Diagnosis
Observational and Interventional Causal Learning for Regret-Minimizing Control
We explore how observational and interventional causal discovery methods can be combined. A state-of-the-art observational causal discovery algorithm for time series capable of handling latent confounders and contemporaneous effects, called LPCMCI, is extended to profit from casual constraints found through randomized control trials. Numerical results show that, given perfect interventional constraints, the reconstructed structural causal models (SCMs) of the extended LPCMCI allow 84.6% of the time for the optimal prediction of the target variable. The implementation of interventional and observational causal discovery is modular, allowing causal constraints from other sources. The second part of this thesis investigates the question of regret minimizing control by simultaneously learning a causal model and planning actions through the causal model. The idea is that an agent to optimize a measured variable first learns the system's mechanics through observational causal discovery. The agent then intervenes on the most promising variable with randomized values allowing for the exploitation and generation of new interventional data. The agent then uses the interventional data to enhance the causal model further, allowing improved actions the next time. The extended LPCMCI can be favorable compared to the original LPCMCI algorithm. The numerical results show that detecting and using interventional constraints leads to reconstructed SCMs that allow 60.9% of the time for the optimal prediction of the target variable in contrast to the baseline of 53.6% when using the original LPCMCI algorithm. Furthermore, the induced average regret decreases from 1.2 when using the original LPCMCI algorithm to 1.0 when using the extended LPCMCI algorithm with interventional discovery.
DeepFT: Fault-Tolerant Edge Computing using a Self-Supervised Deep Surrogate Model
Tuli, Shreshth, Casale, Giuliano, Cherkasova, Ludmila, Jennings, Nicholas R.
The emergence of latency-critical AI applications has been supported by the evolution of the edge computing paradigm. However, edge solutions are typically resource-constrained, posing reliability challenges due to heightened contention for compute and communication capacities and faulty application behavior in the presence of overload conditions. Although a large amount of generated log data can be mined for fault prediction, labeling this data for training is a manual process and thus a limiting factor for automation. Due to this, many companies resort to unsupervised fault-tolerance models. Yet, failure models of this kind can incur a loss of accuracy when they need to adapt to non-stationary workloads and diverse host characteristics. To cope with this, we propose a novel modeling approach, called DeepFT, to proactively avoid system overloads and their adverse effects by optimizing the task scheduling and migration decisions. DeepFT uses a deep surrogate model to accurately predict and diagnose faults in the system and co-simulation based self-supervised learning to dynamically adapt the model in volatile settings. It offers a highly scalable solution as the model size scales by only 3 and 1 percent per unit increase in the number of active tasks and hosts. Extensive experimentation on a Raspberry-Pi based edge cluster with DeFog benchmarks shows that DeepFT can outperform state-of-the-art baseline methods in fault-detection and QoS metrics. Specifically, DeepFT gives the highest F1 scores for fault-detection, reducing service deadline violations by up to 37\% while also improving response time by up to 9%.
Mixture of Decision Trees for Interpretable Machine Learning
Brรผggenjรผrgen, Simeon, Schaaf, Nina, Kerschke, Pascal, Huber, Marco F.
This work introduces a novel interpretable machine learning method called Mixture of Decision Trees (MoDT). It constitutes a special case of the Mixture of Experts ensemble architecture, which utilizes a linear model as gating function and decision trees as experts. Our proposed method is ideally suited for problems that cannot be satisfactorily learned by a single decision tree, but which can alternatively be divided into subproblems. Each subproblem can then be learned well from a single decision tree. Therefore, MoDT can be considered as a method that improves performance while maintaining interpretability by making each of its decisions understandable and traceable to humans. Our work is accompanied by a Python implementation, which uses an interpretable gating function, a fast learning algorithm, and a direct interface to fine-tuned interpretable visualization methods. The experiments confirm that the implementation works and, more importantly, show the superiority of our approach compared to single decision trees and random forests of similar complexity.
Learning Data Science: Predictive Maintenance with Decision Trees
Predictive Maintenance is one of the big revolutions happening across all major industries right now. Instead of changing parts regularly or even only after they failed it uses Machine Learning methods to predict when a part is going to fail. If you want to get an introduction to this fascinating developing area, read on! Predictive maintenance techniques are designed to help determine the condition of in-service equipment in order to estimate when maintenance should be performed. This approach promises cost savings over routine or time-based preventive maintenance, because tasks are performed only when warranted.
SketchBoost: Fast Gradient Boosted Decision Tree for Multioutput Problems
Iosipoi, Leonid, Vakhrushev, Anton
Gradient Boosted Decision Tree (GBDT) is a widely-used machine learning algorithm that has been shown to achieve state-of-the-art results on many standard data science problems. We are interested in its application to multioutput problems when the output is highly multidimensional. Although there are highly effective GBDT implementations, their scalability to such problems is still unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose novel methods aiming to accelerate the training process of GBDT in the multioutput scenario. The idea behind these methods lies in the approximate computation of a scoring function used to find the best split of decision trees. These methods are implemented in SketchBoost, which itself is integrated into our easily customizable Python-based GPU implementation of GBDT called Py-Boost. Our numerical study demonstrates that SketchBoost speeds up the training process of GBDT by up to over 40 times while achieving comparable or even better performance.
