Uncertainty
Some Considerations and a Benchmark Related to the CNF Property of the Koczy-Hirota Fuzzy Rule Interpolation
Alzubi, Maen, Kovacs, Szilveszter
The goal of this paper is twofold. Once to highlight some basic problematic properties of the KH Fuzzy Rule Interpolation through examples, secondly to set up a brief Benchmark set of Examples, which is suitable for testing other Fuzzy Rule Interpolation (FRI) methods against these ill conditions. Fuzzy Rule Interpolation methods were originally proposed to handle the situation of missing fuzzy rules (sparse rule-bases) and to reduce the decision complexity. Fuzzy Rule Interpolation is an important technique for implementing inference with sparse fuzzy rule-bases. Even if a given observation has no overlap with the antecedent of any rule from the rule-base, FRI may still conclude a conclusion. The first FRI method was the Koczy and Hirota proposed "Linear Interpolation", which was later renamed to "KH Fuzzy Interpolation" by the followers. There are several conditions and criteria have been suggested for unifying the common requirements an FRI methods have to satisfy. One of the most common one is the demand for a convex and normal fuzzy (CNF) conclusion, if all the rule antecedents and consequents are CNF sets. The KH FRI is the one, which cannot fulfill this condition. This paper is focusing on the conditions, where the KH FRI fails the demand for the CNF conclusion. By setting up some CNF rule examples, the paper also defines a Benchmark, in which other FRI methods can be tested if they can produce CNF conclusion where the KH FRI fails.
Identifying Hidden Buyers in Darknet Markets via Dirichlet Hawkes Process
Zheng, Panpan, Yuan, Shuhan, Wu, Xintao, Wu, Yubao
The darknet markets are notorious black markets in cyberspace, which involve selling or brokering drugs, weapons, stolen credit cards, and other illicit goods. To combat illicit transactions in the cyberspace, it is important to analyze the behaviors of participants in darknet markets. Currently, many studies focus on studying the behavior of vendors. However, there is no much work on analyzing buyers. The key challenge is that the buyers are anonymized in darknet markets. For most of the darknet markets, We only observe the first and last digits of a buyer's ID, such as ``a**b''. To tackle this challenge, we propose a hidden buyer identification model, called UNMIX, which can group the transactions from one hidden buyer into one cluster given a transaction sequence from an anonymized ID. UNMIX is able to model the temporal dynamics information as well as the product, comment, and vendor information associated with each transaction. As a result, the transactions with similar patterns in terms of time and content group together as the subsequence from one hidden buyer. Experiments on the data collected from three real-world darknet markets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach measured by various clustering metrics. Case studies on real transaction sequences explicitly show that our approach can group transactions with similar patterns into the same clusters.
Item Response Theory based Ensemble in Machine Learning
In this article, we propose a novel probabilistic framework to improve the accuracy of a weighted majority voting algorithm. In order to assign higher weights to the classifiers which can correctly classify hard-to-classify instances, we introduce the Item Response Theory (IRT) framework to evaluate the samples' difficulty and classifiers' ability simultaneously. Three models are created with different assumptions suitable for different cases. When making an inference, we keep a balance between the accuracy and complexity. In our experiment, all the base models are constructed by single trees via bootstrap. To explain the models, we illustrate how the IRT ensemble model constructs the classifying boundary. We also compare their performance with other widely used methods and show that our model performs well on 19 datasets.
Model-Augmented Nearest-Neighbor Estimation of Conditional Mutual Information for Feature Selection
Yang, Alan, Ghassami, AmirEmad, Raginsky, Maxim, Kiyavash, Negar, Rosenbaum, Elyse
Markov blanket feature selection, while theoretically optimal, generally is challenging to implement. This is due to the shortcomings of existing approaches to conditional independence (CI) testing, which tend to struggle either with the curse of dimensionality or computational complexity. We propose a novel two-step approach which facilitates Markov blanket feature selection in high dimensions. First, neural networks are used to map features to low-dimensional representations. In the second step, CI testing is performed by applying the k-NN conditional mutual information estimator to the learned feature maps. The mappings are designed to ensure that mapped samples both preserve information and share similar information about the target variable if and only if they are close in Euclidean distance. We show that these properties boost the performance of the k-NN estimator in the second step. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on synthetic, as well as real data pertaining to datacenter hard disk drive failures.
Provably Convergent Off-Policy Actor-Critic with Function Approximation
Zhang, Shangtong, Liu, Bo, Yao, Hengshuai, Whiteson, Shimon
We present the first provably convergent off-policy actor-critic algorithm (COF-PAC) with function approximation in a two-timescale form. Key to COF-PAC is the introduction of a new critic, the emphasis critic, which is trained via Gradient Emphasis Learning (GEM), a novel combination of the key ideas of Gradient Temporal Difference Learning and Emphatic Temporal Difference Learning. With the help of the emphasis critic and the canonical value function critic, we show convergence for COF-PAC, where the critics are linear and the actor can be nonlinear.
