No Arabic abstract
Data Science and Machine Learning have become fundamental assets for companies and research institutions alike. As one of its fields, supervised classification allows for class prediction of new samples, learning from given training data. However, some properties can cause datasets to be problematic to classify. In order to evaluate a dataset a priori, data complexity metrics have been used extensively. They provide information regarding different intrinsic characteristics of the data, which serve to evaluate classifier compatibility and a course of action that improves performance. However, most complexity metrics focus on just one characteristic of the data, which can be insufficient to properly evaluate the dataset towards the classifiers performance. In fact, class overlap, a very detrimental feature for the classification process (especially when imbalance among class labels is also present) is hard to assess. This research work focuses on revisiting complexity metrics based on data morphology. In accordance to their nature, the premise is that they provide both good estimates for class overlap, and great correlations with the classification performance. For that purpose, a novel family of metrics have been developed. Being based on ball coverage by classes, they are named after Overlap Number of Balls. Finally, some prospects for the adaptation of the former family of metrics to singular (more complex) problems are discussed.
Overcomplete representations and dictionary learning algorithms kept attracting a growing interest in the machine learning community. This paper addresses the emerging problem of comparing multivariate overcomplete representations. Despite a recurrent need to rely on a distance for learning or assessing multivariate overcomplete representations, no metrics in their underlying spaces have yet been proposed. Henceforth we propose to study overcomplete representations from the perspective of frame theory and matrix manifolds. We consider distances between multivariate dictionaries as distances between their spans which reveal to be elements of a Grassmannian manifold. We introduce Wasserstein-like set-metrics defined on Grassmannian spaces and study their properties both theoretically and numerically. Indeed a deep experimental study based on tailored synthetic datasetsand real EEG signals for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) have been conducted. In particular, the introduced metrics have been embedded in clustering algorithm and applied to BCI Competition IV-2a for dataset quality assessment. Besides, a principled connection is made between three close but still disjoint research fields, namely, Grassmannian packing, dictionary learning and compressed sensing.
It is well understood that classification algorithms, for example, for deciding on loan applications, cannot be evaluated for fairness without taking context into account. We examine what can be learned from a fairness oracle equipped with an underlying understanding of ``true fairness. The oracle takes as input a (context, classifier) pair satisfying an arbitrary fairness definition, and accepts or rejects the pair according to whether the classifier satisfies the underlying fairness truth. Our principal conceptual result is an extraction procedure that learns the underlying truth; moreover, the procedure can learn an approximation to this truth given access to a weak form of the oracle. Since every ``truly fair classifier induces a coarse metric, in which those receiving the same decision are at distance zero from one another and those receiving different decisions are at distance one, this extraction process provides the basis for ensuring a rough form of metric fairness, also known as individual fairness. Our principal technical result is a higher fidelity extractor under a mild technical constraint on the weak oracles conception of fairness. Our framework permits the scenario in which many classifiers, with differing outcomes, may all be considered fair. Our results have implications for interpretablity -- a highly desired but poorly defined property of classification systems that endeavors to permit a human arbiter to reject classifiers deemed to be ``unfair or illegitimately derived.
Instance segmentation on 3D point clouds is one of the most extensively researched areas toward the realization of autonomous cars and robots. Certain existing studies have split input point clouds into small regions such as 1m x 1m; one reason for this is that models in the studies cannot consume a large number of points because of the large space complexity. However, because such small regions occasionally include a very small number of instances belonging to the same class, an evaluation using existing metrics such as mAP is largely affected by the category recognition performance. To address these problems, we propose a new method with space complexity O(Np) such that large regions can be consumed, as well as novel metrics for tasks that are independent of the categories or size of the inputs. Our method learns a mapping from input point clouds to an embedding space, where the embeddings form clusters for each instance and distinguish instances using these clusters during testing. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance using both existing and the proposed metrics. Moreover, we show that our new metric can evaluate the performance of a task without being affected by any other condition.
We develop techniques to quantify the degree to which a given (training or testing) example is an outlier in the underlying distribution. We evaluate five methods to score examples in a dataset by how well-represented the examples are, for different plausible definitions of well-represented, and apply these to four common datasets: MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet. Despite being independent approaches, we find all five are highly correlated, suggesting that the notion of being well-represented can be quantified. Among other uses, we find these methods can be combined to identify (a) prototypical examples (that match human expectations); (b) memorized training examples; and, (c) uncommon submodes of the dataset. Further, we show how we can utilize our metrics to determine an improved ordering for curriculum learning, and impact adversarial robustness. We release all metric values on training and test sets we studied.
In representation learning, there has been recent interest in developing algorithms to disentangle the ground-truth generative factors behind a dataset, and metrics to quantify how fully this occurs. However, these algorithms and metrics often assume that both representations and ground-truth factors are flat, continuous, and factorized, whereas many real-world generative processes involve rich hierarchical structure, mixtures of discrete and continuous variables with dependence between them, and even varying intrinsic dimensionality. In this work, we develop benchmarks, algorithms, and metrics for learning such hierarchical representations.