#### 2020

##### Model-Agnostic Counterfactual Explanations for Consequential Decisions

Karimi, A., Barthe, G., Balle, B., Valera, I.

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 108, pages: 895-905, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Silvia Chiappa and Roberto Calandra), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei plg

#### 2020

##### More Powerful Selective Kernel Tests for Feature Selection

Lim, J. N., Yamada, M., Jitkrittum, W., Terada, Y., Matsui, S., Shimodaira, H.

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 108, pages: 820-830, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Silvia Chiappa and Roberto Calandra), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Bayesian Online Prediction of Change Points
Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 124, pages: 320-329, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Jonas Peters and David Sontag), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Semi-supervised learning, causality, and the conditional cluster assumption

von Kügelgen, J., Mey, A., Loog, M., Schölkopf, B.

Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) , 124, pages: 1-10, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Jonas Peters and David Sontag), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Kernel Conditional Moment Test via Maximum Moment Restriction
Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 124, pages: 41-50, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Jonas Peters and David Sontag), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei

##### On the design of consequential ranking algorithms

Tabibian, B., Gómez, V., De, A., Schölkopf, B., Gomez Rodriguez, M.

Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 124, pages: 171-180, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Jonas Peters and David Sontag), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Importance Sampling via Local Sensitivity

Raj, A., Musco, C., Mackey, L.

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 108, pages: 3099-3109, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Silvia Chiappa and Roberto Calandra), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei

##### A Continuous-time Perspective for Modeling Acceleration in Riemannian Optimization

F Alimisis, F., Orvieto, A., Becigneul, G., Lucchi, A.

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 108, pages: 1297-1307, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Silvia Chiappa and Roberto Calandra), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Fair Decisions Despite Imperfect Predictions

Kilbertus, N., Gomez Rodriguez, M., Schölkopf, B., Muandet, K., Valera, I.

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 108, pages: 277-287, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Silvia Chiappa and Roberto Calandra), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei plg

##### Integrals over Gaussians under Linear Domain Constraints

Gessner, A., Kanjilal, O., Hennig, P.

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 108, pages: 2764-2774, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Silvia Chiappa and Roberto Calandra), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Modular Block-diagonal Curvature Approximations for Feedforward Architectures

Dangel, F., Harmeling, S., Hennig, P.

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 108, pages: 799-808, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Silvia Chiappa and Roberto Calandra), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Testing Goodness of Fit of Conditional Density Models with Kernels

Jitkrittum, W., Kanagawa, H., Schölkopf, B.

Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 124, pages: 221-230, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Jonas Peters and David Sontag), PMLR, August 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Algorithmic Recourse: from Counterfactual Explanations to Interventions
37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), July 2020 (conference) Submitted

ei plg

##### Fast Non-Parametric Learning to Accelerate Mixed-Integer Programming for Online Hybrid Model Predictive Control
21rst IFAC World Congress, July 2020 (conference) Accepted

al ei

##### Variational Bayes in Private Settings (VIPS) (Extended Abstract)

Foulds, J. R., Park, M., Chaudhuri, K., Welling, M.

Proceedings of the 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (IJCAI-PRICAI), pages: 5050-5054, (Editors: Christian Bessiere), International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization, July 2020, Journal track (conference)

ei

##### A New Distribution-Free Concept for Representing, Comparing, and Propagating Uncertainty in Dynamical Systems with Kernel Probabilistic Programming

Zhu, J., Muandet, K., Diehl, M., Schölkopf, B.

21rst IFAC World Congress, July 2020 (conference) Accepted

ei

##### Kernel Conditional Density Operators

Schuster, I., Mollenhauer, M., Klus, S., Muandet, K.

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 108, pages: 993-1004, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Silvia Chiappa and Roberto Calandra), PMLR, June 2020 (conference)

ei

##### A Kernel Mean Embedding Approach to Reducing Conservativeness in Stochastic Programming and Control

Zhu, J., Diehl, M., Schölkopf, B.

