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Autoregressive Models for Matrix-Valued Time Series

In finance, economics and many other fields, observations in a matrix form are often generated over time. For example, a set of key economic indicators are regularly reported in different countries every quarter. The observations at each quarter neatly form a matrix and are observed over many consecutive quarters. Dynamic transport networks with observations generated on the edges can be formed as a matrix observed over time. Although it is natural to turn the matrix observations into a long vector, and then use the standard vector time series models for analysis, it is often the case that the columns and rows of the matrix represent different types of structures that are closely interplayed. In this paper we follow the autoregressive structure for modeling time series and propose a novel matrix autoregressive model in a bilinear form that maintains and utilizes the matrix structure to achieve a greater dimensional reduction, as well as more interpretable results. Probabilistic properties of the models are investigated. Estimation procedures with their theoretical properties are presented and demonstrated with simulated and real examples.

ChamNet: Towards Efficient Network Design through Platform-Aware Model Adaptation

This paper proposes an efficient neural network (NN) architecture design methodology called Chameleon that honors given resource constraints. Instead of developing new building blocks or using computationally-intensive reinforcement learning algorithms, our approach leverages existing efficient network building blocks and focuses on exploiting hardware traits and adapting computation resources to fit target latency and/or energy constraints. We formulate platform-aware NN architecture search in an optimization framework and propose a novel algorithm to search for optimal architectures aided by efficient accuracy and resource (latency and/or energy) predictors. At the core of our algorithm lies an accuracy predictor built atop Gaussian Process with Bayesian optimization for iterative sampling. With a one-time building cost for the predictors, our algorithm produces state-of-the-art model architectures on different platforms under given constraints in just minutes. Our results show that adapting computation resources to building blocks is critical to model performance. Without the addition of any bells and whistles, our models achieve significant accuracy improvements against state-of-the-art hand-crafted and automatically designed architectures. We achieve 73.8% and 75.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet at 20ms latency on a mobile CPU and DSP. At reduced latency, our models achieve up to 8.5% (4.8%) and 6.6% (9.3%) absolute top-1 accuracy improvements compared to MobileNetV2 and MnasNet, respectively, on a mobile CPU (DSP), and 2.7% (4.6%) and 5.6% (2.6%) accuracy gains over ResNet-101 and ResNet-152, respectively, on an Nvidia GPU (Intel CPU).

Offline timed pattern matching under uncertainty

Given a log and a specification, timed pattern matching aims at exhibiting for which start and end dates a specification holds on that log. For example, ‘a given action is always followed by another action before a given deadline’. This problem has strong connections with monitoring real-time systems. We address here timed pattern matching in presence of an uncertain specification, i.e., that may contain timing parameters (e.g., the deadline can be uncertain or unknown). That is, we want to know for which start and end dates, and for what values of the deadline, this property holds. Or what is the minimum or maximum deadline (together with the corresponding start and end dates) for which this property holds. We propose here a framework for timed pattern matching based on parametric timed model checking. In contrast to most parametric timed problems, the solution is effectively computable, and we perform experiments using IMITATOR to show the applicability of our approach.

Nearly-Linear Time Spectral Graph Reduction for Scalable Graph Partitioning and Data Visualization

This paper proposes a scalable algorithmic framework for spectral reduction of large undirected graphs. The proposed method allows computing much smaller graphs while preserving the key spectral (structural) properties of the original graph. Our framework is built upon the following two key components: a spectrum-preserving node aggregation (reduction) scheme, as well as a spectral graph sparsification framework with iterative edge weight scaling. We show that the resulting spectrally-reduced graphs can robustly preserve the first few nontrivial eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the original graph Laplacian. In addition, the spectral graph reduction method has been leveraged to develop much faster algorithms for multilevel spectral graph partitioning as well as t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) of large data sets. We conducted extensive experiments using a variety of large graphs and data sets, and obtained very promising results. For instance, we are able to reduce the ‘coPapersCiteseer’ graph with 0.43 million nodes and 16 million edges to a much smaller graph with only 13K (32X fewer) nodes and 17K (950X fewer) edges in about 16 seconds; the spectrally-reduced graphs also allow us to achieve up to 1100X speedup for spectral graph partitioning and up to 60X speedup for t-SNE visualization of large data sets.

Analysis Methods in Neural Language Processing: A Survey

The field of natural language processing has seen impressive progress in recent years, with neural network models replacing many of the traditional systems. A plethora of new models have been proposed, many of which are thought to be opaque compared to their feature-rich counterparts. This has led researchers to analyze, interpret, and evaluate neural networks in novel and more fine-grained ways. In this survey paper, we review analysis methods in neural language processing, categorize them according to prominent research trends, highlight existing limitations, and point to potential directions for future work.

