scholarly journals Understanding, Explanation, and Active Inference

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Parr ◽  
Giovanni Pezzulo

While machine learning techniques have been transformative in solving a range of problems, an important challenge is to understand why they arrive at the decisions they output. Some have argued that this necessitates augmenting machine intelligence with understanding such that, when queried, a machine is able to explain its behaviour (i.e., explainable AI). In this article, we address the issue of machine understanding from the perspective of active inference. This paradigm enables decision making based upon a model of how data are generated. The generative model contains those variables required to explain sensory data, and its inversion may be seen as an attempt to explain the causes of these data. Here we are interested in explanations of one’s own actions. This implies a deep generative model that includes a model of the world, used to infer policies, and a higher-level model that attempts to predict which policies will be selected based upon a space of hypothetical (i.e., counterfactual) explanations—and which can subsequently be used to provide (retrospective) explanations about the policies pursued. We illustrate the construct validity of this notion of understanding in relation to human understanding by highlighting the similarities in computational architecture and the consequences of its dysfunction.

2019 ◽  
Vol 113 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 495-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Parr ◽  
Karl J. Friston

Abstract Active inference is an approach to understanding behaviour that rests upon the idea that the brain uses an internal generative model to predict incoming sensory data. The fit between this model and data may be improved in two ways. The brain could optimise probabilistic beliefs about the variables in the generative model (i.e. perceptual inference). Alternatively, by acting on the world, it could change the sensory data, such that they are more consistent with the model. This implies a common objective function (variational free energy) for action and perception that scores the fit between an internal model and the world. We compare two free energy functionals for active inference in the framework of Markov decision processes. One of these is a functional of beliefs (i.e. probability distributions) about states and policies, but a function of observations, while the second is a functional of beliefs about all three. In the former (expected free energy), prior beliefs about outcomes are not part of the generative model (because they are absorbed into the prior over policies). Conversely, in the second (generalised free energy), priors over outcomes become an explicit component of the generative model. When using the free energy function, which is blind to future observations, we equip the generative model with a prior over policies that ensure preferred (i.e. priors over) outcomes are realised. In other words, if we expect to encounter a particular kind of outcome, this lends plausibility to those policies for which this outcome is a consequence. In addition, this formulation ensures that selected policies minimise uncertainty about future outcomes by minimising the free energy expected in the future. When using the free energy functional—that effectively treats future observations as hidden states—we show that policies are inferred or selected that realise prior preferences by minimising the free energy of future expectations. Interestingly, the form of posterior beliefs about policies (and associated belief updating) turns out to be identical under both formulations, but the quantities used to compute them are not.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Praveeen Anandhanathan ◽  
Priyanka Gopalan

Abstract Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is spreading across the world. Since at first it has appeared in Wuhan, China in December 2019, it has become a serious issue across the globe. There are no accurate resources to predict and find the disease. So, by knowing the past patients’ records, it could guide the clinicians to fight against the pandemic. Therefore, for the prediction of healthiness from symptoms Machine learning techniques can be implemented. From this we are going to analyse only the symptoms which occurs in every patient. These predictions can help clinicians in the easier manner to cure the patients. Already for prediction of many of the diseases, techniques like SVM (Support vector Machine), Fuzzy k-Means Clustering, Decision Tree algorithm, Random Forest Method, ANN (Artificial Neural Network), KNN (k-Nearest Neighbour), Naïve Bayes, Linear Regression model are used. As we haven’t faced this disease before, we can’t say which technique will give the maximum accuracy. So, we are going to provide an efficient result by comparing all the such algorithms in RStudio.


2020 ◽  
pp. 193-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hayder A. Alatabi ◽  
Ayad R. Abbas

Over the last period, social media achieved a widespread use worldwide where the statistics indicate that more than three billion people are on social media, leading to large quantities of data online. To analyze these large quantities of data, a special classification method known as sentiment analysis, is used. This paper presents a new sentiment analysis system based on machine learning techniques, which aims to create a process to extract the polarity from social media texts. By using machine learning techniques, sentiment analysis achieved a great success around the world. This paper investigates this topic and proposes a sentiment analysis system built on Bayesian Rough Decision Tree (BRDT) algorithm. The experimental results show the success of this system where the accuracy of the system is more than 95% on social media data.