2nd Annual Conference on Learning for Dynamics and Control (L4DC), 120, pages: 915-923, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Alexandre M. Bayen and Ali Jadbabaie and George Pappas and Pablo A. Parrilo and Benjamin Recht and Claire Tomlin and Melanie Zeilinger), PMLR, June 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Disentangling Factors of Variations Using Few Labels

Locatello, F., Tschannen, M., Bauer, S., Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B., Bachem, O.

8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Mixed-curvature Variational Autoencoders

Skopek, O., Ganea, O., Becigneul, G.

8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Non-linear interlinkages and key objectives amongst the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals

Laumann, F., von Kügelgen, J., Barahona, M.

ICLR 2020 Workshop "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning", April 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Counterfactuals uncover the modular structure of deep generative models

Besserve, M., Mehrjou, A., Sun, R., Schölkopf, B.

8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2020 (conference)

ei

##### Towards causal generative scene models via competition of experts

von Kügelgen*, J., Ustyuzhaninov*, I., Gehler, P., Bethge, M., Schölkopf, B.

ICLR 2020 Workshop "Causal Learning for Decision Making", April 2020, *equal contribution (conference)

ei

##### On Mutual Information Maximization for Representation Learning

Tschannen, M., Djolonga, J., Rubenstein, P. K., Gelly, S., Lucic, M.

8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2020 (conference)

ei

##### From Variational to Deterministic Autoencoders
8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) , April 2020, *equal contribution (conference)

Abstract
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) provide a theoretically-backed framework for deep generative models. However, they often produce “blurry” images, which is linked to their training objective. Sampling in the most popular implementation, the Gaussian VAE, can be interpreted as simply injecting noise to the input of a deterministic decoder. In practice, this simply enforces a smooth latent space structure. We challenge the adoption of the full VAE framework on this specific point in favor of a simpler, deterministic one. Specifically, we investigate how substituting stochasticity with other explicit and implicit regularization schemes can lead to a meaningful latent space without having to force it to conform to an arbitrarily chosen prior. To retrieve a generative mechanism for sampling new data points, we propose to employ an efficient ex-post density estimation step that can be readily adopted both for the proposed deterministic autoencoders as well as to improve sample quality of existing VAEs. We show in a rigorous empirical study that regularized deterministic autoencoding achieves state-of-the-art sample quality on the common MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets.

ei ps

##### Radial and Directional Posteriors for Bayesian Deep Learning
Proceedings of the 34th Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 34(4):5298-5305, AAAI Press, Febuary 2020, AAAI Technical Track: Machine Learning (conference)

ei

##### ODIN: ODE-Informed Regression for Parameter and State Inference in Time-Continuous Dynamical Systems

Wenk, P., Abbati, G., Osborne, M. A., Schölkopf, B., Krause, A., Bauer, S.

Proceedings of the 34th Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 34(4):6364-6371, AAAI Press, Febuary 2020, AAAI Technical Track: Machine Learning (conference)

ei

##### Interpretable and Differentially Private Predictions
Proceedings of the 34th Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 34(4):4083-4090, AAAI Press, Febuary 2020, AAAI Technical Track: Machine Learning (conference)

ei

##### A Commentary on the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations

Locatello, F., Bauer, S., Lucic, M., Rätsch, G., Gelly, S., Schölkopf, B., Bachem, O.

Proceedings of the 34th Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 34(9):13681-13684, AAAI Press, Febuary 2020, Sister Conference Track (conference)

ei

##### Computationally Tractable Riemannian Manifolds for Graph Embeddings

Cruceru, C., Becigneul, G., Ganea, O.

