Efficient optimisation of black-box problems that comprise both continuous and categorical inputs is important, yet poses significant challenges. We propose a new approach, Continuous and Categorical Bayesian Optimisation (CoCaBO), which combines the strengths of multi-armed bandits and Bayesian optimisation to select …
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48 results for “Categorical Inputs”
Natural Language Processing models help encode categorical process inputs.
problem Encoding categorical variables in industrial process modeling.
method Using NLP models for categorical variable encoding, combined with dimensionality reduction.
result Meaningful embeddings of categorical variables improve feature importance.
A new method for Gaussian Processes handles mixed continuous and categorical inputs.
problem Modeling cross-correlations between continuous and categorical data.
method Low-Rank Correlation (LRC) method for Gaussian Processes with flexible rank approximation.
result LRC outperforms existing methods in estimating cross-correlations and predicting response surfaces.
WE constructs GP kernels for mixed inputs using weighted EDMs.
problem Limitation of standard GP models in handling categorical variables.
method WEGP constructs kernel function using weighted EDMs for categorical inputs.
result WEGP improves GP model accuracy in both synthetic and real-world optimization problems.
Interprets neural network classifiers for categorical inputs.
problem Neural networks' interpretability in human-sensitive applications.
method Mapping to physical energy model, expansion of neural network layers.
result Each layer's contribution to classification can be analyzed.
We solve the ANOVA decomposition for categorical inputs.
problem Lack of a closed-form expression for ANOVA decomposition with categorical dependent variables.
method Bridge functional analysis with discrete Fourier analysis to derive a closed-form decomposition.
result Closed-form decomposition for categorical inputs without assumptions.
VAIOM models financial returns using continuous input and categorical output.
problem Modeling continuous, noisy, and heterogeneous financial data.
method VAIOM is a decoder-only Transformer that separates input representation from output likelihood.
result VAIOM models outperform fixed single-bar LightGBM baseline in both Test halves.
Bayesian Optimization (BO) methods are useful for optimizing functions that are expen- sive to evaluate, lack an analytical expression and whose evaluations can be contaminated by noise. These methods rely on a probabilistic model of the objective function, typically a Gaussian process (GP), upon which an acquisition f…
Unified Bayesian Optimisation for mixed variables improves performance.
problem Efficient optimisation of problems with both categorical and continuous variables.
method Derive value proposals from the Expected Improvement criterion to optimise both categorical and continuous variables under a single acquisition metric.
result Unified approach significantly outperforms existing methods across mixed-variable tasks.
Gradient-based adversarial attacks on categorical sequence models via traversing an embedded worldcs.LG
New methods tackle adversarial attacks on categorical sequences, improving model security.
problem Adversarial attacks on categorical sequence models, especially for money transactions and medical fraud.
method Two black-box adversarial attacks: Monte-Carlo and continuous relaxation methods.
result Generated adversarial sequences fool machine learning models but remain close to original ones.
Differentiable language model attacks improve adversarial examples for categorical sequence classifiers.
problem Challenges in adversarial attacks for categorical sequence models due to non-differentiability.
method Fine-tuning a language model as a generator of adversarial examples, using a differentiable loss function that combines a surrogate classifier score and approximate edit distance.
result Semantically better and more resistant adversarial examples.
This study compares and evaluates categorical kernels for Gaussian process regression.
problem Challenges in designing effective categorical kernels for Gaussian process regression.
method Reproducible comparative study of existing kernels, new evaluation metrics, and clustering-based nested kernels.
result Nested kernels outperform other methods, especially when group structure is unknown or unknown.
A new method for Gaussian process regression with categorical inputs.
problem Challenges in building a predictive and computationally efficient Gaussian process with categorical inputs.
method Distributional encoding based on maximum mean discrepancy and Wasserstein distance.
result State-of-the-art predictive performance on various datasets.
Paper reduces hyperparameters in mixed-categorical Gaussian processes for green aircraft optimization.
problem High-dimensional mixed-categorical Gaussian processes with many hyperparameters.
method Innovative dimension reduction algorithm using partial least squares regression.
result Significant reduction in fuel consumption (439 kg) for a green aircraft.