Author(s):  
Christos Floros ◽  
Panagiotis Ballas

Crises around the world reveal a generally unstable environment in the last decades within which banks and financial institutions operate. Risk is an inherent characteristic of financial institutions and is a multifaceted phenomenon. Everyday business practice involves decisions, which requires the use of information regarding various types of threats involved together with an evaluation of their impact on future performance, concluding to combinations of types of risks and projected returns for decision makers to choose from. Moreover, financial institutions process a massive amount of data, collected either internally or externally, in an effort to continuously analyse trends of the economy they operate in and decode global economic conditions. Even though research has been performed in the field of accounting and finance, the authors explore the application of machine learning techniques to facilitate decision making by top management of contemporary financial institutions improving the quality of their accounting disclosure.


Author(s):  
Pablo Díaz-Moreno ◽  
Juan José Carrasco ◽  
Emilio Soria-Olivas ◽  
José M. Martínez-Martínez ◽  
Pablo Escandell-Montero ◽  
...  

Neural Networks (NN) are one of the most used machine learning techniques in different areas of knowledge. This has led to the emergence of a large number of courses of Neural Networks around the world and in areas where the users of this technique do not have a lot of programming skills. Current software that implements these elements, such as Matlab®, has a number of important limitations in teaching field. In some cases, the implementation of a MLP requires a thorough knowledge of the software and of the instructions that train and validate these systems. In other cases, the architecture of the model is fixed and they do not allow an automatic sweep of the parameters that determine the architecture of the network. This chapter presents a teaching tool for the its use in courses about neural models that solves some of the above-mentioned limitations. This tool is based on Matlab® software.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (136) ◽  
pp. 20170376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Parr ◽  
Karl J. Friston

Biological systems—like ourselves—are constantly faced with uncertainty. Despite noisy sensory data, and volatile environments, creatures appear to actively maintain their integrity. To account for this remarkable ability to make optimal decisions in the face of a capricious world, we propose a generative model that represents the beliefs an agent might possess about their own uncertainty. By simulating a noisy and volatile environment, we demonstrate how uncertainty influences optimal epistemic (visual) foraging. In our simulations, saccades were deployed less frequently to regions with a lower sensory precision, while a greater volatility led to a shorter inhibition of return. These simulations illustrate a principled explanation for some cardinal aspects of visual foraging—and allow us to propose a correspondence between the representation of uncertainty and ascending neuromodulatory systems, complementing that suggested by Yu & Dayan (Yu & Dayan 2005 Neuron 46 , 681–692. ( doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2005.04.026 )).


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandip S Panesar ◽  
Rhett N D’Souza ◽  
Fang-Cheng Yeh ◽  
Juan C Fernandez-Miranda

AbstractBackgroundMachine learning (ML) is the application of specialized algorithms to datasets for trend delineation, categorization or prediction. ML techniques have been traditionally applied to large, highly-dimensional databases. Gliomas are a heterogeneous group of primary brain tumors, traditionally graded using histopathological features. Recently the World Health Organization proposed a novel grading system for gliomas incorporating molecular characteristics. We aimed to study whether ML could achieve accurate prognostication of 2-year mortality in a small, highly-dimensional database of glioma patients.MethodsWe applied three machine learning techniques: artificial neural networks (ANN), decision trees (DT), support vector machine (SVM), and classical logistic regression (LR) to a dataset consisting of 76 glioma patients of all grades. We compared the effect of applying the algorithms to the raw database, versus a database where only statistically significant features were included into the algorithmic inputs (feature selection).ResultsRaw input consisted of 21 variables, and achieved performance of (accuracy/AUC): 70.7%/0.70 for ANN, 68%/0.72 for SVM, 66.7%/0.64 for LR and 65%/0.70 for DT. Feature selected input consisted of 14 variables and achieved performance of 73.4%/0.75 for ANN, 73.3%/0.74 for SVM, 69.3%/0.73 for LR and 65.2%/0.63 for DT.ConclusionsWe demonstrate that these techniques can also be applied to small, yet highly-dimensional datasets. Our ML techniques achieved reasonable performance compared to similar studies in the literature. Though local databases may be small versus larger cancer repositories, we demonstrate that ML techniques can still be applied to their analysis, though traditional statistical methods are of similar benefit.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (15) ◽  
pp. 1834
Author(s):  
Abdullah Aljumah

