Impact of Biases in Big Data

The underlying paradigm of big data-driven machine learning reflects the desire of deriving better conclusions from simply analyzing more data, without the necessity of looking at theory and models. Is having simply more data always helpful? In 1936, The Literary Digest collected 2.3M filled in questionnaires to predict the outcome of that year's US presidential election. The outcome of this big data prediction proved to be entirely wrong, whereas George Gallup only needed 3K handpicked people to make an accurate prediction. Generally, biases occur in machine learning whenever the distributions of training set and test set are different. In this work, we provide a review of different sorts of biases in (big) data sets in machine learning. We provide definitions and discussions of the most commonly appearing biases in machine learning: class imbalance and covariate shift. We also show how these biases can be quantified and corrected. This work is an introductory text for both researchers and practitioners to become more aware of this topic and thus to derive more reliable models for their learning problems

Large-Scale Online Semantic Indexing of Biomedical Articles via an Ensemble of Multi-Label Classification Models

Background: In this paper we present the approaches and methods employed in order to deal with a large scale multi-label semantic indexing task of biomedical papers. This work was mainly implemented within the context of the BioASQ challenge of 2014. Methods: The main contribution of this work is a multi-label ensemble method that incorporates a McNemar statistical significance test in order to validate the combination of the constituent machine learning algorithms. Some secondary contributions include a study on the temporal aspects of the BioASQ corpus (observations apply also to the BioASQ's super-set, the PubMed articles collection) and the proper adaptation of the algorithms used to deal with this challenging classification task. Results: The ensemble method we developed is compared to other approaches in experimental scenarios with subsets of the BioASQ corpus giving positive results. During the BioASQ 2014 challenge we obtained the first place during the first batch and the third in the two following batches. Our success in the BioASQ challenge proved that a fully automated machine-learning approach, which does not implement any heuristics and rule-based approaches, can be highly competitive and outperform other approaches in similar challenging contexts