scholarly journals DISCRIMINATION-FREE INSURANCE PRICING

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
M. Lindholm ◽  
R. Richman ◽  
A. Tsanakas ◽  
M.V. Wüthrich
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Generalized Linear Model ◽  
Simple Formula ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Important Conclusion ◽  
Privacy Concerns ◽  
Insurance Pricing ◽  
Indirect Discrimination ◽  
Mathematical Definitions

Abstract We consider the following question: given information on individual policyholder characteristics, how can we ensure that insurance prices do not discriminate with respect to protected characteristics, such as gender? We address the issues of direct and indirect discrimination, the latter resulting from implicit learning of protected characteristics from nonprotected ones. We provide rigorous mathematical definitions for direct and indirect discrimination, and we introduce a simple formula for discrimination-free pricing, that avoids both direct and indirect discrimination. Our formula works in any statistical model. We demonstrate its application on a health insurance example, using a state-of-the-art generalized linear model and a neural network regression model. An important conclusion is that discrimination-free pricing in general requires collection of policyholders’ discriminatory characteristics, posing potential challenges in relation to policyholder’s privacy concerns.

scholarly journals CoCoX: Generating Conceptual and Counterfactual Explanations via Fault-Lines

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (03) ◽  
pp. 2594-2601
Author(s):  
Arjun Akula ◽  
Shuai Wang ◽  
Song-Chun Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Input Image ◽  
Classification Model ◽  
Learning Models ◽  
Fault Line ◽  
Semantic Level ◽  
Explainable Ai ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
Classification Category

We present CoCoX (short for Conceptual and Counterfactual Explanations), a model for explaining decisions made by a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). In Cognitive Psychology, the factors (or semantic-level features) that humans zoom in on when they imagine an alternative to a model prediction are often referred to as fault-lines. Motivated by this, our CoCoX model explains decisions made by a CNN using fault-lines. Specifically, given an input image I for which a CNN classification model M predicts class cpred, our fault-line based explanation identifies the minimal semantic-level features (e.g., stripes on zebra, pointed ears of dog), referred to as explainable concepts, that need to be added to or deleted from I in order to alter the classification category of I by M to another specified class calt. We argue that, due to the conceptual and counterfactual nature of fault-lines, our CoCoX explanations are practical and more natural for both expert and non-expert users to understand the internal workings of complex deep learning models. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments verify our hypotheses, showing that CoCoX significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art explainable AI models. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/arjunakula/CoCoX

scholarly journals Image Restoration by Learning Morphological Opening-Closing Network

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-107
Author(s):  
Ranjan Mondal ◽  
Moni Shankar Dey ◽  
Bhabatosh Chanda
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Image Restoration ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Source Code ◽  
Back Propagation ◽  
Image Features ◽  
Main Difficulty ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right Order ◽  
Morphological Opening

AbstractMathematical morphology is a powerful tool for image processing tasks. The main difficulty in designing mathematical morphological algorithm is deciding the order of operators/filters and the corresponding structuring elements (SEs). In this work, we develop morphological network composed of alternate sequences of dilation and erosion layers, which depending on learned SEs, may form opening or closing layers. These layers in the right order along with linear combination (of their outputs) are useful in extracting image features and processing them. Structuring elements in the network are learned by back-propagation method guided by minimization of the loss function. Efficacy of the proposed network is established by applying it to two interesting image restoration problems, namely de-raining and de-hazing. Results are comparable to that of many state-of-the-art algorithms for most of the images. It is also worth mentioning that the number of network parameters to handle is much less than that of popular convolutional neural network for similar tasks. The source code can be found here https://github.com/ranjanZ/Mophological-Opening-Closing-Net

scholarly journals SketchGNN: Semantic Sketch Segmentation with Graph Neural Networks

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Lumin Yang ◽  
Jiajie Zhuang ◽  
Hongbo Fu ◽  
Xiangzhi Wei ◽  
Kun Zhou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Neural Networks ◽  
Network Architecture ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Semantic Segmentation ◽  
Structure Information ◽  
Graph Neural Networks ◽  
Node Labels ◽  
Point Level

We introduce SketchGNN , a convolutional graph neural network for semantic segmentation and labeling of freehand vector sketches. We treat an input stroke-based sketch as a graph with nodes representing the sampled points along input strokes and edges encoding the stroke structure information. To predict the per-node labels, our SketchGNN uses graph convolution and a static-dynamic branching network architecture to extract the features at three levels, i.e., point-level, stroke-level, and sketch-level. SketchGNN significantly improves the accuracy of the state-of-the-art methods for semantic sketch segmentation (by 11.2% in the pixel-based metric and 18.2% in the component-based metric over a large-scale challenging SPG dataset) and has magnitudes fewer parameters than both image-based and sequence-based methods.

