Statistical Learning
Spectral Graph Convolutions for Population-based Disease Prediction
Parisot, Sarah, Ktena, Sofia Ira, Ferrante, Enzo, Lee, Matthew, Moreno, Ricardo Guerrerro, Glocker, Ben, Rueckert, Daniel
Exploiting the wealth of imaging and non-imaging information for disease prediction tasks requires models capable of representing, at the same time, individual features as well as data associations between subjects from potentially large populations. Graphs provide a natural framework for such tasks, yet previous graph-based approaches focus on pairwise similarities without modelling the subjects' individual characteristics and features. On the other hand, relying solely on subject-specific imaging feature vectors fails to model the interaction and similarity between subjects, which can reduce performance. In this paper, we introduce the novel concept of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) for brain analysis in populations, combining imaging and non-imaging data. We represent populations as a sparse graph where its vertices are associated with image-based feature vectors and the edges encode phenotypic information. This structure was used to train a GCN model on partially labelled graphs, aiming to infer the classes of unlabelled nodes from the node features and pairwise associations between subjects. We demonstrate the potential of the method on the challenging ADNI and ABIDE databases, as a proof of concept of the benefit from integrating contextual information in classification tasks. This has a clear impact on the quality of the predictions, leading to 69.5% accuracy for ABIDE (outperforming the current state of the art of 66.8%) and 77% for ADNI for prediction of MCI conversion, significantly outperforming standard linear classifiers where only individual features are considered.
The Machine Learning Algorithms Used in Self-Driving Cars
Today, the machine learning algorithms are extensively used to find the solutions to various challenges arising in manufacturing self-driving cars. With the incorporation of sensor data processing in an ECU (Electronic Control Unit) in a car, it is essential to enhance the utilization of machine learning to accomplish new tasks. The potential applications include evaluation of driver condition or driving scenario classification through data fusion from different external and internal sensors – like lidar, radars, cameras or the IoT (Internet of Things). The applications that run the infotainment system of a car can receive the information from sensor data fusion systems and for example, have the capability to direct the car to a hospital if it notices that something is not right with the driver. This application based on machine learning also includes the driver's speech and gesture recognition and language translation.
Using ANNs on small data – Deep Learning vs. Xgboost
Andrew Beam does a great job showing that small datasets are not off limits for current neural net methods. If you use the regularisation methods at hand – ANNs is entirely possible to use instead of classic methods. Let's see how this holds up on up on some benchmark datasets. Let's start with the iris dataset that you nicely can pull with the pandas read_csv function right of the internets. We create a feature matrix X and a target y from the Pandas dataframe.
Learn the Concept of linearity in Regression Models
This Tutorial talks about basics of Linear regression by discussing in depth about the concept of Linearity and Which type of linearity is desirable. Linear regression however always means linearity in parameters, irrespective of linearity in explanatory variables. Here the variable X can be non linear i.e X or X² and still we can consider this as a linear regression. However if our parameters are not linear i.e say the regression equation is A function Y f(x) is said to be linear in X if X appears with a power or index of 1 only. Y is linearly related to X if the rate of change of Y with respect to X (dY/dX) is independent of the value of X.
Dual Iterative Hard Thresholding: From Non-convex Sparse Minimization to Non-smooth Concave Maximization
Liu, Bo, Yuan, Xiao-Tong, Wang, Lezi, Liu, Qingshan, Metaxas, Dimitris N.
Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT) is a class of projected gradient descent methods for optimizing sparsity-constrained minimization models, with the best known efficiency and scalability in practice. As far as we know, the existing IHT-style methods are designed for sparse minimization in primal form. It remains open to explore duality theory and algorithms in such a non-convex and NP-hard problem setting. In this paper, we bridge this gap by establishing a duality theory for sparsity-constrained minimization with $\ell_2$-regularized loss function and proposing an IHT-style algorithm for dual maximization. Our sparse duality theory provides a set of sufficient and necessary conditions under which the original NP-hard/non-convex problem can be equivalently solved in a dual formulation. The proposed dual IHT algorithm is a super-gradient method for maximizing the non-smooth dual objective. An interesting finding is that the sparse recovery performance of dual IHT is invariant to the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP), which is required by virtually all the existing primal IHT algorithms without sparsity relaxation. Moreover, a stochastic variant of dual IHT is proposed for large-scale stochastic optimization. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of dual IHT algorithms to the state-of-the-art primal IHT-style algorithms in model estimation accuracy and computational efficiency.
