Determining mortality risk is important for critical decisions in Intensive Care Units (ICU). The need for machine learning models that provide accurate patient-specific prediction of mortality is well recognized. We present a new algorithm for ICU mortality prediction that is designed to address the problem of imbalance, which occurs, in the context of binary classification, when one of the two classes is significantly under--represented in the data. We take a fundamentally new approach in exploiting the class imbalance through a feature transformation such that the transformed features are easier to classify. Hypothesis testing is used for classification with a test statistic that follows the distribution of the difference of two chi-squared random variables, for which there are no analytic expressions and we derive an accurate approximation. Experiments on a benchmark dataset of 4000 ICU patients show that our algorithm surpasses the best competing methods for mortality prediction.

Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) is a classic technique that seeks vectorial representations for data points, given the pairwise distances between them. In recent years, data are usually collected from diverse sources or have multiple heterogeneous representations. However, how to do multidimensional scaling on multiple input distance matrices is still unsolved to our best knowledge. In this paper, we first define this new task formally. Then, we propose a new algorithm called Multi-View Multidimensional Scaling (MVMDS) by considering each input distance matrix as one view. The proposed algorithm can learn the weights of views (i.e., distance matrices) automatically by exploring the consensus information and complementary nature of views. Experimental results on synthetic as well as real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MVMDS. We hope that our work encourages a wider consideration in many domains where MDS is needed.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of emotion tagging of multimedia data by modeling the dependencies among multiple emotions in both the feature and label spaces. These dependencies, which carry crucial top-down and bottom-up evidence for improving multimedia affective content analysis, have not been thoroughly exploited yet. To this end, we propose two hierarchical models that independently and dependently learn the shared features and global semantic relationships among emotion labels to jointly tag multiple emotion labels of multimedia data. Efficient learning and inference algorithms of the proposed models are also developed. Experiments on three benchmark emotion databases demonstrate the superior performance of our methods to existing methods.

One of the key advantages of visual analytics is its capability to leverage both humans's visual perception and the power of computing. A big obstacle in integrating machine learning with visual analytics is its high computing cost. To tackle this problem, this paper presents PIVE (Per-Iteration Visualization Environment) that supports real-time interactive visualization with machine learning. By immediately visualizing the intermediate results from algorithm iterations, PIVE enables users to quickly grasp insights and interact with the intermediate output, which then affects subsequent algorithm iterations. In addition, we propose a widely-applicable interaction methodology that allows efficient incorporation of user feedback into virtually any iterative computational method without introducing additional computational cost. We demonstrate the application of PIVE for various dimension reduction algorithms such as multidimensional scaling and t-SNE and clustering and topic modeling algorithms such as k-means and latent Dirichlet allocation.

Inferring the latent emotive content of a narrative requires consideration of para-linguistic cues (e.g. pitch), linguistic content (e.g. vocabulary) and the physiological state of the narrator (e.g. heart-rate). In this study we utilized a combination of auditory, text, and physiological signals to predict the mood (happy or sad) of 31 narrations from subjects engaged in personal story-telling. We extracted 386 audio and 222 physiological features (using the Samsung Simband) from the data. A subset of 4 audio, 1 text, and 5 physiologic features were identified using Sequential Forward Selection (SFS) for inclusion in a Neural Network (NN). These features included subject movement, cardiovascular activity, energy in speech, probability of voicing, and linguistic sentiment (i.e. negative or positive). We explored the effects of introducing our selected features at various layers of the NN and found that the location of these features in the network topology had a significant impact on model performance. To ensure the real-time utility of the model, classification was performed over 5 second intervals. We evaluated our model’s performance using leave-one-subject-out crossvalidation and compared the performance to 20 baseline models and a NN with all features included in the input layer.

Although distance metric learning has been successfully applied to many real-world applications, learning a distance metric from large-scale and high-dimensional data remains a challenging problem. Due to the PSD constraint, the computational complexity of previous algorithms per iteration is at least O ( d 2 ) where d is the dimensionality of the data.In this paper, we develop an efficient stochastic algorithm  for a class of distance metric learning problems with nuclear norm regularization, referred to as low-rank DML. By utilizing the low-rank structure of the intermediate solutions and stochastic gradients, the complexity of our algorithm has a linear dependence on the dimensionality d . The key idea is to maintain all the iterates  in factorized representations  and construct  stochastic gradients that are low-rank. In this way, the projection onto the PSD cone can be implemented efficiently by incremental SVD. Experimental results on several data sets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.

