In scientific inference problems, the underlying statistical modeling assumptions have a crucial impact on the end results. There exist, however, only a few automatic means for validating these fundamental modelling assumptions. The contribution in this paper is a general criterion to evaluate the consistency of a set of statistical models with respect to observed data. This is achieved by automatically gauging the models' ability to generate data that is similar to the observed data. Importantly, the criterion follows from the model class itself and is therefore directly applicable to a broad range of inference problems with varying data types. The proposed data consistency criterion is illustrated and evaluated using three synthetic and two real data sets.

Although there are millions of transgender people in the world, a lack of information exists about their health issues. This issue has consequences for the medical field, which only has a nascent understanding of how to identify and meet this population's health-related needs. Social media sites like Twitter provide new opportunities for transgender people to overcome these barriers by sharing their personal health experiences. Our research employs a computational framework to collect tweets from self-identified transgender users, detect those that are health-related, and identify their information needs. This framework is significant because it provides a macro-scale perspective on an issue that lacks investigation at national or demographic levels. Our findings identified 54 distinct health-related topics that we grouped into 7 broader categories. Further, we found both linguistic and topical differences in the health-related information shared by transgender men (TM) as com-pared to transgender women (TW). These findings can help inform medical and policy-based strategies for health interventions within transgender communities. Also, our proposed approach can inform the development of computational strategies to identify the health-related information needs of other marginalized populations.

Hence, it is seldom the case where a single oracle labels an entire collection. Furthermore, the Web, through its social nature, also exploits the wisdom of crowds to annotate large collections of documents and images. By categorizing texts, tagging images or rating products and places, Web users are generating large volumes of labeled content. However, when learning supervised models from crowds, the quality of labels can vary significantly due to task subjectivity and differences in annotator reliability (or bias) [9], [10]. If we consider a sentiment analysis task, it becomes clear that the subjectiveness of the exercise is prone to generate considerably distinct labels from different annotators. Similarly, online product reviews are known to vary considerably depending on the personal biases and volatility of the reviewer's opinions. It is therefore essential to account for these issues when learning from this increasingly common type of data. Hence, the interest of researchers on building models that take the reliabilities of different annotators into consideration and mitigate the effect of their biases has spiked during the last few years (e.g.

Frequentist Statistics tests whether an event (hypothesis) occurs or not. It calculates the probability of an event in the long run of the experiment. A very common flaw found in frequentist approach i.e. dependence of the result of an experiment on the number of times the experiment is repeated. Bayesian statistics is a mathematical procedure that applies probabilities to statistical problems. It provides people the tools to update their beliefs in the evidence of new data.

The combination of a CNN detector and a search framework forms the basis for local object/pattern detection. To handle the waste of regional information and the defective compromise between efficiency and accuracy, this paper proposes a probabilistic model with a powerful search framework. By mapping an image into a probabilistic distribution of objects, this new model gives more informative outputs with less computation. The setting and analytic traits are elaborated in this paper, followed by a series of experiments carried out on FDDB, which show that the proposed model is sound, efficient and analytic.

The Dynamic Chain Event Graph (DCEG) is able to depict many classes of discrete random processes exhibiting asymmetries in their developments and context-specific conditional probabilities structures. However, paradoxically, this very generality has so far frustrated its wide application. So in this paper we develop an object-oriented method to fully analyse a particularly useful and feasibly implementable new subclass of these graphical models called the N Time-Slice DCEG (NT-DCEG). After demonstrating a close relationship between an NT-DCEG and a specific class of Markov processes, we discuss how graphical modellers can exploit this connection to gain a deep understanding of their processes. We also show how to read from the topology of this graph context-specific independence statements that can then be checked by domain experts. Our methods are illustrated throughout using examples of dynamic multivariate processes describing inmate radicalisation in a prison.

Approaches to decision-making under uncertainty in the belief function framework are reviewed. Most methods are shown to blend criteria for decision under ignorance with the maximum expected utility principle of Bayesian decision theory. A distinction is made between methods that construct a complete preference relation among acts, and those that allow incomparability of some acts due to lack of information. Methods developed in the imprecise probability framework are applicable in the Dempster-Shafer context and are also reviewed. Shafer's constructive decision theory, which substitutes the notion of goal for that of utility, is described and contrasted with other approaches. The paper ends by pointing out the need to carry out deeper investigation of fundamental issues related to decision-making with belief functions and to assess the descriptive, normative and prescriptive values of the different approaches.

Collaborative filtering is an important technique for recommendation. Whereas it has been repeatedly shown to be effective in previous work, its performance remains unsatisfactory in many real-world applications, especially those where the items or users are highly diverse. In this paper, we explore an ensemble-based framework to enhance the capability of a recommender in handling diverse data. Specifically, we formulate a probabilistic model which integrates the items, the users, as well as the associations between them into a generative process. On top of this formulation, we further derive a progressive algorithm to construct an ensemble of collaborative filters. In each iteration, a new filter is derived from re-weighted entries and incorporated into the ensemble. It is noteworthy that while the algorithmic procedure of our algorithm is apparently similar to boosting, it is derived from an essentially different formulation and thus differs in several key technical aspects. We tested the proposed method on three large datasets, and observed substantial improvement over the state of the art, including L2Boost, an effective method based on boosting.

As a promising area in artificial intelligence, a new learning paradigm, called Small Sample Learning (SSL), has been attracting prominent research attention in the recent years. In this paper, we aim to present a survey to comprehensively introduce the current techniques proposed on this topic. Specifically, current SSL techniques can be mainly divided into two categories. The first category of SSL approaches can be called "concept learning", which emphasizes learning new concepts from only few related observations. The purpose is mainly to simulate human learning behaviors like recognition, generation, imagination, synthesis and analysis. The second category is called "experience learning", which usually co-exists with the large sample learning manner of conventional machine learning. This category mainly focuses on learning with insufficient samples, and can also be called small data learning in some literatures. More extensive surveys on both categories of SSL techniques are introduced and some neuroscience evidences are provided to clarify the rationality of the entire SSL regime, and the relationship with human learning process. Some discussions on the main challenges and possible future research directions along this line are also presented.

There are many examples of human decision making which cannot be modeled by classical probabilistic and logic models, on which the current AI systems are based. Hence the need for a modeling framework which can enable intelligent systems to detect and predict cognitive biases in human decisions to facilitate better human-agent interaction. We give a few examples of irrational behavior and use a generalized probabilistic model inspired by the mathematical framework of Quantum Theory to model and explain such behavior.