Beetle Antennae Search (BAS)
Meta-heuristic algorithms have become very popular because of powerful performance on the optimization problem. A new algorithm called beetle antennae search algorithm (BAS) is proposed in the paper inspired by the searching behavior of longhorn beetles. The BAS algorithm imitates the function of antennae and the random walking mechanism of beetles in nature, and then two main steps of detecting and searching are implemented. Finally, the algorithm is benchmarked on 2 well-known test functions, in which the numerical results validate the efficacy of the proposed BAS algorithm.
BSAS: Beetle Swarm Antennae Search Algorithm for Optimization Problems …

Prior-Aware Dual Decomposition (PADD)
Spectral topic modeling algorithms operate on matrices/tensors of word co-occurrence statistics to learn topic-specific word distributions. This approach removes the dependence on the original documents and produces substantial gains in efficiency and provable topic inference, but at a cost: the model can no longer provide information about the topic composition of individual documents. Recently Thresholded Linear Inverse (TLI) is proposed to map the observed words of each document back to its topic composition. However, its linear characteristics limit the inference quality without considering the important prior information over topics. In this paper, we evaluate Simple Probabilistic Inverse (SPI) method and novel Prior-aware Dual Decomposition (PADD) that is capable of learning document-specific topic compositions in parallel. Experiments show that PADD successfully leverages topic correlations as a prior, notably outperforming TLI and learning quality topic compositions comparable to Gibbs sampling on various data. …

Anytime Stochastic Gradient Descent
In this paper, we focus on approaches to parallelizing stochastic gradient descent (SGD) wherein data is farmed out to a set of workers, the results of which, after a number of updates, are then combined at a central master node. Although such synchronized SGD approaches parallelize well in idealized computing environments, they often fail to realize their promised computational acceleration in practical settings. One cause is slow workers, termed stragglers, who can cause the fusion step at the master node to stall, which greatly slowing convergence. In many straggler mitigation approaches work completed by these nodes, while only partial, is discarded completely. In this paper, we propose an approach to parallelizing synchronous SGD that exploits the work completed by all workers. The central idea is to fix the computation time of each worker and then to combine distinct contributions of all workers. We provide a convergence analysis and optimize the combination function. Our numerical results demonstrate an improvement of several factors of magnitude in comparison to existing methods. …

Co-Arg
This paper presents Co-Arg, a new type of cognitive assistant to an intelligence analyst that enables the synergistic integration of analyst imagination and expertise, computer knowledge and critical reasoning, and crowd wisdom, to draw defensible and persuasive conclusions from masses of evidence of all types, in a world that is changing all the time. Co-Arg’s goal is to improve the quality of the analytic results and enhance their understandability for both experts and novices. The performed analysis is based on a sound and transparent argumentation that links evidence to conclusions in a way that shows very clearly how the conclusions have been reached, what evidence was used and how, what is not known, and what assumptions have been made. The analytic results are presented in a report describes the analytic conclusion and its probability, the main favoring and disfavoring arguments, the justification of the key judgments and assumptions, and the missing information that might increase the accuracy of the solution. …

Locally Smoothed Neural Network (LSNN)
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and the locally connected layer are limited in capturing the importance and relations of different local receptive fields, which are often crucial for tasks such as face verification, visual question answering, and word sequence prediction. To tackle the issue, we propose a novel locally smoothed neural network (LSNN) in this paper. The main idea is to represent the weight matrix of the locally connected layer as the product of the kernel and the smoother, where the kernel is shared over different local receptive fields, and the smoother is for determining the importance and relations of different local receptive fields. Specifically, a multi-variate Gaussian function is utilized to generate the smoother, for modeling the location relations among different local receptive fields. Furthermore, the content information can also be leveraged by setting the mean and precision of the Gaussian function according to the content. Experiments on some variant of MNIST clearly show our advantages over CNN and locally connected layer. …

Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM)
Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) are a family of statistical models for analyzing data about social and other networks. Many metrics exist to describe the structural features of an observed network such as the density, centrality, or assortativity. However, these metrics describe the observed network which is only one instance of a large number of possible alternative networks. This set of alternative networks may have similar or dissimilar structural features. To support statistical inference on the processes influencing the formation of network structure, a statistical model should consider the set of all possible alternative networks weighted on their similarity to an observed network. However because network data is inherently relational, it violates the assumptions of independence and identical distribution of standard statistical models like linear regression. Alternative statistical models should reflect the uncertainty associated with a given observation, permit inference about the relative frequency about network substructures of theoretical interest, disambiguating the influence of confounding processes, efficiently representing complex structures, and linking local-level processes to global-level properties. Degree Preserving Randomization, for example, is a specific way in which an observed network could be considered in terms of multiple alternative networks. …

TechKG
Knowledge graph is a kind of valuable knowledge base which would benefit lots of AI-related applications. Up to now, lots of large-scale knowledge graphs have been built. However, most of them are non-Chinese and designed for general purpose. In this work, we introduce TechKG, a large scale Chinese knowledge graph that is technology-oriented. It is built automatically from massive technical papers that are published in Chinese academic journals of different research domains. Some carefully designed heuristic rules are used to extract high quality entities and relations. Totally, it comprises of over 260 million triplets that are built upon more than 52 million entities which come from 38 research domains. Our preliminary ex-periments indicate that TechKG has high adaptability and can be used as a dataset for many diverse AI-related applications. We released TechKG at: http://www.techkg.cn. …

Vertex-Diminished Random Walk (VDRW)
Imbalanced data widely exists in many high-impact applications. An example is in air traffic control, where we aim to identify the leading indicators for each type of accident cause from historical records. Among all three types of accident causes, historical records with ‘personnel issues’ are much more than the other two types (‘aircraft issues’ and ‘environmental issues’) combined. Thus, the resulting dataset is highly imbalanced, and can be naturally modeled as a network. Up until now, most existing work on imbalanced data analysis focused on the classification setting, and very little is devoted to learning the node representation from imbalanced networks. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose Vertex-Diminished Random Walk (VDRW) for imbalanced network analysis. The key idea is to encourage the random particle to walk within the same class by adjusting the transition probabilities each step. It resembles the existing Vertex Reinforced Random Walk in terms of the dynamic nature of the transition probabilities, as well as some convergence properties. However, it is more suitable for analyzing imbalanced networks as it leads to more separable node representations in the embedding space. Then, based on VDRW, we propose a semi-supervised network representation learning framework named ImVerde for imbalanced networks, in which context sampling uses VDRW and the label information to create node-context pairs, and balanced-batch sampling adopts a simple under-sampling method to balance these pairs in different classes. Experimental results demonstrate that ImVerde based on VDRW outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for learning network representation from imbalanced data. …

Caffe
Caffe is a deep learning framework made with expression, speed, and modularity in mind. It is developed by the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center (BVLC) and by community contributors. Yangqing Jia created the project during his PhD at UC Berkeley. Caffe is released under the BSD 2-Clause license.
http://…/neural-networks-with-caffe-on-the-gpu
Github …

Class Label Autoencoder
Existing zero-shot learning (ZSL) methods usually learn a projection function between a feature space and a semantic embedding space(text or attribute space) in the training seen classes or testing unseen classes. However, the projection function cannot be used between the feature space and multi-semantic embedding spaces, which have the diversity characteristic for describing the different semantic information of the same class. To deal with this issue, we present a novel method to ZSL based on learning class label autoencoder (CLA). CLA can not only build a uniform framework for adapting to multi-semantic embedding spaces, but also construct the encoder-decoder mechanism for constraining the bidirectional projection between the feature space and the class label space. Moreover, CLA can jointly consider the relationship of feature classes and the relevance of the semantic classes for improving zero-shot classification. The CLA solution can provide both unseen class labels and the relation of the different classes representation(feature or semantic information) that can encode the intrinsic structure of classes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the CLA outperforms state-of-art methods on four benchmark datasets, which are AwA, CUB, Dogs and ImNet-2. …