37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2020 (conference) Submitted

ei

##### A Real-Robot Dataset for Assessing Transferability of Learned Dynamics Models

Agudelo-España, D., Zadaianchuk, A., Wenk, P., Garg, A., Akpo, J., Grimminger, F., Viereck, J., Naveau, M., Righetti, L., Martius, G., Krause, A., Schölkopf, B., Bauer, S., Wüthrich, M.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020 (conference) Accepted

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##### Worst-Case Risk Quantification under Distributional Ambiguity using Kernel Mean Embedding in Moment Problem

Zhu, J., Jitkrittum, W., Diehl, M., Schölkopf, B.

In 59th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2020 (inproceedings) Accepted

ei

##### Practical Accelerated Optimization on Riemannian Manifolds

F Alimisis, F., Orvieto, A., Becigneul, G., Lucchi, A.

37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2020 (conference) Submitted

ei

##### Constant Curvature Graph Convolutional Networks

Bachmann*, G., Becigneul*, G., Ganea, O.

37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2020, *equal contribution (conference) Submitted

ei

##### Divide-and-Conquer Monte Carlo Tree Search for goal directed planning

Parascandolo*, G., Buesing*, L., Merel, J., Hasenclever, L., Aslanides, J., Hamrick, J. B., Heess, N., Neitz, A., Weber, T.

2020, *equal contribution (conference) Submitted

ei

#### 2006

##### Conformal Multi-Instance Kernels

Blaschko, M., Hofmann, T.

In NIPS 2006 Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, pages: 1-6, NIPS Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, December 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In the multiple instance learning setting, each observation is a bag of feature vectors of which one or more vectors indicates membership in a class. The primary task is to identify if any vectors in the bag indicate class membership while ignoring vectors that do not. We describe here a kernel-based technique that defines a parametric family of kernels via conformal transformations and jointly learns a discriminant function over bags together with the optimal parameter settings of the kernel. Learning a conformal transformation effectively amounts to weighting regions in the feature space according to their contribution to classification accuracy; regions that are discriminative will be weighted higher than regions that are not. This allows the classifier to focus on regions contributing to classification accuracy while ignoring regions that correspond to vectors found both in positive and in negative bags. We show how parameters of this transformation can be learned for support vector machines by posing the problem as a multiple kernel learning problem. The resulting multiple instance classifier gives competitive accuracy for several multi-instance benchmark datasets from different domains.

ei

#### 2006

##### Adapting Spatial Filter Methods for Nonstationary BCIs

Tomioka, R., Hill, J., Blankertz, B., Aihara, K.

In IBIS 2006, pages: 65-70, 2006 Workshop on Information-Based Induction Sciences, November 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
A major challenge in applying machine learning methods to Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) is to overcome the possible nonstationarity in the data from the datablock the method is trained on and that the method is applied to. Assuming the joint distributions of the whitened signal and the class label to be identical in two blocks, where the whitening is done in each block independently, we propose a simple adaptation formula that is applicable to a broad class of spatial filtering methods including ICA, CSP, and logistic regression classifiers. We characterize the class of linear transformations for which the above assumption holds. Experimental results on 60 BCI datasets show improved classification accuracy compared to (a) fixed spatial filter approach (no adaptation) and (b) fixed spatial pattern approach (proposed by Hill et al., 2006 [1]).

ei

##### A Linear Programming Approach for Molecular QSAR analysis

Saigo, H., Kadowaki, T., Tsuda, K.

In MLG 2006, pages: 85-96, (Editors: Gärtner, T. , G. C. Garriga, T. Meinl), International Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs, September 2006, Best Paper Award (inproceedings)

Abstract
Small molecules in chemistry can be represented as graphs. In a quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis, the central task is to find a regression function that predicts the activity of the molecule in high accuracy. Setting a QSAR as a primal target, we propose a new linear programming approach to the graph-based regression problem. Our method extends the graph classification algorithm by Kudo et al. (NIPS 2004), which is a combination of boosting and graph mining. Instead of sequential multiplicative updates, we employ the linear programming boosting (LP) for regression. The LP approach allows to include inequality constraints for the parameter vector, which turns out to be particularly useful in QSAR tasks where activity values are sometimes unavailable. Furthermore, the efficiency is improved significantly by employing multiple pricing.

ei

##### Incremental Aspect Models for Mining Document Streams

Surendran, A., Sra, S.

