Bayesian variable selection is a powerful tool for data analysis, as it offers a principled method for variable selection that accounts for prior information and uncertainty. However, wider adoption of Bayesian variable selection has been hampered by computational challenges, especially in difficult regimes with a large number of covariates or non-conjugate likelihoods. Generalized linear models for count data, which are prevalent in biology, ecology, economics, and beyond, represent an important special case. Here we introduce an efficient MCMC scheme for variable selection in binomial and negative binomial regression that exploits Tempered Gibbs Sampling (Zanella and Roberts, 2019) and that includes logistic regression as a special case. In experiments we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, including on cancer data with seventeen thousand covariates.
Rigid spherical microphone arrays (RSMAs) have been widely used in ambisonics sound field recording. While it is desired to combine the information captured by a grid of densely arranged RSMAs for expanding the area of accurate reconstruction, or sweet-spots, this is not trivial due to inter-array interference. Here we propose multiple scattering ambisonics, a method for three-dimensional ambisonics sound field recording using multiple acoustically interacting RSMAs. Numerical experiments demonstrate the sweet-spot expansion realized by the proposed method. The proposed method can be used with existing RSMAs as building blocks and opens possibilities including higher degrees-of-freedom spatial audio.
Recent advancements in the area of Computer Vision with state-of-art Neural Networks has given a boost to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracies. However, extracting characters/text alone is often insufficient for relevant information extraction as documents also have a visual structure that is not captured by OCR. Extracting information from tables, charts, footnotes, boxes, headings and retrieving the corresponding structured representation for the document remains a challenge and finds application in a large number of real-world use cases. In this paper, we propose a novel enterprise based end-to-end framework called DeepReader which facilitates information extraction from document images via identification of visual entities and populating a meta relational model across different entities in the document image. The model schema allows for an easy to understand abstraction of the entities detected by the deep vision models and the relationships between them. DeepReader has a suite of state-of-the-art vision algorithms which are applied to recognize handwritten and printed text, eliminate noisy effects, identify the type of documents and detect visual entities like tables, lines and boxes. Deep Reader maps the extracted entities into a rich relational schema so as to capture all the relevant relationships between entities (words, textboxes, lines etc) detected in the document. Relevant information and fields can then be extracted from the document by writing SQL queries on top of the relationship tables. A natural language based interface is added on top of the relationship schema so that a non-technical user, specifying the queries in natural language, can fetch the information with minimal effort. In this paper, we also demonstrate many different capabilities of Deep Reader and report results on a real-world use case.
Chemical space is routinely explored by machine learning methods to discover interesting molecules, before time-consuming experimental synthesizing is attempted. However, these methods often rely on a graph representation, ignoring 3D information necessary for determining the stability of the molecules. We propose a reinforcement learning approach for generating molecules in cartesian coordinates allowing for quantum chemical prediction of the stability. To improve sample-efficiency we learn basic chemical rules from imitation learning on the GDB-11 database to create an initial model applicable for all stoichiometries. We then deploy multiple copies of the model conditioned on a specific stoichiometry in a reinforcement learning setting. The models correctly identify low energy molecules in the database and produce novel isomers not found in the training set. Finally, we apply the model to larger molecules to show how reinforcement learning further refines the imitation learning model in domains far from the training data.
DNA-encoded library (DEL) screening and quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) modeling are two techniques used in drug discovery to find small molecules that bind a protein target. Applying QSAR modeling to DEL data can facilitate the selection of compounds for off-DNA synthesis and evaluation. Such a combined approach has been shown recently by training binary classifiers to learn DEL enrichments of aggregated "disynthons" to accommodate the sparse and noisy nature of DEL data. However, a binary classifier cannot distinguish between different levels of enrichment, and information is potentially lost during disynthon aggregation. Here, we demonstrate a regression approach to learning DEL enrichments of individual molecules using a custom negative log-likelihood loss function that effectively denoises DEL data and introduces opportunities for visualization of learned structure-activity relationships (SAR). Our approach explicitly models the Poisson statistics of the sequencing process used in the DEL experimental workflow under a frequentist view. We illustrate this approach on a dataset of 108k compounds screened against CAIX, and a dataset of 5.7M compounds screened against sEH and SIRT2. Due to the treatment of uncertainty in the data through the negative log-likelihood loss function, the models can ignore low-confidence outliers. While our approach does not demonstrate a benefit for extrapolation to novel structures, we expect our denoising and visualization pipeline to be useful in identifying SAR trends and enriched pharmacophores in DEL data. Further, this approach to uncertainty-aware regression is applicable to other sparse or noisy datasets where the nature of stochasticity is known or can be modeled; in particular, the Poisson enrichment ratio metric we use can apply to other settings that compare sequencing count data between two experimental conditions.
