pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Sampling for Minimax Fair Classification
Authors: Shubhanshu Shekhar, Greg Fields, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Tara Javidi
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

Machine learning models trained on uncurated datasets can often end up adversely affecting inputs belonging to underrepresented groups. To address this issue, we consider the problem of adaptively constructing training sets which allow us to learn classifiers that are fair in a minimax sense. We first propose an adaptive sampling algorithm based on the principle of optimism, and derive theoretical bounds on its performance. We also propose heuristic extensions of this algorithm suitable for application to large scale, practical problems. Next, by deriving algorithm independent lower-bounds for a specific class of problems, we show that the performance achieved by our adaptive scheme cannot be improved in general. We then validate the benefits of adaptively constructing training sets via experiments on synthetic tasks with logistic regression classifiers, as well as on several real-world tasks using convolutional neural networks (CNNs).
Self-supervised Auxiliary Learning for Graph Neural Networks via Meta-Learning
Authors: Dasol Hwang, Jinyoung Park, Sunyoung Kwon, Kyung-Min Kim, Jung-Woo Ha, Hyunwoo J. Kim
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Auxiliary Learning, Graph Neural Network, Link Prediction, Meta-Learning, Node Classification, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted in the representation learning of graph-structured data and provided state-of-the-art performance in various applications such as link prediction, node classification, and recommendation. Motivated by recent advances of self-supervision for representation learning in natural language processing and computer vision, self-supervised learning has been recently studied to leverage unlabeled graph-structured data. However, employing self-supervision tasks as auxiliary tasks to assist a primary task has been less explored in the literature on graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised auxiliary learning framework to effectively learn graph neural networks. Moreover, this work is the first study showing that a meta-path prediction is beneficial as a self-supervised auxiliary task for heterogeneous graphs. Our method is learning to learn a primary task with various auxiliary tasks to improve generalization performance. The proposed method identifies an effective combination of auxiliary tasks and automatically balances them to improve the primary task. Our methods can be applied to any graph neural network in a plug-in manner without manual labeling or additional data. Also, it can be extended to any other auxiliary tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves the performance of node classification and link prediction.
Online anomaly detection using statistical leverage for streaming business process events
Authors: Jonghyeon Ko, Marco Comuzzi
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

While several techniques for detecting trace-level anomalies in event logs in offline settings have appeared recently in the literature, such techniques are currently lacking for online settings. Event log anomaly detection in online settings can be crucial for discovering anomalies in process execution as soon as they occur and, consequently, allowing to promptly take early corrective actions. This paper describes a novel approach to event log anomaly detection on event streams that uses statistical leverage. Leverage has been used extensively in statistics to develop measures to identify outliers and it has been adapted in this paper to the specific scenario of event stream data. The proposed approach has been evaluated on both artificial and real event streams.
Computationally Efficient Wasserstein Loss for Structured Labels
Authors: Ayato Toyokuni, Sho Yokoi, Hisashi Kashima, Makoto Yamada
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2
Tasks: Age Estimation, Emotion Recognition, Semantic Segmentation, text-classification, Text Classification

The problem of estimating the probability distribution of labels has been widely studied as a label distribution learning (LDL) problem, whose applications include age estimation, emotion analysis, and semantic segmentation. We propose a tree-Wasserstein distance regularized LDL algorithm, focusing on hierarchical text classification tasks. We propose predicting the entire label hierarchy using neural networks, where the similarity between predicted and true labels is measured using the tree-Wasserstein distance. Through experiments using synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method successfully considers the structure of labels during training, and it compares favorably with the Sinkhorn algorithm in terms of computation time and memory usage.
Manifold optimization for non-linear optimal transport problems
Authors: Bamdev Mishra, N T V Satyadev, Hiroyuki Kasai, Pratik Jawanpuria
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00

Optimal transport (OT) has recently found widespread interest in machine learning. It allows to define novel distances between probability measures, which have shown promise in several applications. In this work, we discuss how to computationally approach general non-linear OT problems within the framework of Riemannian manifold optimization. The basis of this is the manifold of doubly stochastic matrices (and their generalization). Even though the manifold geometry is not new, surprisingly, its usefulness for solving general non-linear OT problems has not been popular. To this end, we specifically discuss optimization-related ingredients that allow modeling the OT problem on smooth Riemannian manifolds by exploiting the geometry of the search space. We also discuss extensions where we reuse the developed optimization ingredients. We make available the Manifold optimization-based Optimal Transport, or MOT, repository with codes useful in solving OT problems in Python and Matlab. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/SatyadevNtv/MOT}.
STUDD: A Student-Teacher Method for Unsupervised Concept Drift Detection
Authors: Vitor Cerqueira, Heitor Murilo Gomes, Albert Bifet, Luis Torgo
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Drift Detection

