pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Spatial sensitivity analysis for urban land use prediction with physics-constrained conditional generative adversarial networks
Authors: Adrian Albert, Jasleen Kaur, Emanuele Strano, Marta Gonzalez
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Sensitivity

Accurately forecasting urban development and its environmental and climate impacts critically depends on realistic models of the spatial structure of the built environment, and of its dependence on key factors such as population and economic development. Scenario simulation and sensitivity analysis, i.e., predicting how changes in underlying factors at a given location affect urbanization outcomes at other locations, is currently not achievable at a large scale with traditional urban growth models, which are either too simplistic, or depend on detailed locally-collected socioeconomic data that is not available in most places. Here we develop a framework to estimate, purely from globally-available remote-sensing data and without parametric assumptions, the spatial sensitivity of the (\textit{static}) rate of change of urban sprawl to key macroeconomic development indicators. We formulate this spatial regression problem as an image-to-image translation task using conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs), where the gradients necessary for comparative static analysis are provided by the backpropagation algorithm used to train the model. This framework allows to naturally incorporate physical constraints, e.g., the inability to build over water bodies. To validate the spatial structure of model-generated built environment distributions, we use spatial statistics commonly used in urban form analysis. We apply our method to a novel dataset comprising of layers on the built environment, nightlighs measurements (a proxy for economic development and energy use), and population density for the world's most populous 15,000 cities.
Adversarial Feature Learning in Brain Interfacing: An Experimental Study on Eliminating Drowsiness Effects
Authors: Ozan Ozdenizci, Barry Oken, Tab Memmott, Melanie Fried-Oken, Deniz Erdogmus
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Across- and within-recording variabilities in electroencephalographic (EEG) activity is a major limitation in EEG-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Specifically, gradual changes in fatigue and vigilance levels during long EEG recording durations and BCI system usage bring along significant fluctuations in BCI performances even when these systems are calibrated daily. We address this in an experimental offline study from EEG-based BCI speller usage data acquired for one hour duration. As the main part of our methodological approach, we propose the concept of adversarial invariant feature learning for BCIs as a regularization approach on recently expanding EEG deep learning architectures, to learn nuisance-invariant discriminative features. We empirically demonstrate the feasibility of adversarial feature learning on eliminating drowsiness effects from event related EEG activity features, by using temporal recording block ordering as the source of drowsiness variability.
Channel Normalization in Convolutional Neural Network avoids Vanishing Gradients
Authors: Zhenwei Dai, Reinhard Heckel
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Normalization layers are widely used in deep neural networks to stabilize training. In this paper, we consider the training of convolutional neural networks with gradient descent on a single training example. This optimization problem arises in recent approaches for solving inverse problems such as the deep image prior or the deep decoder. We show that for this setup, channel normalization, which centers and normalizes each channel individually, avoids vanishing gradients, whereas, without normalization, gradients vanish which prevents efficient optimization. This effect prevails in deep single-channel linear convolutional networks, and we show that without channel normalization, gradient descent takes at least exponentially many steps to come close to an optimum. Contrary, with channel normalization, the gradients remain bounded, thus avoiding exploding gradients.
BEHRT: Transformer for Electronic Health Records
Authors: Yikuan Li, Shishir Rao, Jose Roberto Ayala Solares, Abdelaali Hassaine, Dexter Canoy, Yajie Zhu, Kazem Rahimi, Gholamreza Salimi-Khorshidi
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Today, despite decades of developments in medicine and the growing interest in precision healthcare, vast majority of diagnoses happen once patients begin to show noticeable signs of illness. Early indication and detection of diseases, however, can provide patients and carers with the chance of early intervention, better disease management, and efficient allocation of healthcare resources. The latest developments in machine learning (more specifically, deep learning) provides a great opportunity to address this unmet need. In this study, we introduce BEHRT: A deep neural sequence transduction model for EHR (electronic health records), capable of multitask prediction and disease trajectory mapping. When trained and evaluated on the data from nearly 1.6 million individuals, BEHRT shows a striking absolute improvement of 8.0-10.8%, in terms of Average Precision Score, compared to the existing state-of-the-art deep EHR models (in terms of average precision, when predicting for the onset of 301 conditions). In addition to its superior prediction power, BEHRT provides a personalised view of disease trajectories through its attention mechanism; its flexible architecture enables it to incorporate multiple heterogeneous concepts (e.g., diagnosis, medication, measurements, and more) to improve the accuracy of its predictions; and its (pre-)training results in disease and patient representations that can help us get a step closer to interpretable predictions.
Association rule mining and itemset-correlation based variants
Authors: Niels Mündler
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00

