Local field potentials (LFPs) are signals that measure electrical activity in localized cortical regions from implanted tetrodes in the human or animal brain. The LFP signals are curves observed at multiple tetrodes which are implanted across a patch on the surface of the cortex. Hence, they can be treated as multi-group functional data, where the trajectories collected across temporal epochs from one tetrode are viewed as a group of functions. In many cases, multi-tetrode LFP trajectories contain both global variation patterns (which are shared in common to all groups, due to signal synchrony) and isolated variation patterns (common only to a small subset of groups), and such structure is very informative to the analysis of such data. Therefore, one goal in this paper is to develop an efficient procedure that is able to capture and quantify both global and isolated features. We propose a novel tree-structured functional principal components (filt-fPC) analysis through finite-dimensional functional representation - specifically via filtration. A major advantage of the proposed filt-fPC method is the ability to extract the components that are common to multiple groups (or tetrodes) in a flexible "multi-resolution" manner and simultaneously preserve the idiosyncratic individual components of different tetrodes. The proposed filt-fPC approach is highly data-driven and no "ground-truth" model pre-specification is needed, making it a suitable approach for analyzing multi-group functional data that is complex. In addition, the filt-fPC method is able to produce a parsimonious, interpretable, and efficient low dimensional representation of multi-group functional data with orthonormal basis functions. Here, the proposed filt-fPCA method is employed to study the impact of a shock (induced stroke) on the synchrony structure of the rat brain.
Common tasks encountered in epidemiology, including disease incidence estimation and causal inference, rely on predictive modeling. Constructing a predictive model can be thought of as learning a prediction function, i.e., a function that takes as input covariate data and outputs a predicted value. Many strategies for learning these functions from data are available, from parametric regressions to machine learning algorithms. It can be challenging to choose an approach, as it is impossible to know in advance which one is the most suitable for a particular dataset and prediction task at hand. The super learner (SL) is an algorithm that alleviates concerns over selecting the one "right" strategy while providing the freedom to consider many of them, such as those recommended by collaborators, used in related research, or specified by subject-matter experts. It is an entirely pre-specified and data-adaptive strategy for predictive modeling. To ensure the SL is well-specified for learning the prediction function, the analyst does need to make a few important choices. In this Education Corner article, we provide step-by-step guidelines for making these choices, walking the reader through each of them and providing intuition along the way. In doing so, we aim to empower the analyst to tailor the SL specification to their prediction task, thereby ensuring their SL performs as well as possible. A flowchart provides a concise, easy-to-follow summary of key suggestions and heuristics, based on our accumulated experience, and guided by theory.
Linear mixed models (LMMs) are instrumental for regression analysis with structured dependence, such as grouped, clustered, or multilevel data. However, selection among the covariates--while accounting for this structured dependence--remains a challenge. We introduce a Bayesian decision analysis for subset selection with LMMs. Using a Mahalanobis loss function that incorporates the structured dependence, we derive optimal linear coefficients for (i) any given subset of variables and (ii) all subsets of variables that satisfy a cardinality constraint. Crucially, these estimates inherit shrinkage or regularization and uncertainty quantification from the underlying Bayesian model, and apply for any well-specified Bayesian LMM. More broadly, our decision analysis strategy deemphasizes the role of a single "best" subset, which is often unstable and limited in its information content, and instead favors a collection of near-optimal subsets. This collection is summarized by key member subsets and variable-specific importance metrics. Customized subset search and out-of-sample approximation algorithms are provided for more scalable computing. These tools are applied to simulated data and a longitudinal physical activity dataset, and demonstrate excellent prediction, estimation, and selection ability.