On the Relative Expressiveness of Bayesian and Neural Networks

A neural network computes a function. A central property of neural networks is that they are ‘universal approximators:’ for a given continuous function, there exists a neural network that can approximate it arbitrarily well, given enough neurons (and some additional assumptions). In contrast, a Bayesian network is a model, but each of its queries can be viewed as computing a function. In this paper, we identify some key distinctions between the functions computed by neural networks and those by marginal Bayesian network queries, showing that the former are more expressive than the latter. Moreover, we propose a simple augmentation to Bayesian networks (a testing operator), which enables their marginal queries to become ‘universal approximators.’

Lifelong Testing of Smart Autonomous Systems by Shepherding a Swarm of Watchdog Artificial Intelligence Agents

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies could be broadly categorised into Analytics and Autonomy. Analytics focuses on algorithms offering perception, comprehension, and projection of knowledge gleaned from sensorial data. Autonomy revolves around decision making, and influencing and shaping the environment through action production. A smart autonomous system (SAS) combines analytics and autonomy to understand, learn, decide and act autonomously. To be useful, SAS must be trusted and that requires testing. Lifelong learning of a SAS compounds the testing process. In the remote chance that it is possible to fully test and certify the system pre-release, which is theoretically an undecidable problem, it is near impossible to predict the future behaviours that these systems, alone or collectively, will exhibit. While it may be feasible to severely restrict such systems\textquoteright \ learning abilities to limit the potential unpredictability of their behaviours, an undesirable consequence may be severely limiting their utility. In this paper, we propose the architecture for a watchdog AI (WAI) agent dedicated to lifelong functional testing of SAS. We further propose system specifications including a level of abstraction whereby humans shepherd a swarm of WAI agents to oversee an ecosystem made of humans and SAS. The discussion extends to the challenges, pros, and cons of the proposed concept.

COSINE: Compressive Network Embedding on Large-scale Information Networks

There is recently a surge in approaches that learn low-dimensional embeddings of nodes in networks. As there are many large-scale real-world networks, it’s inefficient for existing approaches to store amounts of parameters in memory and update them edge after edge. With the knowledge that nodes having similar neighborhood will be close to each other in embedding space, we propose COSINE (COmpresSIve NE) algorithm which reduces the memory footprint and accelerates the training process by parameters sharing among similar nodes. COSINE applies graph partitioning algorithms to networks and builds parameter sharing dependency of nodes based on the result of partitioning. With parameters sharing among similar nodes, COSINE injects prior knowledge about higher structural information into training process which makes network embedding more efficient and effective. COSINE can be applied to any embedding lookup method and learn high-quality embeddings with limited memory and shorter training time. We conduct experiments of multi-label classification and link prediction, where baselines and our model have the same memory usage. Experimental results show that COSINE gives baselines up to 23% increase on classification and up to 25% increase on link prediction. Moreover, time of all representation learning methods using COSINE decreases from 30% to 70%.

A Multi-task Neural Approach for Emotion Attribution, Classification and Summarization

Emotional content is a crucial ingredient in user-generated videos. However, the sparsely expressed emotions in the user-generated video cause difficulties to emotions analysis in videos. In this paper, we propose a new neural approach—Bi-stream Emotion Attribution-Classification Network (BEAC-Net) to solve three related emotion analysis tasks: emotion recognition, emotion attribution and emotion-oriented summarization, in an integrated framework. BEAC-Net has two major constituents, an attribution network and a classification network. The attribution network extracts the main emotional segment that classification should focus on in order to mitigate the sparsity problem. The classification network utilizes both the extracted segment and the original video in a bi-stream architecture. We contribute a new dataset for the emotion attribution task with human-annotated ground-truth labels for emotion segments. Experiments on two video datasets demonstrate superior performance of the proposed framework and the complementary nature of the dual classification streams.