In PKDD 2006, pages: 633-640, (Editors: Fürnkranz, J. , T. Scheffer, M. Spiliopoulou), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 10th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper we introduce a novel approach for incrementally building aspect models, and use it to dynamically discover underlying themes from document streams. Using the new approach we present an application which we call query-line tracking i.e., we automatically discover and summarize different themes or stories that appear over time, and that relate to a particular query. We present evaluation on news corpora to demonstrate the strength of our method for both query-line tracking, online indexing and clustering.

ei

##### PALMA: Perfect Alignments using Large Margin Algorithms

Rätsch, G., Hepp, B., Schulze, U., Ong, C.

In GCB 2006, pages: 104-113, (Editors: Huson, D. , O. Kohlbacher, A. Lupas, K. Nieselt, A. Zell), Gesellschaft für Informatik, Bonn, Germany, German Conference on Bioinformatics, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Despite many years of research on how to properly align sequences in the presence of sequencing errors, alternative splicing and micro-exons, the correct alignment of mRNA sequences to genomic DNA is still a challenging task. We present a novel approach based on large margin learning that combines kernel based splice site predictions with common sequence alignment techniques. By solving a convex optimization problem, our algorithm -- called PALMA -- tunes the parameters of the model such that the true alignment scores higher than all other alignments. In an experimental study on the alignments of mRNAs containing artificially generated micro-exons, we show that our algorithm drastically outperforms all other methods: It perfectly aligns all 4358 sequences on an hold-out set, while the best other method misaligns at least 90 of them. Moreover, our algorithm is very robust against noise in the query sequence: when deleting, inserting, or mutating up to 50% of the query sequence, it still aligns 95% of all sequences correctly, while other methods achieve less than 36% accuracy. For datasets, additional results and a stand-alone alignment tool see http://www.fml.mpg.de/raetsch/projects/palma.

ei

##### Graph Based Semi-Supervised Learning with Sharper Edges

Shin, H., Hill, N., Rätsch, G.

In ECML 2006, pages: 401-412, (Editors: Fürnkranz, J. , T. Scheffer, M. Spiliopoulou), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 17th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML), September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In many graph-based semi-supervised learning algorithms, edge weights are assumed to be fixed and determined by the data points&amp;amp;amp;amp;lsquo; (often symmetric)relationships in input space, without considering directionality. However, relationships may be more informative in one direction (e.g. from labelled to unlabelled) than in the reverse direction, and some relationships (e.g. strong weights between oppositely labelled points) are unhelpful in either direction. Undesirable edges may reduce the amount of influence an informative point can propagate to its neighbours -- the point and its outgoing edges have been blunted.&amp;amp;amp;amp;lsquo;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lsquo; We present an approach to sharpening&amp;amp;amp;amp;lsquo;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lsquo; in which weights are adjusted to meet an optimization criterion wherever they are directed towards labelled points. This principle can be applied to a wide variety of algorithms. In the current paper, we present one ad hoc solution satisfying the principle, in order to show that it can improve performance on a number of publicly available benchmark data sets.

ei

##### Finite-Horizon Optimal State-Feedback Control of Nonlinear Stochastic Systems Based on a Minimum Principle

Deisenroth, MP., Ohtsuka, T., Weissel, F., Brunn, D., Hanebeck, UD.