Association rules express implication formed relations among attributes in databases of itemsets. The apriori algorithm is presented, the basis for most association rule mining algorithms. It works by pruning away rules that need not be evaluated based on the user specified minimum support confidence. Additionally, variations of the algorithm are presented that enable it to handle quantitative attributes and to extract rules about generalizations of items, but preserve the downward closure property that enables pruning. Intertransformation of the extensions is proposed for special cases.
Maximizing Stylistic Control and Semantic Accuracy in NLG: Personality Variation and Discourse Contrast
Authors: Vrindavan Harrison, Lena Reed, Shereen Oraby, Marilyn Walker
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 11
Tasks: Decoder

Neural generation methods for task-oriented dialogue typically generate from a meaning representation that is populated using a database of domain information, such as a table of data describing a restaurant. While earlier work focused solely on the semantic fidelity of outputs, recent work has started to explore methods for controlling the style of the generated text while simultaneously achieving semantic accuracy. Here we experiment with two stylistic benchmark tasks, generating language that exhibits variation in personality, and generating discourse contrast. We report a huge performance improvement in both stylistic control and semantic accuracy over the state of the art on both of these benchmarks. We test several different models and show that putting stylistic conditioning in the decoder and eliminating the semantic re-ranker used in earlier models results in more than 15 points higher BLEU for Personality, with a reduction of semantic error to near zero. We also report an improvement from .75 to .81 in controlling contrast and a reduction in semantic error from 16% to 2%.
Universal Person Re-Identification
Authors: Xu Lan, Xiatian Zhu, Shaogang Gong
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Domain Generalization, Person Re-Identification, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Most state-of-the-art person re-identification (re-id) methods depend on supervised model learning with a large set of cross-view identity labelled training data. Even worse, such trained models are limited to only the same-domain deployment with significantly degraded cross-domain generalization capability, i.e. "domain specific". To solve this limitation, there are a number of recent unsupervised domain adaptation and unsupervised learning methods that leverage unlabelled target domain training data. However, these methods need to train a separate model for each target domain as supervised learning methods. This conventional "{\em train once, run once}" pattern is unscalable to a large number of target domains typically encountered in real-world deployments. We address this problem by presenting a "train once, run everywhere" pattern industry-scale systems are desperate for. We formulate a "universal model learning' approach enabling domain-generic person re-id using only limited training data of a "{\em single}" seed domain. Specifically, we train a universal re-id deep model to discriminate between a set of transformed person identity classes. Each of such classes is formed by applying a variety of random appearance transformations to the images of that class, where the transformations simulate the camera viewing conditions of any domains for making the model training domain generic. Extensive evaluations show the superiority of our method for universal person re-id over a wide variety of state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation and unsupervised learning re-id methods on five standard benchmarks: Market-1501, DukeMTMC, CUHK03, MSMT17, and VIPeR.
Reservoir Computing Models for Patient-Adaptable ECG Monitoring in Wearable Devices
Authors: Fatemeh Hadaeghi
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Arrhythmia Detection, Computational Efficiency, ECG Classification, Electrocardiography (ECG), regression

The reservoir computing paradigm is employed to classify heartbeat anomalies online based on electrocardiogram signals. Inspired by the principles of information processing in the brain, reservoir computing provides a framework to design, train, and analyze recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for processing time-dependent information. Due to its computational efficiency and the fact that training amounts to a simple linear regression, this supervised learning algorithm has been variously considered as a strategy to implement useful computations not only on digital computers but also on emerging unconventional hardware platforms such as neuromorphic microchips. Here, this biological-inspired learning framework is exploited to devise an accurate patient-adaptive model that has the potential to be integrated into wearable cardiac events monitoring devices. The proposed patient-customized model was trained and tested on ECG recordings selected from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. Restrictive inclusion criteria were used to conduct the study only on ECGs including, at least, two classes of heartbeats with highly unequal number of instances. The results of extensive simulations showed this model not only provides accurate, cheap and fast patient-customized heartbeat classifier but also circumvents the problem of "imbalanced classes" when the readout weights are trained using weighted ridge-regression.
deepCR: Cosmic Ray Rejection with Deep Learning
Authors: Keming Zhang, Joshua S. Bloom
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, CPU, Deep Learning, GPU, Image Inpainting