Many learning algorithms require categorical data to be transformed into real vectors before it can be used as input. Often, categorical variables are encoded as one-hot (or dummy) vectors. However, this mode of representation can be wasteful since it adds many low-signal regressors, especially when the number of uniqu…
Applied Data Scientists throughout various industries are commonly faced with the challenging task of encoding high-cardinality categorical features into digestible inputs for machine learning algorithms. This paper describes a Bayesian encoding technique developed for WeWork's lead scoring engine which outputs the pro…
Study categorizes mutual funds using natural language processing from unstructured data.
problem Categorizing mutual funds using unstructured data for financial analysis.
method Used natural language processing models to classify mutual funds from their investment strategy descriptions.
result High accuracy in categorizing mutual funds using NLP from unstructured data.
Scalable GP model tackles big data, categorical factors, and multiple responses.
problem Handling big datasets, categorical inputs, and multiple responses in Gaussian processes.
method Latent variable Gaussian process (LVGP) with variational inference for scalability and interpretability.
result The method scales well for large datasets and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Three bootstrap tests compare categorical time series generating processes.
problem Testing equality of generating processes in categorical time series.
method Proposes three tests using dissimilarity measures and bootstrap methods.
result Advantages and disadvantages of each bootstrap method discussed.
This research compares two encoding methods for categorical attributes in machine learning, affecting model fairness.
problem The impact of encoding protected categorical attributes on fairness in machine learning models.
method Comparison of one-hot encoding and target encoding methods.
result Target encoding can lead to more unfair models compared to one-hot encoding due to induced bias.
This paper describes InfoCatVAE, an extension of the variational autoencoder that enables unsupervised disentangled representation learning. InfoCatVAE uses multimodal distributions for the prior and the inference network and then maximizes the evidence lower bound objective (ELBO). We connect the new ELBO derived for …
This work assesses DNNs for estimating conditional probabilities.
problem Lack of uncertainty characterization in DNNs for probabilistic applications.
method Investigates DNNs' ability to estimate conditional probabilities using synthetic and real-world datasets.
result DNNs' precision in estimating conditional probabilities is influenced by probability density and inter-categorical sparsity.
New approach categorizes objective functions for embodied agents.
problem Understanding how objectives relate to each other and discovering new objectives.
method Introducing Action Perception Divergence (APD) to categorize objective functions.
result Introduces a spectrum of objectives from narrow to general, explaining various unsupervised objectives.
Events are happening in real-world and real-time, which can be planned and organized occasions involving multiple people and objects. Social media platforms publish a lot of text messages containing public events with comprehensive topics. However, mining social events is challenging due to the heterogeneous event elem…
We consider derivative-free black-box global optimization of expensive noisy functions, when most of the randomness in the objective is produced by a few influential scalar random inputs. We present a new Bayesian global optimization algorithm, called Stratified Bayesian Optimization (SBO), which uses this strong depen…
Bayesian Optimization over High-Dimensional Combinatorial Spaces via Dictionary-based Embeddingscs.LG
Bayesian optimization for high-dimensional combinatorial spaces using embeddings.
problem Optimizing expensive functions over large, complex input spaces.
method Dictionary-based ordinal embeddings for high-dimensional combinatorial structures, using Gaussian process models.
result The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art BO methods on diverse real-world benchmarks.
Kendall transformation converts continuous data into categorical vectors for robust information theory.
problem Handling small number of observations and preserving ranking in continuous data.
method Kendall transformation converts ordered features into categorical vectors of pairwise order relations.
result Kendall transformation makes information theory methods applicable to continuous data robustly.
We propose a novel approach to train a multi-modal policy from mixed demonstrations without their behavior labels. We develop a method to discover the latent factors of variation in the demonstrations. Specifically, our method is based on the variational autoencoder with a categorical latent variable. The encoder infer…
Random Intersection Chainsstat.ML
Random Intersection Chains selects important interactions from categorical features.
problem Heavy computational burden in considering all interactions for categorical features.
method Randomly generates chains of intersections, estimates and selects frequent patterns.
result Selected patterns are the most frequent in the data set.
Neural networks encode inputs deterministically and categorically, behaving like hash encoders.
problem Understanding the encoding properties of neural networks.
method Analyzed the input space partitioned by ReLU-like activations in neural networks.
result Neural networks can be represented by unique activation patterns, similar to hash encoders.
Ensemble Quantile Classifierstat.ML
Both the median-based classifier and the quantile-based classifier are useful for discriminating high-dimensional data with heavy-tailed or skewed inputs. But these methods are restricted as they assign equal weight to each variable in an unregularized way. The ensemble quantile classifier is a more flexible regularize…
Improves robustness of information bottleneck framework with sparsity-inducing prior.
problem Fixed-dimensional priors restrict flexibility and restrict robustness.
method Sparsity-inducing spike-slab categorical prior that learns dimension distribution per data point.
result Improves accuracy and robustness compared to traditional priors and other methods.
