Background: Survival analysis concerns the study of timeline data where the event of interest may remain unobserved (i.e., censored). Studies commonly record more than one type of event, but conventional survival techniques focus on a single event type. We set out to integrate both multiple independently censored time-to-event variables as well as missing observations. Methods: An energy-based approach is taken with a bi-partite structure between latent and visible states, commonly known as harmoniums (or restricted Boltzmann machines). Results: The present harmonium is shown, both theoretically and experimentally, to capture non-linear patterns between distinct time recordings. We illustrate on real world data that, for a single time-to-event variable, our model is on par with established methods. In addition, we demonstrate that discriminative predictions improve by leveraging an extra time-to-event variable. Conclusions: Multiple time-to-event variables can be successfully captured within the harmonium paradigm.
The availability of multi-modality datasets provides a unique opportunity to characterize the same object of interest using multiple viewpoints more comprehensively. In this work, we investigate the use of canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and penalized variants of CCA (pCCA) for the fusion of two modalities. We study a simple graphical model for the generation of two-modality data. We analytically show that, with known model parameters, posterior mean estimators that jointly use both modalities outperform arbitrary linear mixing of single modality posterior estimators in latent variable prediction. Penalized extensions of CCA (pCCA) that incorporate domain knowledge can discover correlations with high-dimensional, low-sample data, whereas traditional CCA is inapplicable. To facilitate the generation of multi-dimensional embeddings with pCCA, we propose two matrix deflation schemes that enforce desirable properties exhibited by CCA. We propose a two-stage prediction pipeline using pCCA embeddings generated with deflation for latent variable prediction by combining all the above. On simulated data, our proposed model drastically reduces the mean-squared error in latent variable prediction. When applied to publicly available histopathology data and RNA-sequencing data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) breast cancer patients, our model can outperform principal components analysis (PCA) embeddings of the same dimension in survival prediction.
Survival outcomes are common in comparative effectiveness studies and require unique handling because they are usually incompletely observed due to right-censoring. A "once for all" approach for causal inference with survival outcomes constructs pseudo-observations and allows standard methods such as propensity score weighting to proceed as if the outcomes are completely observed. For a general class of model-free causal estimands with survival outcomes on user-specified target populations, we develop corresponding propensity score weighting estimators based on the pseudo-observations and establish their asymptotic properties. In particular, utilizing the functional delta-method and the von Mises expansion, we derive a new closed-form variance of the weighting estimator that takes into account the uncertainty due to both pseudo-observation calculation and propensity score estimation. This allows valid and computationally efficient inference without resampling. We also prove the optimal efficiency property of the overlap weights within the class of balancing weights for survival outcomes. The proposed methods are applicable to both binary and multiple treatments. Extensive simulations are conducted to explore the operating characteristics of the proposed method versus other commonly used alternatives. We apply the proposed method to compare the causal effects of three popular treatment approaches for prostate cancer patients.
We consider the Bayesian approach to the linear Gaussian inference problem of inferring the initial condition of a linear dynamical system from noisy output measurements taken after the initial time. In practical applications, the large dimension of the dynamical system state poses a computational obstacle to computing the exact posterior distribution. Model reduction offers a variety of computational tools that seek to reduce this computational burden. In particular, balanced truncation is a system-theoretic approach to model reduction which obtains an efficient reduced-dimension dynamical system by projecting the system operators onto state directions which trade off the reachability and observability of state directions as expressed through the associated Gramians. We introduce Gramian definitions relevant to the inference setting and propose a balanced truncation approach based on these inference Gramians that yield a reduced dynamical system that can be used to cheaply approximate the posterior mean and covariance. Our definitions exploit natural connections between (i) the reachability Gramian and the prior covariance and (ii) the observability Gramian and the Fisher information. The resulting reduced model then inherits stability properties and error bounds from system theoretic considerations, and in some settings yields an optimal posterior covariance approximation. Numerical demonstrations on two benchmark problems in model reduction show that our method can yield near-optimal posterior covariance approximations with order-of-magnitude state dimension reduction.