Cosmic ray (CR) identification and replacement are critical components of imaging and spectroscopic reduction pipelines involving solid-state detectors. We present deepCR, a deep learning based framework for CR identification and subsequent image inpainting based on the predicted CR mask. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework, we train and evaluate models on Hubble Space Telescope ACS/WFC images of sparse extragalactic fields, globular clusters, and resolved galaxies. We demonstrate that at a false positive rate of 0.5%, deepCR achieves close to 100% detection rates in both extragalactic and globular cluster fields, and 91% in resolved galaxy fields, which is a significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art method LACosmic. Compared to a multicore CPU implementation of LACosmic, deepCR CR mask predictions run up to 6.5 times faster on CPU and 90 times faster on a single GPU. For image inpainting, the mean squared errors of deepCR predictions are 20 times lower in globular cluster fields, 5 times lower in resolved galaxy fields, and 2.5 times lower in extragalactic fields, compared to the best performing non-neural technique tested. We present our framework and the trained models as an open-source Python project, with a simple-to-use API. To facilitate reproducibility of the results we also provide a benchmarking codebase.
IsoNN: Isomorphic Neural Network for Graph Representation Learning and Classification
Authors: Lin Meng, Jiawei Zhang
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Graph Classification, Graph Matching, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Deep learning models have achieved huge success in numerous fields, such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, unlike such fields, it is hard to apply traditional deep learning models on the graph data due to the 'node-orderless' property. Normally, adjacency matrices will cast an artificial and random node-order on the graphs, which renders the performance of deep models on graph classification tasks extremely erratic, and the representations learned by such models lack clear interpretability. To eliminate the unnecessary node-order constraint, we propose a novel model named Isomorphic Neural Network (IsoNN), which learns the graph representation by extracting its isomorphic features via the graph matching between input graph and templates. IsoNN has two main components: graph isomorphic feature extraction component and classification component. The graph isomorphic feature extraction component utilizes a set of subgraph templates as the kernel variables to learn the possible subgraph patterns existing in the input graph and then computes the isomorphic features. A set of permutation matrices is used in the component to break the node-order brought by the matrix representation. Three fully-connected layers are used as the classification component in IsoNN. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark datasets, the experimental results can demonstrate the effectiveness of ISONN, especially compared with both classic and state-of-the-art graph classification methods.
Context-Aware Convolutional Neural Network for Grading of Colorectal Cancer Histology Images
Authors: Muhammad Shaban, Ruqayya Awan, Muhammad Moazam Fraz, Ayesha Azam, David Snead, Nasir M. Rajpoot
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Cancer Classification, Representation Learning

Digital histology images are amenable to the application of convolutional neural network (CNN) for analysis due to the sheer size of pixel data present in them. CNNs are generally used for representation learning from small image patches (e.g. 224x224) extracted from digital histology images due to computational and memory constraints. However, this approach does not incorporate high-resolution contextual information in histology images. We propose a novel way to incorporate larger context by a context-aware neural network based on images with a dimension of 1,792x1,792 pixels. The proposed framework first encodes the local representation of a histology image into high dimensional features then aggregates the features by considering their spatial organization to make a final prediction. The proposed method is evaluated for colorectal cancer grading and breast cancer classification. A comprehensive analysis of some variants of the proposed method is presented. Our method outperformed the traditional patch-based approaches, problem-specific methods, and existing context-based methods quantitatively by a margin of 3.61%. Code and dataset related information is available at this link: https://tia-lab.github.io/Context-Aware-CNN
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Clinical Decision Support: A Brief Survey
Authors: Si-Qi Liu, Kee Yuan Ngiam, Mengling Feng
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Survey

Owe to the recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence especially deep learning, many data-driven decision support systems have been implemented to facilitate medical doctors in delivering personalized care. We focus on the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models in this paper. DRL models have demonstrated human-level or even superior performance in the tasks of computer vision and game playings, such as Go and Atari game. However, the adoption of deep reinforcement learning techniques in clinical decision optimization is still rare. We present the first survey that summarizes reinforcement learning algorithms with Deep Neural Networks (DNN) on clinical decision support. We also discuss some case studies, where different DRL algorithms were applied to address various clinical challenges. We further compare and contrast the advantages and limitations of various DRL algorithms and present a preliminary guide on how to choose the appropriate DRL algorithm for particular clinical applications.
Design of one-year mortality forecast at hospital admission based: a machine learning approach
Authors: Vicent Blanes-Selva, Vicente Ruiz-García, Salvador Tortajada, José-Miguel Benedí, Bernardo Valdivieso, Juan M. García-Gómez
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Sensitivity, Specificity

