No Arabic abstract
Prognostic models in survival analysis are aimed at understanding the relationship between patients covariates and the distribution of survival time. Traditionally, semi-parametric models, such as the Cox model, have been assumed. These often rely on strong proportionality assumptions of the hazard that might be violated in practice. Moreover, they do not often include covariate information updated over time. We propose a new flexible method for survival prediction: DeepHazard, a neural network for time-varying risks. Our approach is tailored for a wide range of continuous hazards forms, with the only restriction of being additive in time. A flexible implementation, allowing different optimization methods, along with any norm penalty, is developed. Numerical examples illustrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methodology in terms of predictive capability evaluated through the C-index metric. The same is revealed on the popular real datasets as METABRIC, GBSG, and ACTG.
We consider the problem of neural network training in a time-varying context. Machine learning algorithms have excelled in problems that do not change over time. However, problems encountered in financial markets are often time-varying. We propose the online early stopping algorithm and show that a neural network trained using this algorithm can track a function changing with unknown dynamics. We compare the proposed algorithm to current approaches on predicting monthly U.S. stock returns and show its superiority. We also show that prominent factors (such as the size and momentum effects) and industry indicators, exhibit time varying stock return predictiveness. We find that during market distress, industry indicators experience an increase in importance at the expense of firm level features. This indicates that industries play a role in explaining stock returns during periods of heightened risk.
The Gaussian process bandit is a problem in which we want to find a maximizer of a black-box function with the minimum number of function evaluations. If the black-box function varies with time, then time-varying Bayesian optimization is a promising framework. However, a drawback with current methods is in the assumption that the evaluation time for every observation is constant, which can be unrealistic for many practical applications, e.g., recommender systems and environmental monitoring. As a result, the performance of current methods can be degraded when this assumption is violated. To cope with this problem, we propose a novel time-varying Bayesian optimization algorithm that can effectively handle the non-constant evaluation time. Furthermore, we theoretically establish a regret bound of our algorithm. Our bound elucidates that a pattern of the evaluation time sequence can hugely affect the difficulty of the problem. We also provide experimental results to validate the practical effectiveness of the proposed method.
Ongoing developments in neural network models are continually advancing the state of the art in terms of system accuracy. However, the predicted labels should not be regarded as the only core output; also important is a well-calibrated estimate of the prediction uncertainty. Such estimates and their calibration are critical in many practical applications. Despite their obvious aforementioned advantage in relation to accuracy, contemporary neural networks can, generally, be regarded as poorly calibrated and as such do not produce reliable output probability estimates. Further, while post-processing calibration solutions can be found in the relevant literature, these tend to be for systems performing classification. In this regard, we herein present two novel methods for acquiring calibrated predictions intervals for neural network regressors: empirical calibration and temperature scaling. In experiments using different regression tasks from the audio and computer vision domains, we find that both our proposed methods are indeed capable of producing calibrated prediction intervals for neural network regressors with any desired confidence level, a finding that is consistent across all datasets and neural network architectures we experimented with. In addition, we derive an additional practical recommendation for producing more accurate calibrated prediction intervals. We release the source code implementing our proposed methods for computing calibrated predicted intervals. The code for computing calibrated predicted intervals is publicly available.
Encoding domain knowledge into the prior over the high-dimensional weight space of a neural network is challenging but essential in applications with limited data and weak signals. Two types of domain knowledge are commonly available in scientific applications: 1. feature sparsity (fraction of features deemed relevant); 2. signal-to-noise ratio, quantified, for instance, as the proportion of variance explained (PVE). We show how to encode both types of domain knowledge into the widely used Gaussian scale mixture priors with Automatic Relevance Determination. Specifically, we propose a new joint prior over the local (i.e., feature-specific) scale parameters that encodes knowledge about feature sparsity, and a Stein gradient optimization to tune the hyperparameters in such a way that the distribution induced on the models PVE matches the prior distribution. We show empirically that the new prior improves prediction accuracy, compared to existing neural network priors, on several publicly available datasets and in a genetics application where signals are weak and sparse, often outperforming even computationally intensive cross-validation for hyperparameter tuning.
We propose SPARFA-Trace, a new machine learning-based framework for time-varying learning and content analytics for education applications. We develop a novel message passing-based, blind, approximate Kalman filter for sparse factor analysis (SPARFA), that jointly (i) traces learner concept knowledge over time, (ii) analyzes learner concept knowledge state transitions (induced by interacting with learning resources, such as textbook sections, lecture videos, etc, or the forgetting effect), and (iii) estimates the content organization and intrinsic difficulty of the assessment questions. These quantities are estimated solely from binary-valued (correct/incorrect) graded learner response data and a summary of the specific actions each learner performs (e.g., answering a question or studying a learning resource) at each time instance. Experimental results on two online course datasets demonstrate that SPARFA-Trace is capable of tracing each learners concept knowledge evolution over time, as well as analyzing the quality and content organization of learning resources, the question-concept associations, and the question intrinsic difficulties. Moreover, we show that SPARFA-Trace achieves comparable or better performance in predicting unobserved learner responses than existing collaborative filtering and knowledge tracing approaches for personalized education.