Concept drift detection is a crucial task in data stream evolving environments. Most of state of the art approaches designed to tackle this problem monitor the loss of predictive models. However, this approach falls short in many real-world scenarios, where the true labels are not readily available to compute the loss. In this context, there is increasing attention to approaches that perform concept drift detection in an unsupervised manner, i.e., without access to the true labels. We propose a novel approach to unsupervised concept drift detection based on a student-teacher learning paradigm. Essentially, we create an auxiliary model (student) to mimic the behaviour of the primary model (teacher). At run-time, our approach is to use the teacher for predicting new instances and monitoring the mimicking loss of the student for concept drift detection. In a set of experiments using 19 data streams, we show that the proposed approach can detect concept drift and present a competitive behaviour relative to the state of the art approaches.
Secure Bilevel Asynchronous Vertical Federated Learning with Backward Updating
Authors: Qingsong Zhang, Bin Gu, Cheng Deng, Heng Huang
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical federated learning (VFL) attracts increasing attention due to the emerging demands of multi-party collaborative modeling and concerns of privacy leakage. In the real VFL applications, usually only one or partial parties hold labels, which makes it challenging for all parties to collaboratively learn the model without privacy leakage. Meanwhile, most existing VFL algorithms are trapped in the synchronous computations, which leads to inefficiency in their real-world applications. To address these challenging problems, we propose a novel {\bf VF}L framework integrated with new {\bf b}ackward updating mechanism and {\bf b}ilevel asynchronous parallel architecture (VF{${\textbf{B}}^2$}), under which three new algorithms, including VF{${\textbf{B}}^2$}-SGD, -SVRG, and -SAGA, are proposed. We derive the theoretical results of the convergence rates of these three algorithms under both strongly convex and nonconvex conditions. We also prove the security of VF{${\textbf{B}}^2$} under semi-honest threat models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our algorithms are efficient, scalable and lossless.
GaNDLF: A Generally Nuanced Deep Learning Framework for Scalable End-to-End Clinical Workflows in Medical Imaging
Authors: Sarthak Pati, Siddhesh P. Thakur, İbrahim Ethem Hamamcı, Ujjwal Baid, Bhakti Baheti, Megh Bhalerao, Orhun Güley, Sofia Mouchtaris, David Lang, Spyridon Thermos, Karol Gotkowski, Camila González, Caleb Grenko, Alexander Getka, Brandon Edwards, Micah Sheller, Junwen Wu, Deepthi Karkada, Ravi Panchumarthy, Vinayak Ahluwalia, Chunrui Zou, Vishnu Bashyam, Yuemeng Li, Babak Haghighi, Rhea Chitalia, Shahira Abousamra, Tahsin M. Kurc, Aimilia Gastounioti, Sezgin Er, Mark Bergman, Joel H. Saltz, Yong Fan, Prashant Shah, Anirban Mukhopadhyay, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Bjoern Menze, Christos Davatzikos, Despina Kontos, Alexandros Karargyris, Renato Umeton, Peter Mattson, Spyridon Bakas
Date: 2021-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Segmentation, Data Augmentation, Deep Learning, Image Classification, UNET Segmentation

Deep Learning (DL) has the potential to optimize machine learning in both the scientific and clinical communities. However, greater expertise is required to develop DL algorithms, and the variability of implementations hinders their reproducibility, translation, and deployment. Here we present the community-driven Generally Nuanced Deep Learning Framework (GaNDLF), with the goal of lowering these barriers. GaNDLF makes the mechanism of DL development, training, and inference more stable, reproducible, interpretable, and scalable, without requiring an extensive technical background. GaNDLF aims to provide an end-to-end solution for all DL-related tasks in computational precision medicine. We demonstrate the ability of GaNDLF to analyze both radiology and histology images, with built-in support for k-fold cross-validation, data augmentation, multiple modalities and output classes. Our quantitative performance evaluation on numerous use cases, anatomies, and computational tasks supports GaNDLF as a robust application framework for deployment in clinical workflows.
Snowflake: Scaling GNNs to High-Dimensional Continuous Control via Parameter Freezing
Authors: Charlie Blake, Vitaly Kurin, Maximilian Igl, Shimon Whiteson
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Recent research has shown that graph neural networks (GNNs) can learn policies for locomotion control that are as effective as a typical multi-layer perceptron (MLP), with superior transfer and multi-task performance (Wang et al., 2018; Huang et al., 2020). Results have so far been limited to training on small agents, with the performance of GNNs deteriorating rapidly as the number of sensors and actuators grows. A key motivation for the use of GNNs in the supervised learning setting is their applicability to large graphs, but this benefit has not yet been realised for locomotion control. We identify the weakness with a common GNN architecture that causes this poor scaling: overfitting in the MLPs within the network that encode, decode, and propagate messages. To combat this, we introduce Snowflake, a GNN training method for high-dimensional continuous control that freezes parameters in parts of the network that suffer from overfitting. Snowflake significantly boosts the performance of GNNs for locomotion control on large agents, now matching the performance of MLPs, and with superior transfer properties.
Tax Evasion Risk Management Using a Hybrid Unsupervised Outlier Detection Method
Authors: Miloš Savić, Jasna Atanasijević, Dušan Jakovetić, Nataša Krejić
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Fraud Detection, Management, Outlier Detection

