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 Statistical Learning



R: Simple Linear Regression

#artificialintelligence

Linear Regression is a very popular prediction method and most likely the first predictive algorithm most be people learn. To put it simply, in linear regression you try to place a line of best fit through a data set and then use that line to predict new data points. Now our data file contains a listing of Years a person has worked for company A and their Salary. With a 2 variable data set, often it is quickest just to graph the data to check for a possible linear relationship. Looking at the plot, there definitely appears to be a linear relationship.


Data Science 101: The Rise and Shine of Machine Learning

#artificialintelligence

We are living in a digital era where Customer is the king. Many businesses have capitulated to this new realm and have started interacting with customers dynamically. Today the customers are free to navigate a merchant (eCommerce) website any way they fancy. Also the merchant can display content and place offers dynamically based on how a given customer interacts with his website. To add to the complexity purchase decisions are not necessarily made on the first visit itself.


Fast, Robust and Non-convex Subspace Recovery

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This work presents a fast and non-convex algorithm for robust subspace recovery. The data sets considered include inliers drawn around a low-dimensional subspace of a higher dimensional ambient space, and a possibly large portion of outliers that do not lie nearby this subspace. The proposed algorithm, which we refer to as Fast Median Subspace (FMS), is designed to robustly determine the underlying subspace of such data sets, while having lower computational complexity than existing methods. We prove convergence of the FMS iterates to a stationary point. Further, under a special model of data, FMS converges to a point which is near to the global minimum with overwhelming probability. Under this model, we show that the iteration complexity is globally bounded and locally $r$-linear. The latter theorem holds for any fixed fraction of outliers (less than 1) and any fixed positive distance between the limit point and the global minimum. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate its competitive speed and accuracy.


Your car doesn't have to be "smart" to be a privacy concern ยป Behind the Headlines

#artificialintelligence

It not only knows where you you have been, but also how fast you were driving and how hard you brake. It can tell if you were the driver or if someone else was behind the wheel. Due to the connected nature of smart cars, it can share this data over web-based platforms. Over the last few decades, automobiles evolved from modes of transport into sensor-laden mobile computing platforms. While the sensor-generated data has enabled breakthroughs in safety features and performance, it also creates privacy concerns for drivers.


Nonparametric Modeling of Dynamic Functional Connectivity in fMRI Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Dynamic functional connectivity (FC) has in recent years become a topic of interest in the neuroimaging community. Several models and methods exist for both functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), and the results point towards the conclusion that FC exhibits dynamic changes. The existing approaches modeling dynamic connectivity have primarily been based on time-windowing the data and k-means clustering. We propose a non-parametric generative model for dynamic FC in fMRI that does not rely on specifying window lengths and number of dynamic states. Rooted in Bayesian statistical modeling we use the predictive likelihood to investigate if the model can discriminate between a motor task and rest both within and across subjects. We further investigate what drives dynamic states using the model on the entire data collated across subjects and task/rest. We find that the number of states extracted are driven by subject variability and preprocessing differences while the individual states are almost purely defined by either task or rest. This questions how we in general interpret dynamic FC and points to the need for more research on what drives dynamic FC.


Clustering with a Reject Option: Interactive Clustering as Bayesian Prior Elicitation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

A good clustering can help a data analyst to explore and understand a data set, but what constitutes a good clustering may depend on domain-specific and application-specific criteria. These criteria can be difficult to formalize, even when it is easy for an analyst to know a good clustering when she sees one. We present a new approach to interactive clustering for data exploration, called \ciif, based on a particularly simple feedback mechanism, in which an analyst can choose to reject individual clusters and request new ones. The new clusters should be different from previously rejected clusters while still fitting the data well. We formalize this interaction in a novel Bayesian prior elicitation framework. In each iteration, the prior is adapted to account for all the previous feedback, and a new clustering is then produced from the posterior distribution. To achieve the computational efficiency necessary for an interactive setting, we propose an incremental optimization method over data minibatches using Lagrangian relaxation. Experiments demonstrate that \ciif can produce accurate and diverse clusterings.


Learning Representations for Counterfactual Inference

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Observational studies are rising in importance due to the widespread accumulation of data in fields such as healthcare, education, employment and ecology. We consider the task of answering counterfactual questions such as, "Would this patient have lower blood sugar had she received a different medication?". We propose a new algorithmic framework for counterfactual inference which brings together ideas from domain adaptation and representation learning. In addition to a theoretical justification, we perform an empirical comparison with previous approaches to causal inference from observational data. Our deep learning algorithm significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art.


On the Theory and Practice of Privacy-Preserving Bayesian Data Analysis

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Bayesian inference has great promise for the privacy-preserving analysis of sensitive data, as posterior sampling automatically preserves differential privacy, an algorithmic notion of data privacy, under certain conditions (Dimitrakakis et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2015b). While this one posterior sample (OPS) approach elegantly provides privacy "for free," it is data inefficient in the sense of asymptotic relative efficiency (ARE). We show that a simple alternative based on the Laplace mechanism, the workhorse of differential privacy, is as asymptotically efficient as non-private posterior inference, under general assumptions. This technique also has practical advantages including efficient use of the privacy budget for MCMC. We demonstrate the practicality of our approach on a time-series analysis of sensitive military records from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars disclosed by the Wikileaks organization.


Phase Transitions for High Dimensional Clustering and Related Problems

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Consider a two-class clustering problem where we observe $X_i = \ell_i \mu + Z_i$, $Z_i \stackrel{iid}{\sim} N(0, I_p)$, $1 \leq i \leq n$. The feature vector $\mu\in R^p$ is unknown but is presumably sparse. The class labels $\ell_i\in\{-1, 1\}$ are also unknown and the main interest is to estimate them. We are interested in the statistical limits. In the two-dimensional phase space calibrating the rarity and strengths of useful features, we find the precise demarcation for the Region of Impossibility and Region of Possibility. In the former, useful features are too rare/weak for successful clustering. In the latter, useful features are strong enough to allow successful clustering. The results are extended to the case of colored noise using Le Cam's idea on comparison of experiments. We also extend the study on statistical limits for clustering to that for signal recovery and that for hypothesis testing. We compare the statistical limits for three problems and expose some interesting insight. We propose classical PCA and Important Features PCA (IF-PCA) for clustering. For a threshold $t > 0$, IF-PCA clusters by applying classical PCA to all columns of $X$ with an $L^2$-norm larger than $t$. We also propose two aggregation methods. For any parameter in the Region of Possibility, some of these methods yield successful clustering. We find an interesting phase transition for IF-PCA. Our results require delicate analysis, especially on post-selection Random Matrix Theory and on lower bound arguments.