TreeGrad: Transferring Tree Ensembles to Neural Networks

Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) are popular machine learning algorithms with implementations such as LightGBM and in popular machine learning toolkits like Scikit-Learn. Many implementations can only produce trees in an offline manner and in a greedy manner. We explore ways to convert existing GBDT implementations to known neural network architectures with minimal performance loss in order to allow decision splits to be updated in an online manner and provide extensions to allow splits points to be altered as a neural architecture search problem. We provide learning bounds for our neural network.Comment: Technical Report on Implementation of Deep Neural Decision Forests Algorithm. To accompany implementation here: https://github.com/chappers/TreeGrad. Update: Please cite as: Siu, C. (2019). "Transferring Tree Ensembles to Neural Networks". International Conference on Neural Information Processing. Springer, 2019. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1909.1179

Foreign direct investment in East Asia and Latin America: Is there a People's Republic of China effect?

People's Republic of China (PRC) in recent years has emerged as the largest recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the world. Many analysts and government officials in the developing world have increasingly expressed concerns that they are losing competitiveness to PRC. Is PRC diverting FDI from other developing countries? Theoretically, a growing PRC can add to other countries' direct investment by creating more opportunities for production networking and raising the need for raw materials and resources. At the same time, the extremely low Chinese labor costs may lure multinationals away from sites in other developing countries when the foreign corporations consider alternative locations for low-cost export platforms. In this paper, we explore this important research and policy issue empirically. We focus our studies on East and Southeast Asia as well as Latin America. For Asia, we use data for eight Asian economies (Hong Kong, China, Taipei,China, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand) for 1985-2002 while for Latin America, we use data for sixteen Latin American economies (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela) for 1990-2002. We control for the standard determinants of their inward direct investment. We then add PRC's inward foreign direct investment as an indicator of the 'PRC Effect'. Estimation of the coefficient associated with the PRC Effect proxy gives us indications about the existence of the PRC Effect. We have three results: (1) The level of PRC's foreign direct investment is positively related to the levels of inward direct investments of economies in East and Southeast Asia, while the PRC Effect is mostly insignificant for Latin American nations; (2) the level of PRC's foreign direct investment is negatively related to the direct investment of these economies as shares of total foreign direct investments in the developing countries; (3) The PRC Effect is generally not the most important determinant of the inward direct investments of these economies. Market sizes and policy variables such as openness and corporate tax rates tend to be more important

Foreign Direct Investment in East Asia and Latin America: Is there a People's Republic of China Effect?

In recent years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has emerged as the world’s largest recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI). Many analysts and government officials in the developing world have expressed concern that they are losing competitiveness to the PRC. Is the PRC diverting FDI from other developing countries? Theoretically, a growing PRC could add to other countries’ FDI by creating more opportunities for production networking and raising the need for raw materials and resources. At the same time, the extremely low labor costs in the PRC might lure multinational enterprises (MNEs) away from other developing countries when they considered alternative locations for low-cost export platforms. In this paper, we explore this important research and policy issue empirically. We focus on East and Southeast Asia as well as Latin America. For Asia, we use data for eight economies (Hong Kong, China, Taipei,China, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand) for 1985-2002, while for Latin America, we use data for sixteen economies (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela) for 1990–2002. We control for the standard determinants of inward direct investment. We then add the PRC’s inward FDI as an indicator of the “PRC Effect.” An estimation of the coefficient associated with the PRC Effect proxy gives us indications about its existence. We obtain three results: (1) the level of the PRC’s foreign direct investment is positively related to the levels of inward direct investments of economies in East and Southeast Asia, while it is mostly insignificant for Latin American economies; (2) the level of the PRC’s FDI is negatively related to the direct investment into these economies as shares of total foreign direct investments in the developing countries; (3) the PRC Effect is generally not the most important determinant of inward direct investment for these economies. Market size and policy variables such as openness and corporate tax rates tend to be more important

A modified dynamic evolving neural-fuzzy approach to modeling customer satisfaction for affective design

Affective design is an important aspect of product development to achieve a competitive edge in the marketplace. A neural-fuzzy network approach has been attempted recently to model customer satisfaction for affective design and it has been proved to be an effective one to deal with the fuzziness and non-linearity of the modeling as well as generate explicit customer satisfaction models. However, such an approach to modeling customer satisfaction has two limitations. First, it is not suitable for the modeling problems which involve a large number of inputs. Second, it cannot adapt to new data sets, given that its structure is fixed once it has been developed. In this paper, a modified dynamic evolving neural-fuzzy approach is proposed to address the above mentioned limitations. A case study on the affective design of mobile phones was conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. Validation tests were conducted and the test results indicated that: (1) the conventional Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) failed to run due to a large number of inputs; (2) the proposed dynamic neural-fuzzy model outperforms the subtractive clustering-based ANFIS model and fuzzy c-means clustering-based ANFIS model in terms of their modeling accuracy and computational effort

