalization bounds for learning algorithms that converge to global minima. We do so by deriving black-box stability results that only depend on the convergence of a learning algorithm and the geometry around the minimizers of the loss function. The results are shown for nonconvex loss functions satisfying the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (PL) and the quadratic growth (QG) conditions. We further show that these conditions arise for some neural networks with linear activations. We use our black-box results to establish the stability of optimization algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD), gradient descent (GD), randomized coordinate descent (RCD), and the stochastic variance reduced gradient method (SVRG), in both the PL and the strongly convex setting. Our results match or improve state-of-the-art generalization bounds and can easily be extended to similar optimization algorithms. Finally, we show that although our results imply comparable stability for SGD and GD in the PL setting, there exist simple neural networks with multiple local minima where SGD is stable but GD is not.

Visual exploration of high-dimensional real-valued datasets is a fundamental task in exploratory data analysis (EDA). Existing methods use predefined criteria to choose the representation of data. There is a lack of methods that (i) elicit from the user what she has learned from the data and (ii) show patterns that she does not know yet. We construct a theoretical model where identified patterns can be input as knowledge to the system. The knowledge syntax here is intuitive, such as "this set of points forms a cluster", and requires no knowledge of maths. This background knowledge is used to find a Maximum Entropy distribution of the data, after which the system provides the user data projections in which the data and the Maximum Entropy distribution differ the most, hence showing the user aspects of the data that are maximally informative given the user's current knowledge. We provide an open source EDA system with tailored interactive visualizations to demonstrate these concepts. We study the performance of the system and present use cases on both synthetic and real data. We find that the model and the prototype system allow the user to learn information efficiently from various data sources and the system works sufficiently fast in practice. We conclude that the information theoretic approach to exploratory data analysis where patterns observed by a user are formalized as constraints provides a principled, intuitive, and efficient basis for constructing an EDA system.