Rain removal plays an important role in the restoration of degraded images. Recently, data-driven methods have achieved remarkable success. However, these approaches neglect that the appearance of rain is often accompanied by low light conditions, which will further degrade the image quality. Therefore, it is very indispensable to jointly remove the rain and enhance the light for real-world rain image restoration. In this paper, we aim to address this problem from two aspects. First, we proposed a novel entangled network, namely EMNet, which can remove the rain and enhance illumination in one go. Specifically, two encoder-decoder networks interact complementary information through entanglement structure, and parallel rain removal and illumination enhancement. Considering that the encoder-decoder structure is unreliable in preserving spatial details, we employ a detail recovery network to restore the desired fine texture. Second, we present a new synthetic dataset, namely DarkRain, to boost the development of rain image restoration algorithms in practical scenarios. DarkRain not only contains different degrees of rain, but also considers different lighting conditions, and more realistically simulates the rainfall in the real world. EMNet is extensively evaluated on the proposed benchmark and achieves state-of-the-art results. In addition, after a simple transformation, our method outshines existing methods in both rain removal and low-light image enhancement. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available later.
Most existing human pose estimation (HPE) methods exploit multi-scale information by fusing feature maps of four different spatial sizes, \ie $1/4$, $1/8$, $1/16$, and $1/32$ of the input image. There are two drawbacks of this strategy: 1) feature maps of different spatial sizes may be not well aligned spatially, which potentially hurts the accuracy of keypoint location; 2) these scales are fixed and inflexible, which may restrict the generalization ability over various human sizes. Towards these issues, we propose an adaptive dilated convolution (ADC). It can generate and fuse multi-scale features of the same spatial sizes by setting different dilation rates for different channels. More importantly, these dilation rates are generated by a regression module. It enables ADC to adaptively adjust the fused scales and thus ADC may generalize better to various human sizes. ADC can be end-to-end trained and easily plugged into existing methods. Extensive experiments show that ADC can bring consistent improvements to various HPE methods. The source codes will be released for further research.
In the last couple of decades, tremendous progress has been achieved in developing robotic telescopes and, as a result, sky surveys (both terrestrial and space) have become the source of a substantial amount of new observational data. These data contain a lot of information about binary stars, hidden in their light curves. With the huge amount of astronomical data gathered, it is not reasonable to expect all the data to be manually processed and analyzed. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the automatic classification of eclipsing binary stars using deep learning methods. Our classifier provides a tool for the categorization of light curves of binary stars into two classes: detached and over-contact. We used the ELISa software to obtain synthetic data, which we then used for the training of the classifier. For evaluation purposes, we collected 100 light curves of observed binary stars, in order to evaluate a number of classifiers. We evaluated semi-detached eclipsing binary stars as detached. The best-performing classifier combines bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and a one-dimensional convolutional neural network, which achieved 98% accuracy on the evaluation set. Omitting semi-detached eclipsing binary stars, we could obtain 100% accuracy in classification.
Crowdsourcing provides an efficient label collection schema for supervised machine learning. However, to control annotation cost, each instance in the crowdsourced data is typically annotated by a small number of annotators. This creates a sparsity issue and limits the quality of machine learning models trained on such data. In this paper, we study how to handle sparsity in crowdsourced data using data augmentation. Specifically, we propose to directly learn a classifier by augmenting the raw sparse annotations. We implement two principles of high-quality augmentation using Generative Adversarial Networks: 1) the generated annotations should follow the distribution of authentic ones, which is measured by a discriminator; 2) the generated annotations should have high mutual information with the ground-truth labels, which is measured by an auxiliary network. Extensive experiments and comparisons against an array of state-of-the-art learning from crowds methods on three real-world datasets proved the effectiveness of our data augmentation framework. It shows the potential of our algorithm for low-budget crowdsourcing in general.
Academic performance prediction aims to leverage student-related information to predict their future academic outcomes, which is beneficial to numerous educational applications, such as personalized teaching and academic early warning. In this paper, we address the problem by analyzing students' daily behavior trajectories, which can be comprehensively tracked with campus smartcard records. Different from previous studies, we propose a novel Tri-Branch CNN architecture, which is equipped with row-wise, column-wise, and depth-wise convolution and attention operations, to capture the characteristics of persistence, regularity, and temporal distribution of student behavior in an end-to-end manner, respectively. Also, we cast academic performance prediction as a top-$k$ ranking problem, and introduce a top-$k$ focused loss to ensure the accuracy of identifying academically at-risk students. Extensive experiments were carried out on a large-scale real-world dataset, and we show that our approach substantially outperforms recently proposed methods for academic performance prediction. For the sake of reproducibility, our codes have been released at https://github.com/ZongJ1111/Academic-Performance-Prediction.