BlueSky Statistics
Fully featured Statistics application and development framework built on the open source R project. Provides familiar powerful user interface available in mainstream statistical applications like SPSS, SAS etc. Unlocks the power of R for the analyst community by providing a rich GUI and output for several popular statistics, data mining, data manipulation and graphics commands, all out of the box… Provide a rich development framework for developing and deploying new statistical modules, applications or functions with rich graphical user interfaces and output, all through intuitive drag and drop user interfaces (No programming required).
A quick look at BlueSky Statistics …

Determinantal Point Processes Network (DPPNet)
Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) provide an elegant and versatile way to sample sets of items that balance the point-wise quality with the set-wise diversity of selected items. For this reason, they have gained prominence in many machine learning applications that rely on subset selection. However, sampling from a DPP over a ground set of size $N$ is a costly operation, requiring in general an $O(N^3)$ preprocessing cost and an $O(Nk^3)$ sampling cost for subsets of size $k$. We approach this problem by introducing DPPNets: generative deep models that produce DPP-like samples for arbitrary ground sets. We develop an inhibitive attention mechanism based on transformer networks that captures a notion of dissimilarity between feature vectors. We show theoretically that such an approximation is sensible as it maintains the guarantees of inhibition or dissimilarity that makes DPPs so powerful and unique. Empirically, we demonstrate that samples from our model receive high likelihood under the more expensive DPP alternative. …

Effect Size
In statistics, an effect size is a quantitative measure of the strength of a phenomenon. Examples of effect sizes are the correlation between two variables, the regression coefficient, the mean difference, or even the risk with which something happens, such as how many people survive after a heart attack for every one person that does not survive. For each type of effect-size, a larger absolute value always indicates a stronger effect. Effect sizes complement statistical hypothesis testing, and play an important role in statistical power analyses, sample size planning, and in meta-analyses. Especially in meta-analysis, where the purpose is to combine multiple effect-sizes, the standard error of effect-size is of critical importance. The S.E. of effect-size is used to weight effect-sizes when combining studies, so that large studies are considered more important than small studies in the analysis. The S.E. of effect-size is calculated differently for each type of effect-size, but generally only requires knowing the study’s sample size (N), or the number of observations in each group (n’s). Reporting effect sizes is considered good practice when presenting empirical research findings in many fields. The reporting of effect sizes facilitates the interpretation of the substantive, as opposed to the statistical, significance of a research result. Effect sizes are particularly prominent in social and medical research. Relative and absolute measures of effect size convey different information, and can be used complementarily. …

Total Distance Multivariance
We introduce two new measures for the dependence of $n \ge 2$ random variables: `distance multivariance’ and `total distance multivariance’. Both measures are based on the weighted $L^2$-distance of quantities related to the characteristic functions of the underlying random variables. They extend distance covariance (introduced by Szekely, Rizzo and Bakirov) and generalized distance covariance (introduced in part I) from pairs of random variables to $n$-tuplets of random variables. We show that total distance multivariance can be used to detect the independence of $n$ random variables and has a simple finite-sample representation in terms of distance matrices of the sample points, where distance is measured by a continuous negative definite function. Based on our theoretical results, we present a test for independence of multiple random vectors which is consistent against all alternatives. …

Data Transfer Project (DTP)
The Data Transfer Project was formed in 2017 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want. The contributors to the Data Transfer Project believe portability and interoperability are central to innovation. Making it easier for individuals to choose among services facilitates competition, empowers individuals to try new services and enables them to choose the offering that best suits their needs.
Data Transfer Project (DTP) is a collaboration of organizations committed to building a common framework with open-source code that can connect any two online service providers, enabling a seamless, direct, user initiated portability of data between the two platforms.
The Data Transfer Project uses services´ existing APIs and authorization mechanisms to access data. It then uses service specific adapters to transfer that data into a common format, and then back into the new service´s API. …