Meta-analyses of survival studies aim to reveal the variation of an effect measure of interest over different studies and present a meaningful summary. They must address between study heterogeneity in several dimensions and eliminate spurious sources of variation. Forest plots of the usual (adjusted) hazard ratios are fraught with difficulties from this perspective since both the magnitude and interpretation of these hazard ratios depend on factors ancillary to the true study-specific exposure effect. These factors generally include the study duration, the censoring patterns within studies, the covariates adjusted for and their distribution over exposure groups. Ignoring these mentioned features and accepting implausible hidden assumptions may critically affect interpretation of the pooled effect measure. Risk differences or restricted mean effects over a common follow-up interval and balanced distribution of a covariate set are natural candidates for exposure evaluation and possible treatment choice. In this paper, we propose differently standardized survival curves over a fitting time horizon, targeting various estimands with their own transportability. With each type of standardization comes a given interpretation within studies and overall, under stated assumptions. These curves can in turn be summarized by standardized study-specific contrasts, including hazard ratios with more consistent meaning. We prefer forest plots of risk differences at well chosen time points. Our case study examines overall survival among anal squamous cell carcinoma patients, expressing the tumor marker $p16^{INK4a}$ or not, based on the individual patient data of six studies.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
In this work, we propose a generally applicable transformation unit for visual recognition with deep convolutional neural networks. This transformation explicitly models channel relationships with explainable control variables. These variables determine the neuron behaviors of competition or cooperation, and they are jointly optimized with the convolutional weight towards more accurate recognition. In Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) Networks, the channel relationships are implicitly learned by fully connected layers, and the SE block is integrated at the block-level. We instead introduce a channel normalization layer to reduce the number of parameters and computational complexity. This lightweight layer incorporates a simple l2 normalization, enabling our transformation unit applicable to operator-level without much increase of additional parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our unit with clear margins on many vision tasks, i.e., image classification on ImageNet, object detection and instance segmentation on COCO, video classification on Kinetics.
We present a novel framework for the automatic discovery and recognition of motion primitives in videos of human activities. Given the 3D pose of a human in a video, human motion primitives are discovered by optimizing the `motion flux', a quantity which captures the motion variation of a group of skeletal joints. A normalization of the primitives is proposed in order to make them invariant with respect to a subject anatomical variations and data sampling rate. The discovered primitives are unknown and unlabeled and are unsupervisedly collected into classes via a hierarchical non-parametric Bayes mixture model. Once classes are determined and labeled they are further analyzed for establishing models for recognizing discovered primitives. Each primitive model is defined by a set of learned parameters. Given new video data and given the estimated pose of the subject appearing on the video, the motion is segmented into primitives, which are recognized with a probability given according to the parameters of the learned models. Using our framework we build a publicly available dataset of human motion primitives, using sequences taken from well-known motion capture datasets. We expect that our framework, by providing an objective way for discovering and categorizing human motion, will be a useful tool in numerous research fields including video analysis, human inspired motion generation, learning by demonstration, intuitive human-robot interaction, and human behavior analysis.
In this paper, we introduce a challenging new dataset, MLB-YouTube, designed for fine-grained activity detection. The dataset contains two settings: segmented video classification as well as activity detection in continuous videos. We experimentally compare various recognition approaches capturing temporal structure in activity videos, by classifying segmented videos and extending those approaches to continuous videos. We also compare models on the extremely difficult task of predicting pitch speed and pitch type from broadcast baseball videos. We find that learning temporal structure is valuable for fine-grained activity recognition.
Attention-based encoder-decoder architectures such as Listen, Attend, and Spell (LAS), subsume the acoustic, pronunciation and language model components of a traditional automatic speech recognition (ASR) system into a single neural network. In our previous work, we have shown that such architectures are comparable to state-of-the-art ASR systems on dictation tasks, but it was not clear if such architectures would be practical for more challenging tasks such as voice search. In this work, we explore a variety of structural and optimization improvements to our LAS model which significantly improve performance. On the structural side, we show that word piece models can be used instead of graphemes. We introduce a multi-head attention architecture, which offers improvements over the commonly-used single-head attention. On the optimization side, we explore techniques such as synchronous training, scheduled sampling, label smoothing, and minimum word error rate optimization, which are all shown to improve accuracy. We present results with a unidirectional LSTM encoder for streaming recognition. On a 12,500 hour voice search task, we find that the proposed changes improve the WER of the LAS system from 9.2% to 5.6%, while the best conventional system achieve 6.7% WER. We also test both models on a dictation dataset, and our model provide 4.1% WER while the conventional system provides 5% WER.
During recent years, active learning has evolved into a popular paradigm for utilizing user's feedback to improve accuracy of learning algorithms. Active learning works by selecting the most informative sample among unlabeled data and querying the label of that point from user. Many different methods such as uncertainty sampling and minimum risk sampling have been utilized to select the most informative sample in active learning. Although many active learning algorithms have been proposed so far, most of them work with binary or multi-class classification problems and therefore can not be applied to problems in which only samples from one class as well as a set of unlabeled data are available. Such problems arise in many real-world situations and are known as the problem of learning from positive and unlabeled data. In this paper we propose an active learning algorithm that can work when only samples of one class as well as a set of unlabelled data are available. Our method works by separately estimating probability desnity of positive and unlabeled points and then computing expected value of informativeness to get rid of a hyper-parameter and have a better measure of informativeness./ Experiments and empirical analysis show promising results compared to other similar methods.