scholarly journals Fast Accurate and Automatic Brushstroke Extraction

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Yunfei Fu ◽  
Hongchuan Yu ◽  
Chih-Kuo Yeh ◽  
Tong-Yee Lee ◽  
Jian J. Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Efficient Algorithm ◽  
Deep Neural Network ◽  
High Efficiency ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
High Reliability ◽  
The Other ◽  
Manual Annotation ◽  
Stroke Extraction ◽  
Art Research

Brushstrokes are viewed as the artist’s “handwriting” in a painting. In many applications such as style learning and transfer, mimicking painting, and painting authentication, it is highly desired to quantitatively and accurately identify brushstroke characteristics from old masters’ pieces using computer programs. However, due to the nature of hundreds or thousands of intermingling brushstrokes in the painting, it still remains challenging. This article proposes an efficient algorithm for brush Stroke extraction based on a Deep neural network, i.e., DStroke. Compared to the state-of-the-art research, the main merit of the proposed DStroke is to automatically and rapidly extract brushstrokes from a painting without manual annotation, while accurately approximating the real brushstrokes with high reliability. Herein, recovering the faithful soft transitions between brushstrokes is often ignored by the other methods. In fact, the details of brushstrokes in a master piece of painting (e.g., shapes, colors, texture, overlaps) are highly desired by artists since they hold promise to enhance and extend the artists’ powers, just like microscopes extend biologists’ powers. To demonstrate the high efficiency of the proposed DStroke, we perform it on a set of real scans of paintings and a set of synthetic paintings, respectively. Experiments show that the proposed DStroke is noticeably faster and more accurate at identifying and extracting brushstrokes, outperforming the other methods.

scholarly journals ShadingNet: Image Intrinsics by Fine-Grained Shading Decomposition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anil S. Baslamisli ◽  
Partha Das ◽  
Hoang-An Le ◽  
Sezer Karaoglu ◽  
Theo Gevers
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Image Decomposition ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Decomposition Algorithms ◽  
Ambient Light ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Large Scale Dataset ◽  
Direct Illumination

AbstractIn general, intrinsic image decomposition algorithms interpret shading as one unified component including all photometric effects. As shading transitions are generally smoother than reflectance (albedo) changes, these methods may fail in distinguishing strong photometric effects from reflectance variations. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to decompose the shading component into direct (illumination) and indirect shading (ambient light and shadows) subcomponents. The aim is to distinguish strong photometric effects from reflectance variations. An end-to-end deep convolutional neural network (ShadingNet) is proposed that operates in a fine-to-coarse manner with a specialized fusion and refinement unit exploiting the fine-grained shading model. It is designed to learn specific reflectance cues separated from specific photometric effects to analyze the disentanglement capability. A large-scale dataset of scene-level synthetic images of outdoor natural environments is provided with fine-grained intrinsic image ground-truths. Large scale experiments show that our approach using fine-grained shading decompositions outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms utilizing unified shading on NED, MPI Sintel, GTA V, IIW, MIT Intrinsic Images, 3DRMS and SRD datasets.

scholarly journals Communication Failure Resilient Distributed Neural Network for Edge Devices

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (14) ◽  
pp. 1614
Author(s):  
Jonghun Jeong ◽  
Jong Sung Park ◽  
Hoeseok Yang
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Neural Networks ◽  
High Performance ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Wearable Devices ◽  
Communication Failure ◽  
Canadian Institute ◽  
Multiple Devices ◽  
Knowledge Distillation ◽  
Partitioning Technique

Recently, the necessity to run high-performance neural networks (NN) is increasing even in resource-constrained embedded systems such as wearable devices. However, due to the high computational and memory requirements of the NN applications, it is typically infeasible to execute them on a single device. Instead, it has been proposed to run a single NN application cooperatively on top of multiple devices, a so-called distributed neural network. In the distributed neural network, workloads of a single big NN application are distributed over multiple tiny devices. While the computation overhead could effectively be alleviated by this approach, the existing distributed NN techniques, such as MoDNN, still suffer from large traffics between the devices and vulnerability to communication failures. In order to get rid of such big communication overheads, a knowledge distillation based distributed NN, called Network of Neural Networks (NoNN), was proposed, which partitions the filters in the final convolutional layer of the original NN into multiple independent subsets and derives smaller NNs out of each subset. However, NoNN also has limitations in that the partitioning result may be unbalanced and it considerably compromises the correlation between filters in the original NN, which may result in an unacceptable accuracy degradation in case of communication failure. In this paper, in order to overcome these issues, we propose to enhance the partitioning strategy of NoNN in two aspects. First, we enhance the redundancy of the filters that are used to derive multiple smaller NNs by means of averaging to increase the immunity of the distributed NN to communication failure. Second, we propose a novel partitioning technique, modified from Eigenvector-based partitioning, to preserve the correlation between filters as much as possible while keeping the consistent number of filters distributed to each device. Throughout extensive experiments with the CIFAR-100 (Canadian Institute For Advanced Research-100) dataset, it has been observed that the proposed approach maintains high inference accuracy (over 70%, 1.53× improvement over the state-of-the-art approach), on average, even when a half of eight devices in a distributed NN fail to deliver their partial inference results.

