The operationalization of algorithmic fairness comes with several practical challenges, not the least of which is the availability or reliability of protected attributes in datasets. In real-world contexts, practical and legal impediments may prevent the collection and use of demographic data, making it difficult to ensure algorithmic fairness. While initial fairness algorithms did not consider these limitations, recent proposals aim to achieve algorithmic fairness in classification by incorporating noisiness in protected attributes or not using protected attributes at all. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first head-to-head study of fair classification algorithms to compare attribute-reliant, noise-tolerant and attribute-blind algorithms along the dual axes of predictivity and fairness. We evaluated these algorithms via case studies on four real-world datasets and synthetic perturbations. Our study reveals that attribute-blind and noise-tolerant fair classifiers can potentially achieve similar level of performance as attribute-reliant algorithms, even when protected attributes are noisy. However, implementing them in practice requires careful nuance. Our study provides insights into the practical implications of using fair classification algorithms in scenarios where protected attributes are noisy or partially available.
Hypergraphs are important for processing data with higher-order relationships involving more than two entities. In scenarios where explicit hypergraphs are not readily available, it is desirable to infer a meaningful hypergraph structure from the node features to capture the intrinsic relations within the data. However, existing methods either adopt simple pre-defined rules that fail to precisely capture the distribution of the potential hypergraph structure, or learn a mapping between hypergraph structures and node features but require a large amount of labelled data, i.e., pre-existing hypergraph structures, for training. Both restrict their applications in practical scenarios. To fill this gap, we propose a novel smoothness prior that enables us to design a method to infer the probability for each potential hyperedge without labelled data as supervision. The proposed prior indicates features of nodes in a hyperedge are highly correlated by the features of the hyperedge containing them. We use this prior to derive the relation between the hypergraph structure and the node features via probabilistic modelling. This allows us to develop an unsupervised inference method to estimate the probability for each potential hyperedge via solving an optimisation problem that has an analytical solution. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that our method can learn meaningful hypergraph structures from data more efficiently than existing hypergraph structure inference methods.
I consider a class of statistical decision problems in which the policy maker must decide between two alternative policies to maximize social welfare based on a finite sample. The central assumption is that the underlying, possibly infinite-dimensional parameter, lies in a known convex set, potentially leading to partial identification of the welfare effect. An example of such restrictions is the smoothness of counterfactual outcome functions. As the main theoretical result, I derive a finite-sample, exact minimax regret decision rule within the class of all decision rules under normal errors with known variance. When the error distribution is unknown, I obtain a feasible decision rule that is asymptotically minimax regret. I apply my results to the problem of whether to change a policy eligibility cutoff in a regression discontinuity setup, and illustrate them in an empirical application to a school construction program in Burkina Faso.
In recent years operator networks have emerged as promising deep learning tools for approximating the solution to partial differential equations (PDEs). These networks map input functions that describe material properties, forcing functions and boundary data to the solution of a PDE. This work describes a new architecture for operator networks that mimics the form of the numerical solution obtained from an approximate variational or weak formulation of the problem. The application of these ideas to a generic elliptic PDE leads to a variationally mimetic operator network (VarMiON). Like the conventional Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) the VarMiON is also composed of a sub-network that constructs the basis functions for the output and another that constructs the coefficients for these basis functions. However, in contrast to the DeepONet, the architecture of these sub-networks in the VarMiON is precisely determined. An analysis of the error in the VarMiON solution reveals that it contains contributions from the error in the training data, the training error, the quadrature error in sampling input and output functions, and a "covering error" that measures the distance between the test input functions and the nearest functions in the training dataset. It also depends on the stability constants for the exact solution operator and its VarMiON approximation. The application of the VarMiON to a canonical elliptic PDE and a nonlinear PDE reveals that for approximately the same number of network parameters, on average the VarMiON incurs smaller errors than a standard DeepONet and a recently proposed multiple-input operator network (MIONet). Further, its performance is more robust to variations in input functions, the techniques used to sample the input and output functions, the techniques used to construct the basis functions, and the number of input functions.
Graphlet counting is an important problem as it has numerous applications in several fields, including social network analysis, biological network analysis, transaction network analysis, etc. Most of the practical networks are dynamic. A graphlet is a subgraph with a fixed number of vertices and can be induced or non-induced. There are several works for counting graphlets in a static network where graph topology never changes. Surprisingly, there have been no scalable and practical algorithms for maintaining all fixed-sized graphlets in a dynamic network where the graph topology changes over time. We are the first to propose an efficient algorithm for maintaining graphlets in a fully dynamic network. Our algorithm is efficient because (1) we consider only the region of changes in the graph for updating the graphlet count, and (2) we use an efficient algorithm for counting graphlets in the region of change. We show by experimental evaluation that our technique is more than 10x faster than the baseline approach.
