Uncertainty
Neural ODE and DAE Modules for Power System Dynamic Modeling
Xiao, Tannan, Chen, Ying, He, Tirui, Guan, Huizhe
The time-domain simulation is the fundamental tool for power system transient stability analysis. Accurate and reliable simulations rely on accurate dynamic component modeling. In practical power systems, dynamic component modeling has long faced the challenges of model determination and model calibration, especially with the rapid development of renewable generation and power electronics. In this paper, based on the general framework of neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), a modified neural ODE module and a neural differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) module for power system dynamic component modeling are proposed. The modules adopt an autoencoder to raise the dimension of state variables, model the dynamics of components with artificial neural networks (ANNs), and keep the numerical integration structure. In the neural DAE module, an additional ANN is used to calculate injection currents. The neural models can be easily integrated into time-domain simulations. With datasets consisting of sampled curves of input variables and output variables, the proposed modules can be used to fulfill the tasks of parameter inference, physics-data-integrated modeling, black-box modeling, etc., and can be easily integrated into power system dynamic simulations. Some simple numerical tests are carried out in the IEEE-39 system and prove the validity and potentiality of the proposed modules.
Learning Stochastic Shortest Path with Linear Function Approximation
Min, Yifei, He, Jiafan, Wang, Tianhao, Gu, Quanquan
The Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) model refers to a type of reinforcement learning (RL) problems where an agent repeatedly interacts with a stochastic environment and aims to reach some specific goal state while minimizing the cumulative cost. Compared with other popular RL settings such as episodic and infinite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), the horizon length in SSP is random, varies across different policies, and can potentially be infinite because the interaction only stops when arriving at the goal state. Therefore, the SSP model includes both episodic and infinitehorizon MDPs as special cases, and is comparably more general and of broader applicability. In particular, many goal-oriented real-world problems fit better into the SSP model, such as navigation and GO game (Andrychowicz et al., 2017; Nasiriany et al., 2019). In recent years, there emerges a line of works on developing efficient algorithms and the corresponding analyses for learning SSP. Most of them consider the episodic setting, where the interaction between the agent and the environment proceeds in K episodes (Cohen et al., 2020; Tarbouriech et al., 2020a). For tabular SSP models where the sizes of the action and state space are finite, Cohen et al. (2021) developed a finite-horizon reduction algorithm that achieves the minimax
5 Concrete Benefits of Bayesian Statistics
Many of us (myself included) have felt discouraged from using Bayesian statistics for analysis. Supposedly, Bayesian statistics has a bad reputation: it is difficult and heavily dependent on math. Also, because of its relevance to many fields, Data Science included, writers and professionals, want to get a head start by publishing articles on how the formula works. I believe data professionals, academics, existing books, and online courses are responsible for creating the negative stereotype of Bayes' hard work. We can all agree that not everyone is attracted to mathematical formulas.
Box-Cox Transformation for Normalizing a Non-normal Variable in R - Universe of Data Science
Box-Cox transformation is commonly used remedy when the normality is not met. This comherensive guide includes estimation techniques and use of Box-Cox transformation in practice. Find out how to apply Box-Cox transformation in R. In this tutorial, we will work on Box-Cox transformation in R. Firstly, we will mention two types of estimation techniques for Box-Cox transformation parameter. These are maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and estimation via normality tests. Secondly, we will work how to apply Box-Cox transformation in practice.
Conditional Deep Gaussian Processes: empirical Bayes hyperdata learning
It is desirable to combine the expressive power of deep learning with Gaussian Process (GP) in one expressive Bayesian learning model. Deep kernel learning showed success in adopting a deep network for feature extraction followed by a GP used as function model. Recently,it was suggested that, albeit training with marginal likelihood, the deterministic nature of feature extractor might lead to overfitting while the replacement with a Bayesian network seemed to cure it. Here, we propose the conditional Deep Gaussian Process (DGP) in which the intermediate GPs in hierarchical composition are supported by the hyperdata and the exposed GP remains zero mean. Motivated by the inducing points in sparse GP, the hyperdata also play the role of function supports, but are hyperparameters rather than random variables. We follow our previous moment matching approach to approximate the marginal prior for conditional DGP with a GP carrying an effective kernel. Thus, as in empirical Bayes, the hyperdata are learned by optimizing the approximate marginal likelihood which implicitly depends on the hyperdata via the kernel. We shall show the equivalence with the deep kernel learning in the limit of dense hyperdata in latent space. However, the conditional DGP and the corresponding approximate inference enjoy the benefit of being more Bayesian than deep kernel learning. Preliminary extrapolation results demonstrate expressive power from the depth of hierarchy by exploiting the exact covariance and hyperdata learning, in comparison with GP kernel composition, DGP variational inference and deep kernel learning. We also address the non-Gaussian aspect of our model as well as way of upgrading to a full Bayes inference.
