TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: In this paper, we theoretically justify an approach popular among participants of the Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge to optimize approximate median significance (AMS). The approach is based on the following two-stage procedure. First, a real-valued function f is learned by minimizing a surrogate loss for binary classification, such as logistic loss, on the training sample. Then, given f , a threshold θ̂ is tuned on a separate validation sample, by direct optimization of AMS. We show that the regret of the resulting classifier (obtained from thresholding f on θ̂) measured with respect to the squared AMS, is upperbounded by the regret of f measured with respect to the logistic loss. Hence, we prove that minimizing logistic surrogate is a consistent method of optimizing AMS.

SOLUTION: Consistent optimization of AMS by logistic loss minimization

PROBLEM: As food becomes an important part of modern life, recipes shared on the web are a great indicator of civilizations and culinary attitudes in different countries. Similarly, ingredients, flavors, and nutrition information are strong signals of the taste preferences of individuals from various parts of the world. Yet, we do not have a thorough understanding of these palate varieties. In this paper, we present a large-scale study of recipes published on the Web and their content, aiming to understand cuisines and culinary habits around the world. Using a database of more than 157K recipes from over 200 different cuisines, we analyze ingredients, flavors, and nutritional values which distinguish dishes from different regions, and use this knowledge to assess the predictability of recipes from different cuisines. We then use country health statistics to understand the relation between these factors and health indicators of different nations, such as obesity, diabetes, migration, and health expenditure. Our results confirm the strong effects of geographical and cultural similarities on recipes, health indicators, and culinary preferences between countries around the world.

SOLUTION: Kissing Cuisines: Exploring Worldwide Culinary Habits on the Web

PROBLEM: Non-technical losses (NTL) such as electricity theft cause significant harm to our economies, as in some countries they may range up to 40% of the total electricity distributed. Detecting NTLs requires costly on-site inspections. Accurate prediction of NTLs for customers using machine learning is therefore crucial. To date, related research largely ignore that the two classes of regular and non-regular customers are highly imbalanced, that NTL proportions may change and mostly consider small data sets, often not allowing to deploy the results in production. In this paper, we present a comprehensive approach to assess three NTL detection models for different NTL proportions in large real world data sets of 100Ks of customers: Boolean rules, fuzzy logic and Support Vector Machine. This work has resulted in appreciable results that are about to be deployed in a leading industry solution. We believe that the considerations and observations made in this contribution are necessary for future smart meter research in order to report their effectiveness on imbalanced and large real world data sets.

SOLUTION:
Large-Scale Detection of Non-Technical Losses in Imbalanced Data Sets