Big data methods are becoming an important tool for tax fraud detection around the world. Unsupervised learning approach is the dominant framework due to the lack of label and ground truth in corresponding data sets although these methods suffer from low interpretability. HUNOD, a novel hybrid unsupervised outlier detection method for tax evasion risk management, is presented in this paper. In contrast to previous methods proposed in the literature, the HUNOD method combines two outlier detection approaches based on two different machine learning designs (i.e, clustering and representational learning) to detect and internally validate outliers in a given tax dataset. The HUNOD method allows its users to incorporate relevant domain knowledge into both constituent outlier detection approaches in order to detect outliers relevant for a given economic context. The interpretability of obtained outliers is achieved by training explainable-by-design surrogate models over results of unsupervised outlier detection methods. The experimental evaluation of the HUNOD method is conducted on two datasets derived from the database on individual personal income tax declarations collected by the Tax Administration of Serbia. The obtained results show that the method indicates between 90% and 98% internally validated outliers depending on the clustering configuration and employed regularization mechanisms for representational learning.
Predictive Maintenance Tool for Non-Intrusive Inspection Systems
Authors: Georgi Nalbantov, Dimitar Todorov, Nikolay Zografov, Stefan Georgiev, Nadia Bojilova
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00

Cross-border security is of topmost priority for societies. Economies lose billions each year due to counterfeiters and other threats. Security checkpoints equipped with X-ray Security Systems (NIIS-Non-Intrusive Inspection Systems) like airports, ports, border control and customs authorities tackle the myriad of threats by using NIIS to inspect bags, air, land, sea and rail cargo, and vehicles. The reliance on the X-ray scanning systems necessitates their continuous 24/7 functioning being provided for. Hence the need for their working condition being closely monitored and preemptive actions being taken to reduce the overall X-ray systems downtime. In this paper, we present a predictive maintenance decision support system, abbreviated as PMT4NIIS (Predictive Maintenance Tool for Non-Intrusive Inspection Systems), which is a kind of augmented analytics platforms that provides real-time AI-generated warnings for upcoming risk of system malfunctioning leading to possible downtime. The industrial platform is the basis of a 24/7 Service Desk and Monitoring center for the working condition of various X-ray Security Systems.
A Biased Graph Neural Network Sampler with Near-Optimal Regret
Authors: Qingru Zhang, David Wipf, Quan Gan, Le Song
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Graph neural networks (GNN) have recently emerged as a vehicle for applying deep network architectures to graph and relational data. However, given the increasing size of industrial datasets, in many practical situations the message passing computations required for sharing information across GNN layers are no longer scalable. Although various sampling methods have been introduced to approximate full-graph training within a tractable budget, there remain unresolved complications such as high variances and limited theoretical guarantees. To address these issues, we build upon existing work and treat GNN neighbor sampling as a multi-armed bandit problem but with a newly-designed reward function that introduces some degree of bias designed to reduce variance and avoid unstable, possibly-unbounded pay outs. And unlike prior bandit-GNN use cases, the resulting policy leads to near-optimal regret while accounting for the GNN training dynamics introduced by SGD. From a practical standpoint, this translates into lower variance estimates and competitive or superior test accuracy across several benchmarks.
Counterfactual Explanations for Oblique Decision Trees: Exact, Efficient Algorithms
Authors: Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán, Suryabhan Singh Hada
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