Secretome Analysis of Skeletal Myogenesis Using SILAC and Shotgun Proteomics

Myogenesis, the formation of skeletal muscle, is a multistep event that commences with myoblast proliferation, followed by cell-cycle arrest, and finally the formation of multinucleated myotubes via fusion of mononucleated myoblasts. Each step is orchestrated by well-documented intracellular factors, such as cytoplasmic signalling molecules and nuclear transcription factors. Regardless, the key step in getting a more comprehensive understanding of the regulation of myogenesis is to explore the extracellular factors that are capable of eliciting the downstream intracellular factors. This could further provide valuable insight into the acute cellular response to extrinsic cues in maintaining normal muscle development. In this paper, we survey the intracellular factors that respond to extracellular cues that are responsible for the cascades of events during myogenesis: myoblast proliferation, cell-cycle arrest of myoblasts, and differentiation of myoblasts into myotubes. This focus on extracellular perspective of muscle development illustrates our mass spectrometry-based proteomic approaches to identify differentially expressed secreted factors during skeletal myogenesis

Biomechanics (Chapter 9)

Biomechanics is a discipline. A discipline deals with understanding, predicting, and explaining phenomena within a content domain, and biomechanics is the study of the human body in motion. Kinesiology, the parent discipline of biomechanics, is a science that investigates movement. Biomechanical research in human development focuses on evaluating essential movement patterns across the human life span. Biomechanical analysis is specifically important in quantifying the developmental motor skills and movement patterns such as walking, kicking, jumping, throwing, and catching. Biomechanical research also involves studying the movement patterns of injured and disabled people. Forensic biomechanists are invited to analyze evidence, clarify some of the most important issues, and facilitate the decisions of the jury. Motion recording devices use optical lenses to capture body motion and provide permanent recorded images of movement that can be evaluated with more precision than perception with the naked eye alone

Knockdown of piRNA pathway proteins results in enhanced Semliki forest virus production in mosquito cells

The exogenous siRNA pathway is important in restricting arbovirus infection in mosquitoes. Less is known about the role of the PIWI-interacting RNA pathway, or piRNA pathway, in antiviral responses. Viral piRNA-like molecules have recently been described following infection of mosquitoes and derived cell lines with several arboviruses. The piRNA pathway has thus been suggested to function as an additional small RNA-mediated antiviral response to the known infection-induced siRNA response. Here we show that piRNA-like molecules are produced following infection with the naturally mosquito-borne Semliki Forest virus in mosquito cell lines. We show that knockdown of piRNA pathway proteins enhances the replication of this arbovirus and defines the contribution of piRNA pathway effectors, thus characterizing the antiviral properties of the piRNA pathway. In conclusion, arbovirus infection can trigger the piRNA pathway in mosquito cells, and knockdown of piRNA proteins enhances virus production

Section Extension from Hyperbolic Geometry of Punctured Disk and Holomorphic Family of Flat Bundles

The construction of sections of bundles with prescribed jet values plays a fundamental role in problems of algebraic and complex geometry. When the jet values are prescribed on a positive dimensional subvariety, it is handled by theorems of Ohsawa-Takegoshi type which give extension of line bundle valued square-integrable top-degree holomorphic forms from the fiber at the origin of a family of complex manifolds over the open unit 1-disk when the curvature of the metric of line bundle is semipositive. We prove here an extension result when the curvature of the line bundle is only semipositive on each fiber with negativity on the total space assumed bounded from below and the connection of the metric locally bounded, if a square-integrable extension is known to be possible over a double point at the origin. It is a Hensel-lemma-type result analogous to Artin's application of the generalized implicit function theorem to the theory of obstruction in deformation theory. The motivation is the need in the abundance conjecture to construct pluricanonical sections from flatly twisted pluricanonical sections. We also give here a new approach to the original theorem of Ohsawa-Takegoshi by using the hyperbolic geometry of the punctured open unit 1-disk to reduce the original theorem of Ohsawa-Takegoshi to a simple application of the standard method of constructing holomorphic functions by solving the d-bar equation with cut-off functions and additional blowup weight functions

The Influence of Visual Perception of Self-Motion on Locomotor Adaptation to Unilateral Limb Loading

Self-perception of motion through visual stimulation may be important for adapting to locomotor conditions. Unilateral limb loading is a locomotor condition that can improve stability and reduce abnormal limb movement. In the present study, the authors investigated the effect of self-perception of motion through virtual reality (VR) on adaptation to unilateral limb loading. Healthy young adults, assigned to either a VR or a non-VR group, walked on a treadmill in the following 3 locomotor task periods—no load, loaded, and load removed. Subjects in the VR group viewed a virtual corridor during treadmill walking. Exposure to VR reduced cadence and muscle activity. During the loaded period, the swing time of the unloaded limb showed a larger increase in the VR group. When the load was removed, the swing time of the previously loaded limb and the stance time of the previously unloaded limb showed larger decrease and the swing time of the previously unloaded limb showed a smaller increase in the VR group. Lack of visual cues may cause the adoption of cautious strategies (higher muscle activity, shorter and more frequent steps, changes in the swing and stance times) when faced with situations that require adaptations. VR technology, providing such perceptual cues, has an important role in enhancing locomotor adaptation