Nowadays, asynchronous parallel algorithms have received much attention in the optimization field due to the crucial demands for modern large-scale optimization problems. However, most asynchronous algorithms focus on convex problems. Analysis on nonconvex problems is lacking. For the Asynchronous Stochastic Descent (ASGD) algorithm, the best result from (Lian et al., 2015) can only achieve an asymptotic O(\frac{1}{\epsilon^2}) rate (convergence to the stationary points) on nonconvex problems. In this paper, we study Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG) in the asynchronous setting. We propose the Asynchronous Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (ASVRG) algorithm for nonconvex finite-sum problems. We develop two schemes for ASVRG, depending on whether the parameters are updated as an atom or not. We prove that both of the two schemes can achieve linear speed up (a non-asymptotic O(\frac{n^\frac{2}{3}}{\epsilon}) rate to the stationary points) for nonconvex problems when the delay parameter \tau\leq n^{\frac{1}{3}}, where n is the number of training samples. We also establish a non-asymptotic O(\frac{n^\frac{2}{3}\tau^\frac{1}{3}}{\epsilon}) rate (convergence to the stationary points) for our algorithm without assumptions on \tau. This further demonstrates that even with asynchronous updating, SVRG has less number of Incremental First-order Oracles (IFOs) compared with Stochastic Gradient Descent and Gradient Descent. We also experiment on a shared memory multi-core system to demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm.

A well-known problem in combinatorial auctions (CAs) is that the value space grows exponentially in the number of goods, which often puts a large burden on the bidders and on the auctioneer. In this paper, we introduce a new design paradigm for CAs based on machine learning (ML). Bidders report their values (bids) to a proxy agent by answering a small number of value queries. The proxy agent then uses an ML algorithm to generalize from those bids to the whole value space, and the efficient allocation is computed based on the generalized valuations. We introduce the concept of "probably approximate efficiency (PAE)" to measure the efficiency of the new ML-based auctions, and we formally show how the generelizability of an ML algorithm relates to the efficiency loss incurred by the corresponding ML-based auction. To instantiate our paradigm, we use support vector regression (SVR) as our ML algorithm, which enables us to keep the winner determination problem of the CA tractable. Different parameters of the SVR algorithm allow us to trade off the expressiveness, economic efficiency, and computational efficiency of the CA. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally that, even with a small number of bids, our ML-based auctions are highly efficient with high probability.

Matrix factorization is a popular approach to solving matrix estimation problems based on partial observations. Existing matrix factorization is based on least squares and aims to yield a low-rank matrix to interpret the conditional sample means given the observations. However, in many real applications with skewed and extreme data, least squares cannot explain their central tendency or tail distributions, yielding undesired estimates. In this paper, we propose expectile matrix factorization by introducing asymmetric least squares, a key concept in expectile regression analysis, into the matrix factorization framework. We propose an efficient algorithm to solve the new problem based on alternating minimization and quadratic programming. We prove that our algorithm converges to a global optimum and exactly recovers the true underlying low-rank matrices when noise is zero. For synthetic data with skewed noise and a real-world dataset containing web service response times, the proposed scheme achieves lower recovery errors than the existing matrix factorization method based on least squares in a wide range of settings.

Data classification and tag recommendation are both important and challenging tasks in social media. These two tasks are often considered independently and most efforts have been made to tackle them separately. However, labels in data classification and tags in tag recommendation are inherently related. For example, a Youtube video annotated with NCAA, stadium, pac12 is likely to be labeled as football, while a video/image with the class label of coast is likely to be tagged with beach, sea, water and sand. The existence of relations between labels and tags motivates us to jointly perform classification and tag recommendation for social media data in this paper. In particular, we provide a principled way to capture the relations between labels and tags, and propose a novel framework CLARE, which fuses data CLAssification and tag REcommendation into a coherent model. With experiments on three social media datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed framework CLARE achieves superior performance on both tasks compared to the state-of-the-art methods.