Decision forests learn to model text by evaluating categorical-set conditions.
problem Decision forests cannot directly model text features.
method Defined and learned conditions for categorical-set features, enabling efficient text modeling.
result Decision forests can now directly model text features.
Proposes CBMI for missing data imputation using labels and input.
problem Missing data in practical data science settings.
method CBMI: imputes labels and input simultaneously; IUL: stacks label into input.
result CBMI improves classification accuracy, especially for imbalanced and categorical data.
Neural framework for conditional OT maps learns from categorical and continuous variables.
problem Learning conditional optimal transport maps between complex distributions.
method Hypernetwork generates adaptive transport layer parameters based on conditioning variables.
result Our method outperforms simpler conditioning methods in comprehensive ablation studies.
We propose Dirichlet Process mixtures of Generalized Linear Models (DP-GLM), a new method of nonparametric regression that accommodates continuous and categorical inputs, and responses that can be modeled by a generalized linear model. We prove conditions for the asymptotic unbiasedness of the DP-GLM regression mean fu…
Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a neural network that can make use of the internal structure of data such as the 2D structure of image data. This paper studies CNN on text categorization to exploit the 1D structure (namely, word order) of text data for accurate prediction. Instead of using low-dimensional word ve…
StructureBoost improves gradient boosting for complex categorical variables efficiently.
problem Efficiently handling complex categorical variables with known structure.
method Two methods to overcome computational obstacles in SCDT enumeration for structured categorical variables.
result StructureBoost outperforms existing packages on complex categorical problems.
Categorical bundles provide a natural framework for gauge theories involving multiple gauge groups. Unlike the case of traditional bundles there are distinct notions of triviality, and hence also of local triviality, for categorical bundles. We study categorical principal bundles that are product bundles in the categor…
The Effectiveness of Discretization in Forecasting: An Empirical Study on Neural Time Series Modelscs.LG
This study examines how discretization improves neural forecasting models.
problem Improving predictive performance of neural forecasting models.
method Empirical investigation of data binning techniques on various neural forecasting architectures.
result Data binning almost always improves forecasting accuracy, but the type of binning is less important.
Bayesian model improves categorization of explosions from sparse data.
problem Challenges in categorizing explosions from limited data.
method Bayesian update to Event Categorization Matrix model with Bayesian Decision Theory.
result Consistent gains in overall accuracy and lower false negative rates.
In the era of big data, learning from categorical features with very large vocabularies (e.g., 28 million for the Criteo click prediction dataset) has become a practical challenge for machine learning researchers and practitioners. We design a highly-scalable vocabulary compression algorithm that seeks to maximize the …
This paper generalizes graph representation for diverse data types.
problem Representing and querying hybrid data types in a unified way.
method Introducing a directed Tensor-Typed Multi-Graph with embeddings.
result Unified representation for visual, linguistic, and auditory data.
UNTIE learns representations of coupled categorical data.
problem Challenges in learning from unlabeled categorical data with complex couplings.
method UNTIE approach for unsupervised representation learning of heterogeneous couplings.
result UNTIE significantly improves categorical data representations on 25 diverse datasets.
Paper introduces Categorical Normalizing Flows for better handling of categorical data.
problem Limited application of normalizing flows on categorical data due to lack of intrinsic order.
method Categorical Normalizing Flows use continuous transformations to model latent relations in categorical data, optimizing both continuous representation and model likelihood.
result GraphCNF, a permutation-invariant generative model, outperforms state-of-the-art on molecule generation.
This paper proposes a method to reduce complexity in GLMs with categorical predictors.
problem Wasteful, hard-to-interpret, and prone to overfitting of traditional one-hot encoding for high-cardinality categorical predictors.
method Clustering categories of categorical predictors through a numerical method that preserves or improves accuracy while reducing the number of coefficients.
result Clustering categories of categorical predictors reduces complexity substantially without harming accuracy.
The paper shows how integrating categorical semantics can enhance unsupervised domain translation.
problem Improving unsupervised domain translation between perceptually different domains.
method Learning invariant categorical semantic features in an unsupervised manner and conditioning them on the style encoder.
result Conditioning the style encoder on learned categorical semantics improves translation and stylization.
Wasserstein gradient boosting predicts probability distributions for supervised learning.
problem Distribution-valued supervised learning where outputs are probability distributions.
method Fits a new weak learner to Wasserstein gradients of loss functionals of probability distributions.
result Superior performance in probabilistic prediction compared to existing methods.