The use of machine learning models in decision support systems with high societal impact raised concerns about unfair (disparate) results for different groups of people. When evaluating such unfair decisions, one generally relies on predefined groups that are determined by a set of features that are considered sensitive. However, such an approach is subjective and does not guarantee that these features are the only ones to be considered as sensitive nor that they entail unfair (disparate) outcomes. In this paper, we propose a preprocessing step to address the task of automatically recognizing sensitive features that does not require a trained model to verify unfair results. Our proposal is based on the Hilber-Schmidt independence criterion, which measures the statistical dependence of variable distributions. We hypothesize that if the dependence between the label vector and a candidate is high for a sensitive feature, then the information provided by this feature will entail disparate performance measures between groups. Our empirical results attest our hypothesis and show that several features considered as sensitive in the literature do not necessarily entail disparate (unfair) results.
Nonparametric tests for functional data are a challenging class of tests to work with because of the potentially high dimensional nature of functional data. One of the main challenges for considering rank-based tests, like the Mann-Whitney or Wilcoxon Rank Sum tests (MWW), is that the unit of observation is a curve. Thus any rank-based test must consider ways of ranking curves. While several procedures, including depth-based methods, have recently been used to create scores for rank-based tests, these scores are not constructed under the null and often introduce additional, uncontrolled for variability. We therefore reconsider the problem of rank-based tests for functional data and develop an alternative approach that incorporates the null hypothesis throughout. Our approach first ranks realizations from the curves at each time point, summarizes the ranks for each subject using a sufficient statistic we derive, and finally re-ranks the sufficient statistics in a procedure we refer to as a doubly ranked test. As we demonstrate, doubly rank tests are more powerful while maintaining ideal type I error in the two sample, MWW setting. We also extend our framework to more than two samples, developing a Kruskal-Wallis test for functional data which exhibits good test characteristics as well. Finally, we illustrate the use of doubly ranked tests in functional data contexts from material science, climatology, and public health policy.
We consider the problem of estimating a scalar target parameter in the presence of nuisance parameters. Replacing the unknown nuisance parameter with a nonparametric estimator, e.g.,a machine learning (ML) model, is convenient but has shown to be inefficient due to large biases. Modern methods, such as the targeted minimum loss-based estimation (TMLE) and double machine learning (DML), achieve optimal performance under flexible assumptions by harnessing ML estimates while mitigating the plug-in bias. To avoid a sub-optimal bias-variance trade-off, these methods perform a debiasing step of the plug-in pre-estimate. Existing debiasing methods require the influence function of the target parameter as input. However, deriving the IF requires specialized expertise and thus obstructs the adaptation of these methods by practitioners. We propose a novel way to debias plug-in estimators which (i) is efficient, (ii) does not require the IF to be implemented, (iii) is computationally tractable, and therefore can be readily adapted to new estimation problems and automated without analytic derivations by the user. We build on the TMLE framework and update a plug-in estimate with a regularized likelihood maximization step over a nonparametric model constructed with a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), producing an efficient plug-in estimate for any regular target parameter. Our method, thus, offers the efficiency of competing debiasing techniques without sacrificing the utility of the plug-in approach.
Federated learning (FL) has been a hot topic in recent years. Ever since it was introduced, researchers have endeavored to devise FL systems that protect privacy or ensure fair results, with most research focusing on one or the other. As two crucial ethical notions, the interactions between privacy and fairness are comparatively less studied. However, since privacy and fairness compete, considering each in isolation will inevitably come at the cost of the other. To provide a broad view of these two critical topics, we presented a detailed literature review of privacy and fairness issues, highlighting unique challenges posed by FL and solutions in federated settings. We further systematically surveyed different interactions between privacy and fairness, trying to reveal how privacy and fairness could affect each other and point out new research directions in fair and private FL.
Reinforcement learning often needs to deal with the exponential growth of states and actions when exploring optimal control in high-dimensional spaces (often known as the curse of dimensionality). In this work, we address this issue by learning the inherent structure of action-wise similar MDP to appropriately balance the performance degradation versus sample/computational complexity. In particular, we partition the action spaces into multiple groups based on the similarity in transition distribution and reward function, and build a linear decomposition model to capture the difference between the intra-group transition kernel and the intra-group rewards. Both our theoretical analysis and experiments reveal a \emph{surprising and counter-intuitive result}: while a more refined grouping strategy can reduce the approximation error caused by treating actions in the same group as identical, it also leads to increased estimation error when the size of samples or the computation resources is limited. This finding highlights the grouping strategy as a new degree of freedom that can be optimized to minimize the overall performance loss. To address this issue, we formulate a general optimization problem for determining the optimal grouping strategy, which strikes a balance between performance loss and sample/computational complexity. We further propose a computationally efficient method for selecting a nearly-optimal grouping strategy, which maintains its computational complexity independent of the size of the action space.