INFODENS
The advent of representation learning methods enabled large performance gains on various language tasks, alleviating the need for manual feature engineering. While engineered representations are usually based on some linguistic understanding and are therefore more interpretable, learned representations are harder to interpret. Empirically studying the complementarity of both approaches can provide more linguistic insights that would help reach a better compromise between interpretability and performance. We present INFODENS, a framework for studying learned and engineered representations of text in the context of text classification tasks. It is designed to simplify the tasks of feature engineering as well as provide the groundwork for extracting learned features and combining both approaches. INFODENS is flexible, extensible, with a short learning curve, and is easy to integrate with many of the available and widely used natural language processing tools. …

Variational Adaptive Newton (VAN)
We present the Variational Adaptive Newton (VAN) method which is a black-box optimization method especially suitable for explorative-learning tasks such as active learning and reinforcement learning. Similar to Bayesian methods, VAN estimates a distribution that can be used for exploration, but requires computations that are similar to continuous optimization methods. Our theoretical contribution reveals that VAN is a second-order method that unifies existing methods in distinct fields of continuous optimization, variational inference, and evolution strategies. Our experimental results show that VAN performs well on a wide-variety of learning tasks. This work presents a general-purpose explorative-learning method that has the potential to improve learning in areas such as active learning and reinforcement learning. …

Hyperspherical Convolution (SphereConv)
Convolution as inner product has been the founding basis of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the key to end-to-end visual representation learning. Benefiting from deeper architectures, recent CNNs have demonstrated increasingly strong representation abilities. Despite such improvement, the increased depth and larger parameter space have also led to challenges in properly training a network. In light of such challenges, we propose hyperspherical convolution (SphereConv), a novel learning framework that gives angular representations on hyperspheres. We introduce SphereNet, deep hyperspherical convolution networks that are distinct from conventional inner product based convolutional networks. In particular, SphereNet adopts SphereConv as its basic convolution operator and is supervised by generalized angular softmax loss – a natural loss formulation under SphereConv. We show that SphereNet can effectively encode discriminative representation and alleviate training difficulty, leading to easier optimization, faster convergence and comparable (even better) classification accuracy over convolutional counterparts. We also provide some theoretical insights for the advantages of learning on hyperspheres. In addition, we introduce the learnable SphereConv, i.e., a natural improvement over prefixed SphereConv, and SphereNorm, i.e., hyperspherical learning as a normalization method. Experiments have verified our conclusions. …

Exponential Multivariate Hawkes Model
In recent years methods of data analysis for point processes have received some attention, for example, by Cox & Lewis (1966) and Lewis (1964). In particular Bartlett (1963a, b) has introduced methods of analysis based on the point spectrum. Theoretical models are relatively sparse. In this paper the theoretical properties of a class of processes with particular reference to the point spectrum or corresponding covariance density functions are discussed. A particular result is a self-exciting process with the same second-order properties as a certain doubly stochastic process. These are not distinguishable by methods of data analysis based on these properties. …

Coreset-Based Neural Network Compression
We propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) compression algorithm based on coreset representations of filters. We exploit the redundancies extant in the space of CNN weights and neuronal activations (across samples) in order to obtain compression. Our method requires no retraining, is easy to implement, and obtains state-of-the-art compression performance across a wide variety of CNN architectures. Coupled with quantization and Huffman coding, we create networks that provide AlexNet-like accuracy, with a memory footprint that is $832\times$ smaller than the original AlexNet, while also introducing significant reductions in inference time as well. Additionally these compressed networks when fine-tuned, successfully generalize to other domains as well. …