Online Replanning in Belief Space for Partially Observable Task and Motion Problems
Garrett, Caelan Reed, Paxton, Chris, Lozano-Pérez, Tomás, Kaelbling, Leslie Pack, Fox, Dieter
-- T o solve multi-step manipulation tasks in the real world, an autonomous robot must take actions to observe its environment and react to unexpected observations. This may require opening a drawer to observe its contents or moving an object out of the way to examine the space behind it. If the robot fails to detect an important object, it must update its belief about the world and compute a new plan of action. Additionally, a robot that acts noisily will never exactly arrive at a desired state. Still, it is important that the robot adjusts accordingly in order to keep making progress towards achieving the goal. In this work, we present an online planning and execution system for robots faced with these kinds of challenges. Our approach is able to efficiently solve partially observable problems both in simulation and in a real-world kitchen. Robots acting autonomously in human environments are faced with a variety of challenges. First, they must make both discrete decisions about what object to manipulate as well as continuous decisions about which motions to execute to achieve a desired interaction. Planning in these large hybrid spaces is the subject of integrated T ask and Motion Planning (T AMP) [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6].
(When) Is Truth-telling Favored in AI Debate?
For some problems, humans may not be able to accurately judge the goodness of AIproposed solutions. Irving, Christiano, and Amodei (2018) propose that in such cases, we may use a debate between two AI systems to amplify the problem-solving capabilities of a human judge. We introduce a mathematical framework that can model debates of this type and propose that the quality of debate designs should be measured by the accuracy of the most persuasive answer. We describe a simple instance of the debate framework called feature debate and analyze the degree to which such debates track the truth. We argue that despite being ver y simple, feature debates nonetheless capture many aspects o f practical debates such as the incentives to confuse the judg e or stall to prevent losing. We then outline how these models should be generalized to analyze a wider range of debate phenomena.
Accurate Uncertainty Estimation and Decomposition in Ensemble Learning
Liu, Jeremiah Zhe, Paisley, John, Kioumourtzoglou, Marianthi-Anna, Coull, Brent
Ensemble learning is a standard approach to building machine learning systems that capture complex phenomena in real-world data. An important aspect of these systems is the complete and valid quantification of model uncertainty. We introduce a Bayesian nonparametric ensemble (BNE) approach that augments an existing ensemble model to account for different sources of model uncertainty. BNE augments a model's prediction and distribution functions using Bayesian nonparametric machinery. It has a theoretical guarantee in that it robustly estimates the uncertainty patterns in the data distribution, and can decompose its overall predictive uncertainty into distinct components that are due to different sources of noise and error. We show that our method achieves accurate uncertainty estimates under complex observational noise, and illustrate its real-world utility in terms of uncertainty decomposition and model bias detection for an ensemble in predict air pollution exposures in Eastern Massachusetts, USA.
TSK-Streams: Learning TSK Fuzzy Systems on Data Streams
Shaker, Ammar, Hüllermeier, Eyke
In many practical applications of machine learning and pred ictive modeling, data is produced incrementally in the course of time and observed in the form of a continuous, potentially unbounded stream of observations. Correspond ingly, the problem of learning from data streams has recently received increasing attenti on (Gama, 2012). Algorithms for learning on streams must be able to process the data in a si ngle pass, which implies an incremental mode of learning, and to adapt to changes of the u nderlying data-generating process (Domingos and Hulten, 2003). A popular approach for learning on data streams, both for cla ssification and regression, is rule induction, in the fuzzy logic and computational inte lligence community also known as "evolving fuzzy systems" (Lughofer, 2011). Shaker et al. (2017) proposed a method for regression that builds on a very efficient and effective techniq ue for rule induction, which 1 is inspired by the state-of-the-art machine learning algor ithm AMRules, and combines it with the strengths of fuzzy modeling. Thus, the method induc es a set of fuzzy rules, which, compared to conventional rules with Boolean antecedents, h as the advantage of producing smooth regression functions. The method presented in this p aper, called TSK-Streams, is a revised and improved variant. The main modifications and novel contributions are as follows.
Alleviating Label Switching with Optimal Transport
Monteiller, Pierre, Claici, Sebastian, Chien, Edward, Mirzazadeh, Farzaneh, Solomon, Justin, Yurochkin, Mikhail
Label switching is a phenomenon arising in mixture model posterior inference that prevents one from meaningfully assessing posterior statistics using standard Monte Carlo procedures. This issue arises due to invariance of the posterior under actions of a group; for example, permuting the ordering of mixture components has no effect on the likelihood. We propose a resolution to label switching that leverages machinery from optimal transport. Our algorithm efficiently computes posterior statistics in the quotient space of the symmetry group. We give conditions under which there is a meaningful solution to label switching and demonstrate advantages over alternative approaches on simulated and real data.