The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have major impact to health and medical infrastructure, economy, and agriculture. Prominent computational and mathematical models have been unreliable due to the complexity of the spread of infections. Moreover, lack of data collection and reporting makes modelling attempts difficult and unreliable. Hence, we need to re-look at the situation with reliable data sources and innovative forecasting models. Deep learning models such as recurrent neural networks are well suited for modelling spatiotemporal sequences. In this paper, we apply recurrent neural networks such as long short term memory (LSTM), bidirectional LSTM, and encoder-decoder LSTM models for multi-step (short-term) COVID-19 infection forecasting. We select Indian states with COVID-19 hotpots and capture the first (2020) and second (2021) wave of infections and provide two months ahead forecast. Our model predicts that the likelihood of another wave of infections in October and November 2021 is low; however, the authorities need to be vigilant given emerging variants of the virus. The accuracy of the predictions motivate the application of the method in other countries and regions. Nevertheless, the challenges in modelling remain due to the reliability of data and difficulties in capturing factors such as population density, logistics, and social aspects such as culture and lifestyle.
The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak quickly spread around the world, resulting in over 240 million infections and 4 million deaths by Oct 2021. While the virus is spreading from person to person silently, fear has also been spreading around the globe. The COVID-19 information from the Australian Government is convincing but not timely or detailed, and there is much information on social networks with both facts and rumors. As software engineers, we have spontaneously and rapidly constructed a COVID-19 information dashboard aggregating reliable information semi-automatically checked from different sources for providing one-stop information sharing site about the latest status in Australia. Inspired by the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Map, our dashboard contains the case statistics, case distribution, government policy, latest news, with interactive visualization. In this paper, we present a participant's in-person observations in which the authors acted as founders of //covid-19-au.com/ serving more than 830K users with 14M page views since March 2020. According to our first-hand experience, we summarize 9 lessons for developers, researchers and instructors. These lessons may inspire the development, research and teaching in software engineer aspects for coping with similar public crises in the future.
While utilization of digital agents to support crucial decision making is increasing, trust in suggestions made by these agents is hard to achieve. However, it is essential to profit from their application, resulting in a need for explanations for both the decision making process and the model. For many systems, such as common black-box models, achieving at least some explainability requires complex post-processing, while other systems profit from being, to a reasonable extent, inherently interpretable. We propose a rule-based learning system specifically conceptualised and, thus, especially suited for these scenarios. Its models are inherently transparent and easily interpretable by design. One key innovation of our system is that the rules' conditions and which rules compose a problem's solution are evolved separately. We utilise independent rule fitnesses which allows users to specifically tailor their model structure to fit the given requirements for explainability.
Accurate and fast demand forecast is one of the hot topics in supply chain for enabling the precise execution of the corresponding downstream processes (inbound and outbound planning, inventory placement, network planning, etc). We develop three alternatives to tackle the problem of forecasting the customer sales at day/store/item level using deep learning techniques and the Corporaci\'on Favorita data set, published as part of a Kaggle competition. Our empirical results show how good performance can be achieved by using a simple sequence to sequence architecture with minimal data preprocessing effort. Additionally, we describe a training trick for making the model more time independent and hence improving generalization over time. The proposed solution achieves a RMSLE of around 0.54, which is competitive with other more specific solutions to the problem proposed in the Kaggle competition.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
Deep Learning has implemented a wide range of applications and has become increasingly popular in recent years. The goal of multimodal deep learning is to create models that can process and link information using various modalities. Despite the extensive development made for unimodal learning, it still cannot cover all the aspects of human learning. Multimodal learning helps to understand and analyze better when various senses are engaged in the processing of information. This paper focuses on multiple types of modalities, i.e., image, video, text, audio, body gestures, facial expressions, and physiological signals. Detailed analysis of past and current baseline approaches and an in-depth study of recent advancements in multimodal deep learning applications has been provided. A fine-grained taxonomy of various multimodal deep learning applications is proposed, elaborating on different applications in more depth. Architectures and datasets used in these applications are also discussed, along with their evaluation metrics. Last, main issues are highlighted separately for each domain along with their possible future research directions.