HI-VAE
Variational autoencoders (VAEs), as well as other generative models, have been shown to be efficient and accurate to capture the latent structure of vast amounts of complex high-dimensional data. However, existing VAEs can still not directly handle data that are heterogenous (mixed continuous and discrete) or incomplete (with missing data at random), which is indeed common in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a general framework to design VAEs, suitable for fitting incomplete heterogenous data. The proposed HI-VAE includes likelihood models for real-valued, positive real valued, interval, categorical, ordinal and count data, and allows to estimate (and potentially impute) missing data accurately. Furthermore, HI-VAE presents competitive predictive performance in supervised tasks, outperforming supervised models when trained on incomplete data. …

Pontryagin Maximum Principle
Pontryagin’s maximum (or minimum) principle is used in optimal control theory to find the best possible control for taking a dynamical system from one state to another, especially in the presence of constraints for the state or input controls. It was formulated in 1956 by the Russian mathematician Lev Pontryagin and his students. It has as a special case the Euler-Lagrange equation of the calculus of variations. The principle states, informally, that the control Hamiltonian must take an extreme value over controls in the set of all permissible controls. Whether the extreme value is maximum or minimum depends both on the problem and on the sign convention used for defining the Hamiltonian. The normal convention, which is the one used in Hamiltonian, leads to a maximum hence maximum principle but the sign convention used in this article makes the extreme value a minimum. …

Conceptual Expansion
Problems with few examples of a new class of objects prove challenging to most classifiers. One solution to is to reuse existing data through transfer methods such as one-shot learning or domain adaption. However these approaches require an explicit hand-authored or learned definition of how reuse can occur. We present an approach called conceptual expansion that learns how to reuse existing machine-learned knowledge when classifying new cases. We evaluate our approach by adding new classes of objects to the CIFAR-10 dataset and varying the number of available examples of these new classes. …

Tree-Structured Multi-Linear Principle Component Analysis (TMPCA)
A novel text data dimension reduction technique, called the tree-structured multi-linear principle component analysis (TMPCA), is proposed in this work. Being different from traditional text dimension reduction methods that deal with the word-level representation, the TMPCA technique reduces the dimension of input sequences and sentences to simplify the following text classification tasks. It is shown mathematically and experimentally that the TMPCA tool demands much lower complexity (and, hence, less computing power) than the ordinary principle component analysis (PCA). Furthermore, it is demon- strated by experimental results that the support vector machine (SVM) method applied to the TMPCA-processed data achieves commensurable or better performance than the state-of-the-art recurrent neural network (RNN) approach. …

K-Groups
We propose a new class of distribution-based clustering algorithms, called k-groups, based on energy distance between samples. The energy distance clustering criterion assigns observations to clusters according to a multi-sample energy statistic that measures the distance between distributions. The energy distance determines a consistent test for equality of distributions, and it is based on a population distance that characterizes equality of distributions. The k-groups procedure therefore generalizes the k-means method, which separates clusters that have different means. We propose two k-groups algorithms: k-groups by first variation; and k-groups by second variation. The implementation of k-groups is partly based on Hartigan and Wong’s algorithm for k-means. The algorithm is generalized from moving one point on each iteration (first variation) to moving $m$ $(m > 1)$ points. For univariate data, we prove that Hartigan and Wong’s k-means algorithm is a special case of k-groups by first variation. The simulation results from univariate and multivariate cases show that our k-groups algorithms perform as well as Hartigan and Wong’s k-means algorithm when clusters are well-separated and normally distributed. Moreover, both k-groups algorithms perform better than k-means when data does not have a finite first moment or data has strong skewness and heavy tails. For non–spherical clusters, both k-groups algorithms performed better than k-means in high dimension, and k-groups by first variation is consistent as dimension increases. In a case study on dermatology data with 34 features, both k-groups algorithms performed better than k-means. …