scholarly journals Low-Rank and Sparse Based Deep-Fusion Convolutional Neural Network for Crowd Counting

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siqi Tang ◽  
Zhisong Pan ◽  
Xingyu Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Convolutional Neural Network ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Regression Method ◽  
Low Rank ◽  
Counting Method ◽  
Direct Integral ◽  
Crowd Counting ◽  
Counting Methods ◽  
Density Map

This paper proposes an accurate crowd counting method based on convolutional neural network and low-rank and sparse structure. To this end, we firstly propose an effective deep-fusion convolutional neural network to promote the density map regression accuracy. Furthermore, we figure out that most of the existing CNN based crowd counting methods obtain overall counting by direct integral of estimated density map, which limits the accuracy of counting. Instead of direct integral, we adopt a regression method based on low-rank and sparse penalty to promote accuracy of the projection from density map to global counting. Experiments demonstrate the importance of such regression process on promoting the crowd counting performance. The proposed low-rank and sparse based deep-fusion convolutional neural network (LFCNN) outperforms existing crowd counting methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

scholarly journals A convolutional neural network for estimating synaptic connectivity from spike trains

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daisuke Endo ◽  
Ryota Kobayashi ◽  
Ramon Bartolo ◽  
Bruno B. Averbeck ◽  
Yasuko Sugase-Miyamoto ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Convolutional Neural Network ◽  
Generalized Linear Model ◽  
Simulated Data ◽  
Spike Trains ◽  
Synaptic Connectivity ◽  
Neuronal Circuits ◽  
Cortical Areas ◽  
Neuronal Spike Trains ◽  
Individual Dataset

AbstractThe recent increase in reliable, simultaneous high channel count extracellular recordings is exciting for physiologists and theoreticians because it offers the possibility of reconstructing the underlying neuronal circuits. We recently presented a method of inferring this circuit connectivity from neuronal spike trains by applying the generalized linear model to cross-correlograms. Although the algorithm can do a good job of circuit reconstruction, the parameters need to be carefully tuned for each individual dataset. Here we present another method using a Convolutional Neural Network for Estimating synaptic Connectivity from spike trains. After adaptation to huge amounts of simulated data, this method robustly captures the specific feature of monosynaptic impact in a noisy cross-correlogram. There are no user-adjustable parameters. With this new method, we have constructed diagrams of neuronal circuits recorded in several cortical areas of monkeys.

SHEDR: An End-to-End Deep Neural Event Detection and Recommendation Framework for Hyperlocal News Using Social Media

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuheng Hu ◽  
Yili Hong
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Event Detection ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Neural Network Models ◽  
Neural Event ◽  
End To End

Residents often rely on newspapers and television to gather hyperlocal news for community awareness and engagement. More recently, social media have emerged as an increasingly important source of hyperlocal news. Thus far, the literature on using social media to create desirable societal benefits, such as civic awareness and engagement, is still in its infancy. One key challenge in this research stream is to timely and accurately distill information from noisy social media data streams to community members. In this work, we develop SHEDR (social media–based hyperlocal event detection and recommendation), an end-to-end neural event detection and recommendation framework with a particular use case for Twitter to facilitate residents’ information seeking of hyperlocal events. The key model innovation in SHEDR lies in the design of the hyperlocal event detector and the event recommender. First, we harness the power of two popular deep neural network models, the convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM), in a novel joint CNN-LSTM model to characterize spatiotemporal dependencies for capturing unusualness in a region of interest, which is classified as a hyperlocal event. Next, we develop a neural pairwise ranking algorithm for recommending detected hyperlocal events to residents based on their interests. To alleviate the sparsity issue and improve personalization, our algorithm incorporates several types of contextual information covering topic, social, and geographical proximities. We perform comprehensive evaluations based on two large-scale data sets comprising geotagged tweets covering Seattle and Chicago. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in comparison with several state-of-the-art approaches. We show that our hyperlocal event detection and recommendation models consistently and significantly outperform other approaches in terms of precision, recall, and F-1 scores. Summary of Contribution: In this paper, we focus on a novel and important, yet largely underexplored application of computing—how to improve civic engagement in local neighborhoods via local news sharing and consumption based on social media feeds. To address this question, we propose two new computational and data-driven methods: (1) a deep learning–based hyperlocal event detection algorithm that scans spatially and temporally to detect hyperlocal events from geotagged Twitter feeds; and (2) A personalized deep learning–based hyperlocal event recommender system that systematically integrates several contextual cues such as topical, geographical, and social proximity to recommend the detected hyperlocal events to potential users. We conduct a series of experiments to examine our proposed models. The outcomes demonstrate that our algorithms are significantly better than the state-of-the-art models and can provide users with more relevant information about the local neighborhoods that they live in, which in turn may boost their community engagement.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document