High model performance, on average, can hide that models may systematically underperform on subgroups of the data. We consider the tabular setting, which surfaces the unique issue of outcome heterogeneity - this is prevalent in areas such as healthcare, where patients with similar features can have different outcomes, thus making reliable predictions challenging. To tackle this, we propose Data-IQ, a framework to systematically stratify examples into subgroups with respect to their outcomes. We do this by analyzing the behavior of individual examples during training, based on their predictive confidence and, importantly, the aleatoric (data) uncertainty. Capturing the aleatoric uncertainty permits a principled characterization and then subsequent stratification of data examples into three distinct subgroups (Easy, Ambiguous, Hard). We experimentally demonstrate the benefits of Data-IQ on four real-world medical datasets. We show that Data-IQ's characterization of examples is most robust to variation across similarly performant (yet different) models, compared to baselines. Since Data-IQ can be used with any ML model (including neural networks, gradient boosting etc.), this property ensures consistency of data characterization, while allowing flexible model selection. Taking this a step further, we demonstrate that the subgroups enable us to construct new approaches to both feature acquisition and dataset selection. Furthermore, we highlight how the subgroups can inform reliable model usage, noting the significant impact of the Ambiguous subgroup on model generalization.
Causal effects may vary among individuals and can even be of opposite signs. When significant effect heterogeneity exists, the population average causal effect might be uninformative for an individual. Due to the fundamental problem of causality, individual causal effects (ICEs) cannot be retrieved from cross-sectional data. However, in crossover studies, it is accepted that ICEs can be estimated under the assumptions of no carryover effects and time invariance of potential outcomes. A generic potential-outcome formulation with appropriate statistical assumptions to identify ICEs is lacking for other longitudinal data with time-varying exposures. We present a general framework for causal effect heterogeneity in which individual-specific effect modification is parameterized with a latent variable, the receptiveness factor. If the exposure varies over time, then the repeated measurements contain information on an individual's level of this receptiveness factor. Therefore, we study the conditional distribution of the ICE given all an individual's factual information. This novel conditional random variable is called the cross-world causal effect (CWCE). For known causal structures and time-varying exposures, the variability of the CWCE reduces with an increasing number of repeated measurements. The CWCE becomes identifiable from observational data under the causal assumption of cross-world similarity of individual-effect modification (i.e. there exists an exposure strategy whose effect is affected by all latent causes). We illustrate the theory with examples in which the cause-effect relations can be parameterized as generalized linear mixed assignments.
A recently developed measure-theoretic framework solves a stochastic inverse problem (SIP) for models where uncertainties in model output data are predominantly due to aleatoric (i.e., irreducible) uncertainties in model inputs (i.e., parameters). The subsequent inferential target is a distribution on parameters. Another type of inverse problem is to quantify uncertainties in estimates of "true" parameter values under the assumption that such uncertainties should be reduced as more data are incorporated into the problem, i.e., the uncertainty is considered epistemic. A major contribution of this work is the formulation and solution of such a parameter identification problem (PIP) within the measure-theoretic framework developed for the SIP. The approach is novel in that it utilizes a solution to a stochastic forward problem (SFP) to update an initial density only in the parameter directions informed by the model output data. In other words, this method performs "selective regularization" only in the parameter directions not informed by data. The solution is defined by a maximal updated density (MUD) point where the updated density defines the measure-theoretic solution to the PIP. Another significant contribution of this work is the full theory of existence and uniqueness of MUD points for linear maps with Gaussian distributions. Data-constructed Quantity of Interest (QoI) maps are also presented and analyzed for solving the PIP within this measure-theoretic framework as a means of reducing uncertainties in the MUD estimate. We conclude with a demonstration of the general applicability of the method on two problems involving either spatial or temporal data for estimating uncertain model parameters.
The HCI field has seen a growing body of qualitative research, making use of a wide range of activities and methods. Interviews and workshops are some of the main techniques used to help understand user needs and to conduct co-design activities with them. However, these methods might be conducted in various ways and have different advantage and disadvantages. An important aspect influencing the types of activities and methods used is the culture of research participants. This paper aims to compare the research methods conducted in the context of the Saudi Arabian culture. It provides a reflection on the methods used to understand user needs when designing social commerce platforms, including interviews, co-design workshops and critique design workshops. We found that each method has its positives and negatives in terms of user preferences, and can help to obtain useful information at different levels of detail. For example, conducting semi-structured interviews by text was preferred by participants who are at home with their families. However, they can be slower than other methods.
Mixtures of regression are a powerful class of models for regression learning with respect to a highly uncertain and heterogeneous response variable of interest. In addition to being a rich predictive model for the response given some covariates, the parameters in this model class provide useful information about the heterogeneity in the data population, which is represented by the conditional distributions for the response given the covariates associated with a number of distinct but latent subpopulations. In this paper, we investigate conditions of strong identifiability, rates of convergence for conditional density and parameter estimation, and the Bayesian posterior contraction behavior arising in finite mixture of regression models, under exact-fitted and over-fitted settings and when the number of components is unknown. This theory is applicable to common choices of link functions and families of conditional distributions employed by practitioners. We provide simulation studies and data illustrations, which shed some light on the parameter learning behavior found in several popular regression mixture models reported in the literature.