In MFI 2006, pages: 371-376, (Editors: Hanebeck, U. D.), IEEE Service Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 6th IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper, an approach to the finite-horizon optimal state-feedback control problem of nonlinear, stochastic, discrete-time systems is presented. Starting from the dynamic programming equation, the value function will be approximated by means of Taylor series expansion up to second-order derivatives. Moreover, the problem will be reformulated, such that a minimum principle can be applied to the stochastic problem. Employing this minimum principle, the optimal control problem can be rewritten as a two-point boundary-value problem to be solved at each time step of a shrinking horizon. To avoid numerical problems, the two-point boundary-value problem will be solved by means of a continuation method. Thus, the curse of dimensionality of dynamic programming is avoided, and good candidates for the optimal state-feedback controls are obtained. The proposed approach will be evaluated by means of a scalar example system.

ei

##### Uniform Convergence of Adaptive Graph-Based Regularization
In COLT 2006, pages: 50-64, (Editors: Lugosi, G. , H.-U. Simon), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 19th Annual Conference on Learning Theory, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The regularization functional induced by the graph Laplacian of a random neighborhood graph based on the data is adaptive in two ways. First it adapts to an underlying manifold structure and second to the density of the data-generating probability measure. We identify in this paper the limit of the regularizer and show uniform convergence over the space of Hoelder functions. As an intermediate step we derive upper bounds on the covering numbers of Hoelder functions on compact Riemannian manifolds, which are of independent interest for the theoretical analysis of manifold-based learning methods.

ei

##### Regularised CSP for Sensor Selection in BCI

Farquhar, J., Hill, N., Lal, T., Schölkopf, B.

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Brain-Computer Interface Workshop and Training Course 2006, pages: 14-15, (Editors: GR Müller-Putz and C Brunner and R Leeb and R Scherer and A Schlögl and S Wriessnegger and G Pfurtscheller), Verlag der Technischen Universität Graz, Graz, Austria, 3rd International Brain-Computer Interface Workshop and Training Course, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) algorithm is a highly successful method for efficiently calculating spatial filters for brain signal classification. Spatial filtering can improve classification performance considerably, but demands that a large number of electrodes be mounted, which is inconvenient in day-to-day BCI usage. The CSP algorithm is also known for its tendency to overfit, i.e. to learn the noise in the training set rather than the signal. Both problems motivate an approach in which spatial filters are sparsified. We briefly sketch a reformulation of the problem which allows us to do this, using 1-norm regularisation. Focusing on the electrode selection issue, we present preliminary results on EEG data sets that suggest that effective spatial filters may be computed with as few as 10--20 electrodes, hence offering the potential to simplify the practical realisation of BCI systems significantly.

ei

##### Time-Dependent Demixing of Task-Relevant EEG Signals

Hill, N., Farquhar, J., Lal, T., Schölkopf, B.

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Brain-Computer Interface Workshop and Training Course 2006, pages: 20-21, (Editors: GR Müller-Putz and C Brunner and R Leeb and R Scherer and A Schlögl and S Wriessnegger and G Pfurtscheller), Verlag der Technischen Universität Graz, Graz, Austria, 3rd International Brain-Computer Interface Workshop and Training Course, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Given a spatial filtering algorithm that has allowed us to identify task-relevant EEG sources, we present a simple approach for monitoring the activity of these sources while remaining relatively robust to changes in other (task-irrelevant) brain activity. The idea is to keep spatial *patterns* fixed rather than spatial filters, when transferring from training to test sessions or from one time window to another. We show that a fixed spatial pattern (FSP) approach, using a moving-window estimate of signal covariances, can be more robust to non-stationarity than a fixed spatial filter (FSF) approach.

ei

##### A Sober Look at Clustering Stability

Ben-David, S., von Luxburg, U., Pal, D.

In COLT 2006, pages: 5-19, (Editors: Lugosi, G. , H.-U. Simon), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 19th Annual Conference on Learning Theory, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Stability is a common tool to verify the validity of sample based algorithms. In clustering it is widely used to tune the parameters of the algorithm, such as the number k of clusters. In spite of the popularity of stability in practical applications, there has been very little theoretical analysis of this notion. In this paper we provide a formal definition of stability and analyze some of its basic properties. Quite surprisingly, the conclusion of our analysis is that for large sample size, stability is fully determined by the behavior of the objective function which the clustering algorithm is aiming to minimize. If the objective function has a unique global minimizer, the algorithm is stable, otherwise it is unstable. In particular we conclude that stability is not a well-suited tool to determine the number of clusters - it is determined by the symmetries of the data which may be unrelated to clustering parameters. We prove our results for center-based clusterings and for spectral clustering, and support our conclusions by many examples in which the behavior of stability is counter-intuitive.

ei

##### Information Marginalization on Subgraphs

Huang, J., Zhu, T., Rereiner, R., Zhou, D., Schuurmans, D.

