Extracting actionable intelligence from distributed, heterogeneous, correlated and high-dimensional data sources requires run-time processing and learning both locally and globally. In the last decade, a large number of meta-learning techniques have been proposed in which local learners make online predictions based on their locally-collected data instances, and feed these predictions to an ensemble learner, which fuses them and issues a global prediction. However, most of these works do not provide performance guarantees or, when they do, these guarantees are asymptotic. None of these existing works provide confidence estimates about the issued predictions or rate of learning guarantees for the ensemble learner. In this paper, we provide a systematic ensemble learning method called Hedged Bandits, which comes with both long run (asymptotic) and short run (rate of learning) performance guarantees. Moreover, our approach yields performance guarantees with respect to the optimal local prediction strategy, and is also able to adapt its predictions in a data-driven manner. We illustrate the performance of Hedged Bandits in the context of medical informatics and show that it outperforms numerous online and offline ensemble learning methods.

Biological and social systems consist of myriad interacting units. The interactions can be represented in the form of a graph or network. Measurements of these graphs can reveal the underlying structure of these interactions, which provides insight into the systems that generated the graphs. Moreover, in applications such as connectomics, social networks, and genomics, graph data are accompanied by contextualizing measures on each node. We utilize these node covariates to help uncover latent communities in a graph, using a modification of spectral clustering. Statistical guarantees are provided under a joint mixture model that we call the node-contextualized stochastic blockmodel, including a bound on the mis-clustering rate. The bound is used to derive conditions for achieving perfect clustering. For most simulated cases, covariate-assisted spectral clustering yields results superior to regularized spectral clustering without node covariates and to an adaptation of canonical correlation analysis. We apply our clustering method to large brain graphs derived from diffusion MRI data, using the node locations or neurological region membership as covariates. In both cases, covariate-assisted spectral clustering yields clusters that are easier to interpret neurologically.

Introduction: In the first blog, we decided on the predictors. We knew that different predictive models have different assumptions about their predictors. Random Forest has none, but Logistic Regression requires normality of the continuous variables, and assumes the probability between 2 consecutive unit levels in a series of numbers to stay constant. K Nearest Neighbors requires the predictors to be at least on the same scale. SVM, Logistic Regression, and Neural Networks tend to be sensitive to outliers.

Here we discuss general applications of statistical models, whether they arise from data science, operations research, engineering, machine learning or statistics. We do not discuss specific algorithms such as decision trees, logistic regression, Bayesian modeling, Markov models, data reduction or feature selection. Instead, I discuss frameworks - each one using its own types of techniques and algorithms - to solve real life problems. Most of the entries below are found in Wikipedia, and I have used a few definitions or extracts from the relevant Wikipedia articles, in addition to personal contributions. Spatial dependency is the co-variation of properties within geographic space: characteristics at proximal locations appear to be correlated, either positively or negatively. Methods for time series analyses may be divided into two classes: frequency-domain methods and time-domain methods.

A novel approach termed \emph{stochastic truncated amplitude flow} (STAF) is developed to reconstruct an unknown $n$-dimensional real-/complex-valued signal $\bm{x}$ from $m$ `phaseless' quadratic equations of the form $\psi_i=|\langle\bm{a}_i,\bm{x}\rangle|$. This problem, also known as phase retrieval from magnitude-only information, is \emph{NP-hard} in general. Adopting an amplitude-based nonconvex formulation, STAF leads to an iterative solver comprising two stages: s1) Orthogonality-promoting initialization through a stochastic variance reduced gradient algorithm; and, s2) A series of iterative refinements of the initialization using stochastic truncated gradient iterations. Both stages involve a single equation per iteration, thus rendering STAF a simple, scalable, and fast approach amenable to large-scale implementations that is useful when $n$ is large. When $\{\bm{a}_i\}_{i=1}^m$ are independent Gaussian, STAF provably recovers exactly any $\bm{x}\in\mathbb{R}^n$ exponentially fast based on order of $n$ quadratic equations. STAF is also robust in the presence of additive noise of bounded support. Simulated tests involving real Gaussian $\{\bm{a}_i\}$ vectors demonstrate that STAF empirically reconstructs any $\bm{x}\in\mathbb{R}^n$ exactly from about $2.3n$ magnitude-only measurements, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches and narrowing the gap from the information-theoretic number of equations $m=2n-1$. Extensive experiments using synthetic data and real images corroborate markedly improved performance of STAF over existing alternatives.

