Estimating dependence relationships between variables is a crucial issue in many applied domains, such as medicine, social sciences and psychology. When several variables are entertained, these can be organized into a network which encodes their set of conditional dependence relations. Typically however, the underlying network structure is completely unknown or can be partially drawn only; accordingly it should be learned from the available data, a process known as structure learning. In addition, data arising from social and psychological studies are often of different types, as they can include categorical, discrete and continuous measurements. In this paper we develop a novel Bayesian methodology for structure learning of directed networks which applies to mixed data, i.e. possibly containing continuous, discrete, ordinal and binary variables simultaneously. Whenever available, our method can easily incorporate known dependence structures among variables represented by paths or edge directions that can be postulated in advance based on the specific problem under consideration. We evaluate the proposed method through extensive simulation studies, with appreciable performances in comparison with current state-of-the-art alternative methods. Finally, we apply our methodology to well-being data from a social survey promoted by the United Nations, and mental health data collected from a cohort of medical students.
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Objective: Prediction models are popular in medical research and practice. By predicting an outcome of interest for specific patients, these models may help inform difficult treatment decisions, and are often hailed as the poster children for personalized, data-driven healthcare. Many prediction models are deployed for decision support based on their prediction accuracy in validation studies. We investigate whether this is a safe and valid approach. Materials and Methods: We show that using prediction models for decision making can lead to harmful decisions, even when the predictions exhibit good discrimination after deployment. These models are harmful self-fulfilling prophecies: their deployment harms a group of patients but the worse outcome of these patients does not invalidate the predictive power of the model. Results: Our main result is a formal characterization of a set of such prediction models. Next we show that models that are well calibrated before and after deployment are useless for decision making as they made no change in the data distribution. Discussion: Our results point to the need to revise standard practices for validation, deployment and evaluation of prediction models that are used in medical decisions. Conclusion: Outcome prediction models can yield harmful self-fulfilling prophecies when used for decision making, a new perspective on prediction model development, deployment and monitoring is needed.
Bayesian networks are widely utilised in various fields, offering elegant representations of factorisations and causal relationships. We use surjective functions to reduce the dimensionality of the Bayesian networks by combining states and study the preservation of their factorisation structure. We introduce and define corresponding notions, analyse their properties, and provide examples of highly symmetric special cases, enhancing the understanding of the fundamental properties of such reductions for Bayesian networks. We also discuss the connection between this and reductions of homogeneous and non-homogeneous Markov chains.
We analyze correlation structures in financial markets by coarse graining the Pearson correlation matrices according to market sectors to obtain Guhr matrices using Guhr's correlation method according to Ref. [P. Rinn {\it et. al.}, Europhysics Letters 110, 68003 (2015)]. We compare the results for the evolution of market states and the corresponding transition matrices with those obtained using Pearson correlation matrices. The behavior of market states is found to be similar for both the coarse grained and Pearson matrices. However, the number of relevant variables is reduced by orders of magnitude.
Understanding the mechanisms through which neural networks extract statistics from input-label pairs is one of the most important unsolved problems in supervised learning. Prior works have identified that the gram matrices of the weights in trained neural networks of general architectures are proportional to the average gradient outer product of the model, in a statement known as the Neural Feature Ansatz (NFA). However, the reason these quantities become correlated during training is poorly understood. In this work, we explain the emergence of this correlation. We identify that the NFA is equivalent to alignment between the left singular structure of the weight matrices and a significant component of the empirical neural tangent kernels associated with those weights. We establish that the NFA introduced in prior works is driven by a centered NFA that isolates this alignment. We show that the speed of NFA development can be predicted analytically at early training times in terms of simple statistics of the inputs and labels. Finally, we introduce a simple intervention to increase NFA correlation at any given layer, which dramatically improves the quality of features learned.
We present MIPS, a novel method for program synthesis based on automated mechanistic interpretability of neural networks trained to perform the desired task, auto-distilling the learned algorithm into Python code. We test MIPS on a benchmark of 62 algorithmic tasks that can be learned by an RNN and find it highly complementary to GPT-4: MIPS solves 32 of them, including 13 that are not solved by GPT-4 (which also solves 30). MIPS uses an integer autoencoder to convert the RNN into a finite state machine, then applies Boolean or integer symbolic regression to capture the learned algorithm. As opposed to large language models, this program synthesis technique makes no use of (and is therefore not limited by) human training data such as algorithms and code from GitHub. We discuss opportunities and challenges for scaling up this approach to make machine-learned models more interpretable and trustworthy.