From the end of 2019, the world has been facing the threat of COVID-19. It is predicted that, before herd immunity is achieved globally via vaccination, people around the world will have to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic using precautionary steps. This paper suggests a COVID-19 identification and control system that operates in real-time. The proposed system utilizes the Internet of Things (IoT) platform to capture users’ time-sensitive symptom information to detect potential cases of coronaviruses early on, to track the clinical measures adopted by survivors, and to gather and examine appropriate data to verify the existence of the virus. There are five key components in the framework: symptom data collection and uploading (via communication technology), a quarantine/isolation center, an information processing core (using artificial intelligent techniques), cloud computing, and visualization to healthcare doctors. This research utilizes eight machine/deep learning techniques—Neural Network, Decision Table, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes, OneR, K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN), Dense Neural Network (DNN), and the Long Short-Term Memory technique—to detect coronavirus cases from time-sensitive information. A simulation was performed to verify the eight algorithms, after selecting the relevant symptoms, on real-world COVID-19 data values. The results showed that five of these eight algorithms obtained an accuracy of over 90%. Conclusively, it is shown that real-world symptomatic information would enable these three algorithms to identify potential COVID-19 cases effectively with enhanced accuracy. Additionally, the framework presents responses to treatment for COVID-19 patients.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Yar Muhammad ◽  
Mohammad Dahman Alshehri ◽  
Wael Mohammed Alenazy ◽  
Truong Vinh Hoang ◽  
Ryan Alturki

Pneumonia is a very common and fatal disease, which needs to be identified at the initial stages in order to prevent a patient having this disease from more damage and help him/her in saving his/her life. Various techniques are used for the diagnosis of pneumonia including chest X-ray, CT scan, blood culture, sputum culture, fluid sample, bronchoscopy, and pulse oximetry. Medical image analysis plays a vital role in the diagnosis of various diseases like MERS, COVID-19, pneumonia, etc. and is considered to be one of the auspicious research areas. To analyze chest X-ray images accurately, there is a need for an expert radiologist who possesses expertise and experience in the desired domain. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report, about 2/3 people in the world still do not have access to the radiologist, in order to diagnose their disease. This study proposes a DL framework to diagnose pneumonia disease in an efficient and effective manner. Various Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) transfer learning techniques such as AlexNet, SqueezeNet, VGG16, VGG19, and Inception-V3 are utilized for extracting useful features from the chest X-ray images. In this study, several machine learning (ML) classifiers are utilized. The proposed system has been trained and tested on chest X-ray and CT images dataset. In order to examine the stability and effectiveness of the proposed system, different performance measures have been utilized. The proposed system is intended to be beneficial and supportive for medical doctors to accurately and efficiently diagnose pneumonia disease.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdallah Moubayed ◽  
Mohammadnoor Injadat ◽  
Abdallah Shami ◽  
Hanan Lutfiyya

E-learning platforms and processes face several challenges, among which is the idea of personalizing the e-learning experience and to keep students motivated and engaged. This work is part of a larger study that aims to tackle these two challenges using a variety of machine learning techniques. To that end, this paper proposes the use of k-means algorithm to cluster students based on 12 engagement metrics divided into two categories: interaction-related and effort-related. Quantitative analysis is performed to identify the students that are not engaged who may need help. Three different clustering models are considered: two-level, three-level, and five-level. The considered dataset is the students’ event log of a second-year undergraduate Science course from a North American university that was given in a blended format. The event log is transformed using MATLAB to generate a new dataset representing the considered metrics. Experimental results’ analysis shows that among the considered interaction-related and effort-related metrics, the number of logins and the average duration to submit assignments are the most representative of the students’ engagement level. Furthermore, using the silhouette coefficient as a performance metric, it is shown that the two-level model offers the best performance in terms of cluster separation. However, the three-level model has a similar performance while better identifying students with low engagement levels.


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