Prediction failures of machine learning models often arise from deficiencies in training data, such as incorrect labels, outliers, and selection biases. However, such data points that are responsible for a given failure mode are generally not known a priori, let alone a mechanism for repairing the failure. This work draws on the Bayesian view of continual learning, and develops a generic framework for both, identifying training examples which have given rise to the target failure, and fixing the model through erasing information about them. This framework naturally allows leveraging recent advances in continual learning to this new problem of model repairment, while subsuming the existing works on influence functions and data deletion as specific instances. Experimentally, the proposed approach outperforms the baselines for both identification of detrimental training data and fixing model failures in a generalisable manner.

Major depressive disorder is a debilitating disease affecting 264 million people worldwide. While many antidepressant medications are available, few clinical guidelines support choosing among them. Decision support tools (DSTs) embodying machine learning models may help improve the treatment selection process, but often fail in clinical practice due to poor system integration.

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) are flexible function priors well-suited to situations in which data are scarce and uncertainty must be quantified. Yet, common weight priors are able to encode little functional knowledge and can behave in undesirable ways. We present a novel prior over radial basis function networks (RBFNs) that allows for independent specification of functional amplitude variance and lengthscale (i.e., smoothness), where the inverse lengthscale corresponds to the concentration of radial basis functions. When the lengthscale is uniform over the input space, we prove consistency and approximate variance stationarity. This is in contrast to common BNN priors, which are highly nonstationary. When the input dependence of the lengthscale is unknown, we show how it can be inferred. We compare this model’s behavior to standard BNNs and Gaussian processes using synthetic and real examples.

Latent variable models allow capturing the hidden structure underlying the data. In particular, feature allocation models represent each observation by a linear combination of latent variables. These models are often used to make predictions either for new observations or for missing information in the original data, as well as to perform exploratory data analysis. Although there is an extensive literature on latent feature allocation models for homogeneous datasets, where all the attributes that describe each object are of the same (continuous or discrete) type, there is no general framework for practical latent feature modeling for heterogeneous datasets. In this paper, we introduce a general Bayesian nonparametric latent feature allocation model suitable for heterogeneous datasets, where the attributes describing each object can be arbitrary combinations of real-valued, positive real-valued, categorical, ordinal and count variables. The proposed model presents several important properties. First, it is suitable for heterogeneous data while keeping the properties of conjugate models, which enables us to develop an inference algorithm that presents linear complexity with respect to the number of objects and attributes per MCMC iteration. Second, the Bayesian nonparametric component allows us to place a prior distribution on the number of features required to capture the latent structure in the data. Third, the latent features in the model are binary-valued, which facilitates the interpretability of the obtained latent features in exploratory data analysis. Finally, a software package, called GLFM toolbox, is made publicly available for other researchers to use and extend. It is available at https://ivaleram.github.io/GLFM/. We show the flexibility of the proposed model by solving both prediction and data analysis tasks on several real-world datasets.

This paper presents a Bayesian nonparametric latent feature model specially suitable for exploratory analysis of high-dimensional count data. We perform a non-negative doubly sparse matrix factorization that has two main advantages: not only we are able to better approximate the row input distributions, but the inferred topics are also easier to interpret. By combining the three-parameter and restricted Indian buffet processes into a single prior, we increase the model flexibility, allowing for a full spectrum of sparse solutions in the latent space. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach in the analysis of countries' economic structure. Compared to other approaches, empirical results show our model's ability to give easy-to-interpret information and better capture the underlying sparsity structure of data.