CAFE: Conflict-Aware Feature-wise Explanations

Feature attribution methods are widely used to explain neural models by determining the influence of individual input features on the models' outputs. We propose a novel feature attribution method, CAFE (Conflict-Aware Feature-wise Explanations), that addresses three limitations of the existing methods: their disregard for the impact of conflicting features, their lack of consideration for the influence of bias terms, and an overly high sensitivity to local variations in the underpinning activation functions. Unlike other methods, CAFE provides safeguards against overestimating the effects of neuron inputs and separately traces positive and negative influences of input features and biases, resulting in enhanced robustness and increased ability to surface feature conflicts. We show experimentally that CAFE is better able to identify conflicting features on synthetic tabular data and exhibits the best overall fidelity on several real-world tabular datasets, while being highly computationally efficient.

A Federated Cox Model with Non-Proportional Hazards

Recent research has shown the potential for neural networks to improve upon classical survival models such as the Cox model, which is widely used in clinical practice. Neural networks, however, typically rely on data that are centrally available, whereas healthcare data are frequently held in secure silos. We present a federated Cox model that accommodates this data setting and also relaxes the proportional hazards assumption, allowing time-varying covariate effects. In this latter respect, our model does not require explicit specification of the time-varying effects, reducing upfront organisational costs compared to previous works. We experiment with publicly available clinical datasets and demonstrate that the federated model is able to perform as well as a standard model.

Federated Learning Enables Big Data for Rare Cancer Boundary Detection

Although machine learning (ML) has shown promise in numerous domains, there are concerns about generalizability to out-of-sample data. This is currently addressed by centrally sharing ample, and importantly diverse, data from multiple sites. However, such centralization is challenging to scale (or even not feasible) due to various limitations. Federated ML (FL) provides an alternative to train accurate and generalizable ML models, by only sharing numerical model updates. Here we present findings from the largest FL study to-date, involving data from 71 healthcare institutions across 6 continents, to generate an automatic tumor boundary detector for the rare disease of glioblastoma, utilizing the largest dataset of such patients ever used in the literature (25,256 MRI scans from 6,314 patients). We demonstrate a 33% improvement over a publicly trained model to delineate the surgically targetable tumor, and 23% improvement over the tumor's entire extent. We anticipate our study to: 1) enable more studies in healthcare informed by large and diverse data, ensuring meaningful results for rare diseases and underrepresented populations, 2) facilitate further quantitative analyses for glioblastoma via performance optimization of our consensus model for eventual public release, and 3) demonstrate the effectiveness of FL at such scale and task complexity as a paradigm shift for multi-site collaborations, alleviating the need for data sharing.

The Enemy Among Us: Detecting Hate Speech with Threats Based 'Othering' Language Embeddings

Offensive or antagonistic language targeted at individuals and social groups based on their personal characteristics (also known as cyber hate speech or cyberhate) has been frequently posted and widely circulated viathe World Wide Web. This can be considered as a key risk factor for individual and societal tension linked toregional instability. Automated Web-based cyberhate detection is important for observing and understandingcommunity and regional societal tension - especially in online social networks where posts can be rapidlyand widely viewed and disseminated. While previous work has involved using lexicons, bags-of-words orprobabilistic language parsing approaches, they often suffer from a similar issue which is that cyberhate can besubtle and indirect - thus depending on the occurrence of individual words or phrases can lead to a significantnumber of false negatives, providing inaccurate representation of the trends in cyberhate. This problemmotivated us to challenge thinking around the representation of subtle language use, such as references toperceived threats from "the other" including immigration or job prosperity in a hateful context. We propose anovel framework that utilises language use around the concept of "othering" and intergroup threat theory toidentify these subtleties and we implement a novel classification method using embedding learning to computesemantic distances between parts of speech considered to be part of an "othering" narrative. To validate ourapproach we conduct several experiments on different types of cyberhate, namely religion, disability, race andsexual orientation, with F-measure scores for classifying hateful instances obtained through applying ourmodel of 0.93, 0.86, 0.97 and 0.98 respectively, providing a significant improvement in classifier accuracy overthe state-of-the-art