In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.
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Question: Electronic Health Records (EHR) comprise of longitudinal clinical observations portrayed with sparsity, irregularity, and high-dimensionality which become the major obstacles in drawing reliable downstream outcome. Despite greatly numbers of imputation methods are being proposed to tackle these issues, most of the existing methods ignore correlated features or temporal dynamics and entirely put aside the uncertainty. In particular, since the missing values estimates have the risk of being imprecise, it motivates us to pay attention to reliable and less certain information differently. In this work, we propose a novel variational-recurrent imputation network (V-RIN), which unified imputation and prediction network, by taking into account the correlated features, temporal dynamics, and further utilizing the uncertainty to alleviate the risk of biased missing values estimates. Specifically, we leverage the deep generative model to estimate the missing values based on the distribution among variables and a recurrent imputation network to exploit the temporal relations in conjunction with utilization of the uncertainty. We validated the effectiveness of our proposed model with publicly available real-world EHR dataset, PhysioNet Challenge 2012, and compared the results with other state-of-the-art competing methods in the literature.

Answer: Our variational-recurrent imputation network (V-RIN) takes into account the correlated features, temporal dynamics, and further utilizes the uncertainty to alleviate the risk of biased missing values estimates.

Question: Deep ensembles have been empirically shown to be a promising approach for improving accuracy, uncertainty and out-of-distribution robustness of deep learning models. While deep ensembles were theoretically motivated by the bootstrap, non-bootstrap ensembles trained with just random initialization also perform well in practice, which suggests that there could be other explanations for why deep ensembles work well. Bayesian neural networks, which learn distributions over the parameters of the network, are theoretically well-motivated by Bayesian principles, but do not perform as well as deep ensembles in practice, particularly under dataset shift. One possible explanation for this gap between theory and practice is that popular scalable approximate Bayesian methods tend to focus on a single mode, whereas deep ensembles tend to explore diverse modes in function space. We investigate this hypothesis by building on recent work on understanding the loss landscape of neural networks and adding our own exploration to measure the similarity of functions in the space of predictions. Our results show that random initializations explore entirely different modes, while functions along an optimization trajectory or sampled from the subspace thereof cluster within a single mode predictions-wise, while often deviating significantly in the weight space. We demonstrate that while low-loss connectors between modes exist, they are not connected in the space of predictions. Developing the concept of the diversity--accuracy plane, we show that the decorrelation power of random initializations is unmatched by popular subspace sampling methods.

Answer: We study deep ensembles through the lens of loss landscape and the space of predictions, demonstrating that the decorrelation power of random initializations is unmatched by subspace sampling that only explores a single mode.

Question: Several state of the art convolutional networks rely on inter-connecting different layers to ease the flow of information and gradient between their input and output layers. These techniques have enabled practitioners to successfully train deep convolutional networks with hundreds of layers. Particularly, a novel way of interconnecting layers was introduced as the Dense Convolutional Network (DenseNet) and has achieved state of the art performance on relevant image recognition tasks. Despite their notable empirical success, their theoretical understanding is still limited. In this work, we address this problem by analyzing the effect of layer interconnection on the overall expressive power of a convolutional network. In particular, the connections used in DenseNet are compared with other types of inter-layer connectivity. We carry out a tensor analysis on the expressive power inter-connections on convolutional arithmetic circuits (ConvACs) and relate our results to standard convolutional networks. The analysis leads to performance bounds and practical guidelines for design of ConvACs. The generalization of these results are discussed for other kinds of convolutional networks via generalized tensor decompositions.

Answer:
We analyze the expressive power of the connections used in DenseNets via tensor decompositions.