In many machine learning applications, we are faced with incomplete datasets. In the literature, missing data imputation techniques have been mostly concerned with filling missing values. However, the existence of missing values is synonymous with uncertainties not only over the distribution of missing values but also over target class assignments that require careful consideration. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective method for imputing missing features and estimating the distribution of target assignments given incomplete data. In order to make imputations, we train a simple and effective generator network to generate imputations that a discriminator network is tasked to distinguish. Following this, a predictor network is trained using the imputed samples from the generator network to capture the classification uncertainties and make predictions accordingly. The proposed method is evaluated on CIFAR-10 and MNIST image datasets as well as five real-world tabular classification datasets, under different missingness rates and structures. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in generating imputations as well as providing estimates for the class uncertainties in a classification task when faced with missing values.

Existing public face image datasets are strongly biased toward Caucasian faces, and other races (e.g., Latino) are significantly underrepresented. The models trained from such datasets suffer from inconsistent classification accuracy, which limits the applicability of face analytic systems to non-White race groups. To mitigate the race bias problem in these datasets, we constructed a novel face image dataset containing 108,501 images which is balanced on race. We define 7 race groups: White, Black, Indian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latino. Images were collected from the YFCC-100M Flickr dataset and labeled with race, gender, and age groups. Evaluations were performed on existing face attribute datasets as well as novel image datasets to measure the generalization performance. We find that the model trained from our dataset is substantially more accurate on novel datasets and the accuracy is consistent across race and gender groups. We also compare several commercial computer vision APIs and report their balanced accuracy across gender, race, and age groups. Our code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/joojs/fairface.

Healthcare big data remains under-utilized due to various incompatibility issues between the domains of data analytics and healthcare. The lack of generalizable iterative feature acquisition methods under budget and machine learning models that allow reasoning with a model’s uncertainty are two examples. Meanwhile, a boost to the available data is currently under way with the rapid growth in the Internet of Things applications and personalized healthcare. For the healthcare domain to be able to adopt models that take advantage of this big data, machine learning models should be coupled with more informative, germane feature acquisition methods, consequently adding robustness to the model’s results. We introduce an approach to feature selection that is based on Bayesian learning, allowing us to report the level of uncertainty in the model, combined with false-positive and false-negative rates. In addition, measuring target-specific uncertainty lifts the restriction on feature selection being target agnostic, allowing for feature acquisition based on a target of focus. We show that acquiring features for a specific target is at least as good as deep learning feature selection methods and common linear feature selection approaches for small non-sparse datasets, and surpasses these when faced with real-world data that is larger in scale and sparseness.