We consider (robust) inference in the context of a factor model for tensor-valued sequences. We study the consistency of the estimated common factors and loadings space when using estimators based on minimising quadratic loss functions. Building on the observation that such loss functions are adequate only if sufficiently many moments exist, we extend our results to the case of heavy-tailed distributions by considering estimators based on minimising the Huber loss function, which uses an $L_{1}$ -norm weight on outliers. We show that such class of estimators is robust to the presence of heavy tails, even when only the second moment of the data exists. We also propose a modified version of the eigenvalue-ratio principle to estimate the dimensions of the core tensor and show the consistency of the resultant estimators without any condition on the relative rates of divergence of the sample size and dimensions. Extensive numerical studies are conducted to show the advantages of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-art ones especially under the heavy-tailed cases. An import/export dataset of a variety of commodities across multiple countries is analyzed to show the practical usefulness of the proposed robust estimation procedure. An R package ``RTFA" implementing the proposed methods is available on R CRAN.
Many data extraction tasks of practical relevance require not only syntactic pattern matching but also semantic reasoning about the content of the underlying text. While regular expressions are very well suited for tasks that require only syntactic pattern matching, they fall short for data extraction tasks that involve both a syntactic and semantic component. To address this issue, we introduce semantic regexes, a generalization of regular expressions that facilitates combined syntactic and semantic reasoning about textual data. We also propose a novel learning algorithm that can synthesize semantic regexes from a small number of positive and negative examples. Our proposed learning algorithm uses a combination of neural sketch generation and compositional type-directed synthesis for fast and effective generalization from a small number of examples. We have implemented these ideas in a new tool called Smore and evaluated it on representative data extraction tasks involving several textual datasets. Our evaluation shows that semantic regexes can better support complex data extraction tasks than standard regular expressions and that our learning algorithm significantly outperforms existing tools, including state-of-the-art neural networks and program synthesis tools.
The conjoining of dynamical systems and deep learning has become a topic of great interest. In particular, neural differential equations (NDEs) demonstrate that neural networks and differential equation are two sides of the same coin. Traditional parameterised differential equations are a special case. Many popular neural network architectures, such as residual networks and recurrent networks, are discretisations. NDEs are suitable for tackling generative problems, dynamical systems, and time series (particularly in physics, finance, ...) and are thus of interest to both modern machine learning and traditional mathematical modelling. NDEs offer high-capacity function approximation, strong priors on model space, the ability to handle irregular data, memory efficiency, and a wealth of available theory on both sides. This doctoral thesis provides an in-depth survey of the field. Topics include: neural ordinary differential equations (e.g. for hybrid neural/mechanistic modelling of physical systems); neural controlled differential equations (e.g. for learning functions of irregular time series); and neural stochastic differential equations (e.g. to produce generative models capable of representing complex stochastic dynamics, or sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions). Further topics include: numerical methods for NDEs (e.g. reversible differential equations solvers, backpropagation through differential equations, Brownian reconstruction); symbolic regression for dynamical systems (e.g. via regularised evolution); and deep implicit models (e.g. deep equilibrium models, differentiable optimisation). We anticipate this thesis will be of interest to anyone interested in the marriage of deep learning with dynamical systems, and hope it will provide a useful reference for the current state of the art.
Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
Embedding models for deterministic Knowledge Graphs (KG) have been extensively studied, with the purpose of capturing latent semantic relations between entities and incorporating the structured knowledge into machine learning. However, there are many KGs that model uncertain knowledge, which typically model the inherent uncertainty of relations facts with a confidence score, and embedding such uncertain knowledge represents an unresolved challenge. The capturing of uncertain knowledge will benefit many knowledge-driven applications such as question answering and semantic search by providing more natural characterization of the knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertain KG embedding model UKGE, which aims to preserve both structural and uncertainty information of relation facts in the embedding space. Unlike previous models that characterize relation facts with binary classification techniques, UKGE learns embeddings according to the confidence scores of uncertain relation facts. To further enhance the precision of UKGE, we also introduce probabilistic soft logic to infer confidence scores for unseen relation facts during training. We propose and evaluate two variants of UKGE based on different learning objectives. Experiments are conducted on three real-world uncertain KGs via three tasks, i.e. confidence prediction, relation fact ranking, and relation fact classification. UKGE shows effectiveness in capturing uncertain knowledge by achieving promising results on these tasks, and consistently outperforms baselines on these tasks.
This paper is an attempt to explain all the matrix calculus you need in order to understand the training of deep neural networks. We assume no math knowledge beyond what you learned in calculus 1, and provide links to help you refresh the necessary math where needed. Note that you do not need to understand this material before you start learning to train and use deep learning in practice; rather, this material is for those who are already familiar with the basics of neural networks, and wish to deepen their understanding of the underlying math. Don't worry if you get stuck at some point along the way---just go back and reread the previous section, and try writing down and working through some examples. And if you're still stuck, we're happy to answer your questions in the Theory category at forums.fast.ai. Note: There is a reference section at the end of the paper summarizing all the key matrix calculus rules and terminology discussed here. See related articles at //explained.ai