SVD (singular value decomposition) is one of the basic tools of machine learning, allowing to optimize basis for a given matrix. However, sometimes we have a set of matrices $\{A_k\}_k$ instead, and would like to optimize a single common basis for them: find orthogonal matrices $U$, $V$, such that $\{U^T A_k V\}$ set of matrices is somehow simpler. For example DCT-II is orthonormal basis of functions commonly used in image/video compression - as discussed here, this kind of basis can be quickly automatically optimized for a given dataset. While also discussed gradient descent optimization might be computationally costly, there is proposed CSVD (common SVD): fast general approach based on SVD. Specifically, we choose $U$ as built of eigenvectors of $\sum_i (w_k)^q (A_k A_k^T)^p$ and $V$ of $\sum_k (w_k)^q (A_k^T A_k)^p$, where $w_k$ are their weights, $p,q>0$ are some chosen powers e.g. 1/2, optionally with normalization e.g. $A \to A - rc^T$ where $r_i=\sum_j A_{ij}, c_j =\sum_i A_{ij}$.
In this paper, we investigate the problem of Semantic Segmentation for agricultural aerial imagery. We observe that the existing methods used for this task are designed without considering two characteristics of the aerial data: (i) the top-down perspective implies that the model cannot rely on a fixed semantic structure of the scene, because the same scene may be experienced with different rotations of the sensor; (ii) there can be a strong imbalance in the distribution of semantic classes because the relevant objects of the scene may appear at extremely different scales (e.g., a field of crops and a small vehicle). We propose a solution to these problems based on two ideas: (i) we use together a set of suitable augmentation and a consistency loss to guide the model to learn semantic representations that are invariant to the photometric and geometric shifts typical of the top-down perspective (Augmentation Invariance); (ii) we use a sampling method (Adaptive Sampling) that selects the training images based on a measure of pixel-wise distribution of classes and actual network confidence. With an extensive set of experiments conducted on the Agriculture-Vision dataset, we demonstrate that our proposed strategies improve the performance of the current state-of-the-art method.
Motivated by problems from neuroimaging in which existing approaches make use of "mass univariate" analysis which neglects spatial structure entirely, but the full joint modelling of all quantities of interest is computationally infeasible, a novel method for incorporating spatial dependence within a (potentially large) family of model-selection problems is presented. Spatial dependence is encoded via a Markov random field model for which a variant of the pseudo-marginal Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is developed and extended by a further augmentation of the underlying state space. This approach allows the exploitation of existing unbiased marginal likelihood estimators used in settings in which spatial independence is normally assumed thereby facilitating the incorporation of spatial dependence using non-spatial estimates with minimal additional development effort. The proposed algorithm can be realistically used for analysis of %smaller subsets of large image moderately sized data sets such as $2$D slices of whole $3$D dynamic PET brain images or other regions of interest. Principled approximations of the proposed method, together with simple extensions based on the augmented spaces, are investigated and shown to provide similar results to the full pseudo-marginal method. Such approximations and extensions allow the improved performance obtained by incorporating spatial dependence to be obtained at negligible additional cost. An application to measured PET image data shows notable improvements in revealing underlying spatial structure when compared to current methods that assume spatial independence.
Kernel smooth is the most fundamental technique for data density and regression estimation. However, time-consuming is the biggest obstacle for the application that the direct evaluation of kernel smooth for $N$ samples needs ${O}\left( {{N}^{2}} \right)$ operations. People have developed fast smooth algorithms using the idea of binning with FFT. Unfortunately, the accuracy is not controllable, and the implementation for multivariable and its bandwidth selection for the fast method is not available. Hence, we introduce a new MATLAB toolbox for fast multivariate kernel regression with the idea of non-uniform FFT (NUFFT), which implemented the algorithm for $M$ gridding points with ${O}\left( N+M\log M \right)$ complexity and accuracy controllability. The bandwidth selection problem utilizes the Fast Monte-Carlo algorithm to estimate the degree of freedom (DF), saving enormous cross-validation time even better when data share the same grid space for multiple regression. Up to now, this is the first toolbox for fast-binning high-dimensional kernel regression. Moreover, the estimation for local polynomial regression, the conditional variance for the heteroscedastic model, and the complex-valued datasets are also implemented in this toolbox. The performance is demonstrated with simulations and an application on the quantitive EEG.
