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Logistic Regression for Machine Learning - Machine Learning Mastery

#artificialintelligence

Logistic regression is another technique borrowed by machine learning from the field of statistics. It is the go-to method for binary classification problems (problems with two class values). In this post you will discover the logistic regression algorithm for machine learning. This post was written for developers interested in applied machine learning, specifically predictive modeling. You do not need to have a background in linear algebra or statistics.


Noisy Activation Functions

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Common nonlinear activation functions used in neural networks can cause training difficulties due to the saturation behavior of the activation function, which may hide dependencies that are not visible to vanilla-SGD (using first order gradients only). Gating mechanisms that use softly saturating activation functions to emulate the discrete switching of digital logic circuits are good examples of this. We propose to exploit the injection of appropriate noise so that the gradients may flow easily, even if the noiseless application of the activation function would yield zero gradient. Large noise will dominate the noise-free gradient and allow stochastic gradient descent to explore more. By adding noise only to the problematic parts of the activation function, we allow the optimization procedure to explore the boundary between the degenerate (saturating) and the well-behaved parts of the activation function. We also establish connections to simulated annealing, when the amount of noise is annealed down, making it easier to optimize hard objective functions. We find experimentally that replacing such saturating activation functions by noisy variants helps training in many contexts, yielding state-of-the-art or competitive results on different datasets and task, especially when training seems to be the most difficult, e.g., when curriculum learning is necessary to obtain good results.


Multi-Relational Learning at Scale with ADMM

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The complex graph structure of the Web - with different relations or edge types - has motivated a large body of research tackling the challenge of mining multi-relational data in the presence of noise, partial inconsistencies, ambiguities, or duplicate entities. State-of-the-art advances in this field are relevant to many applications such as link prediction [1], Resource Description Framework (RDF) mining [2], entity linking [3], recommender systems [4], and natural language processing [5]. However, new paradigms are still needed for statistical and computational inference for very large multi-relational datasets, like the ones produced at massive scale in projects such as the Google's Knowledge Graph [6], YAGO [7], and in Semantic Web initiatives such as DBpedia [8]. Factorization models are considered state-of-the-art approaches for Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) in which they have exhibited a high predictive performance [9], [10], [11]. Factorization models for multi-relational data associate entities and relations with latent feature vectors and model predictions about unknown relationships through operations on these vectors (e.g., dot products). Optimizing the predictions for a number of relations can be seen as a prediction task with multiple target variables. For example, multi-target models can support information retrieval tasks in Linked Open Data bases like DBPedia by providing estimates of facts, that are neither explicitly stated in the knowledge base nor can be inferred from logical entailment, enabling probabilistic queries on such databases [1], [2]. Another example in the context of social web recommender systems, is that such services are not only interested in recommending, for instance, news items to a user but also recommending other users as potential new friends. State-of-the-art factorization models approach the multitarget prediction task by sharing the parameters used for all target relations.


How to Set Up Distributed XGBoost on MapR-FS

#artificialintelligence

XGBoost is a library that is designed for boosted (tree) algorithms. It has become a popular machine learning framework among data science practitioners, especially on Kaggle, which is a platform for data prediction competitions where researchers post their data and statisticians and data miners compete to produce the best models. For structured learning problems on Kaggle, it can be difficult to get into the top 10 without including XGBoost. Typically, data scientists use multi-thread single machines to train XGBoost models. Very few people have deployed XGBoost on a distributed environment and achieved good performance.


Intro to Machine Learning Udacity

#artificialintelligence

You'll learn how to start with a question and/or a dataset, and use machine learning to turn them into insights. Naive Bayes: We jump in headfirst, learning perhaps the world's greatest algorithm for classifying text. The ability to generate new features independently and on the fly. Behind any great machine learning project is a great dataset that the algorithm can learn from. We were inspired by a treasure trove of email and financial data from the Enron corporation, which would normally be strictly confidential but became public when the company went bankrupt in a blizzard of fraud.


Advancing Machine Learning to Uncover New Insights

#artificialintelligence

The sheer volume and unstructured nature of the data generated by billions of connected devices and systems presents significant challenges for those in search of turning this data into insight. For many, machine learning holds the promise of not only structuring this vast amount of data but also to create true business intelligence that can be monetized and leveraged to guide decisions. In the past, it wasn't possible or practical to implement machine learning at such a large scale for a variety of reasons. Machine learning, generally speaking, refers to a class of algorithms that learn from data, uncover insights, and predict behavior without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning algorithms vary greatly depending on the goal of the enterprise and can include various algorithms targeting classification or anomaly detection, clustering of information, time series prediction such as video and speech and even state-action learning and decision making through the use of reinforcement learning.


An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms

#artificialintelligence

Gradient descent is one of the most popular algorithms to perform optimization and by far the most common way to optimize neural networks. At the same time, every state-of-the-art Deep Learning library contains implementations of various algorithms to optimize gradient descent (e.g. These algorithms, however, are often used as black-box optimizers, as practical explanations of their strengths and weaknesses are hard to come by. This blog post aims at providing you with intuitions towards the behaviour of different algorithms for optimizing gradient descent that will help you put them to use. We are first going to look at the different variants of gradient descent. We will then briefly summarize challenges during training. Subsequently, we will introduce the most common optimization algorithms by showing their motivation to resolve these challenges and how this leads to the derivation of their update rules.


Convex block-sparse linear regression with expanders -- provably

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Sparse matrices are favorable objects in machine learning and optimization. When such matrices are used, in place of dense ones, the overall complexity requirements in optimization can be significantly reduced in practice, both in terms of space and run-time. Prompted by this observation, we study a convex optimization scheme for block-sparse recovery from linear measurements. To obtain linear sketches, we use expander matrices, i.e., sparse matrices containing only few non-zeros per column. Hitherto, to the best of our knowledge, such algorithmic solutions have been only studied from a non-convex perspective. Our aim here is to theoretically characterize the performance of convex approaches under such setting. Our key novelty is the expression of the recovery error in terms of the model-based norm, while assuring that solution lives in the model. To achieve this, we show that sparse model-based matrices satisfy a group version of the null-space property. Our experimental findings on synthetic and real applications support our claims for faster recovery in the convex setting -- as opposed to using dense sensing matrices, while showing a competitive recovery performance.


How to forecast using Regression Analysis in R

#artificialintelligence

P-values for coefficients of cylinders, horsepower and acceleration are all greater than 0.05. This means that the relationship between the dependent and these independent variables is not significant at the 95% certainty level. I'll drop 2 of these variables and try again. High p-values for these independent variables do not mean that they definitely should not be used in the model. It could be that some other variables are correlated with these variables and making these variables less useful for prediction (check Multicollinearity).


Detecting and Visualising Clusterings Interaction Networks (And a few other cool things like Facebook)

@machinelearnbot

For my submission to HackCambridge I wanted to spend my 24 hours learning something new in accordance with my interests. I was recently introduced to protein interaction networks in my Bioinfomartics class, and during my review of machine learning techniques for an exam noticed that we study many supervised methods, but no unsupervised methods other than the k means clustering. Thus I decided to combine the two interests by clustering the Protein interaction networks with unsupervised clustering techniques and communicate my learning, results, and visualisations using the Beaker notebook. The study of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) determined by high-throughput experimental techniques has created karge sets of interaction data and a new need for methods allowing us to discover new information about biological function. These interactions can be thought of as a large-scale network, with nodes representing proteins and edges signifying an interaction between two proteins.