scholarly journals Identifying Model Complexity: A Machine Learning Framework

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark D. Verhagen

`All models are wrong, but some are useful' is an often used mantra, particularly when a model's ability to capture the full complexities of social life is questioned. However, an appropriate functional form is key to valid statistical inference, and under-estimating model complexity can lead to biased results. Unfortunately, it is unclear a-priori what the appropriate complexity of a functional form should be. I propose to use methods from machine learning to generate an estimate of the fit potential in a dataset. By comparing this fit potential with that from a functional form originally hypothesized by a researcher, a lack of model complexity in the latter can be identified. These flexible models can then be unpacked to generate understanding into the type of complexity missing. I illustrate the approach using simulations, and real-world case studies, and show how the framework is easy to implement, and leads to improved model specification.

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 5867-5874
Author(s):  
Gan Sun ◽  
Yang Cong ◽  
Qianqian Wang ◽  
Jun Li ◽  
Yun Fu

In the past decades, spectral clustering (SC) has become one of the most effective clustering algorithms. However, most previous studies focus on spectral clustering tasks with a fixed task set, which cannot incorporate with a new spectral clustering task without accessing to previously learned tasks. In this paper, we aim to explore the problem of spectral clustering in a lifelong machine learning framework, i.e., Lifelong Spectral Clustering (L2SC). Its goal is to efficiently learn a model for a new spectral clustering task by selectively transferring previously accumulated experience from knowledge library. Specifically, the knowledge library of L2SC contains two components: 1) orthogonal basis library: capturing latent cluster centers among the clusters in each pair of tasks; 2) feature embedding library: embedding the feature manifold information shared among multiple related tasks. As a new spectral clustering task arrives, L2SC firstly transfers knowledge from both basis library and feature library to obtain encoding matrix, and further redefines the library base over time to maximize performance across all the clustering tasks. Meanwhile, a general online update formulation is derived to alternatively update the basis library and feature library. Finally, the empirical experiments on several real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that our L2SC model can effectively improve the clustering performance when comparing with other state-of-the-art spectral clustering algorithms.


Author(s):  
Eunhye Kim ◽  
Hani S. Mahmassani ◽  
Haleh Ale-Ahmad ◽  
Marija Ostojic

Origin–destination (O–D) demand is a critical component in both online and offline dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) systems. Recent advances in real-time DTA applications in large networks call for robust and efficient methodologies for online O–D demand estimation and prediction. This study presents a day-to-day learning framework for a priori O–D demand, along with a predictive data-driven O–D correction approach for online consistency between predicted and observed (sensor) values. When deviations between simulation and real world are observed, a consistency-checking module initiates O–D demand correction for the given prediction horizon. Two predictive correction methods are suggested: 1) simple gradient method, and 2) Taylor approximation method. New O–D demand matrices, corrected for 24 simulation hours by the correction module, are used as the updated a priori demand for the next day simulation. The methodology is tested in a real-world network, Kansas City, MO, for a 3-day period. Actual tests in real-world networks of online DTA systems have been very limited in the literature and in actual practice. The test results are analyzed in time and space dimensions. The overall performance of observed links is assessed. To measure the impact of O–D correction and daily O–D updates, traffic prediction performance with the new modules is compared with the base case. Predictive O–D correction improves prediction performance in a long prediction window. Also, daily updated O–D demand provides better initial states for traffic prediction, enhancing prediction in short prediction windows. The two modules collectively improve traffic prediction performance of the real-time DTA system.


2021 ◽  
Vol 186 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 445-451
Author(s):  
Yifei Sun ◽  
Navid Rashedi ◽  
Vikrant Vaze ◽  
Parikshit Shah ◽  
Ryan Halter ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Introduction Early prediction of the acute hypotensive episode (AHE) in critically ill patients has the potential to improve outcomes. In this study, we apply different machine learning algorithms to the MIMIC III Physionet dataset, containing more than 60,000 real-world intensive care unit records, to test commonly used machine learning technologies and compare their performances. Materials and Methods Five classification methods including K-nearest neighbor, logistic regression, support vector machine, random forest, and a deep learning method called long short-term memory are applied to predict an AHE 30 minutes in advance. An analysis comparing model performance when including versus excluding invasive features was conducted. To further study the pattern of the underlying mean arterial pressure (MAP), we apply a regression method to predict the continuous MAP values using linear regression over the next 60 minutes. Results Support vector machine yields the best performance in terms of recall (84%). Including the invasive features in the classification improves the performance significantly with both recall and precision increasing by more than 20 percentage points. We were able to predict the MAP with a root mean square error (a frequently used measure of the differences between the predicted values and the observed values) of 10 mmHg 60 minutes in the future. After converting continuous MAP predictions into AHE binary predictions, we achieve a 91% recall and 68% precision. In addition to predicting AHE, the MAP predictions provide clinically useful information regarding the timing and severity of the AHE occurrence. Conclusion We were able to predict AHE with precision and recall above 80% 30 minutes in advance with the large real-world dataset. The prediction of regression model can provide a more fine-grained, interpretable signal to practitioners. Model performance is improved by the inclusion of invasive features in predicting AHE, when compared to predicting the AHE based on only the available, restricted set of noninvasive technologies. This demonstrates the importance of exploring more noninvasive technologies for AHE prediction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Y. Lee ◽  
Britney Nguyen ◽  
Carlos Orosco ◽  
Mark P. Styczynski

