Process mining techniques focus on extracting insight in processes from event logs. Process mining has the potential to provide valuable insights in (un)healthy habits and to contribute to ambient assisted living solutions when applied on data from smart home environments. However, events recorded in smart home environments are on the level of sensor triggers, at which process discovery algorithms produce overgeneralizing process models that allow for too much behavior and that are difficult to interpret for human experts. We show that abstracting the events to a higher-level interpretation can enable discovery of more precise and more comprehensible models. We present a framework for the extraction of features that can be used for abstraction with supervised learning methods that is based on the XES IEEE standard for event logs. This framework can automatically abstract sensor-level events to their interpretation at the human activity level, after training it on training data for which both the sensor and human activity events are known. We demonstrate our abstraction framework on three real-life smart home event logs and show that the process models that can be discovered after abstraction are more precise indeed.

More than 100 years ago, the invention of the internal combustion engine revolutionized automotive travel, and with it gave birth to a new industrial economy. Just as internal combustion once did, the proliferation of data science and analytics is once again reshaping the information economy and transforming how we interact with technology. Business analytics, in particular, is playing a pivotal role in improving operations at large-scale organizations. For example--UPS, a shipping service, saved $30 million in fuel by using predictive analytics. These kinds of cost savings are mouthwatering if you're a C-suite executive.

The volume of data generated by internet and social networks is increasing every day, and there is a clear need for efficient ways of extracting useful information from them. As those data can take different forms, it is important to use all the available data representations for prediction. In this paper, we focus our attention on supervised classification using both regular plain, tabular, data and structural information coming from a network structure. 14 techniques are investigated and compared in this study and can be divided in three classes: the first one uses only the plain data to build a classification model, the second uses only the graph structure and the last uses both information sources. The relative performances in these three cases are investigated. Furthermore, the effect of using a graph embedding and well-known indicators in spatial statistics is also studied. Possible applications are automatic classification of web pages or other linked documents, of people in a social network or of proteins in a biological complex system, to name a few. Based on our comparison, we draw some general conclusions and advices to tackle this particular classification task: some datasets can be better explained by their graph structure (graph-driven), or by their feature set (features-driven). The most efficient methods are discussed in both cases.

Identifying the flavour of neutral $B$ mesons production is one of the most important components needed in the study of time-dependent $CP$ violation. The harsh environment of the Large Hadron Collider makes it particularly hard to succeed in this task. We present an inclusive flavour-tagging algorithm as an upgrade of the algorithms currently used by the LHCb experiment. Specifically, a probabilistic model which efficiently combines information from reconstructed vertices and tracks using machine learning is proposed. The algorithm does not use information about underlying physics process. It reduces the dependence on the performance of lower level identification capacities and thus increases the overall performance. The proposed inclusive flavour-tagging algorithm is applicable to tag the flavour of $B$ mesons in any proton-proton experiment.

Many real datasets contain values missing not at random (MNAR). In this scenario, investigators often perform list-wise deletion, or delete samples with any missing values, before applying causal discovery algorithms. List-wise deletion is a sound and general strategy when paired with algorithms such as FCI and RFCI, but the deletion procedure also eliminates otherwise good samples that contain only a few missing values. In this report, we show that we can more efficiently utilize the observed values with test-wise deletion while still maintaining algorithmic soundness. Here, test-wise deletion refers to the process of list-wise deleting samples only among the variables required for each conditional independence (CI) test used in constraint-based searches. Test-wise deletion therefore often saves more samples than list-wise deletion for each CI test, especially when we have a sparse underlying graph. Our theoretical results show that test-wise deletion is sound under the justifiable assumption that none of the missingness mechanisms causally affect each other in the underlying causal graph. We also find that FCI and RFCI with test-wise deletion outperform their list-wise deletion and imputation counterparts on average when MNAR holds in both synthetic and real data.

Crowdsourcing platforms emerged as popular venues for purchasing human intelligence at low cost for large volumes of tasks. As many low-paid workers are prone to give noisy answers, one of the fundamental questions is how to identify more reliable workers and exploit this heterogeneity to infer the true answers accurately. Despite significant research efforts for classification tasks with discrete answers, little attention has been paid to regression tasks with continuous answers. The popular Dawid-Skene model for discrete answers has the algorithmic and mathematical simplicity in relation to low-rank structures. But it does not generalize for continuous valued answers. To this end, we introduce a new probabilistic model for crowdsourced regression capturing the heterogeneity of the workers, generalizing the Dawid-Skene model to the continuous domain. We design a message-passing algorithm for Bayesian inference inspired by the popular belief propagation algorithm. We showcase its performance first by proving that it achieves a near optimal mean squared error by comparing it to an oracle estimator. Asymptotically, we can provide a tighter analysis showing that the proposed algorithm achieves the exact optimal performance. We next show synthetic experiments confirming our theoretical predictions. As a practical application, we further emulate a crowdsourcing system reproducing PASCAL visual object classes datasets and show that de-noising the crowdsourced data from the proposed scheme can significantly improve the performance for the vision task.

"Speaker: Christopher Fonnesbeck This intermediate-level tutorial will provide students with hands-on experience applying practical statistical modeling methods on real data. Unlike many introductory statistics courses, we will not be applying ""cookbook"" methods that are easy to teach, but often inapplicable; instead, we will learn some foundational statistical methods that can be applied generally to a wide variety of problems: maximum likelihood, bootstrapping, linear regression, and other modern techniques. The tutorial will start with a short introduction on data manipulation and cleaning using [pandas](http://pandas.pydata.org/), Slightly more advanced topics include bootstrapping (for estimating uncertainty around estimates) and flexible linear regression methods using Bayesian methods. By using and modifying hand-coded implementations of these techniques, students will gain an understanding of how each method works.

We propose a novel approximate inference algorithm that approximates a target distribution by amortising the dynamics of a user-selected MCMC sampler. The idea is to initialise MCMC using samples from an approximation network, apply the MCMC operator to improve these samples, and finally use the samples to update the approximation network thereby improving its quality. This provides a new generic framework for approximate inference, allowing us to deploy highly complex, or implicitly defined approximation families with intractable densities, including approximations produced by warping a source of randomness through a deep neural network. Experiments consider image modelling with deep generative models as a challenging test for the method. Deep models trained using amortised MCMC are shown to generate realistic looking samples as well as producing diverse imputations for images with regions of missing pixels.

This book provides an introduction to statistical learning methods. It is aimed for upper level undergraduate students, masters students and Ph.D. students in the non-mathematical sciences. The book also contains a number of R labs with detailed explanations on how to implement the various methods in real life settings, and should be a valuable resource for a practicing data scientist.

So you know the Bayes rule. How does it relate to machine learning? It can be quite difficult to grasp how the puzzle pieces fit together - we know it took us a while. This article is an introduction we wish we had back then. While we have some grasp on the matter, we're not experts, so the following might contain inaccuracies or even outright errors. Feel free to point them out, either in the comments or privately.