Insuring Smiles: Predicting routine dental coverage using Spark ML

Finding suitable health insurance coverage can be challenging for individuals and small enterprises in the USA. The Health Insurance Exchange Public Use Files (Exchange PUFs) dataset provided by CMS offers valuable information on health and dental policies [1]. In this paper, we leverage machine learning algorithms to predict if a health insurance plan covers routine dental services for adults. By analyzing plan type, region, deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums, and copayments, we employ Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boost, Factorization Model and Support Vector Machine algorithms. Our goal is to provide a clinical strategy for individuals and families to select the most suitable insurance plan based on income and expenses.

Bayesian Federated Learning via Predictive Distribution Distillation

For most existing federated learning algorithms, each round consists of minimizing a loss function at each client to learn an optimal model at the client, followed by aggregating these client models at the server. Point estimation of the model parameters at the clients does not take into account the uncertainty in the models estimated at each client. In many situations, however, especially in limited data settings, it is beneficial to take into account the uncertainty in the client models for more accurate and robust predictions. Uncertainty also provides useful information for other important tasks, such as active learning and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. We present a framework for Bayesian federated learning where each client infers the posterior predictive distribution using its training data and present various ways to aggregate these client-specific predictive distributions at the server. Since communicating and aggregating predictive distributions can be challenging and expensive, our approach is based on distilling each client's predictive distribution into a single deep neural network. This enables us to leverage advances in standard federated learning to Bayesian federated learning as well. Unlike some recent works that have tried to estimate model uncertainty of each client, our work also does not make any restrictive assumptions, such as the form of the client's posterior distribution. We evaluate our approach on classification in federated setting, as well as active learning and OOD detection in federated settings, on which our approach outperforms various existing federated learning baselines.

Humor@IITK at SemEval-2021 Task 7: Large Language Models for Quantifying Humor and Offensiveness

Humor and Offense are highly subjective due to multiple word senses, cultural knowledge, and pragmatic competence. Hence, accurately detecting humorous and offensive texts has several compelling use cases in Recommendation Systems and Personalized Content Moderation. However, due to the lack of an extensive labeled dataset, most prior works in this domain haven't explored large neural models for subjective humor understanding. This paper explores whether large neural models and their ensembles can capture the intricacies associated with humor/offense detection and rating. Our experiments on the SemEval-2021 Task 7: HaHackathon show that we can develop reasonable humor and offense detection systems with such models. Our models are ranked third in subtask 1b and consistently ranked around the top 33% of the leaderboard for the remaining subtasks.