A Very Brief Introduction to Machine Learning With Applications to Communication Systems

Given the unprecedented availability of data and computing resources, there is widespread renewed interest in applying data-driven machine learning methods to problems for which the development of conventional engineering solutions is challenged by modelling or algorithmic deficiencies. This tutorial-style paper starts by addressing the questions of why and when such techniques can be useful. It then provides a high-level introduction to the basics of supervised and unsupervised learning. For both supervised and unsupervised learning, exemplifying applications to communication networks are discussed by distinguishing tasks carried out at the edge and at the cloud segments of the network at different layers of the protocol stack

Adversarially Learned Anomaly Detection on CMS Open Data: re-discovering the top quark

We apply an Adversarially Learned Anomaly Detection (ALAD) algorithm to the problem of detecting new physics processes in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Anomaly detection based on ALAD matches performances reached by Variational Autoencoders, with a substantial improvement in some cases. Training the ALAD algorithm on 4.4 fb-1 of 8 TeV CMS Open Data, we show how a data-driven anomaly detection and characterization would work in real life, re-discovering the top quark by identifying the main features of the t-tbar experimental signature at the LHC.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure

Conditional Random Field Autoencoders for Unsupervised Structured Prediction

We introduce a framework for unsupervised learning of structured predictors with overlapping, global features. Each input's latent representation is predicted conditional on the observable data using a feature-rich conditional random field. Then a reconstruction of the input is (re)generated, conditional on the latent structure, using models for which maximum likelihood estimation has a closed-form. Our autoencoder formulation enables efficient learning without making unrealistic independence assumptions or restricting the kinds of features that can be used. We illustrate insightful connections to traditional autoencoders, posterior regularization and multi-view learning. We show competitive results with instantiations of the model for two canonical NLP tasks: part-of-speech induction and bitext word alignment, and show that training our model can be substantially more efficient than comparable feature-rich baselines