Pattern similarity-based methods are widely used in classification and regression problems. Repeated, similar-shaped cycles observed in seasonal time series encourage to apply these methods for forecasting. In this paper we use the pattern similarity-based methods for forecasting monthly electricity demand expressing annual seasonality. An integral part of the models is the time series representation using patterns of time series sequences. Pattern representation ensures the input and output data unification through trend filtering and variance equalization. Consequently, pattern representation simplifies the forecasting problem and allows us to use models based on pattern similarity. We consider four such models: nearest neighbor model, fuzzy neighborhood model, kernel regression model and general regression neural network. A regression function is constructed by aggregation output patterns with weights dependent on the similarity between input patterns. The advantages of the proposed models are: clear principle of operation, small number of parameters to adjust, fast optimization procedure, good generalization ability, working on the newest data without retraining, robustness to missing input variables, and generating a vector as an output. In the experimental part of the work the proposed models were used to forecasting the monthly demand for 35 European countries. The model performances were compared with the performances of the classical models such as ARIMA and exponential smoothing as well as state-of-the-art models such as multilayer perceptron, neuro-fuzzy system and long short-term memory model. The results show high performance of the proposed models which outperform the comparative models in accuracy, simplicity and ease of optimization.

Energy-efficient navigation constitutes an important challenge in electric vehicles, due to their limited battery capacity. We employ a Bayesian approach to model energy consumption at road-segments for efficient navigation. In order to learn the model parameters, we develop an online learning framework and investigate several exploration strategies such as Thompson Sampling and Upper Confidence Bound. We then extend our online learning framework to multi-agent setting, where multiple vehicles adaptively navigate and learn the parameters of the energy model. We analyze Thompson Sampling and establish rigorous regret bounds on its performance. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of our methods via several real-world experiments on Luxembourg SUMO Traffic dataset.

Current deep reinforcement learning approaches incorporate minimal prior knowledge about the environment, limiting computational and sample efficiency. We incorporate a few object-based priors that humans are known to use: "Infants divide perceptual arrays into units that move as connected wholes, that move separately from one another, that tend to maintain their size and shape over motion, and that tend to act upon each other only on contact" [Spelke]. We propose a probabilistic object-based model of environments and use human object priors to develop an efficient self-supervised algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation of the model parameters from observations and for inferring objects directly from the perceptual stream. We then use object features and incorporate object-contact priors to improve the sample efficiency our object-based RL agent.We evaluate our approach on a subset of the Atari benchmarks, and learn up to four orders of magnitude faster than the standard deep Q-learning network, rendering rapid desktop experiments in this domain feasible. To our knowledge, our system is the first to learn any Atari task in fewer environment interactions than humans.

Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. Pattern recognition is closely related to artificial intelligence and machine learning,[1] together with applications such as data mining and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), and is often used interchangeably with these terms. However, these are distinguished: machine learning is one approach to pattern recognition, while other approaches include hand-crafted (not learned) rules or heuristics; and pattern recognition is one approach to artificial intelligence, while other approaches include symbolic artificial intelligence.[2] The field of pattern recognition is concerned with the automatic discovery of regularities in data through the use of computer algorithms and with the use of these regularities to take actions such as classifying the data into different categories.[3] This article focuses on machine learning approaches to pattern recognition.

Even though model predictive control (MPC) is currently the main algorithm for insulin control in the artificial pancreas (AP), it usually requires complex online optimizations, which are infeasible for resource-constrained medical devices. MPC also typically relies on state estimation, an error-prone process. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to AP control that uses Imitation Learning to synthesize neural-network insulin policies from MPC-computed demonstrations. Such policies are computationally efficient and, by instrumenting MPC at training time with full state information, they can directly map measurements into optimal therapy decisions, thus bypassing state estimation. We apply Bayesian inference via Monte Carlo Dropout to learn policies, which allows us to quantify prediction uncertainty and thereby derive safer therapy decisions. We show that our control policies trained under a specific patient model readily generalize (in terms of model parameters and disturbance distributions) to patient cohorts, consistently outperforming traditional MPC with state estimation.

In Bayesian Deep Learning, distributions over the output of classification neural networks are approximated by first constructing a Gaussian distribution over the weights, then sampling from it to receive a distribution over the categorical output distribution. This is costly. We reconsider old work to construct a Dirichlet approximation of this output distribution, which yields an analytic map between Gaussian distributions in logit space and Dirichlet distributions (the conjugate prior to the categorical) in the output space. We argue that the resulting Dirichlet distribution has theoretical and practical advantages, in particular more efficient computation of the uncertainty estimate, scaling to large datasets and networks like ImageNet and DenseNet. We demonstrate the use of this Dirichlet approximation by using it to construct a lightweight uncertainty-aware output ranking for the ImageNet setup.

One obstacle to the use of Gaussian processes (GPs) in large-scale problems, and as a component in deep learning system, is the need for bespoke derivations and implementations for small variations in the model or inference. In order to improve the utility of GPs we need a modular system that allows rapid implementation and testing, as seen in the neural network community. We present a mathematical and software framework for scalable approximate inference in GPs, which combines interdomain approximations and multiple outputs. Our framework, implemented in GPflow, provides a unified interface for many existing multioutput models, as well as more recent convolutional structures. This simplifies the creation of deep models with GPs, and we hope that this work will encourage more interest in this approach.

We propose a novel actor-critic, model-free reinforcement learning algorithm which employs a Bayesian method of parameter space exploration to solve environments. A Gaussian process is used to learn the expected return of a policy given the policy's parameters. The system is trained by updating the parameters using gradient descent on a new surrogate loss function consisting of the Proximal Policy Optimization 'Clipped' loss function and a bonus term representing the expected improvement acquisition function given by the Gaussian process. This new method is shown to be comparable to and at times empirically outperform current algorithms on environments that simulate robotic locomotion using the MuJoCo physics engine.

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) are trained to optimize an entire distribution over their weights instead of a single set, having significant advantages in terms of, e.g., interpretability, multi-task learning, and calibration. Because of the intractability of the resulting optimization problem, most BNNs are either sampled through Monte Carlo methods, or trained by minimizing a suitable Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO) on a variational approximation. In this paper, we propose a variant of the latter, wherein we replace the Kullback-Leibler divergence in the ELBO term with a Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) estimator, inspired by recent work in variational inference. After motivating our proposal based on the properties of the MMD term, we proceed to show a number of empirical advantages of the proposed formulation over the state-of-the-art. In particular, our BNNs achieve higher accuracy on multiple benchmarks, including several image classification tasks. In addition, they are more robust to the selection of a prior over the weights, and they are better calibrated. As a second contribution, we provide a new formulation for estimating the uncertainty on a given prediction, showing it performs in a more robust fashion against adversarial attacks and the injection of noise over their inputs, compared to more classical criteria such as the differential entropy.

Symmetric property estimation is a fundamental and well studied problem in machine learning and statistics. In this problem, we are given n i.i.d samples from an unknown distribution 1 p and asked to estimate f(p), where f is a symmetric property (i.e. it does not depend on the labels of the symbols). Over the past few years, the computational and sample complexities for estimating many symmetric properties have been extensively studied. Estimators with optimal sample complexities have been obtained for several properties including entropy [VV11b, WY16a, JVHW15], distance to uniformity [VV11a, JHW16], and support [VV11b, WY15]. All aforementioned estimators were property specific and therefore, a natural question is to design a universal estimator. In [ADOS16], the authors showed that the distribution that maximizes the profile likelihood, i.e. the likelihood of the multiset of frequencies of elements in the sample, referred to as profile maximum likelihood (PML) distribution, can be used as a universal plugin estimator.