Progressive Web Application (PWA)
Progressive web applications (PWAs) are web applications that load like regular web pages or websites but can offer the user functionality such as working offline, push notifications, and device hardware access traditionally available only to native applications. PWAs combine the flexibility of the web with the experience of a native application. …

PyOD
PyOD is an open-source Python toolbox for performing scalable outlier detection on multivariate data. Uniquely, it provides access to a wide range of outlier detection algorithms, including established outlier ensembles and more recent neural network-based approaches, under a single, well-documented API designed for use by both practitioners and researchers. With robustness and scalability in mind, best practices such as unit testing, continuous integration, code coverage, maintainability checks, interactive examples and parallelization are emphasized as core components in the toolbox’s development. PyOD is compatible with both Python 2 and 3 and can be installed through Python Package Index (PyPI) or https://…/pyod. …

Antisymmetrical Initialization (ASI)
How different initializations and loss functions affect the learning of a deep neural network (DNN), specifically its generalization error, is an important problem in practice. In this work, focusing on regression problems, we develop a kernel-norm minimization framework for the analysis of DNNs in the kernel regime in which the number of neurons in each hidden layer is sufficiently large (Jacot et al. 2018, Lee et al. 2019). We find that, in the kernel regime, for any loss in a general class of functions, e.g., any Lp loss for $1 < p < \infty$, the DNN finds the same global minima-the one that is nearest to the initial value in the parameter space, or equivalently, the one that is closest to the initial DNN output in the corresponding reproducing kernel Hilbert space. With this framework, we prove that a non-zero initial output increases the generalization error of DNN. We further propose an antisymmetrical initialization (ASI) trick that eliminates this type of error and accelerates the training. We also demonstrate experimentally that even for DNNs in the non-kernel regime, our theoretical analysis and the ASI trick remain effective. Overall, our work provides insight into how initialization and loss function quantitatively affect the generalization of DNNs, and also provides guidance for the training of DNNs. …

Spline-Based Probability Calibration (SplineCalib)
In many classification problems it is desirable to output well-calibrated probabilities on the different classes. We propose a robust, non-parametric method of calibrating probabilities called SplineCalib that utilizes smoothing splines to determine a calibration function. We demonstrate how applying certain transformations as part of the calibration process can improve performance on problems in deep learning and other domains where the scores tend to be ‘overconfident’. We adapt the approach to multi-class problems and find that better calibration can improve accuracy as well as log-loss by better resolving uncertain cases. Finally, we present a cross-validated approach to calibration which conserves data. Significant improvements to log-loss and accuracy are shown on several different problems. We also introduce the ml-insights python package which contains an implementation of the SplineCalib algorithm. …