In humans, Attention is a core property of all perceptual and cognitive operations. Given our limited ability to process competing sources, attention mechanisms select, modulate, and focus on the information most relevant to behavior. For decades, concepts and functions of attention have been studied in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computing. For the last six years, this property has been widely explored in deep neural networks. Currently, the state-of-the-art in Deep Learning is represented by neural attention models in several application domains. This survey provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of developments in neural attention models. We systematically reviewed hundreds of architectures in the area, identifying and discussing those in which attention has shown a significant impact. We also developed and made public an automated methodology to facilitate the development of reviews in the area. By critically analyzing 650 works, we describe the primary uses of attention in convolutional, recurrent networks and generative models, identifying common subgroups of uses and applications. Furthermore, we describe the impact of attention in different application domains and their impact on neural networks' interpretability. Finally, we list possible trends and opportunities for further research, hoping that this review will provide a succinct overview of the main attentional models in the area and guide researchers in developing future approaches that will drive further improvements.
Traffic forecasting is an important factor for the success of intelligent transportation systems. Deep learning models including convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied in traffic forecasting problems to model the spatial and temporal dependencies. In recent years, to model the graph structures in the transportation systems as well as the contextual information, graph neural networks (GNNs) are introduced as new tools and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a series of traffic forecasting problems. In this survey, we review the rapidly growing body of recent research using different GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional and graph attention networks, in various traffic forecasting problems, e.g., road traffic flow and speed forecasting, passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit systems, demand forecasting in ride-hailing platforms, etc. We also present a collection of open data and source resources for each problem, as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey that explores the application of graph neural networks for traffic forecasting problems. We have also created a public Github repository to update the latest papers, open data and source resources.
Few sample learning (FSL) is significant and challenging in the field of machine learning. The capability of learning and generalizing from very few samples successfully is a noticeable demarcation separating artificial intelligence and human intelligence since humans can readily establish their cognition to novelty from just a single or a handful of examples whereas machine learning algorithms typically entail hundreds or thousands of supervised samples to guarantee generalization ability. Despite the long history dated back to the early 2000s and the widespread attention in recent years with booming deep learning technologies, little surveys or reviews for FSL are available until now. In this context, we extensively review 200+ papers of FSL spanning from the 2000s to 2019 and provide a timely and comprehensive survey for FSL. In this survey, we review the evolution history as well as the current progress on FSL, categorize FSL approaches into the generative model based and discriminative model based kinds in principle, and emphasize particularly on the meta learning based FSL approaches. We also summarize several recently emerging extensional topics of FSL and review the latest advances on these topics. Furthermore, we highlight the important FSL applications covering many research hotspots in computer vision, natural language processing, audio and speech, reinforcement learning and robotic, data analysis, etc. Finally, we conclude the survey with a discussion on promising trends in the hope of providing guidance and insights to follow-up researches.
This paper surveys the machine learning literature and presents machine learning as optimization models. Such models can benefit from the advancement of numerical optimization techniques which have already played a distinctive role in several machine learning settings. Particularly, mathematical optimization models are presented for commonly used machine learning approaches for regression, classification, clustering, and deep neural networks as well new emerging applications in machine teaching and empirical model learning. The strengths and the shortcomings of these models are discussed and potential research directions are highlighted.
In structure learning, the output is generally a structure that is used as supervision information to achieve good performance. Considering the interpretation of deep learning models has raised extended attention these years, it will be beneficial if we can learn an interpretable structure from deep learning models. In this paper, we focus on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) whose inner mechanism is still not clearly understood. We find that Finite State Automaton (FSA) that processes sequential data has more interpretable inner mechanism and can be learned from RNNs as the interpretable structure. We propose two methods to learn FSA from RNN based on two different clustering methods. We first give the graphical illustration of FSA for human beings to follow, which shows the interpretability. From the FSA's point of view, we then analyze how the performance of RNNs are affected by the number of gates, as well as the semantic meaning behind the transition of numerical hidden states. Our results suggest that RNNs with simple gated structure such as Minimal Gated Unit (MGU) is more desirable and the transitions in FSA leading to specific classification result are associated with corresponding words which are understandable by human beings.