Machine Learning Methods for Anomaly Detection in Nuclear Power Plant Power Transformers
Katser, Iurii, Raspopov, Dmitriy, Kozitsin, Vyacheslav, Mezhov, Maxim
Power transformers are an important component of a nuclear power plant (NPP). Currently, the NPP operates a lot of power transformers with extended service life, which exceeds the designated 25 years. Due to the extension of the service life, the task of monitoring the technical condition of power transformers becomes urgent. An important method for monitoring power transformers is Chromatographic Analysis of Dissolved Gas. It is based on the principle of controlling the concentration of gases dissolved in transformer oil. The appearance of almost any type of defect in equipment is accompanied by the formation of gases that dissolve in oil, and specific types of defects generate their gases in different quantities. At present, at NPPs, the monitoring systems for transformer equipment use predefined control limits for the concentration of dissolved gases in the oil. This study describes the stages of developing an algorithm to detect defects and faults in transformers automatically using machine learning and data analysis methods. Among machine learning models, we trained Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Neural Networks. The best of them were then combined into an ensemble (StackingClassifier) showing F1-score of 0.974 on a test sample. To develop mathematical models, we used data on the state of transformers, containing time series with values of gas concentrations (H2, CO, C2H4, C2H2). The datasets were labeled and contained four operating modes: normal mode, partial discharge, low energy discharge, low-temperature overheating.
Decision Trees (the upside-down trees)
Taking SpongeBob SquarePants' mood as an example, based on historical data, there are two factors that affect whether he is happy or upset. So, if the whole mood table of Mr. SquarePants is visualized into a scatter plot, it will look as the following: Decision trees are used in classification problems to find a line(s) that separates the data as perfectly as possible. The separation process is done by measuring the homogeneity or similarity of the data. Attempting to separate data, a vertical line is drawn to separate happy SpongeBob from upset SpongeBob, taking into consideration one feature only -which is the number of jellyfish that were hunted. A vertical line at the number 10 on the x-axis can work as a separator, so if the number of jellyfish hunted is less than 10 SpongeBob is upset otherwise, he is happy.
Mind Your Bias: A Critical Review of Bias Detection Methods for Contextual Language Models
The awareness and mitigation of biases are of fundamental importance for the fair and transparent use of contextual language models, yet they crucially depend on the accurate detection of biases as a precursor. Consequently, numerous bias detection methods have been proposed, which vary in their approach, the considered type of bias, and the data used for evaluation. However, while most detection methods are derived from the word embedding association test for static word embeddings, the reported results are heterogeneous, inconsistent, and ultimately inconclusive. To address this issue, we conduct a rigorous analysis and comparison of bias detection methods for contextual language models. Our results show that minor design and implementation decisions (or errors) have a substantial and often significant impact on the derived bias scores. Overall, we find the state of the field to be both worse than previously acknowledged due to systematic and propagated errors in implementations, yet better than anticipated since divergent results in the literature homogenize after accounting for implementation errors. Based on our findings, we conclude with a discussion of paths towards more robust and consistent bias detection methods.
VicOne launches Secured RDS Service on MIH Open EV Platform
The rapid development of the global electric vehicle market has ushered in a new era of Software Defined Vehicle (SDV). The accelerated innovative development has also made electric vehicles the new target for hackers, which accentuate the importance of the cyber security in the electric vehicle industry. VicOne, an automotive cybersecurity solution provider, established by cloud security leader Trend Micro, unveiled the industry's first-of-kind in-vehicle software safety remote diagnosis service on the Open EV Platform at MIH Demo Day, an annual technical event organized by MIH Consortium on the 8th November, 2023. VicOne Secured RDS (Remote Diagnostic Service) is the first to extend the service of vehicle abnormality detection to software diagnosis. Detecting abnormalities and real-time warnings remotely can help car manufacturers and system suppliers to establish a stronger cyber security defense and provide comprehensive network security protection to electric vehicles.
Framework Construction of an Adversarial Federated Transfer Learning Classifier
Yi, Hang, Bie, Tongxuan, Yan, Tongjiang
As the Internet grows in popularity, more and more classification jobs, such as IoT, finance industry and healthcare field, rely on mobile edge computing to advance machine learning. In the medical industry, however, good diagnostic accuracy necessitates the combination of large amounts of labeled data to train the model, which is difficult and expensive to collect and risks jeopardizing patients' privacy. In this paper, we offer a novel medical diagnostic framework that employs a federated learning platform to ensure patient data privacy by transferring classification algorithms acquired in a labeled domain to a domain with sparse or missing labeled data. Rather than using a generative adversarial network, our framework uses a discriminative model to build multiple classification loss functions with the goal of improving diagnostic accuracy. It also avoids the difficulty of collecting large amounts of labeled data or the high cost of generating large amount of sample data. Experiments on real-world image datasets demonstrates that the suggested adversarial federated transfer learning method is promising for real-world medical diagnosis applications that use image classification.