Interpretable Predictions of Tree-based Ensembles via Actionable Feature Tweaking
Tolomei, Gabriele, Silvestri, Fabrizio, Haines, Andrew, Lalmas, Mounia
Machine-learned models are often described as "black boxes". In many real-world applications however, models may have to sacrifice predictive power in favour of human-interpretability. When this is the case, feature engineering becomes a crucial task, which requires significant and time-consuming human effort. Whilst some features are inherently static, representing properties that cannot be influenced (e.g., the age of an individual), others capture characteristics that could be adjusted (e.g., the daily amount of carbohydrates taken). Nonetheless, once a model is learned from the data, each prediction it makes on new instances is irreversible - assuming every instance to be a static point located in the chosen feature space. There are many circumstances however where it is important to understand (i) why a model outputs a certain prediction on a given instance, (ii) which adjustable features of that instance should be modified, and finally (iii) how to alter such a prediction when the mutated instance is input back to the model. In this paper, we present a technique that exploits the internals of a tree-based ensemble classifier to offer recommendations for transforming true negative instances into positively predicted ones. We demonstrate the validity of our approach using an online advertising application. First, we design a Random Forest classifier that effectively separates between two types of ads: low (negative) and high (positive) quality ads (instances). Then, we introduce an algorithm that provides recommendations that aim to transform a low quality ad (negative instance) into a high quality one (positive instance). Finally, we evaluate our approach on a subset of the active inventory of a large ad network, Yahoo Gemini.
Statistical Mechanics of Node-perturbation Learning with Noisy Baseline
Hara, Kazuyuki, Katahira, Kentaro, Okada, Masato
Node-perturbation learning is a type of statistical gradient descent algorithm that can be applied to problems where the objective function is not explicitly formulated, including reinforcement learning. It estimates the gradient of an objective function by using the change in the object function in response to the perturbation. The value of the objective function for an unperturbed output is called a baseline. Cho et al. proposed node-perturbation learning with a noisy baseline. In this paper, we report on building the statistical mechanics of Cho's model and on deriving coupled differential equations of order parameters that depict learning dynamics. We also show how to derive the generalization error by solving the differential equations of order parameters. On the basis of the results, we show that Cho's results are also apply in general cases and show some general performances of Cho's model.
Most Ligand-Based Benchmarks Measure Overfitting Rather than Accuracy
Wallach, Izhar, Heifets, Abraham
Undetected overfitting can occur when there are significant redundancies between training and validation data. We describe AVE, a new measure of training-validation redundancy for ligand-based classification problems that accounts for the similarity amongst inactive molecules as well as active. We investigated nine widely-used benchmarks for virtual screening and QSAR, and show that the amount of AVE bias strongly correlates with the performance of ligand-based predictive methods irrespective of the predicted property, chemical fingerprint, similarity measure, or previously-applied unbiasing techniques. Therefore, it is likely that the previously-reported performance of most ligand-based methods can be explained by overfitting to benchmarks rather than good prospective accuracy.
A Unified Approach to Adaptive Regularization in Online and Stochastic Optimization
Gupta, Vineet, Koren, Tomer, Singer, Yoram
We describe a framework for deriving and analyzing online optimization algorithms that incorporate adaptive, data-dependent regularization, also termed preconditioning. Such algorithms have been proven useful in stochastic optimization by reshaping the gradients according to the geometry of the data. Our framework captures and unifies much of the existing literature on adaptive online methods, including the AdaGrad and Online Newton Step algorithms as well as their diagonal versions. As a result, we obtain new convergence proofs for these algorithms that are substantially simpler than previous analyses. Our framework also exposes the rationale for the different preconditioned updates used in common stochastic optimization methods.