No Arabic abstract
AutoML systems are currently rising in popularity, as they can build powerful models without human oversight. They often combine techniques from many different sub-fields of machine learning in order to find a model or set of models that optimize a user-supplied criterion, such as predictive performance. The ultimate goal of such systems is to reduce the amount of time spent on menial tasks, or tasks that can be solved better by algorithms while leaving decisions that require human intelligence to the end-user. In recent years, the importance of other criteria, such as fairness and interpretability, and many others have become more and more apparent. Current AutoML frameworks either do not allow to optimize such secondary criteria or only do so by limiting the systems choice of models and preprocessing steps. We propose to optimize additional criteria defined by the user directly to guide the search towards an optimal machine learning pipeline. In order to demonstrate the need and usefulness of our approach, we provide a simple multi-criteria AutoML system and showcase an exemplary application.
Counterfactual explanations are one of the most popular methods to make predictions of black box machine learning models interpretable by providing explanations in the form of `what-if scenarios. Most current approaches optimize a collapsed, weighted sum of multiple objectives, which are naturally difficult to balance a-priori. We propose the Multi-Objective Counterfactuals (MOC) method, which translates the counterfactual search into a multi-objective optimization problem. Our approach not only returns a diverse set of counterfactuals with different trade-offs between the proposed objectives, but also maintains diversity in feature space. This enables a more detailed post-hoc analysis to facilitate better understanding and also more options for actionable user responses to change the predicted outcome. Our approach is also model-agnostic and works for numerical and categorical input features. We show the usefulness of MOC in concrete cases and compare our approach with state-of-the-art methods for counterfactual explanations.
In the standard setting of approachability there are two players and a target set. The players play repeatedly a known vector-valued game where the first player wants to have the average vector-valued payoff converge to the target set which the other player tries to exclude it from this set. We revisit this setting in the spirit of online learning and do not assume that the first player knows the game structure: she receives an arbitrary vector-valued reward vector at every round. She wishes to approach the smallest (best) possible set given the observed average payoffs in hindsight. This extension of the standard setting has implications even when the original target set is not approachable and when it is not obvious which expansion of it should be approached instead. We show that it is impossible, in general, to approach the best target set in hindsight and propose achievable though ambitious alternative goals. We further propose a concrete strategy to approach these goals. Our method does not require projection onto a target set and amounts to switching between scalar regret minimization algorithms that are performed in episodes. Applications to global cost minimization and to approachability under sample path constraints are considered.
Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is increasingly used to automatically tune the predictive performance (e.g., accuracy) of machine learning models. However, in a plethora of real-world applications, accuracy is only one of the multiple -- often conflicting -- performance criteria, necessitating the adoption of a multi-objective (MO) perspective. While the literature on MO optimization is rich, few prior studies have focused on HPO. In this paper, we propose algorithms that extend asynchronous successive halving (ASHA) to the MO setting. Considering multiple evaluation metrics, we assess the performance of these methods on three real world tasks: (i) Neural architecture search, (ii) algorithmic fairness and (iii) language model optimization. Our empirical analysis shows that MO ASHA enables to perform MO HPO at scale. Further, we observe that that taking the entire Pareto front into account for candidate selection consistently outperforms multi-fidelity HPO based on MO scalarization in terms of wall-clock time. Our algorithms (to be open-sourced) establish new baselines for future research in the area.
In this work we formulate and formally characterize group fairness as a multi-objective optimization problem, where each sensitive group risk is a separate objective. We propose a fairness criterion where a classifier achieves minimax risk and is Pareto-efficient w.r.t. all groups, avoiding unnecessary harm, and can lead to the best zero-gap model if policy dictates so. We provide a simple optimization algorithm compatible with deep neural networks to satisfy these constraints. Since our method does not require test-time access to sensitive attributes, it can be applied to reduce worst-case classification errors between outcomes in unbalanced classification problems. We test the proposed methodology on real case-studies of predicting income, ICU patient mortality, skin lesions classification, and assessing credit risk, demonstrating how our framework compares favorably to other approaches.
Machine learning techniques have been developed to learn from complete data. When missing values exist in a dataset, the incomplete data should be preprocessed separately by removing data points with missing values or imputation. In this paper, we propose an online approach to handle missing values while a classification model is learnt. To reach this goal, we develop a multi-objective optimization model with two objective functions for imputation and model selection. We also propose three formulations for imputation objective function. We use an evolutionary algorithm based on NSGA II to find the optimal solutions as the Pareto solutions. We investigate the reliability and robustness of the proposed model using experiments by defining several scenarios in dealing with missing values and classification. We also describe how the proposed model can contribute to medical informatics. We compare the performance of three different formulations via experimental results. The proposed model results get validated by comparing with a comparable literature.