Background: Palliative care is referred to a set of programs for patients that suffer life-limiting illnesses. These programs aim to guarantee a minimum level of quality of life (QoL) for the last stage of life. They are currently based on clinical evaluation of risk of one-year mortality. Objectives: The main objective of this work is to develop and validate machine-learning based models to predict the exitus of a patient within the next year using data gathered at hospital admission. Methods: Five machine learning techniques were applied in our study to develop machine-learning predictive models: Support Vector Machines, K-neighbors Classifier, Gradient Boosting Classifier, Random Forest and Multilayer Perceptron. All models were trained and evaluated using the retrospective dataset. The evaluation was performed with five metrics computed by a resampling strategy: Accuracy, the area under the ROC curve, Specificity, Sensitivity, and the Balanced Error Rate. Results: All models for forecasting one-year mortality achieved an AUC ROC from 0.858 to 0.911. Specifically, Gradient Boosting Classifier was the best model, producing an AUC ROC of 0.911 (CI 95%, 0.911 to 0.912), a sensitivity of 0.858 (CI 95%, 0.856 to 0.86) and a specificity of 0.807 (CI 95%, 0.806 to 0808) and a BER of 0.168 (CI 95%, 0.167 to 0.169). Conclusions: The analysis of common information at hospital admission combined with machine learning techniques produced models with competitive discriminative power. Our models reach the best results reported in state of the art. These results demonstrate that they can be used as an accurate data-driven palliative care criteria inclusion.
Bayesian Inference with Generative Adversarial Network Priors
Authors: Dhruv Patel, Assad A. Oberai
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Generative Adversarial Network

Bayesian inference is used extensively to infer and to quantify the uncertainty in a field of interest from a measurement of a related field when the two are linked by a physical model. Despite its many applications, Bayesian inference faces challenges when inferring fields that have discrete representations of large dimension, and/or have prior distributions that are difficult to represent mathematically. In this manuscript we consider the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in addressing these challenges. A GAN is a type of deep neural network equipped with the ability to learn the distribution implied by multiple samples of a given field. Once trained on these samples, the generator component of a GAN maps the iid components of a low-dimensional latent vector to an approximation of the distribution of the field of interest. In this work we demonstrate how this approximate distribution may be used as a prior in a Bayesian update, and how it addresses the challenges associated with characterizing complex prior distributions and the large dimension of the inferred field. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach by applying it to the problem of inferring and quantifying uncertainty in the initial temperature field in a heat conduction problem from a noisy measurement of the temperature at later time.
Learning Probabilities: Towards a Logic of Statistical Learning
Authors: Alexandru Baltag, Soroush Rafiee Rad, Sonja Smets
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00

We propose a new model for forming beliefs and learning about unknown probabilities (such as the probability of picking a red marble from a bag with an unknown distribution of coloured marbles). The most widespread model for such situations of 'radical uncertainty' is in terms of imprecise probabilities, i.e. representing the agent's knowledge as a set of probability measures. We add to this model a plausibility map, associating to each measure a plausibility number, as a way to go beyond what is known with certainty and represent the agent's beliefs about probability. There are a number of standard examples: Shannon Entropy, Centre of Mass etc. We then consider learning of two types of information: (1) learning by repeated sampling from the unknown distribution (e.g. picking marbles from the bag); and (2) learning higher-order information about the distribution (in the shape of linear inequalities, e.g. we are told there are more red marbles than green marbles). The first changes only the plausibility map (via a 'plausibilistic' version of Bayes' Rule), but leaves the given set of measures unchanged; the second shrinks the set of measures, without changing their plausibility. Beliefs are defined as in Belief Revision Theory, in terms of truth in the most plausible worlds. But our belief change does not comply with standard AGM axioms, since the revision induced by (1) is of a non-AGM type. This is essential, as it allows our agents to learn the true probability: we prove that the beliefs obtained by repeated sampling converge almost surely to the correct belief (in the true probability). We end by sketching the contours of a dynamic doxastic logic for statistical learning.
Model Adaptation via Model Interpolation and Boosting for Web Search Ranking
Authors: Jianfeng Gao, Qiang Wu, Chris Burges, Krysta Svore, Yi Su, Nazan Khan, Shalin Shah, Hongyan Zhou
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: model

This paper explores two classes of model adaptation methods for Web search ranking: Model Interpolation and error-driven learning approaches based on a boosting algorithm. The results show that model interpolation, though simple, achieves the best results on all the open test sets where the test data is very different from the training data. The tree-based boosting algorithm achieves the best performance on most of the closed test sets where the test data and the training data are similar, but its performance drops significantly on the open test sets due to the instability of trees. Several methods are explored to improve the robustness of the algorithm, with limited success.