This resource is designed primarily for beginning data scientists or analysts who are interested in identifying and applying machine learning algorithms to address the problems of their interest. A typical question asked by a beginner, when facing a wide variety of machine learning algorithms, is "which algorithm should I use?" Even an experienced data scientist cannot tell which algorithm will perform the best before trying different algorithms. We are not advocating a one and done approach, but we do hope to provide some guidance on which algorithms to try first depending on some clear factors. The machine learning algorithm cheat sheet helps you to choose from a variety of machine learning algorithms to find the appropriate algorithm for your specific problems.

In a previous post I summarized the tasks and procedures available in SAS Viya Data Mining and Machine Learning. In this post, I'll dive into the unsupervised learning category which currently hosts several tasks: Kmeans, Kmodes, and Kprototypes Clustering, Outlier Detection, and a few variants of Principal Component Analysis. In unsupervised learning there are no known labels (outcomes), only attributes (inputs). Examples include clustering, association, and segmentation. Machine learning finds high density areas (in multidimensional space) that are more or less similar to each other, and identifies structures in the data that separate these areas.

We propose a general approach to modeling semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms. Specifically, we present a declarative language for modeling both traditional supervised classification tasks and many SSL heuristics, including both well-known heuristics such as co-training and novel domain-specific heuristics. In addition to representing individual SSL heuristics, we show that multiple heuristics can be automatically combined using Bayesian optimization methods. We experiment with two classes of tasks, link-based text classification and relation extraction. We show modest improvements on well-studied link-based classification benchmarks, and state-of-the-art results on relation-extraction tasks for two realistic domains.

You can do alternating training manually by literally following the algorithm, so that you have a Do loop whose body contains two calls to NetTrain, but that suffers from overhead at each alternation (this could be overcome with clever caching, but we haven't done that yet). An approximation of this is to build a single network and optimize the D and G losses simultaneously by using a negative learning rate for the generator. I have prototyped this, but only on a toy example. I encourage you to try how to do it, it didn't take us more than a few hours of playing around to make a simple GAN in which the data distribution is a gaussian, the discriminator is an MLP, and the generator is a single EmbeddingLayer (just a fixed set of samples that can be moved around by gradient updates).

Graph-based semi-supervised learning is one of the most popular methods in machine learning. Some of its theoretical properties such as bounds for the generalization error and the convergence of the graph Laplacian regularizer have been studied in computer science and statistics literatures. However, a fundamental statistical property, the consistency of the estimator from this method has not been proved. In this article, we study the consistency problem under a non-parametric framework. We prove the consistency of graph-based learning in the case that the estimated scores are enforced to be equal to the observed responses for the labeled data. The sample sizes of both labeled and unlabeled data are allowed to grow in this result. When the estimated scores are not required to be equal to the observed responses, a tuning parameter is used to balance the loss function and the graph Laplacian regularizer. We give a counterexample demonstrating that the estimator for this case can be inconsistent. The theoretical findings are supported by numerical studies.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Say you have a collection of customers with a variety of characteristics such as age, location, and financial history, and you wish to discover patterns and sort them into clusters. Or perhaps you have a set of texts, such as wikipedia pages, and you wish to segment them into categories based on their content. This is the world of unsupervised learning, called as such because you are not guiding, or supervising, the pattern discovery by some prediction task, but instead uncovering hidden structure from unlabeled data. Unsupervised learning encompasses a variety of techniques in machine learning, from clustering to dimension reduction to matrix factorization. In this course, you'll learn the fundamentals of unsupervised learning and implement the essential algorithms using scikit-learn and scipy. You will learn how to cluster, transform, visualize, and extract insights from unlabeled datasets, and end the course by building a recommender system to recommend popular musical artists.

Earlier this week we looked at how deep nets can learn intuitive physics given an input of objects and the relations between them. If only there was some way to look at a 2D scene (e.g., an image from a camera) and build a 3D model of the objects in it and their relationships… Today's paper choice is a big step in that direction, learning the 3D structure of objects from 2D observations. The 2D projection of a scene is a complex function of the attributes and positions of the camera, lights and objects that make up the scene. If endowed with 3D understanding agents can abstract away from this complexity to form stable disentangled representations, e.g., recognizing that a chair is a chair whether seen from above or from the side, under different lighting conditions, or under partial occlusion. Moreover, such representations would allow agents to determine downstream properties of these elements more easily and with less training, e.g., enabling intuitive physical reasoning… The approach described is this paper uses an unsupervised deep learning end-to-end model and "demonstrates for the first time the feasibility of learning to infer 3D representations of the world in a purely unsupervised manner."

We introduce a semi-supervised discrete choice model to calibrate discrete choice models when relatively few requests have both choice sets and stated preferences but the majority only have the choice sets. Two classic semi-supervised learning algorithms, the expectation maximization algorithm and the cluster-and-label algorithm, have been adapted to our choice modeling problem setting. We also develop two new algorithms based on the cluster-and-label algorithm. The new algorithms use the Bayesian Information Criterion to evaluate a clustering setting to automatically adjust the number of clusters. Two computational studies including a hotel booking case and a large-scale airline itinerary shopping case are presented to evaluate the prediction accuracy and computational effort of the proposed algorithms. Algorithmic recommendations are rendered under various scenarios.

Long-term automated monitoring of residential or small in- dustrial properties is an important task within the broader scope of human activity recognition. We present a device- free wifi-based localization system for smart indoor spaces, developed in a collaboration between McGill University and Aerˆıal Technologies. The system relies on existing wifi net- work signals and semi-supervised learning, in order to au- tomatically detect entrance into a residential unit, and track the location of a moving subject within the sensing area. The implemented real-time monitoring platform works by detect- ing changes in the characteristics of the wifi signals collected via existing off-the-shelf wifi-enabled devices in the environ- ment. This platform has been deployed in several apartments in the Montreal area, and the results obtained show the poten- tial of this technology to turn any regular home with an ex- isting wifi network into a smart home equipped with intruder alarm and room-level location detector. The machine learn- ing component has been devised so as to minimize the need for user annotation and overcome temporal instabilities in the input signals. We use a semi-supervised learning framework which works in two phases. First, we build a base learner for mapping wifi signals to different physical locations in the en- vironment from a small amount of labeled data; during its lifetime, the learner automatically re-trains when the uncer- tainty level rises significantly, without the need for further supervision. This paper describes the technical and practical issues arising in the design and implementation of such a sys- tem for real residential units, and illustrates its performance during on-going deployment.