Researchers would often like to leverage data from a collection of sources (e.g., primary studies in a meta-analysis) to estimate causal effects in a target population of interest. However, traditional meta-analytic methods do not produce causally interpretable estimates for a well-defined target population. In this paper, we present the CausalMetaR R package, which implements efficient and robust methods to estimate causal effects in a given internal or external target population using multi-source data. The package includes estimators of average and subgroup treatment effects for the entire target population. To produce efficient and robust estimates of causal effects, the package implements doubly robust and non-parametric efficient estimators and supports using flexible data-adaptive (e.g., machine learning techniques) methods and cross-fitting techniques to estimate the nuisance models (e.g., the treatment model, the outcome model). We describe the key features of the package and demonstrate how to use the package through an example.
Graph representation learning (GRL) is critical for extracting insights from complex network structures, but it also raises security concerns due to potential privacy vulnerabilities in these representations. This paper investigates the structural vulnerabilities in graph neural models where sensitive topological information can be inferred through edge reconstruction attacks. Our research primarily addresses the theoretical underpinnings of cosine-similarity-based edge reconstruction attacks (COSERA), providing theoretical and empirical evidence that such attacks can perfectly reconstruct sparse Erdos Renyi graphs with independent random features as graph size increases. Conversely, we establish that sparsity is a critical factor for COSERA's effectiveness, as demonstrated through analysis and experiments on stochastic block models. Finally, we explore the resilience of (provably) private graph representations produced via noisy aggregation (NAG) mechanism against COSERA. We empirically delineate instances wherein COSERA demonstrates both efficacy and deficiency in its capacity to function as an instrument for elucidating the trade-off between privacy and utility.
Constant (naive) imputation is still widely used in practice as this is a first easy-to-use technique to deal with missing data. Yet, this simple method could be expected to induce a large bias for prediction purposes, as the imputed input may strongly differ from the true underlying data. However, recent works suggest that this bias is low in the context of high-dimensional linear predictors when data is supposed to be missing completely at random (MCAR). This paper completes the picture for linear predictors by confirming the intuition that the bias is negligible and that surprisingly naive imputation also remains relevant in very low dimension.To this aim, we consider a unique underlying random features model, which offers a rigorous framework for studying predictive performances, whilst the dimension of the observed features varies.Building on these theoretical results, we establish finite-sample bounds on stochastic gradient (SGD) predictors applied to zero-imputed data, a strategy particularly well suited for large-scale learning.If the MCAR assumption appears to be strong, we show that similar favorable behaviors occur for more complex missing data scenarios.
Speech intelligibility can be degraded due to multiple factors, such as noisy environments, technical difficulties or biological conditions. This work is focused on the development of an automatic non-intrusive system for predicting the speech intelligibility level in this latter case. The main contribution of our research on this topic is the use of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with log-mel spectrograms as input features for this purpose. In addition, this LSTM-based system is further enhanced by the incorporation of a simple attention mechanism that is able to determine the more relevant frames to this task. The proposed models are evaluated with the UA-Speech database that contains dysarthric speech with different degrees of severity. Results show that the attention LSTM architecture outperforms both, a reference Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based system with hand-crafted features and a LSTM-based system with Mean-Pooling.
Graph representation learning for hypergraphs can be used to extract patterns among higher-order interactions that are critically important in many real world problems. Current approaches designed for hypergraphs, however, are unable to handle different types of hypergraphs and are typically not generic for various learning tasks. Indeed, models that can predict variable-sized heterogeneous hyperedges have not been available. Here we develop a new self-attention based graph neural network called Hyper-SAGNN applicable to homogeneous and heterogeneous hypergraphs with variable hyperedge sizes. We perform extensive evaluations on multiple datasets, including four benchmark network datasets and two single-cell Hi-C datasets in genomics. We demonstrate that Hyper-SAGNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on traditional tasks while also achieving great performance on a new task called outsider identification. Hyper-SAGNN will be useful for graph representation learning to uncover complex higher-order interactions in different applications.
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