Predictive User Modeling with Actionable Attributes

Different machine learning techniques have been proposed and used for modeling individual and group user needs, interests and preferences. In the traditional predictive modeling instances are described by observable variables, called attributes. The goal is to learn a model for predicting the target variable for unseen instances. For example, for marketing purposes a company consider profiling a new user based on her observed web browsing behavior, referral keywords or other relevant information. In many real world applications the values of some attributes are not only observable, but can be actively decided by a decision maker. Furthermore, in some of such applications the decision maker is interested not only to generate accurate predictions, but to maximize the probability of the desired outcome. For example, a direct marketing manager can choose which type of a special offer to send to a client (actionable attribute), hoping that the right choice will result in a positive response with a higher probability. We study how to learn to choose the value of an actionable attribute in order to maximize the probability of a desired outcome in predictive modeling. We emphasize that not all instances are equally sensitive to changes in actions. Accurate choice of an action is critical for those instances, which are on the borderline (e.g. users who do not have a strong opinion one way or the other). We formulate three supervised learning approaches for learning to select the value of an actionable attribute at an instance level. We also introduce a focused training procedure which puts more emphasis on the situations where varying the action is the most likely to take the effect. The proof of concept experimental validation on two real-world case studies in web analytics and e-learning domains highlights the potential of the proposed approaches

Rule-based Emotion Detection on Social Media: Putting Tweets on Plutchik's Wheel

We study sentiment analysis beyond the typical granularity of polarity and instead use Plutchik's wheel of emotions model. We introduce RBEM-Emo as an extension to the Rule-Based Emission Model algorithm to deduce such emotions from human-written messages. We evaluate our approach on two different datasets and compare its performance with the current state-of-the-art techniques for emotion detection, including a recursive auto-encoder. The results of the experimental study suggest that RBEM-Emo is a promising approach advancing the current state-of-the-art in emotion detection

Teaching responsible machine learning to engineers

With the increasing application of machine learning in practice, there is a growing need to incorporate ethical considerations in engineering curricula. In this paper, we reflect upon the development of a course on responsible machine learning for undergraduate engineering students. We found that technical material was relatively easy to grasp when it was directly linked to prior knowledge on machine learning. However, it was non-Trivial for engineering students to make a deeper connection between real-world outcomes and ethical considerations such as fairness. Moving forward, we call upon educators to focus on the development of realistic case studies that invite students to interrogate the role of an engineer.</p

OMFP: An approach for online mass flow prediction in CFB boilers

Abstract. Fuel feeding and inhomogeneity of fuel typically cause process fluctuations in the circulating fluidized bed (CFB) boilers. If control systems fail to compensate the fluctuations, the whole plant will suffer from fluctuations that are reinforced by the closed-loop controls. Accurate estimates of fuel consumption among other factors are needed for control systems operation. In this paper we address a problem of online mass flow prediction. Particularly, we consider the problems of (1) constructing the ground truth, (2) handling noise and abrupt concept drift, and (3) learning an accurate predictor. Last but not least we emphasize the importance of having the domain knowledge concerning the considered case. We demonstrate the performance of OMPF using real data sets collected from the experimental CFB boiler.

Predicting Multi-class Customer Profiles Based on Transactions: a Case Study in Food Sales

Predicting the class of a customer profile is a key task in marketing, which enables businesses to approach the right customer with the right product at the right time through the right channel to satisfy the customer's evolving needs. However, due to costs, privacy and/or data protection, only the business' owned transactional data is typically available for constructing customer profiles. Predicting the class of customer profiles based on such data is challenging, as the data tends to be very large, heavily sparse and highly skewed. We present a new approach that is designed to efficiently and accurately handle the multi-class classification of customer profiles built using sparse and skewed transactional data. Our approach first bins the customer profiles on the basis of the number of items transacted. The discovered bins are then partitioned and prototypes within each of the discovered bins selected to build the multi-class classifier models. The results obtained from using four multi-class classifiers on real-world transactional data from the food sales domain consistently show the critical numbers of items at which the predictive performance of customer profiles can be substantially improved

Does the End Justify the Means?:On the Moral Justification of Fairness-Aware Machine Learning

Despite an abundance of fairness-aware machine learning (fair-ml) algorithms, the moral justification of how these algorithms enforce fairness metrics is largely unexplored. The goal of this paper is to elicit the moral implications of a fair-ml algorithm. To this end, we first consider the moral justification of the fairness metrics for which the algorithm optimizes. We present an extension of previous work to arrive at three propositions that can justify the fairness metrics. Different from previous work, our extension highlights that the consequences of predicted outcomes are important for judging fairness. We draw from the extended framework and empirical ethics to identify moral implications of the fair-ml algorithm. We focus on the two optimization strategies inherent to the algorithm: group-specific decision thresholds and randomized decision thresholds. We argue that the justification of the algorithm can differ depending on one's assumptions about the (social) context in which the algorithm is applied - even if the associated fairness metric is the same. Finally, we sketch paths for future work towards a more complete evaluation of fair-ml algorithms, beyond their direct optimization objectives

BSDAR: Beam Search Decoding with Attention Reward in Neural Keyphrase Generation

This study mainly investigates two decoding problems in neural keyphrase generation: sequence length bias and beam diversity. We introduce an extension of beam search inference based on word-level and n-gram level attention score to adjust and constrain Seq2Seq prediction at test time. Results show that our proposed solution can overcome the algorithm bias to shorter and nearly identical sequences, resulting in a significant improvement of the decoding performance on generating keyphrases that are present and absent in source text