In recent years, there is a growing interest in combining techniques attributed to the areas of Statistics and Machine Learning in order to obtain the benefits of both approaches. In this article, the statistical technique lasso for variable selection is represented through a neural network. It is observed that, although both the statistical approach and its neural version have the same objective function, they differ due to their optimization. In particular, the neural version is usually optimized in one-step using a single validation set, while the statistical counterpart uses a two-step optimization based on cross-validation. The more elaborated optimization of the statistical method results in more accurate parameter estimation, especially when the training set is small. For this reason, a modification of the standard approach for training neural networks, that mimics the statistical framework, is proposed. During the development of the above modification, a new optimization algorithm for identifying the significant variables emerged. Experimental results, using synthetic and real data sets, show that this new optimization algorithm achieves better performance than any of the three previous optimization approaches.
Sequential location recommendation plays a huge role in modern life, which can enhance user experience, bring more profit to businesses and assist in government administration. Although methods for location recommendation have evolved significantly thanks to the development of recommendation systems, there is still limited utilization of geographic information, along with the ongoing challenge of addressing data sparsity. In response, we introduce a Proximity-aware based region representation for Sequential Recommendation (PASR for short), built upon the Self-Attention Network architecture. We tackle the sparsity issue through a novel loss function employing importance sampling, which emphasizes informative negative samples during optimization. Moreover, PASR enhances the integration of geographic information by employing a self-attention-based geography encoder to the hierarchical grid and proximity grid at each GPS point. To further leverage geographic information, we utilize the proximity-aware negative samplers to enhance the quality of negative samples. We conducted evaluations using three real-world Location-Based Social Networking (LBSN) datasets, demonstrating that PASR surpasses state-of-the-art sequential location recommendation methods
Neural networks (NNs) are primarily developed within the frequentist statistical framework. Nevertheless, frequentist NNs lack the capability to provide uncertainties in the predictions, and hence their robustness can not be adequately assessed. Conversely, the Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) naturally offer predictive uncertainty by applying Bayes' theorem. However, their computational requirements pose significant challenges. Moreover, both frequentist NNs and BNNs suffer from overfitting issues when dealing with noisy and sparse data, which render their predictions unwieldy away from the available data space. To address both these problems simultaneously, we leverage insights from a hierarchical setting in which the parameter priors are conditional on hyperparameters to construct a BNN by applying a semi-analytical framework known as nonlinear sparse Bayesian learning (NSBL). We call our network sparse Bayesian neural network (SBNN) which aims to address the practical and computational issues associated with BNNs. Simultaneously, imposing a sparsity-inducing prior encourages the automatic pruning of redundant parameters based on the automatic relevance determination (ARD) concept. This process involves removing redundant parameters by optimally selecting the precision of the parameters prior probability density functions (pdfs), resulting in a tractable treatment for overfitting. To demonstrate the benefits of the SBNN algorithm, the study presents an illustrative regression problem and compares the results of a BNN using standard Bayesian inference, hierarchical Bayesian inference, and a BNN equipped with the proposed algorithm. Subsequently, we demonstrate the importance of considering the full parameter posterior by comparing the results with those obtained using the Laplace approximation with and without NSBL.
In this work, we introduce Regularity Structures B-series which are used for describing solutions of singular stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). We define composition and substitutions of these B-series and as in the context of B-series for ordinary differential equations, these operations can rewritten via products and Hopf algebras which have been used for building up renormalised models. These models provide a suitable topology for solving singular SPDEs. This new construction sheds a new light on these products and open interesting perspectives for the study of singular SPDEs in connection with B-series.
We study the problem of reconstructing solutions of inverse problems when only noisy measurements are available. We assume that the problem can be modeled with an infinite-dimensional forward operator that is not continuously invertible. Then, we restrict this forward operator to finite-dimensional spaces so that the inverse is Lipschitz continuous. For the inverse operator, we demonstrate that there exists a neural network which is a robust-to-noise approximation of the operator. In addition, we show that these neural networks can be learned from appropriately perturbed training data. We demonstrate the admissibility of this approach to a wide range of inverse problems of practical interest. Numerical examples are given that support the theoretical findings.