Dynamical systems with large state-spaces are often expensive to thoroughly explore experimentally. Coarse-graining methods aim to define simpler systems which are more amenable to analysis and exploration; most current methods, however, focus on a priori state aggregation based on similarities in transition rates, which is not necessarily reflected in similar behaviours at the level of trajectories. We propose a way to coarsen the state-space of a system which optimally preserves the satisfaction of a set of logical specifications about the system's trajectories. Our approach is based on Gaussian Process emulation and Multi-Dimensional Scaling, a dimensionality reduction technique which optimally preserves distances in non-Euclidean spaces. We show how to obtain low-dimensional visualisations of the system's state-space from the perspective of properties' satisfaction, and how to define macro-states which behave coherently with respect to the specifications. Our approach is illustrated on a non-trivial running example, showing promising performance and high computational efficiency.

It is no doubt that the sub-field of machine learning / artificial intelligence has increasingly gained more popularity in the past couple of years. As Big Data is the hottest trend in the tech industry at the moment, machine learning is incredibly powerful to make predictions or calculated suggestions based on large amounts of data. Some of the most common examples of machine learning are Netflix's algorithms to make movie suggestions based on movies you have watched in the past or Amazon's algorithms that recommend books based on books you have bought before. So if you want to learn more about machine learning, how do you start? For me, my first introduction is when I took an Artificial Intelligence class when I was studying abroad in Copenhagen.

Can computer software be designed to be more emotional? Imagine the idea of conversing with your computer, perhaps checking the weather. The weather appears to be cold and rainy for the early part of the day. This naturally brings a certain feeling of negativity, perhaps even dread, to most people. Typical computer programs of today will simply report the weather and prompt for the next query, without giving the user's disposition a single thought.

Talking about the relationship between cyber security and machine learning, we need to first identify a concept change. In the past, cyber security focuses on blocking the intruders from outside of our network, but today, we have to believe that intruders are among us. They have invaded our systems and they are doing or going to do damages to us. Whatever the compromised device or machine is doing, it's acting abnormally. So, cyber security means anomaly detection.

In many practical applications of multiple hypothesis testing using the False Discovery Rate (FDR), the given hypotheses can be naturally partitioned into groups, and one may not only want to control the number of false discoveries (wrongly rejected null hypotheses), but also the number of falsely discovered groups of hypotheses (we say a group is falsely discovered if at least one hypothesis within that group is rejected, when in reality the group contains only nulls). In this paper, we introduce the p-filter, a procedure which unifies and generalizes the standard FDR procedure by Benjamini and Hochberg and global null testing procedure by Simes. We first prove that our proposed method can simultaneously control the overall FDR at the finest level (individual hypotheses treated separately) and the group FDR at coarser levels (when such groups are user-specified). We then generalize the p-filter procedure even further to handle multiple partitions of hypotheses, since that might be natural in many applications. For example, in neuroscience experiments, we may have a hypothesis for every (discretized) location in the brain, and at every (discretized) timepoint: does the stimulus correlate with activity in location x at time t after the stimulus was presented? In this setting, one might want to group hypotheses by location and by time. Importantly, our procedure can handle multiple partitions which are nonhierarchical (i.e. one partition may arrange p-values by voxel, and another partition arranges them by time point; neither one is nested inside the other). We prove that our procedure controls FDR simultaneously across these multiple lay- ers, under assumptions that are standard in the literature: we do not need the hypotheses to be independent, but require a nonnegative dependence condition known as PRDS.