We consider counterfactual explanations, the problem of minimally adjusting features in a source input instance so that it is classified as a target class under a given classifier. This has become a topic of recent interest as a way to query a trained model and suggest possible actions to overturn its decision. Mathematically, the problem is formally equivalent to that of finding adversarial examples, which also has attracted significant attention recently. Most work on either counterfactual explanations or adversarial examples has focused on differentiable classifiers, such as neural nets. We focus on classification trees, both axis-aligned and oblique (having hyperplane splits). Although here the counterfactual optimization problem is nonconvex and nondifferentiable, we show that an exact solution can be computed very efficiently, even with high-dimensional feature vectors and with both continuous and categorical features, and demonstrate it in different datasets and settings. The results are particularly relevant for finance, medicine or legal applications, where interpretability and counterfactual explanations are particularly important.
DTW-Merge: A Novel Data Augmentation Technique for Time Series Classification
Authors: Mohammad Akyash, Hoda Mohammadzade, Hamid Behroozi
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Dynamic Time Warping, General Classification, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification

In recent years, neural networks achieved much success in various applications. The main challenge in training deep neural networks is the lack of sufficient data to improve the model's generalization and avoid overfitting. One of the solutions is to generate new training samples. This paper proposes a novel data augmentation method for time series based on Dynamic Time Warping. This method is inspired by the concept that warped parts of two time series have similar temporal properties and therefore, exchanging them between the two series generates a new training sample. The proposed method selects an element of the optimal warping path randomly and then exchanges the segments that are aligned together. Exploiting the proposed approach with recently introduced ResNet reveals improved results on the 2018 UCR Time Series Classification Archive. By employing Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) and Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), we manifest that our method extract more discriminant features out of time series.
Extreme Volatility Prediction in Stock Market: When GameStop meets Long Short-Term Memory Networks
Authors: Yigit Alparslan, Edward Kim
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00

The beginning of 2021 saw a surge in volatility for certain stocks such as GameStop company stock (Ticker GME under NYSE). GameStop stock increased around 10 fold from its decade-long average to its peak at \$485. In this paper, we hypothesize a buy-and-hold strategy can be outperformed in the presence of extreme volatility by predicting and trading consolidation breakouts. We investigate GME stock for its volatility and compare it to SPY as a benchmark (since it is a less volatile ETF fund) from February 2002 to February 2021. For strategy 1, we develop a Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) Neural Network to predict stock prices recurrently with a very short look ahead period in the presence of extreme volatility. For our strategy 2, we develop an LSTM autoencoder network specifically designed to trade only on consolidation breakouts after predicting anomalies in the stock price. When back-tested in our simulations, our strategy 1 executes 863 trades for SPY and 452 trades for GME. Our strategy 2 executes 931 trades for SPY and 325 trades for GME. We compare both strategies to buying and holding one single share for the period that we picked as a benchmark. In our simulations, SPY returns \$281.160 from buying and holding one single share, \$110.29 from strategy 1 with 53.5% success rate and \$4.34 from strategy 2 with 57.6% success rate. GME returns \$45.63 from buying and holding one single share, \$69.046 from strategy 1 with 47.12% success rate and \$2.10 from strategy 2 with 48% success rate. Overall, buying and holding outperforms all deep-learning assisted prediction models in our study except for when the LSTM-based prediction model (strategy 1) is applied to GME. We hope that our study sheds more light into the field of extreme volatility predictions based on LSTMs to outperform buying and holding strategy.
Automated data-driven approach for gap filling in the time series using evolutionary learning
Authors: Mikhail Sarafanov, Nikolay O. Nikitin, Anna V. Kalyuzhnaya
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

In the paper, we propose an adaptive data-driven model-based approach for filling the gaps in time series. The approach is based on the automated evolutionary identification of the optimal structure for a composite data-driven model. It allows adapting the model for the effective gap-filling in a specific dataset without the involvement of the data scientist. As a case study, both synthetic and real datasets from different fields (environmental, economic, etc) are used. The experiments confirm that the proposed approach allows achieving the higher quality of the gap restoration and improve the effectiveness of forecasting models.
Towards Synthesizing Twelve-Lead Electrocardiograms from Two Asynchronous Leads
Authors: Yong-Yeon Jo, Young Sang Choi, Jong-Hwan Jang, Joon-Myoung Kwon
Date: 2021-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Rhythm, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

The electrocardiogram (ECG) records electrical signals in a non-invasive way to observe the condition of the heart, typically looking at the heart from 12 different directions. Several types of the cardiac disease are diagnosed by using 12-lead ECGs Recently, various wearable devices have enabled immediate access to the ECG without the use of wieldy equipment. However, they only provide ECGs with a couple of leads. This results in an inaccurate diagnosis of cardiac disease due to lacking of required leads. We propose a deep generative model for ECG synthesis from two asynchronous leads to ten leads. It first represents a heart condition referring to two leads, and then generates ten leads based on the represented heart condition. Both the rhythm and amplitude of leads generated resemble those of the original ones, while the technique removes noise and the baseline wander appearing in the original leads. As a data augmentation method, our model improves the classification performance of models compared with models using ECGs with only one or two leads.