In this report, an automated bartender system was developed for making orders in a bar using hand gestures. The gesture recognition of the system was developed using Machine Learning techniques, where the model was trained to classify gestures using collected data. The final model used in the system reached an average accuracy of 95%. The system raised ethical concerns both in terms of user interaction and having such a system in a real world scenario, but it could initially work as a complement to a real bartender.

Multiresolution analysis and matrix factorization are foundational tools in computer vision. In this work, we study the interface between these two distinct topics and obtain techniques to uncover hierarchical block structure in symmetric matrices -- an important aspect in the success of many vision problems. Our new algorithm, the incremental multiresolution matrix factorization, uncovers such structure one feature at a time, and hence scales well to large matrices. We describe how this multiscale analysis goes much farther than what a direct global factorization of the data can identify. We evaluate the efficacy of the resulting factorizations for relative leveraging within regression tasks using medical imaging data. We also use the factorization on representations learned by popular deep networks, providing evidence of their ability to infer semantic relationships even when they are not explicitly trained to do so. We show that this algorithm can be used as an exploratory tool to improve the network architecture, and within numerous other settings in vision.

Sales forecasting plays a prominent role in business planning and business strategy. The value and importance of advance information is a cornerstone of planning activity, and a well-set forecast goal can guide sale-force more efficiently. In this paper CPU sales forecasting of Intel Corporation, a multinational semiconductor industry, was considered. Past sale, future booking, exchange rates, Gross domestic product (GDP) forecasting, seasonality and other indicators were innovatively incorporated into the quantitative modeling. Benefit from the recent advances in computation power and software development, millions of models built upon multiple regressions, time series analysis, random forest and boosting tree were executed in parallel. The models with smaller validation errors were selected to form the ensemble model. To better capture the distinct characteristics, forecasting models were implemented at lead time and lines of business level. The moving windows validation process automatically selected the models which closely represent current market condition. The weekly cadence forecasting schema allowed the model to response effectively to market fluctuation. Generic variable importance analysis was also developed to increase the model interpretability. Rather than assuming fixed distribution, this non-parametric permutation variable importance analysis provided a general framework across methods to evaluate the variable importance. This variable importance framework can further extend to classification problem by modifying the mean absolute percentage error(MAPE) into misclassify error. Please find the demo code at : https://github.com/qx0731/ensemble_forecast_methods

We describe a new method called t-ETE for finding a low-dimensional embedding of a set of objects in Euclidean space. We formulate the embedding problem as a joint ranking problem over a set of triplets, where each triplet captures the relative similarities between three objects in the set. By exploiting recent advances in robust ranking, t-ETE produces high-quality embeddings even in the presence of a significant amount of noise and better preserves local scale than known methods, such as t-STE and t-SNE. In particular, our method produces significantly better results than t-SNE on signature datasets while also being faster to compute.

It is a key to construct a similarity graph in graph-oriented subspace learning and clustering. In a similarity graph, each vertex denotes a data point and the edge weight represents the similarity between two points. There are two popular schemes to construct a similarity graph, i.e., pairwise distance based scheme and linear representation based scheme. Most existing works have only involved one of the above schemes and suffered from some limitations. Specifically, pairwise distance based methods are sensitive to the noises and outliers compared with linear representation based methods. On the other hand, there is the possibility that linear representation based algorithms wrongly select inter-subspaces points to represent a point, which will degrade the performance. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, called Locally Linear Representation (LLR), which integrates pairwise distance with linear representation together to address the problems. The proposed algorithm can automatically encode each data point over a set of points that not only could denote the objective point with less residual error, but also are close to the point in Euclidean space. The experimental results show that our approach is promising in subspace learning and subspace clustering.

There is intense interest in applying machine learning to problems of causal inference in fields such as healthcare, economics and education. In particular, individual-level causal inference has important applications such as precision medicine. We give a new theoretical analysis and family of algorithms for predicting individual treatment effect (ITE) from observational data, under the assumption known as strong ignorability. The algorithms learn a "balanced" representation such that the induced treated and control distributions look similar. We give a novel, simple and intuitive generalization-error bound showing that the expected ITE estimation error of a representation is bounded by a sum of the standard generalization-error of that representation and the distance between the treated and control distributions induced by the representation. We use Integral Probability Metrics to measure distances between distributions, deriving explicit bounds for the Wasserstein and Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) distances. Experiments on real and simulated data show the new algorithms match or outperform the state-of-the-art.

Machine learning is a very hot topic for many key reasons, and because it provides the ability to automatically obtain deep insights, recognize unknown patterns, and create high performing predictive models from data, all without requiring explicit programming instructions. This is a summary (with links) to an article series that's intended to be a comprehensive, in-depth guide to machine learning, and should be useful to everyone from business executives to machine learning practitioners. It covers virtually all aspects of machine learning (and many related fields) at a high level, and should serve as a sufficient introduction or reference to the terminology, concepts, tools, considerations, and techniques in the field. The first chapter of the series starts with both a formal and informal definition of machine learning. This is followed by a discussion of the machine learning process end-to-end, the different types of machine learning, potential goals and outputs, and a categorized overview of the most widely used machine learning algorithms.

The E-learning course starts by refreshing the basic concepts of the analytics process model: data preprocessing, analytics and post processing. We then discuss decision trees and ensemble methods (bagging, boosting, random forests), neural networks, support vector machines (SVMs), Bayesian networks, survival analysis, social networks, monitoring and backtesting analytical models. Throughout the course, we extensively refer to our industry and research experience. The E-learning course consists of more than 20 hours of movies, each 5 minutes on average. Quizzes are included to facilitate the understanding of the material.

Most of the data science use cases are relatively well established by now: a goal is defined, a target class is selected, a model is trained to recognize/predict the target, and the same model is applied to new never-seen-before productive data. An anomaly is an event that is not part of the system's past; an event that cannot be found in the system's historical data. In the case of network data, an anomaly can be an intrusion, in medicine a sudden pathological status, in sales or credit card businesses a fraudulent payment, and, finally, in machinery a mechanical piece breakdown. In the manufacturing industry, the goal is to keep a mechanical pieceworking as long as possible–mechanical pieces are expensive – and at the same time to predict its breaking point before it actually occurs–a machine breakoften triggers a chain reaction of expensive damages. Therefore, a high value is usually associated with the early discovery, warning, prediction, and/or prevention of anomalies.Specifically, the prediction of "unknown" disruptive events in the field of mechanical maintenance takes the name of "anomaly detection".

Unlike evaluating the accuracy of models that predict a continuous or discrete dependent variable like Linear Regression models, evaluating the accuracy of a classification model could be more complex and time-consuming. Before measuring the accuracy of classification models, an analyst would first measure its robustness with the help of metrics such as AIC-BIC, AUC-ROC, AUC- PR, Kolmogorov-Smirnov chart, etc. The next logical step is to measure its accuracy. To understand the complexity behind measuring the accuracy, we need to know few basic concepts. E.g. – A classification model like Logistic Regression will output a probability number between 0 and 1 instead of the desired output of actual target variable like Yes/No, etc.