Map Induction: Compositional spatial submap learning for efficient exploration in novel environments
Sharma, Sugandha, Curtis, Aidan, Kryven, Marta, Tenenbaum, Josh, Fiete, Ila
Humans are expert explorers. Understanding the computational cognitive mechanisms that support this efficiency can advance the study of the human mind and enable more efficient exploration algorithms. We hypothesize that humans explore new environments efficiently by inferring the structure of unobserved spaces using spatial information collected from previously explored spaces. This cognitive process can be modeled computationally using program induction in a Hierarchical Bayesian framework that explicitly reasons about uncertainty with strong spatial priors. Using a new behavioral Map Induction Task, we demonstrate that this computational framework explains human exploration behavior better than non-inductive models and outperforms state-of-the-art planning algorithms when applied to a realistic spatial navigation domain.
Path Signature Area-Based Causal Discovery in Coupled Time Series
Coupled dynamical systems are frequently observed in nature, but often not well understood in terms of their causal structure without additional domain knowledge about the system. Especially when analyzing observational time series data of dynamical systems where it is not possible to conduct controlled experiments, for example time series of climate variables, it can be challenging to determine how features causally influence each other. There are many techniques available to recover causal relationships from data, such as Granger causality, convergent cross mapping, and causal graph structure learning approaches such as PCMCI. Path signatures and their associated signed areas provide a new way to approach the analysis of causally linked dynamical systems, particularly in informing a model-free, data-driven approach to algorithmic causal discovery. With this paper, we explore the use of path signatures in causal discovery and propose the application of confidence sequences to analyze the significance of the magnitude of the signed area between two variables. These confidence sequence regions converge with greater sampling length, and in conjunction with analyzing pairwise signed areas across time-shifted versions of the time series, can help identify the presence of lag/lead causal relationships. This approach provides a new way to define the confidence of a causal link existing between two time series, and ultimately may provide a framework for hypothesis testing to define whether one time series causes another.
Hierarchical Few-Shot Generative Models
Giannone, Giorgio, Winther, Ole
A few-shot generative model should be able to generate data from a distribution by only observing a limited set of examples. In few-shot learning the model is trained on data from many sets from different distributions sharing some underlying properties such as sets of characters from different alphabets or sets of images of different type objects. We study a latent variables approach that extends the Neural Statistician [8] to a fully hierarchical approach with an attention-based point to set-level aggregation. We extend the previous work to iterative data sampling, likelihood-based model comparison, and adaptation-free out of distribution generalization. Our results show that the hierarchical formulation better captures the intrinsic variability within the sets in the small data regime. With this work we generalize deep latent variable approaches to few-shot learning, taking a step towards large-scale few-shot generation with a formulation that readily can work with current state-of-the-art deep generative models.
On the Tractability of Neural Causal Inference
Zečević, Matej, Dhami, Devendra Singh, Kersting, Kristian
Roth (1996) proved that any form of marginal inference with probabilistic graphical models (e.g. Bayesian Networks) will at least be NP-hard. Introduced and extensively investigated in the past decade, the neural probabilistic circuits known as sum-product network (SPN) offers linear time complexity. On another note, research around neural causal models (NCM) recently gained traction, demanding a tighter integration of causality for machine learning. To this end, we present a theoretical investigation of if, when, how and under what cost tractability occurs for different NCM. We prove that SPN-based causal inference is generally tractable, opposed to standard MLP-based NCM. We further introduce a new tractable NCM-class that is efficient in inference and fully expressive in terms of Pearl's Causal Hierarchy. Our comparative empirical illustration on simulations and standard benchmarks validates our theoretical proofs.
Mechanistic Interpretation of Machine Learning Inference: A Fuzzy Feature Importance Fusion Approach
Rengasamy, Divish, Mase, Jimiama M., Torres, Mercedes Torres, Rothwell, Benjamin, Winkler, David A., Figueredo, Grazziela P.
With the widespread use of machine learning to support decision-making, it is increasingly important to verify and understand the reasons why a particular output is produced. Although post-training feature importance approaches assist this interpretation, there is an overall lack of consensus regarding how feature importance should be quantified, making explanations of model predictions unreliable. In addition, many of these explanations depend on the specific machine learning approach employed and on the subset of data used when calculating feature importance. A possible solution to improve the reliability of explanations is to combine results from multiple feature importance quantifiers from different machine learning approaches coupled with re-sampling. Current state-of-the-art ensemble feature importance fusion uses crisp techniques to fuse results from different approaches. There is, however, significant loss of information as these approaches are not context-aware and reduce several quantifiers to a single crisp output. More importantly, their representation of 'importance' as coefficients is misleading and incomprehensible to end-users and decision makers. Here we show how the use of fuzzy data fusion methods can overcome some of the important limitations of crisp fusion methods.