Traditional approaches for data anonymization consider relational data and textual data independently. We propose rx-anon, an anonymization approach for heterogeneous semi-structured documents composed of relational and textual attributes. We map sensitive terms extracted from the text to the structured data. This allows us to use concepts like k-anonymity to generate a joined, privacy-preserved version of the heterogeneous data input. We introduce the concept of redundant sensitive information to consistently anonymize the heterogeneous data. To control the influence of anonymization over unstructured textual data versus structured data attributes, we introduce a modified, parameterized Mondrian algorithm. The parameter $\lambda$ allows to give different weight on the relational and textual attributes during the anonymization process. We evaluate our approach with two real-world datasets using a Normalized Certainty Penalty score, adapted to the problem of jointly anonymizing relational and textual data. The results show that our approach is capable of reducing information loss by using the tuning parameter to control the Mondrian partitioning while guaranteeing k-anonymity for relational attributes as well as for sensitive terms. As rx-anon is a framework approach, it can be reused and extended by other anonymization algorithms, privacy models, and textual similarity metrics.
Analyzing observational data from multiple sources can be useful for increasing statistical power to detect a treatment effect; however, practical constraints such as privacy considerations may restrict individual-level information sharing across data sets. This paper develops federated methods that only utilize summary-level information from heterogeneous data sets. Our federated methods provide doubly-robust point estimates of treatment effects as well as variance estimates. We derive the asymptotic distributions of our federated estimators, which are shown to be asymptotically equivalent to the corresponding estimators from the combined, individual-level data. We show that to achieve these properties, federated methods should be adjusted based on conditions such as whether models are correctly specified and stable across heterogeneous data sets.
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging, privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm, drawing tremendous attention in both academia and industry. A unique characteristic of FL is heterogeneity, which resides in the various hardware specifications and dynamic states across the participating devices. Theoretically, heterogeneity can exert a huge influence on the FL training process, e.g., causing a device unavailable for training or unable to upload its model updates. Unfortunately, these impacts have never been systematically studied and quantified in existing FL literature. In this paper, we carry out the first empirical study to characterize the impacts of heterogeneity in FL. We collect large-scale data from 136k smartphones that can faithfully reflect heterogeneity in real-world settings. We also build a heterogeneity-aware FL platform that complies with the standard FL protocol but with heterogeneity in consideration. Based on the data and the platform, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the performance of state-of-the-art FL algorithms under heterogeneity-aware and heterogeneity-unaware settings. Results show that heterogeneity causes non-trivial performance degradation in FL, including up to 9.2% accuracy drop, 2.32x lengthened training time, and undermined fairness. Furthermore, we analyze potential impact factors and find that device failure and participant bias are two potential factors for performance degradation. Our study provides insightful implications for FL practitioners. On the one hand, our findings suggest that FL algorithm designers consider necessary heterogeneity during the evaluation. On the other hand, our findings urge system providers to design specific mechanisms to mitigate the impacts of heterogeneity.
Since real-world objects and their interactions are often multi-modal and multi-typed, heterogeneous networks have been widely used as a more powerful, realistic, and generic superclass of traditional homogeneous networks (graphs). Meanwhile, representation learning (\aka~embedding) has recently been intensively studied and shown effective for various network mining and analytical tasks. In this work, we aim to provide a unified framework to deeply summarize and evaluate existing research on heterogeneous network embedding (HNE), which includes but goes beyond a normal survey. Since there has already been a broad body of HNE algorithms, as the first contribution of this work, we provide a generic paradigm for the systematic categorization and analysis over the merits of various existing HNE algorithms. Moreover, existing HNE algorithms, though mostly claimed generic, are often evaluated on different datasets. Understandable due to the application favor of HNE, such indirect comparisons largely hinder the proper attribution of improved task performance towards effective data preprocessing and novel technical design, especially considering the various ways possible to construct a heterogeneous network from real-world application data. Therefore, as the second contribution, we create four benchmark datasets with various properties regarding scale, structure, attribute/label availability, and \etc.~from different sources, towards handy and fair evaluations of HNE algorithms. As the third contribution, we carefully refactor and amend the implementations and create friendly interfaces for 13 popular HNE algorithms, and provide all-around comparisons among them over multiple tasks and experimental settings.
Recent years have witnessed the emerging success of graph neural networks (GNNs) for modeling structured data. However, most GNNs are designed for homogeneous graphs, in which all nodes and edges belong to the same types, making them infeasible to represent heterogeneous structures. In this paper, we present the Heterogeneous Graph Transformer (HGT) architecture for modeling Web-scale heterogeneous graphs. To model heterogeneity, we design node- and edge-type dependent parameters to characterize the heterogeneous attention over each edge, empowering HGT to maintain dedicated representations for different types of nodes and edges. To handle dynamic heterogeneous graphs, we introduce the relative temporal encoding technique into HGT, which is able to capture the dynamic structural dependency with arbitrary durations. To handle Web-scale graph data, we design the heterogeneous mini-batch graph sampling algorithm---HGSampling---for efficient and scalable training. Extensive experiments on the Open Academic Graph of 179 million nodes and 2 billion edges show that the proposed HGT model consistently outperforms all the state-of-the-art GNN baselines by 9%--21% on various downstream tasks.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generalize deep neural networks to graph-structured data, have drawn considerable attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous graph related tasks. However, existing GNN models mainly focus on designing graph convolution operations. The graph pooling (or downsampling) operations, that play an important role in learning hierarchical representations, are usually overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel graph pooling operator, called Hierarchical Graph Pooling with Structure Learning (HGP-SL), which can be integrated into various graph neural network architectures. HGP-SL incorporates graph pooling and structure learning into a unified module to generate hierarchical representations of graphs. More specifically, the graph pooling operation adaptively selects a subset of nodes to form an induced subgraph for the subsequent layers. To preserve the integrity of graph's topological information, we further introduce a structure learning mechanism to learn a refined graph structure for the pooled graph at each layer. By combining HGP-SL operator with graph neural networks, we perform graph level representation learning with focus on graph classification task. Experimental results on six widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.