In this paper, we consider feature screening for ultrahigh dimensional clustering analyses. Based on the observation that the marginal distribution of any given feature is a mixture of its conditional distributions in different clusters, we propose to screen clustering features by independently evaluating the homogeneity of each feature's mixture distribution. Important cluster-relevant features have heterogeneous components in their mixture distributions and unimportant features have homogeneous components. The well-known EM-test statistic is used to evaluate the homogeneity. Under general parametric settings, we establish the tail probability bounds of the EM-test statistic for the homogeneous and heterogeneous features, and further show that the proposed screening procedure can achieve the sure independent screening and even the consistency in selection properties. Limiting distribution of the EM-test statistic is also obtained for general parametric distributions. The proposed method is computationally efficient, can accurately screen for important cluster-relevant features and help to significantly improve clustering, as demonstrated in our extensive simulation and real data analyses.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high potential for a variety of real-world, challenging applications, but one of the major obstacles in GNN research is the lack of large-scale flexible datasets. Most existing public datasets for GNNs are relatively small, which limits the ability of GNNs to generalize to unseen data. The few existing large-scale graph datasets provide very limited labeled data. This makes it difficult to determine if the GNN model's low accuracy for unseen data is inherently due to insufficient training data or if the model failed to generalize. Additionally, datasets used to train GNNs need to offer flexibility to enable a thorough study of the impact of various factors while training GNN models. In this work, we introduce the Illinois Graph Benchmark (IGB), a research dataset tool that the developers can use to train, scrutinize and systematically evaluate GNN models with high fidelity. IGB includes both homogeneous and heterogeneous academic graphs of enormous sizes, with more than 40% of their nodes labeled. Compared to the largest graph datasets publicly available, the IGB provides over 162X more labeled data for deep learning practitioners and developers to create and evaluate models with higher accuracy. The IGB dataset is a collection of academic graphs designed to be flexible, enabling the study of various GNN architectures, embedding generation techniques, and analyzing system performance issues for node classification tasks. IGB is open-sourced, supports DGL and PyG frameworks, and comes with releases of the raw text that we believe foster emerging language models and GNN research projects. An early public version of IGB is available at //github.com/IllinoisGraphBenchmark/IGB-Datasets.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.
The remarkable practical success of deep learning has revealed some major surprises from a theoretical perspective. In particular, simple gradient methods easily find near-optimal solutions to non-convex optimization problems, and despite giving a near-perfect fit to training data without any explicit effort to control model complexity, these methods exhibit excellent predictive accuracy. We conjecture that specific principles underlie these phenomena: that overparametrization allows gradient methods to find interpolating solutions, that these methods implicitly impose regularization, and that overparametrization leads to benign overfitting. We survey recent theoretical progress that provides examples illustrating these principles in simpler settings. We first review classical uniform convergence results and why they fall short of explaining aspects of the behavior of deep learning methods. We give examples of implicit regularization in simple settings, where gradient methods lead to minimal norm functions that perfectly fit the training data. Then we review prediction methods that exhibit benign overfitting, focusing on regression problems with quadratic loss. For these methods, we can decompose the prediction rule into a simple component that is useful for prediction and a spiky component that is useful for overfitting but, in a favorable setting, does not harm prediction accuracy. We focus specifically on the linear regime for neural networks, where the network can be approximated by a linear model. In this regime, we demonstrate the success of gradient flow, and we consider benign overfitting with two-layer networks, giving an exact asymptotic analysis that precisely demonstrates the impact of overparametrization. We conclude by highlighting the key challenges that arise in extending these insights to realistic deep learning settings.
In this monograph, I introduce the basic concepts of Online Learning through a modern view of Online Convex Optimization. Here, online learning refers to the framework of regret minimization under worst-case assumptions. I present first-order and second-order algorithms for online learning with convex losses, in Euclidean and non-Euclidean settings. All the algorithms are clearly presented as instantiation of Online Mirror Descent or Follow-The-Regularized-Leader and their variants. Particular attention is given to the issue of tuning the parameters of the algorithms and learning in unbounded domains, through adaptive and parameter-free online learning algorithms. Non-convex losses are dealt through convex surrogate losses and through randomization. The bandit setting is also briefly discussed, touching on the problem of adversarial and stochastic multi-armed bandits. These notes do not require prior knowledge of convex analysis and all the required mathematical tools are rigorously explained. Moreover, all the proofs have been carefully chosen to be as simple and as short as possible.
Recent years have witnessed the enormous success of low-dimensional vector space representations of knowledge graphs to predict missing facts or find erroneous ones. Currently, however, it is not yet well-understood how ontological knowledge, e.g. given as a set of (existential) rules, can be embedded in a principled way. To address this shortcoming, in this paper we introduce a framework based on convex regions, which can faithfully incorporate ontological knowledge into the vector space embedding. Our technical contribution is two-fold. First, we show that some of the most popular existing embedding approaches are not capable of modelling even very simple types of rules. Second, we show that our framework can represent ontologies that are expressed using so-called quasi-chained existential rules in an exact way, such that any set of facts which is induced using that vector space embedding is logically consistent and deductively closed with respect to the input ontology.