Multi-fidelity models are of great importance due to their capability of fusing information coming from different simulations and sensors. In the context of Gaussian process regression we can exploit low-fidelity models to better capture the latent manifold thus improving the accuracy of the model. We focus on the approximation of high-dimensional scalar functions with low intrinsic dimensionality. By introducing a low dimensional bias in a chain of Gaussian processes with different fidelities we can fight the curse of dimensionality affecting these kind of quantities of interest, especially for many-query applications. In particular we seek a gradient-based reduction of the parameter space through linear active subspaces or a nonlinear transformation of the input space. Then we build a low-fidelity response surface based on such reduction, thus enabling multi-fidelity Gaussian process regression without the need of running new simulations with simplified physical models. This has a great potential in the data scarcity regime affecting many engineering applications. In this work we present a new multi-fidelity approach -- starting from the preliminary analysis conducted in Romor et al. 2020 -- involving active subspaces and nonlinear level-set learning method. The proposed numerical method is tested on two high-dimensional benchmark functions, and on a more complex car aerodynamics problem. We show how a low intrinsic dimensionality bias can increase the accuracy of Gaussian process response surfaces.
Models for dependent data are distinguished by their targets of inference. Marginal models are useful when interest lies in quantifying associations averaged across a population of clusters. When the functional form of a covariate-outcome association is unknown, flexible regression methods are needed to allow for potentially non-linear relationships. We propose a novel marginal additive model (MAM) for modelling cluster-correlated data with non-linear population-averaged associations. The proposed MAM is a unified framework for estimation and uncertainty quantification of a marginal mean model, combined with inference for between-cluster variability and cluster-specific prediction. We propose a fitting algorithm that enables efficient computation of standard errors and corrects for estimation of penalty terms. We demonstrate the proposed methods in simulations and in application to (i) a longitudinal study of beaver foraging behaviour, and (ii) a spatial analysis of Loaloa infection in West Africa. R code for implementing the proposed methodology is available at //github.com/awstringer1/mam.
AI in finance broadly refers to the applications of AI techniques in financial businesses. This area has been lasting for decades with both classic and modern AI techniques applied to increasingly broader areas of finance, economy and society. In contrast to either discussing the problems, aspects and opportunities of finance that have benefited from specific AI techniques and in particular some new-generation AI and data science (AIDS) areas or reviewing the progress of applying specific techniques to resolving certain financial problems, this review offers a comprehensive and dense roadmap of the overwhelming challenges, techniques and opportunities of AI research in finance over the past decades. The landscapes and challenges of financial businesses and data are firstly outlined, followed by a comprehensive categorization and a dense overview of the decades of AI research in finance. We then structure and illustrate the data-driven analytics and learning of financial businesses and data. The comparison, criticism and discussion of classic vs. modern AI techniques for finance are followed. Lastly, open issues and opportunities address future AI-empowered finance and finance-motivated AI research.
Modeling multivariate time series has long been a subject that has attracted researchers from a diverse range of fields including economics, finance, and traffic. A basic assumption behind multivariate time series forecasting is that its variables depend on one another but, upon looking closely, it is fair to say that existing methods fail to fully exploit latent spatial dependencies between pairs of variables. In recent years, meanwhile, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high capability in handling relational dependencies. GNNs require well-defined graph structures for information propagation which means they cannot be applied directly for multivariate time series where the dependencies are not known in advance. In this paper, we propose a general graph neural network framework designed specifically for multivariate time series data. Our approach automatically extracts the uni-directed relations among variables through a graph learning module, into which external knowledge like variable attributes can be easily integrated. A novel mix-hop propagation layer and a dilated inception layer are further proposed to capture the spatial and temporal dependencies within the time series. The graph learning, graph convolution, and temporal convolution modules are jointly learned in an end-to-end framework. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on 3 of 4 benchmark datasets and achieves on-par performance with other approaches on two traffic datasets which provide extra structural information.