122,541 research outputs found
Comparing software prediction techniques using simulation
The need for accurate software prediction systems increases as software becomes much larger and more complex. We believe that the underlying characteristics: size, number of features, type of distribution, etc., of the data set influence the choice of the prediction system to be used. For this reason, we would like to control the characteristics of such data sets in order to systematically explore the relationship between accuracy, choice of prediction system, and data set characteristic. It would also be useful to have a large validation data set. Our solution is to simulate data allowing both control and the possibility of large (1000) validation cases. The authors compare four prediction techniques: regression, rule induction, nearest neighbor (a form of case-based reasoning), and neural nets. The results suggest that there are significant differences depending upon the characteristics of the data set. Consequently, researchers should consider prediction context when evaluating competing prediction systems. We observed that the more "messy" the data and the more complex the relationship with the dependent variable, the more variability in the results. In the more complex cases, we observed significantly different results depending upon the particular training set that has been sampled from the underlying data set. However, our most important result is that it is more fruitful to ask which is the best prediction system in a particular context rather than which is the "best" prediction system
Counterfactual Learning from Bandit Feedback under Deterministic Logging: A Case Study in Statistical Machine Translation
The goal of counterfactual learning for statistical machine translation (SMT)
is to optimize a target SMT system from logged data that consist of user
feedback to translations that were predicted by another, historic SMT system. A
challenge arises by the fact that risk-averse commercial SMT systems
deterministically log the most probable translation. The lack of sufficient
exploration of the SMT output space seemingly contradicts the theoretical
requirements for counterfactual learning. We show that counterfactual learning
from deterministic bandit logs is possible nevertheless by smoothing out
deterministic components in learning. This can be achieved by additive and
multiplicative control variates that avoid degenerate behavior in empirical
risk minimization. Our simulation experiments show improvements of up to 2 BLEU
points by counterfactual learning from deterministic bandit feedback.Comment: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
(EMNLP), 2017, Copenhagen, Denmar
Making inferences with small numbers of training sets
A potential methodological problem with empirical studies that assess project effort prediction system is discussed. Frequently, a hold-out strategy is deployed so that the data set is split into a training and a validation set. Inferences are then made concerning the relative accuracy of the different prediction techniques under examination. This is typically done on very small numbers of sampled training sets. It is shown that such studies can lead to almost random results (particularly where relatively small effects are being studied). To illustrate this problem, two data sets are analysed using a configuration problem for case-based prediction and results generated from 100 training sets. This enables results to be produced with quantified confidence limits. From this it is concluded that in both cases using less than five training sets leads to untrustworthy results, and ideally more than 20 sets should be deployed. Unfortunately, this raises a question over a number of empirical validations of prediction techniques, and so it is suggested that further research is needed as a matter of urgency
Data-driven Soft Sensors in the Process Industry
In the last two decades Soft Sensors established themselves as a valuable alternative to the traditional means for the acquisition of critical process variables, process monitoring and other tasks which are related to process control. This paper discusses characteristics of the process industry data which are critical for the development of data-driven Soft Sensors. These characteristics are common to a large number of process industry fields, like the chemical industry, bioprocess industry, steel industry, etc. The focus of this work is put on the data-driven Soft Sensors because of their growing popularity, already demonstrated usefulness and huge, though yet not completely realised, potential. A comprehensive selection of case studies covering the three most important Soft Sensor application fields, a general introduction to the most popular Soft Sensor modelling techniques as well as a discussion of some open issues in the Soft Sensor development and maintenance and their possible solutions are the main contributions of this work
Joint Distribution Optimal Transportation for Domain Adaptation
This paper deals with the unsupervised domain adaptation problem, where one
wants to estimate a prediction function in a given target domain without
any labeled sample by exploiting the knowledge available from a source domain
where labels are known. Our work makes the following assumption: there exists a
non-linear transformation between the joint feature/label space distributions
of the two domain and . We propose a solution of
this problem with optimal transport, that allows to recover an estimated target
by optimizing simultaneously the optimal coupling
and . We show that our method corresponds to the minimization of a bound on
the target error, and provide an efficient algorithmic solution, for which
convergence is proved. The versatility of our approach, both in terms of class
of hypothesis or loss functions is demonstrated with real world classification
and regression problems, for which we reach or surpass state-of-the-art
results.Comment: Accepted for publication at NIPS 201
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