Period estimation is one of the central topics in astronomical time series analysis, where data is often unevenly sampled. Especially challenging are studies of stellar magnetic cycles, as there the periods looked for are of the order of the same length than the datasets themselves. The datasets often contain trends, the origin of which is either a real long-term cycle or an instrumental effect, but these effects cannot be reliably separated, while they can lead to erroneous period determinations if not properly handled. In this study we aim at developing a method that can handle the trends properly, and by performing extensive set of testing, we show that this is the optimal procedure when contrasted with methods that do not include the trend directly to the model. The effect of the form of the noise (whether constant or heteroscedastic) on the results is also investigated. We introduce a Bayesian Generalised Lomb-Scargle Periodogram with Trend (BGLST), which is a probabilistic linear regression model using Gaussian priors for the coefficients and uniform prior for the frequency parameter. We show, using synthetic data, that when there is no prior information on whether and to what extent the true model of the data contains a linear trend, the introduced BGLST method is preferable to the methods which either detrend the data or leave the data untrended before fitting the periodic model. Whether to use noise with different than constant variance in the model depends on the density of the data sampling as well as on the true noise type of the process.
A rising topic in computational journalism is how to enhance the diversity in news served to subscribers to foster exploration behavior in news reading. Despite the success of preference learning in personalized news recommendation, their over-exploitation causes filter bubble that isolates readers from opposing viewpoints and hurts long-term user experiences with lack of serendipity. Since news providers can recommend neither opposite nor diversified opinions if unpopularity of these articles is surely predicted, they can only bet on the articles whose forecasts of click-through rate involve high variability (risks) or high estimation errors (uncertainties). We propose a novel Bayesian model of uncertainty-aware scoring and ranking for news articles. The Bayesian binary classifier models probability of success (defined as a news click) as a Beta-distributed random variable conditional on a vector of the context (user features, article features, and other contextual features). The posterior of the contextual coefficients can be computed efficiently using a low-rank version of Laplace's method via thin Singular Value Decomposition. Efficiencies in personalized targeting of exceptional articles, which are chosen by each subscriber in test period, are evaluated on real-world news datasets. The proposed estimator slightly outperformed existing training and scoring algorithms, in terms of efficiency in identifying successful outliers.
Scene recognition is an important research topic in computer vision, while feature extraction is a key step of object recognition. Although classical Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM) can efficiently represent complicated data, it is hard to handle large images due to its complexity in computation. In this paper, a novel feature extraction method, named Centered Convolutional Restricted Boltzmann Machines (CCRBM), is proposed for scene recognition. The proposed model is an improved Convolutional Restricted Boltzmann Machines (CRBM) by introducing centered factors in its learning strategy to reduce the source of instabilities. First, the visible units of the network are redefined using centered factors. Then, the hidden units are learned with a modified energy function by utilizing a distribution function, and the visible units are reconstructed using the learned hidden units. In order to achieve better generative ability, the Centered Convolutional Deep Belief Networks (CCDBN) is trained in a greedy layer-wise way. Finally, a softmax regression is incorporated for scene recognition. Extensive experimental evaluations using natural scenes, MIT-indoor scenes, and Caltech 101 datasets show that the proposed approach performs better than other counterparts in terms of stability, generalization, and discrimination. The CCDBN model is more suitable for natural scene image recognition by virtue of convolutional property.
Feature subset selection, as a special case of the general subset selection problem, has been the topic of a considerable number of studies due to the growing importance of data-mining applications. In the feature subset selection problem there are two main issues that need to be addressed: (i) Finding an appropriate measure function than can be fairly fast and robustly computed for high-dimensional data. (ii) A search strategy to optimize the measure over the subset space in a reasonable amount of time. In this article mutual information between features and class labels is considered to be the measure function. Two series expansions for mutual information are proposed, and it is shown that most heuristic criteria suggested in the literature are truncated approximations of these expansions. It is well-known that searching the whole subset space is an NP-hard problem. Here, instead of the conventional sequential search algorithms, we suggest a parallel search strategy based on semidefinite programming (SDP) that can search through the subset space in polynomial time. By exploiting the similarities between the proposed algorithm and an instance of the maximum-cut problem in graph theory, the approximation ratio of this algorithm is derived and is compared with the approximation ratio of the backward elimination method. The experiments show that it can be misleading to judge the quality of a measure solely based on the classification accuracy, without taking the effect of the non-optimum search strategy into account.
We survey SoTA open-domain conversational AI models with the purpose of presenting the prevailing challenges that still exist to spur future research. In addition, we provide statistics on the gender of conversational AI in order to guide the ethics discussion surrounding the issue. Open-domain conversational AI are known to have several challenges, including bland responses and performance degradation when prompted with figurative language, among others. First, we provide some background by discussing some topics of interest in conversational AI. We then discuss the method applied to the two investigations carried out that make up this study. The first investigation involves a search for recent SoTA open-domain conversational AI models while the second involves the search for 100 conversational AI to assess their gender. Results of the survey show that progress has been made with recent SoTA conversational AI, but there are still persistent challenges that need to be solved, and the female gender is more common than the male for conversational AI. One main take-away is that hybrid models of conversational AI offer more advantages than any single architecture. The key contributions of this survey are 1) the identification of prevailing challenges in SoTA open-domain conversational AI, 2) the unusual discussion about open-domain conversational AI for low-resource languages, and 3) the discussion about the ethics surrounding the gender of conversational AI.