Example and Feature importance-based Explanations for Black-box Machine Learning Models

As machine learning models become more accurate, they typically become more complex and uninterpretable by humans. The black-box character of these models holds back its acceptance in practice, especially in high-risk domains where the consequences of failure could be catastrophic such as health-care or defense. Providing understandable and useful explanations behind ML models or predictions can increase the trust of the user. Example-based reasoning, which entails leveraging previous experience with analogous tasks to make a decision, is a well known strategy for problem solving and justification. This work presents a new explanation extraction method called LEAFAGE, for a prediction made by any black-box ML model. The explanation consists of the visualization of similar examples from the training set and the importance of each feature. Moreover, these explanations are contrastive which aims to take the expectations of the user into account. LEAFAGE is evaluated in terms of fidelity to the underlying black-box model and usefulness to the user. The results showed that LEAFAGE performs overall better than the current state-of-the-art method LIME in terms of fidelity, on ML models with non-linear decision boundary. A user-study was conducted which focused on revealing the differences between example-based and feature importance-based explanations. It showed that example-based explanations performed significantly better than feature importance-based explanation, in terms of perceived transparency, information sufficiency, competence and confidence. Counter-intuitively, when the gained knowledge of the participants was tested, it showed that they learned less about the black-box model after seeing a feature importance-based explanation than seeing no explanation at all. The participants found feature importance-based explanation vague and hard to generalize it to other instances.

GaussianProcesses.jl: A Nonparametric Bayes package for the Julia Language

Gaussian processes are a class of flexible nonparametric Bayesian tools that are widely used across the sciences, and in industry, to model complex data sources. Key to applying Gaussian process models is the availability of well-developed open source software, which is available in many programming languages. In this paper, we present a tutorial of the GaussianProcesses.jl package that has been developed for the Julia language. GaussianProcesses.jl utilises the inherent computational benefits of the Julia language, including multiple dispatch and just-in-time compilation, to produce a fast, flexible and user-friendly Gaussian processes package. The package provides a range of mean and kernel functions with supporting inference tools to fit the Gaussian process models, as well as a range of alternative likelihood functions to handle non-Gaussian data (e.g. binary classification models). The package makes efficient use of existing Julia packages to provide users with a range of optimization and plotting tools.

Multivariate Fractional Components Analysis

We investigate a setup for fractionally cointegrated time series which is formulated in terms of latent integrated and short-memory components. It accommodates nonstationary processes with different fractional orders and cointegration of different strengths and is applicable in high-dimensional settings. In an application to realized covariance matrices, we find that orthogonal short- and long-memory components provide a reasonable fit and competitive out-of-sample performance compared to several competitor methods.

Asymptotic distribution and convergence rates of stochastic algorithms for entropic optimal transportation between probability measures

This paper is devoted to the stochastic approximation of entropically regularized Wasserstein distances between two probability measures, also known as Sinkhorn divergences. The semi-dual formulation of such regularized optimal transportation problems can be rewritten as a non-strongly concave optimisation problem. It allows to implement a Robbins-Monro stochastic algorithm to estimate the Sinkhorn divergence using a sequence of data sampled from one of the two distributions. Our main contribution is to establish the almost sure convergence and the asymptotic normality of a new recursive estimator of the Sinkhorn divergence between two probability measures in the discrete and semi-discrete settings. We also study the rate of convergence of the expected excess risk of this estimator in the absence of strong concavity of the objective function. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real datasets are also provided to illustrate the usefulness of our approach for data analysis.

Wikipedia Text Reuse: Within and Without

We study text reuse related to Wikipedia at scale by compiling the first corpus of text reuse cases within Wikipedia as well as without (i.e., reuse of Wikipedia text in a sample of the Common Crawl). To discover reuse beyond verbatim copy and paste, we employ state-of-the-art text reuse detection technology, scaling it for the first time to process the entire Wikipedia as part of a distributed retrieval pipeline. We further report on a pilot analysis of the 100 million reuse cases inside, and the 1.6 million reuse cases outside Wikipedia that we discovered. Text reuse inside Wikipedia gives rise to new tasks such as article template induction, fixing quality flaws due to inconsistencies arising from asynchronous editing of reused passages, or complementing Wikipedia’s ontology. Text reuse outside Wikipedia yields a tangible metric for the emerging field of quantifying Wikipedia’s influence on the web. To foster future research into these tasks, and for reproducibility’s sake, the Wikipedia text reuse corpus and the retrieval pipeline are made freely available.

Persistence Bag-of-Words for Topological Data Analysis

Persistent homology (PH) is a rigorous mathematical theory that provides a robust descriptor of data in the form of persistence diagrams (PDs). PDs are compact 2D representations formed by multisets of points. Their variable size makes them, however, difficult to combine with typical machine learning workflows. In this paper, we introduce persistence bag-of-words, which is a novel, expressive and discriminative vectorized representation of PDs for topological data analysis. It represents PDs in a convenient way for machine learning and statistical analysis and has a number of favorable practical and theoretical properties like 1-Wasserstein stability. We evaluate our representation on several heterogeneous datasets and show its high discriminative power. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and even beyond in much less time than alternative approaches. Thereby, it facilitates the topological analysis of large-scale data sets in future.

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