Awards

Agnostic feature selection

Guillaume Doquet (TAU CNRS - INRIA - LRI - Université Paris-Saclay), Michèle Sebag (TAU CNRS - INRIA - LRI - Université Paris-Saclay)

Unsupervised feature selection is mostly assessed along a supervised learning setting, depending on whether the selected features efficiently permit to predict the (unknown) target variable. Another setting is proposed in this paper: the selected features aim to efficiently recover the whole dataset. The proposed algorithm, called AgnoS, combines an AutoEncoder with structural regularizations to sidestep the combinatorial optimization problem at the core of feature selection. The extensive experimental validation of AgnoS on the scikit-feature benchmark suite demonstrates its ability compared to the state of the art, both in terms of supervised learning and data compression.

FastPoint: Scalable Deep Point Processes

Ali Caner Türkmen (Boğaziçi University), Yuyang Wang (Amazon Research), Alexander J. Smola (Amazon Research)

We propose FastPoint, a novel multivariate point process that enables fast and accurate learning and inference. FastPoint uses deep recurrent neural networks to capture complex temporal dependency patterns among different marks, while self-excitation dynamics within each mark are modeled with Hawkes processes. This results in substantially more efficient learning and scales to millions of correlated marks with superior predictive accuracy. Our construction also allows for efficient and parallel sequential Monte Carlo sampling for fast predictive inference. FastPoint outperforms baseline methods in prediction tasks on synthetic and real-world high-dimensional event data at a small fraction of the computational cost.

Classifier Chains for Multi-label Classification

Jesse Read, Bernhard Pfahringer, Geoff Holmes, Eibe Frank (The University of Waikato)

The widely known binary relevance method for multi-label classification, which considers each label as an independent binary problem, has been sidelined in the literature due to the perceived inadequacy of its label-independence assumption. Instead, most current methods invest considerable complexity to model interdependencies between labels. This paper shows that binary relevance- based methods have much to offer, especially in terms of scalability to large datasets. We exemplify this with a novel chaining method that can model label correlations while maintaining acceptable computational complexity. Empirical evaluation over a broad range of multi-label datasets with a variety of evaluation metrics demonstrates the competitiveness of our chaining method against related and state-of-the-art methods, both in terms of predictive performance and time complexity.

link View full article