Spiking neural network is a kind of neuromorphic computing that is believed to improve the level of intelligence and provide advantages for quantum computing. In this work, we address this issue by designing an optical spiking neural network and find that it can be used to accelerate the speed of computation, especially on combinatorial optimization problems. Here the spiking neural network is constructed by the antisymmetrically coupled degenerate optical parametric oscillator pulses and dissipative pulses. A nonlinear transfer function is chosen to mitigate amplitude inhomogeneities and destabilize the resulting local minima according to the dynamical behavior of spiking neurons. It is numerically shown that the spiking neural network-coherent Ising machines have excellent performance on combinatorial optimization problems, which is expected to offer new applications for neural computing and optical computing.
In this article, an efficient numerical method for computing finite-horizon controllability Gramians in Cholesky-factored form is proposed. The method is applicable to general dense matrices of moderate size and produces a Cholesky factor of the Gramian without computing the full product. In contrast to other methods applicable to this task, the proposed method is a generalization of the scaling-and-squaring approach for approximating the matrix exponential. It exploits a similar doubling formula for the Gramian, and thereby keeps the required computational effort modest. Most importantly, a rigorous backward error analysis is provided, which guarantees that the approximation is accurate to the round-off error level in double precision. This accuracy is illustrated in practice on a large number of standard test examples. The method has been implemented in the Julia package FiniteHorizonGramians.jl, which is available online under the MIT license. Code for reproducing the experimental results is included in this package, as well as code for determining the optimal method parameters. The analysis can thus easily be adapted to a different finite-precision arithmetic.
This article investigates a local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method for one-dimensional and two-dimensional singularly perturbed reaction-diffusion problems on a Shishkin mesh. During this process, due to the inability of the energy norm to fully capture the behavior of the boundary layers appearing in the solutions, a balanced norm is introduced. By designing novel numerical fluxes and constructing special interpolations, optimal convergences under the balanced norm are achieved in both 1D and 2D cases. Numerical experiments support the main theoretical conclusions.
In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.
Nowadays, the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved impressive performance on many computer vision related tasks, such as object detection, image recognition, image retrieval, etc. These achievements benefit from the CNNs outstanding capability to learn the input features with deep layers of neuron structures and iterative training process. However, these learned features are hard to identify and interpret from a human vision perspective, causing a lack of understanding of the CNNs internal working mechanism. To improve the CNN interpretability, the CNN visualization is well utilized as a qualitative analysis method, which translates the internal features into visually perceptible patterns. And many CNN visualization works have been proposed in the literature to interpret the CNN in perspectives of network structure, operation, and semantic concept. In this paper, we expect to provide a comprehensive survey of several representative CNN visualization methods, including Activation Maximization, Network Inversion, Deconvolutional Neural Networks (DeconvNet), and Network Dissection based visualization. These methods are presented in terms of motivations, algorithms, and experiment results. Based on these visualization methods, we also discuss their practical applications to demonstrate the significance of the CNN interpretability in areas of network design, optimization, security enhancement, etc.
Recent advances in 3D fully convolutional networks (FCN) have made it feasible to produce dense voxel-wise predictions of volumetric images. In this work, we show that a multi-class 3D FCN trained on manually labeled CT scans of several anatomical structures (ranging from the large organs to thin vessels) can achieve competitive segmentation results, while avoiding the need for handcrafting features or training class-specific models. To this end, we propose a two-stage, coarse-to-fine approach that will first use a 3D FCN to roughly define a candidate region, which will then be used as input to a second 3D FCN. This reduces the number of voxels the second FCN has to classify to ~10% and allows it to focus on more detailed segmentation of the organs and vessels. We utilize training and validation sets consisting of 331 clinical CT images and test our models on a completely unseen data collection acquired at a different hospital that includes 150 CT scans, targeting three anatomical organs (liver, spleen, and pancreas). In challenging organs such as the pancreas, our cascaded approach improves the mean Dice score from 68.5 to 82.2%, achieving the highest reported average score on this dataset. We compare with a 2D FCN method on a separate dataset of 240 CT scans with 18 classes and achieve a significantly higher performance in small organs and vessels. Furthermore, we explore fine-tuning our models to different datasets. Our experiments illustrate the promise and robustness of current 3D FCN based semantic segmentation of medical images, achieving state-of-the-art results. Our code and trained models are available for download: //github.com/holgerroth/3Dunet_abdomen_cascade.