In ECML/PKDD 2006, pages: 199-210, (Editors: Fürnkranz, J. , T. Scheffer, M. Spiliopoulou), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 10th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Real-world data often involves objects that exhibit multiple relationships; for example, papers and authors exhibit both paper-author interactions and paper-paper citation relationships. A typical learning problem requires one to make inferences about a subclass of objects (e.g. papers), while using the remaining objects and relations to provide relevant information. We present a simple, unified mechanism for incorporating information from multiple object types and relations when learning on a targeted subset. In this scheme, all sources of relevant information are marginalized onto the target subclass via random walks. We show that marginalized random walks can be used as a general technique for combining multiple sources of information in relational data. With this approach, we formulate new algorithms for transduction and ranking in relational data, and quantify the performance of new schemes on real world dataachieving good results in many problems.

ei

##### Bayesian Active Learning for Sensitivity Analysis
In ECML 2006, pages: 353-364, (Editors: Fürnkranz, J. , T. Scheffer, M. Spiliopoulou), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 17th European Conference on Machine Learning, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Designs of micro electro-mechanical devices need to be robust against fluctuations in mass production. Computer experiments with tens of parameters are used to explore the behavior of the system, and to compute sensitivity measures as expectations over the input distribution. Monte Carlo methods are a simple approach to estimate these integrals, but they are infeasible when the models are computationally expensive. Using a Gaussian processes prior, expensive simulation runs can be saved. This Bayesian quadrature allows for an active selection of inputs where the simulation promises to be most valuable, and the number of simulation runs can be reduced further. We present an active learning scheme for sensitivity analysis which is rigorously derived from the corresponding Bayesian expected loss. On three fully featured, high dimensional physical models of electro-mechanical sensors, we show that the learning rate in the active learning scheme is significantly better than for passive learning.

ei

##### Supervised Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis

Yu, S., Yu, K., Tresp, V., Kriegel, H., Wu, M.

In KDD 2006, pages: 464-473, (Editors: Ungar, L. ), ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Principal component analysis (PCA) has been extensively applied in data mining, pattern recognition and information retrieval for unsupervised dimensionality reduction. When labels of data are available, e.g.,~in a classification or regression task, PCA is however not able to use this information. The problem is more interesting if only part of the input data are labeled, i.e.,~in a semi-supervised setting. In this paper we propose a supervised PCA model called SPPCA and a semi-supervised PCA model called S$^2$PPCA, both of which are extensions of a probabilistic PCA model. The proposed models are able to incorporate the label information into the projection phase, and can naturally handle multiple outputs (i.e.,~in multi-task learning problems). We derive an efficient EM learning algorithm for both models, and also provide theoretical justifications of the model behaviors. SPPCA and S$^2$PPCA are compared with other supervised projection methods on various learning tasks, and show not only promising performance but also good scalability.

ei

##### A Continuation Method for Semi-Supervised SVMs

Chapelle, O., Chi, M., Zien, A.

In ICML 2006, pages: 185-192, (Editors: Cohen, W. W., A. Moore), ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning, June 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machines (S3VMs) are an appealing method for using unlabeled data in classification: their objective function favors decision boundaries which do not cut clusters. However their main problem is that the optimization problem is non-convex and has many local minima, which often results in suboptimal performances. In this paper we propose to use a global optimization technique known as continuation to alleviate this problem. Compared to other algorithms minimizing the same objective function, our continuation method often leads to lower test errors.

ei