Abstract Background The topology of metabolic networks is both well-studied and remarkably well-conserved across many species. The regulation of these networks, however, is much more poorly characterized, though it is known to be divergent across organisms—two characteristics that make it difficult to model metabolic networks accurately. While many computational methods have been built to unravel transcriptional regulation, there have been few approaches developed for systems-scale analysis and study of metabolic regulation. Here, we present a stepwise machine learning framework that applies established algorithms to identify regulatory interactions in metabolic systems based on metabolic data: stepwise classification of unknown regulation, or SCOUR. Results We evaluated our framework on both noiseless and noisy data, using several models of varying sizes and topologies to show that our approach is generalizable. We found that, when testing on data under the most realistic conditions (low sampling frequency and high noise), SCOUR could identify reaction fluxes controlled only by the concentration of a single metabolite (its primary substrate) with high accuracy. The positive predictive value (PPV) for identifying reactions controlled by the concentration of two metabolites ranged from 32 to 88% for noiseless data, 9.2 to 49% for either low sampling frequency/low noise or high sampling frequency/high noise data, and 6.6–27% for low sampling frequency/high noise data, with results typically sufficiently high for lab validation to be a practical endeavor. While the PPVs for reactions controlled by three metabolites were lower, they were still in most cases significantly better than random classification. Conclusions SCOUR uses a novel approach to synthetically generate the training data needed to identify regulators of reaction fluxes in a given metabolic system, enabling metabolomics and fluxomics data to be leveraged for regulatory structure inference. By identifying and triaging the most likely candidate regulatory interactions, SCOUR can drastically reduce the amount of time needed to identify and experimentally validate metabolic regulatory interactions. As high-throughput experimental methods for testing these interactions are further developed, SCOUR will provide critical impact in the development of predictive metabolic models in new organisms and pathways.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-16
Author(s):  
José Suárez-Varela ◽  
Miquel Ferriol-Galmés ◽  
Albert López ◽  
Paul Almasan ◽  
Guillermo Bernárdez ◽  
...  

During the last decade, Machine Learning (ML) has increasingly become a hot topic in the field of Computer Networks and is expected to be gradually adopted for a plethora of control, monitoring and management tasks in real-world deployments. This poses the need to count on new generations of students, researchers and practitioners with a solid background in ML applied to networks. During 2020, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has organized the "ITU AI/ML in 5G challenge", an open global competition that has introduced to a broad audience some of the current main challenges in ML for networks. This large-scale initiative has gathered 23 different challenges proposed by network operators, equipment manufacturers and academia, and has attracted a total of 1300+ participants from 60+ countries. This paper narrates our experience organizing one of the proposed challenges: the "Graph Neural Networking Challenge 2020". We describe the problem presented to participants, the tools and resources provided, some organization aspects and participation statistics, an outline of the top-3 awarded solutions, and a summary with some lessons learned during all this journey. As a result, this challenge leaves a curated set of educational resources openly available to anyone interested in the topic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-202
Author(s):  
Brian Z. Tamanaha

A century ago the pragmatists called for reconstruction in philosophy. Philosophy at the time was occupied with conceptual analysis, abstractions, a priori analysis, and the pursuit of necessary, universal truths. Pragmatists argued that philosophy instead should center on the pressing problems of the day, which requires theorists to pay attention to social complexity, variation, change, power, consequences, and other concrete aspects of social life. The parallels between philosophy then and jurisprudence today are striking, as I show, calling for a pragmatism-informed theory of law within contemporary jurisprudence. In the wake of H.L.A. Hart’s mid-century turn to conceptual analysis, “during the course of the twentieth century, the boundaries of jurisprudential inquiry were progressively narrowed.”1 Jurisprudence today is dominated by legal philosophers engaged in conceptual analysis built on intuitions, seeking to identify essential features and timeless truths about law. In the pursuit of these objectives, they detach law from its social and historical moorings, they ignore variation and change, they drastically reduce law to a singular phenomenon—like a coercive planning system for difficult moral problems2—and they deny that coercive force is a universal feature of law, among other ways in which they depart from the reality of law; a few prominent jurisprudents even proffer arguments that invoke aliens or societies of angels.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (16) ◽  
pp. 5312
Author(s):  
Yanni Zhang ◽  
Yiming Liu ◽  
Qiang Li ◽  
Jianzhong Wang ◽  
Miao Qi ◽  
...  

Recently, deep learning-based image deblurring and deraining have been well developed. However, most of these methods fail to distill the useful features. What is more, exploiting the detailed image features in a deep learning framework always requires a mass of parameters, which inevitably makes the network suffer from a high computational burden. We propose a lightweight fusion distillation network (LFDN) for image deblurring and deraining to solve the above problems. The proposed LFDN is designed as an encoder–decoder architecture. In the encoding stage, the image feature is reduced to various small-scale spaces for multi-scale information extraction and fusion without much information loss. Then, a feature distillation normalization block is designed at the beginning of the decoding stage, which enables the network to distill and screen valuable channel information of feature maps continuously. Besides, an information fusion strategy between distillation modules and feature channels is also carried out by the attention mechanism. By fusing different information in the proposed approach, our network can achieve state-of-the-art image deblurring and deraining results with a smaller number of parameters and outperform the existing methods in model complexity.


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