The problem of effectively exploiting the information multiple data sources has become a relevant but challenging research topic in remote sensing. In this paper, we propose a new approach to exploit the complementarity of two data sources: hyperspectral images (HSIs) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data. Specifically, we develop a new dual-channel spatial, spectral and multiscale attention convolutional long short-term memory neural network (called dual-channel A3CLNN) for feature extraction and classification of multisource remote sensing data. Spatial, spectral and multiscale attention mechanisms are first designed for HSI and LiDAR data in order to learn spectral- and spatial-enhanced feature representations, and to represent multiscale information for different classes. In the designed fusion network, a novel composite attention learning mechanism (combined with a three-level fusion strategy) is used to fully integrate the features in these two data sources. Finally, inspired by the idea of transfer learning, a novel stepwise training strategy is designed to yield a final classification result. Our experimental results, conducted on several multisource remote sensing data sets, demonstrate that the newly proposed dual-channel A3CLNN exhibits better feature representation ability (leading to more competitive classification performance) than other state-of-the-art methods.
We introduce a generic, language-independent method to collect a large percentage of offensive and hate tweets regardless of their topics or genres. We harness the extralinguistic information embedded in the emojis to collect a large number of offensive tweets. We apply the proposed method on Arabic tweets and compare it with English tweets -- analyzing some cultural differences. We observed a constant usage of these emojis to represent offensiveness in throughout different timelines in Twitter. We manually annotate and publicly release the largest Arabic dataset for offensive, fine-grained hate speech, vulgar and violence content. Furthermore, we benchmark the dataset for detecting offense and hate speech using different transformer architectures and performed in-depth linguistic analysis. We evaluate our models on external datasets -- a Twitter dataset collected using a completely different method, and a multi-platform dataset containing comments from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, for assessing generalization capability. Competitive results on these datasets suggest that the data collected using our method captures universal characteristics of offensive language. Our findings also highlight the common words used in offensive communications; common targets for hate speech; specific patterns in violence tweets and pinpoints common classification errors due to the need to understand the context, consider culture and background and the presence of sarcasm among others.
Research on crude oil price forecasting has attracted tremendous attention from scholars and policymakers due to its significant effect on the global economy. Besides supply and demand, crude oil prices are largely influenced by various factors, such as economic development, financial markets, conflicts, wars, and political events. Most previous research treats crude oil price forecasting as a time series or econometric variable prediction problem. Although recently there have been researches considering the effects of real-time news events, most of these works mainly use raw news headlines or topic models to extract text features without profoundly exploring the event information. In this study, a novel crude oil price forecasting framework, AGESL, is proposed to deal with this problem. In our approach, an open domain event extraction algorithm is utilized to extract underlying related events, and a text sentiment analysis algorithm is used to extract sentiment from massive news. Then a deep neural network integrating the news event features, sentimental features, and historical price features is built to predict future crude oil prices. Empirical experiments are performed on West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price data, and the results show that our approach obtains superior performance compared with several benchmark methods.
The cocktail party problem aims at isolating any source of interest within a complex acoustic scene, and has long inspired audio source separation research. Recent efforts have mainly focused on separating speech from noise, speech from speech, musical instruments from each other, or sound events from each other. However, separating an audio mixture (e.g., movie soundtrack) into the three broad categories of speech, music, and sound effects (here understood to include ambient noise and natural sound events) has been left largely unexplored, despite a wide range of potential applications. This paper formalizes this task as the cocktail fork problem, and presents the Divide and Remaster (DnR) dataset to foster research on this topic. DnR is built from three well-established audio datasets (LibriVox, FMA, FSD50k), taking care to reproduce conditions similar to professionally produced content in terms of source overlap and relative loudness, and made available at CD quality. We benchmark standard source separation algorithms on DnR, and further introduce a new mixed-STFT-resolution model to better address the variety of acoustic characteristics of the three source types. Our best model produces SI-SDR improvements over the mixture of 11.3 dB for music, 11.8 dB for speech, and 10.9 dB for sound effects.
Understanding the behavior of Artificial Neural Networks is one of the main topics in the field recently, as black-box approaches have become usual since the widespread of deep learning. Such high-dimensional models may manifest instabilities and weird properties that resemble complex systems. Therefore, we propose Complex Network (CN) techniques to analyze the structure and performance of fully connected neural networks. For that, we build a dataset with 4 thousand models and their respective CN properties. They are employed in a supervised classification setup considering four vision benchmarks. Each neural network is approached as a weighted and undirected graph of neurons and synapses, and centrality measures are computed after training. Results show that these measures are highly related to the network classification performance. We also propose the concept of Bag-Of-Neurons (BoN), a CN-based approach for finding topological signatures linking similar neurons. Results suggest that six neuronal types emerge in such networks, independently of the target domain, and are distributed differently according to classification accuracy. We also tackle specific CN properties related to performance, such as higher subgraph centrality on lower-performing models. Our findings suggest that CN properties play a critical role in the performance of fully connected neural networks, with topological patterns emerging independently on a wide range of models.
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