Logarithmic Temporal Coding (LTC)
A Spiking Neural Network (SNN) can be trained indirectly by first training an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with the conventional backpropagation algorithm, then converting it into an SNN. The conventional rate-coding method for SNNs uses the number of spikes to encode magnitude of an activation value, and may be computationally inefficient due to the large number of spikes. Temporal-coding is typically more efficient by leveraging the timing of spikes to encode information. In this paper, we present Logarithmic Temporal Coding (LTC), where the number of spikes used to encode an activation value grows logarithmically with the activation value; and the accompanying Exponentiate-and-Fire (EF) spiking neuron model, which only involves efficient bit-shift and addition operations. Moreover, we improve the training process of ANN to compensate for approximation errors due to LTC. Experimental results indicate that the resulting SNN achieves competitive performance at significantly lower computational cost than related work. …

Import Vector Machines
The Import Vector Machines (Zhu and Hastie 2005) are a sparse, discriminative and probabilistic classifier. The algorithm is based on the Kernel Logistic Regression model, but uses only a few data points to define the decision hyperplane in the feature space. These data points are called import vectors. The Import Vector Machine shows similar results to the widely used Support Vector Machine, but has a probabilistic output. …

MAKESPEARE
Inductive program synthesis, from input/output examples, can provide an opportunity to automatically create programs from scratch without presupposing the algorithmic form of the solution. For induction of general programs with loops (as opposed to loop-free programs, or synthesis for domain-specific languages), the state of the art is at the level of introductory programming assignments. Most problems that require algorithmic subtlety, such as fast sorting, have remained out of reach without the benefit of significant problem-specific background knowledge. A key challenge is to identify cues that are available to guide search towards correct looping programs. We present MAKESPEARE, a simple delayed-acceptance hillclimbing method that synthesizes low-level looping programs from input/output examples. During search, delayed acceptance bypasses small gains to identify significantly-improved stepping stone programs that tend to generalize and enable further progress. The method performs well on a set of established benchmarks, and succeeds on the previously unsolved ‘Collatz Numbers’ program synthesis problem. Additional benchmarks include the problem of rapidly sorting integer arrays, in which we observe the emergence of comb sort (a Shell sort variant that is empirically fast). MAKESPEARE has also synthesized a record-setting program on one of the puzzles from the TIS-100 assembly language programming game. …

Apache Spark (Spark)
Apache Spark is an open-source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley. Spark fits into the Hadoop open-source community, building on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). However, Spark is not tied to the two-stage MapReduce paradigm, and promises performance up to 100 times faster than Hadoop MapReduce, for certain applications. Spark provides primitives for in-memory cluster computing that allows user programs to load data into a cluster’s memory and query it repeatedly, making it well suited to machine learning algorithms. …

Model-Based Approximate Query Processing
Interactive visualizations are arguably the most important tool to explore, understand and convey facts about data. In the past years, the database community has been working on different techniques for Approximate Query Processing (AQP) that aim to deliver an approximate query result given a fixed time bound to support interactive visualizations better. However, classical AQP approaches suffer from various problems that limit the applicability to support the ad-hoc exploration of a new data set: (1) Classical AQP approaches that perform online sampling can support ad-hoc exploration queries but yield low quality if executed over rare subpopulations. (2) Classical AQP approaches that rely on offline sampling can use some form of biased sampling to mitigate these problems but require a priori knowledge of the workload, which is often not realistic if users want to explore a new database. In this paper, we present a new approach to AQP called Model-based Approximate Query Processing that leverages generative models learned over the complete database to answer SQL queries at interactive speeds. Different from classical AQP approaches, generative models allow us to compute responses to ad-hoc queries and deliver high-quality estimates also over rare subpopulations at the same time. In our experiments with real and synthetic data sets, we show that Model-based AQP can in many scenarios return more accurate results in a shorter runtime. Furthermore, we think that our techniques of using generative models presented in this paper can not only be used for AQP in databases but also has applications for other database problems including Query Optimization as well as Data Cleaning. …