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 Statistical Learning


Time Series Analysis: A Primer

#artificialintelligence

Many data sets are cross-sectional and represent a single slice of time. However, we also have data collected over many periods - weekly sales data, for instance. This is an example of time series data. Time series analysis is a specialized branch of statistics used extensively in fields such as Econometrics and Operations Research. Unfortunately, most Marketing Researchers and Data Scientists still have had little exposure to it.


50 Top Free Data Mining Software - Predictive Analytics Today

#artificialintelligence

Orange is a component based data mining and machine learning software suite written in the Python language. It is an Open source data visualization and analysis for novice and experts. Data mining can be done through visual programming or Python scripting. It has components for machine learning. There are add ons for bioinformatics and text mining.


Semi-Supervised Radio Signal Identification

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Radio emitter recognition in dense multi-user environments is an important tool for optimizing spectrum utilization, identifying and minimizing interference, and enforcing spectrum policy. Radio data is readily available and easy to obtain from an antenna, but labeled and curated data is often scarce making supervised learning strategies difficult and time consuming in practice. We demonstrate that semi-supervised learning techniques can be used to scale learning beyond supervised datasets, allowing for discerning and recalling new radio signals by using sparse signal representations based on both unsupervised and supervised methods for nonlinear feature learning and clustering methods.


Sampling Requirements for Stable Autoregressive Estimation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider the problem of estimating the parameters of a linear univariate autoregressive model with sub-Gaussian innovations from a limited sequence of consecutive observations. Assuming that the parameters are compressible, we analyze the performance of the $\ell_1$-regularized least squares as well as a greedy estimator of the parameters and characterize the sampling trade-offs required for stable recovery in the non-asymptotic regime. In particular, we show that for a fixed sparsity level, stable recovery of AR parameters is possible when the number of samples scale sub-linearly with the AR order. Our results improve over existing sampling complexity requirements in AR estimation using the LASSO, when the sparsity level scales faster than the square root of the model order. We further derive sufficient conditions on the sparsity level that guarantee the minimax optimality of the $\ell_1$-regularized least squares estimate. Applying these techniques to simulated data as well as real-world datasets from crude oil prices and traffic speed data confirm our predicted theoretical performance gains in terms of estimation accuracy and model selection.


Triplet Probabilistic Embedding for Face Verification and Clustering

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Despite significant progress made over the past twenty five years, unconstrained face verification remains a challenging problem. This paper proposes an approach that couples a deep CNN-based approach with a low-dimensional discriminative embedding learned using triplet probability constraints to solve the unconstrained face verification problem. Aside from yielding performance improvements, this embedding provides significant advantages in terms of memory and for post-processing operations like subject specific clustering. Experiments on the challenging IJB-A dataset show that the proposed algorithm performs comparably or better than the state of the art methods in verification and identification metrics, while requiring much less training data and training time. The superior performance of the proposed method on the CFP dataset shows that the representation learned by our deep CNN is robust to extreme pose variation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of the deep features to challenges including age, pose, blur and clutter by performing simple clustering experiments on both IJB-A and LFW datasets.


Accelerated Stochastic Subgradient Methods under Local Error Bound Condition

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In this paper, we propose two {\bf accelerated stochastic subgradient} methods for stochastic non-strongly convex optimization problems by leveraging a generic local error bound condition. The novelty of the proposed methods lies at smartly leveraging the recent historical solution to tackle the variance in the stochastic subgradient. The key idea of both methods is to iteratively solve the original problem approximately in a local region around a recent historical solution with size of the local region gradually decreasing as the solution approaches the optimal set. The difference of the two methods lies at how to construct the local region. The first method uses an explicit ball constraint and the second method uses an implicit regularization approach. For both methods, we establish the improved iteration complexity in a high probability for achieving an $\epsilon$-optimal solution. Besides the improved order of iteration complexity with a high probability, the proposed algorithms also enjoy a logarithmic dependence on the distance of the initial solution to the optimal set. We also consider applications in machine learning and demonstrate that the proposed algorithms enjoy faster convergence than the traditional stochastic subgradient method. For example, when applied to the $\ell_1$ regularized polyhedral loss minimization (e.g., hinge loss, absolute loss), the proposed stochastic methods have a logarithmic iteration complexity.


An MM Algorithm for Split Feasibility Problems

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The classical multi-set split feasibility problem seeks a point in the intersection of finitely many closed convex domain constraints, whose image under a linear mapping also lies in the intersection of finitely many closed convex range constraints. Split feasibility generalizes important inverse problems including convex feasibility, linear complementarity, and regression with constraint sets. When a feasible point does not exist, solution methods that proceed by minimizing a proximity function can be used to obtain optimal approximate solutions to the problem. We present an extension of the proximity function approach that generalizes the linear split feasibility problem to allow for non-linear mappings. Our algorithm is based on the principle of majorization-minimization, is amenable to quasi-Newton acceleration, and comes complete with convergence guarantees under mild assumptions. Furthermore, we show that the Euclidean norm appearing in the proximity function of the non-linear split feasibility problem can be replaced by arbitrary Bregman divergences. We explore several examples illustrating the merits of non-linear formulations over the linear case, with a focus on optimization for intensity-modulated radiation therapy.


TensorFlow Machine Learning Cookbook PACKT Books

#artificialintelligence

TensorFlow is an open source software library for Machine Intelligence. The independent recipes in this book will teach you how to use TensorFlow for complex data computations and will help you gain more insights into your data than ever before. We'll start with the fundamentals of the TensorFlow library and you will learn about variables, matrices, and various data sources. Moving ahead, you will get hands-on experience of Linear Regression techniques with TensorFlow. The next chapters cover important high-level concepts such as neural networks, CNN, RNN, and NLP through real-world examples in every recipe.


Improving Prediction of Office Room Occupancy Through Random Sampling

@machinelearnbot

In many cases, you may think that you have a Big Data problem, when in reality you just have a lot of data that a simple sampling can result in great accuracy. In todays blog, I decided to use office room occupancy dataset provided by"Accurate occupancy detection of an office room from light, temperature, humidity and CO2 measurements using statistical learning models. The dataset provided has 6 independent variables (predictors): date with timestamp; temperature of the room in Celsius; relative humidity in percent, light in Lux; CO2 in ppm, and humidity ratio or the ratio between temperature and humidity. The occupancy is a categorical variable with 2 levels: 0 for not occupied; and 1 for occupied. The occupancy has been measured every minutes, for the period of February 11, 2015 to February 18, 2015, and its dataset size is 9,752. The question I want to investigate is can a small random sample produce performance as good as large sample? For the model, I will build a Deep Feed ...


Interactive Elicitation of Knowledge on Feature Relevance Improves Predictions in Small Data Sets

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Providing accurate predictions is challenging for machine learning algorithms when the number of features is larger than the number of samples in the data. Prior knowledge can improve machine learning models by indicating relevant variables and parameter values. Yet, this prior knowledge is often tacit and only available from domain experts. We present a novel approach that uses interactive visualization to elicit the tacit prior knowledge and uses it to improve the accuracy of prediction models. The main component of our approach is a user model that models the domain expert's knowledge of the relevance of different features for a prediction task. In particular, based on the expert's earlier input, the user model guides the selection of the features on which to elicit user's knowledge next. The results of a controlled user study show that the user model significantly improves prior knowledge elicitation and prediction accuracy, when predicting the relative citation counts of scientific documents in a specific domain.