Differentially Private Ensemble Classifiers for Data Streams

Learning from continuous data streams via classification/regression is prevalent in many domains. Adapting to evolving data characteristics (concept drift) while protecting data owners' private information is an open challenge. We present a differentially private ensemble solution to this problem with two distinguishing features: it allows an \textit{unbounded} number of ensemble updates to deal with the potentially never-ending data streams under a fixed privacy budget, and it is \textit{model agnostic}, in that it treats any pre-trained differentially private classification/regression model as a black-box. Our method outperforms competitors on real-world and simulated datasets for varying settings of privacy, concept drift, and data distribution.

The Differentially Private Lottery Ticket Mechanism

We propose the differentially private lottery ticket mechanism (DPLTM). An end-to-end differentially private training paradigm based on the lottery ticket hypothesis. Using "high-quality winners", selected via our custom score function, DPLTM significantly improves the privacy-utility trade-off over the state-of-the-art. We show that DPLTM converges faster, allowing for early stopping with reduced privacy budget consumption. We further show that the tickets from DPLTM are transferable across datasets, domains, and architectures. Our extensive evaluation on several public datasets provides evidence to our claims.

Differentially Private Survival Function Estimation

Survival function estimation is used in many disciplines, but it is most common in medical analytics in the form of the Kaplan-Meier estimator. Sensitive data (patient records) is used in the estimation without any explicit control on the information leakage, which is a significant privacy concern. We propose a first differentially private estimator of the survival function and show that it can be easily extended to provide differentially private confidence intervals and test statistics without spending any extra privacy budget. We further provide extensions for differentially private estimation of the competing risk cumulative incidence function. Using nine real-life clinical datasets, we provide empirical evidence that our proposed method provides good utility while simultaneously providing strong privacy guarantees.

CrowdMI: Multiple Imputation via Crowdsourcing

Can humans impute missing data with similar proficiency as machines? This is the question we aim to answer in this paper. We present a novel idea of converting observations with missing data in to a survey questionnaire, which is presented to crowdworkers for completion. We replicate a multiple imputation framework by having multiple unique crowdworkers complete our questionnaire. Experimental results demonstrate that using our method, it is possible to generate valid imputations for qualitative and quantitative missing data, with results comparable to imputations generated by complex statistical models.

MIDA: Multiple Imputation using Denoising Autoencoders

Missing data is a significant problem impacting all domains. State-of-the-art framework for minimizing missing data bias is multiple imputation, for which the choice of an imputation model remains nontrivial. We propose a multiple imputation model based on overcomplete deep denoising autoencoders. Our proposed model is capable of handling different data types, missingness patterns, missingness proportions and distributions. Evaluation on several real life datasets show our proposed model significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods under varying conditions while simultaneously improving end of the line analytics.

Recovering Loss to Followup Information Using Denoising Autoencoders

Loss to followup is a significant issue in healthcare and has serious consequences for a study's validity and cost. Methods available at present for recovering loss to followup information are restricted by their expressive capabilities and struggle to model highly non-linear relations and complex interactions. In this paper we propose a model based on overcomplete denoising autoencoders to recover loss to followup information. Designed to work with high volume data, results on various simulated and real life datasets show our model is appropriate under varying dataset and loss to followup conditions and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a wide margin ($\ge 20\%$ in some scenarios) while preserving the dataset utility for final analysis.

Detecting Adversarial Samples Using Density Ratio Estimates

Machine learning models, especially based on deep architectures are used in everyday applications ranging from self driving cars to medical diagnostics. It has been shown that such models are dangerously susceptible to adversarial samples, indistinguishable from real samples to human eye, adversarial samples lead to incorrect classifications with high confidence. Impact of adversarial samples is far-reaching and their efficient detection remains an open problem. We propose to use direct density ratio estimation as an efficient model agnostic measure to detect adversarial samples. Our proposed method works equally well with single and multi-channel samples, and with different adversarial sample generation methods. We also propose a method to use density ratio estimates for generating adversarial samples with an added constraint of preserving density ratio.

Classifier comparison using precision

New proposed models are often compared to state-of-the-art using statistical significance testing. Literature is scarce for classifier comparison using metrics other than accuracy. We present a survey of statistical methods that can be used for classifier comparison using precision, accounting for inter-precision correlation arising from use of same dataset. Comparisons are made using per-class precision and methods presented to test global null hypothesis of an overall model comparison. Comparisons are extended to multiple multi-class classifiers and to models using cross validation or its variants. Partial Bayesian update to precision is introduced when population prevalence of a class is known. Applications to compare deep architectures are studied.

Medical image denoising using convolutional denoising autoencoders

Image denoising is an important pre-processing step in medical image analysis. Different algorithms have been proposed in past three decades with varying denoising performances. More recently, having outperformed all conventional methods, deep learning based models have shown a great promise. These methods are however limited for requirement of large training sample size and high computational costs. In this paper we show that using small sample size, denoising autoencoders constructed using convolutional layers can be used for efficient denoising of medical images. Heterogeneous images can be combined to boost sample size for increased denoising performance. Simplest of networks can reconstruct images with corruption levels so high that noise and signal are not differentiable to human eye.