By John Spooner, Head of Artificial Intelligence, EMEA, H2O.ai Artificial Intelligence (AI) has evolved significantly from being a mere technology buzzword, to the commercial reality it is today. The technology is making a positive impact across many industries, including the financial sector. The financial services industry has a reputation of constantly innovating and advancing new technologies, in the pursuit of strengthening the customer base, and finding new revenue opportunities. This is happening across all segments including capital markets, commercial banking, consumer finance and insurance. The use of AI in the financial services is rapidly changing the business landscape, even in traditionally conservative areas.

Most of todays work on knowledge graph completion is concerned with sub-symbolic approaches that focus on the concept of embedding a given graph in a low dimensional vector space. Against this trend, we propose an approach called AnyBURL that is rooted in the symbolic space. Its core algorithm is based on sampling paths, which are generalized into Horn rules. Previously published results show that the prediction quality of AnyBURL is on the same level as current state of the art with the additional benefit of offering an explanation for the predicted fact. In this paper, we are concerned with two extensions of AnyBURL. Firstly, we change AnyBURLs interpretation of rules from $\Theta$-subsumption into $\Theta$-subsumption under Object Identity. Secondly, we introduce reinforcement learning to better guide the sampling process. We found out that reinforcement learning helps finding more valuable rules earlier in the search process. We measure the impact of both extensions and compare the resulting approach with current state of the art approaches. Our results show that AnyBURL outperforms most sub-symbolic methods.

Here, we propose an unsupervised fuzzy rule-based dimensionality reduction method primarily for data visualization. It considers the following important issues relevant to dimensionality reduction-based data visualization: (i) preservation of neighborhood relationships, (ii) handling data on a non-linear manifold, (iii) the capability of predicting projections for new test data points, (iv) interpretability of the system, and (v) the ability to reject test points if required. For this, we use a first-order Takagi-Sugeno type model. We generate rule antecedents using clusters in the input data. In this context, we also propose a new variant of the Geodesic c-means clustering algorithm. We estimate the rule parameters by minimizing an error function that preserves the inter-point geodesic distances (distances over the manifold) as Euclidean distances on the projected space. We apply the proposed method on three synthetic and three real-world data sets and visually compare the results with four other standard data visualization methods. The obtained results show that the proposed method behaves desirably and performs better than or comparable to the methods compared with. The proposed method is found to be robust to the initial conditions. The predictability of the proposed method for test points is validated by experiments. We also assess the ability of our method to reject output points when it should. Then, we extend this concept to provide a general framework for learning an unsupervised fuzzy model for data projection with different objective functions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to manifold learning using unsupervised fuzzy modeling.

Machine Learning is on everyone's lips these days. But how can it help secure an online business from fraud? Talking to a number of fraud prevention professionals, we've noticed that many of them are looking for a more advanced, Machine Learning based solutions to address cybercrime issue. But how do these solutions really work? In this whitepaper, we'll explain what's behind the so-called "black box", show the actual ML process in fraud prevention, and compare the benefits of using ML and rule-based systems.

Two indicators are classically used to evaluate the quality of rule-based classification systems: predictive accuracy, i.e. the system's ability to successfully reproduce learning data and coverage, i.e. the proportion of possible cases for which the logical rules constituting the system apply. In this work, we claim that these two indicators may be insufficient, and additional measures of quality may need to be developed. We theoretically show that classification systems presenting "good" predictive accuracy and coverage can, nonetheless, be trivially improved and illustrate this proposition with examples. To conceptualize our main claim, we characterize a property of reducibility. A classification system is said to be reducible, if and only if, its constituent rules can be replaced by a subset of their elementary conditions, while preserving the quality of the system. We derive a time-efficient constructive algorithm to test this property and to improve a system's predictive accuracy and coverage in case of a positive response. Furthermore, we provide a set of sufficient conditions that can be used to detect non-reducibility and thus validate rule-based classification systems. We use the proposed approach to evaluate a previously published work applied to a public dataset pertaining to the business bankruptcy prediction, using three popular machine learning approaches (namely Genetic Algorithms, Inductive learning and Neural Networks).

Interpretability is becoming increasingly important in predictive model analysis. Unfortunately, as mentioned by many authors, there is still no consensus on that idea. The aim of this article is to propose a rigorous mathematical definition of the concept of interpretability, allowing fair comparisons between any rule-based algorithms. This definition is built from three notions, each of which being quantitatively measured by a simple formula: predictivity, stability and simplicity. While predictivity has been widely studied to measure the accuracy of predictive algorithms, stability is based on the Dice-Sorensen index to compare two sets of rules generated by an algorithm using two independent samples. Simplicity is based on the sum of the length of the rules deriving from the generated model. The final objective measure of the interpretability of any rule-based algorithm ends up as a weighted sum of the three aforementioned concepts. This paper concludes with the comparison of the interpretability between four rule-based algorithms.

A COVID-19 pandemic has already proven itself to be a global challenge. It proves how vulnerable humanity can be. It has also mobilized researchers from different sciences and different countries in the search for a way to fight this potentially fatal disease. In line with this, our study analyses the abstracts of papers related to COVID-19 and coronavirus-related-research using association rule text mining in order to find the most interestingness words, on the one hand, and relationships between them on the other. Then, a method, called information cartography, was applied for extracting structured knowledge from a huge amount of association rules. On the basis of these methods, the purpose of our study was to show how researchers have responded in similar epidemic/pandemic situations throughout history.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are offering an entirely new level of possibilities to businesses worldwide, one of those possibilities is Fraud Detection. Financial institutions and banks will never be the same with the opportunities technology offers to deal with criminal activities and fight internet fraud. Learn how it works in this post! The things people used to buy at shops years ago are now purchased online, no matter what they are: furniture, food, or clothes. As a result, the global E-Commerce market is rapidly rising and estimated to reach $4.9 trillion by 2021. This undoubtedly triggers members of the criminal world to find paths to victims' wallets through the Web. Federal, local, and state law enforcement agencies along with private organizations reported 3 million cases of identity theft in 2019. Money was lost in about 25% of these cases.

From automating the most menial and repetitive tasks to free up the time to focus on higher level objectives, to assisting with customer service management and reducing the risk of frauds, AI is employed from back-office tasks to the frontend with nimbleness and agility. According to the Alan Turing Institute, with $70 billion USD spent by banks on compliance each year just in the U.S., the amount of money spent on fraud is staggering. And when the number of reported cases of payments-related fraud has increased by 66% between 2015 and 2016 in the United Kingdom, it's clear how this problem is much more than a momentary phenomenon. AI is a groundbreaking technology in the battle against financial fraud. ML algorithms are able to analyze millions of data points in a matter of seconds to identify anomalous transactional patterns.

Multi-label classification consists in classifying an instance into two or more classes simultaneously. It is a very challenging task present in many real-world applications, such as classification of biology, image, video, audio, and text. Recently, the interest in interpretable classification models has grown, partially as a consequence of regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation. In this context, we propose a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm that generates multiple rule-based multi-label classification models, allowing users to choose among models that offer different compromises between predictive power and interpretability. An important contribution of this work is that different from most algorithms, which usually generate models based on lists (ordered collections) of rules, our algorithm generates models based on sets (unordered collections) of rules, increasing interpretability. Also, by employing a conflict avoidance algorithm during the rule-creation, every rule within a given model is guaranteed to be consistent with every other rule in the same model. Thus, no conflict resolution strategy is required, evolving simpler models. We conducted experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets and compared our results with state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of predictive performance (F-Score) and interpretability (model size), and demonstrate that our best models had comparable F-Score and smaller model sizes.