arXiv subjects

Cheng Soon Ong

Publications and source records attributed to Cheng Soon Ong.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Radio Galaxy Zoo: tagging radio subjects using text

RadioTalk is a communication platform that enabled members of the Radio Galaxy Zoo (RGZ) citizen science project to engage in discussion threads and provide further descriptions of the radio subjects they were observing in the form of tags and comments. It contains a wealth of auxiliary information which is useful for the morphology identification of complex and extended radio sources. In this paper, we present this new dataset, and for the first time in radio astronomy, we combine text and images to automatically classify radio galaxies using a multi-modal learning approach. We found incorporating text features improved classification performance which demonstrates that text annotations are rare but valuable sources of information for classifying astronomical sources, and suggests the importance of exploiting multi-modal information in future citizen science projects. We also discovered over 10,000 new radio sources beyond the RGZ-DR1 catalogue in this dataset.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2023

Uncertainty Quantification of the Virial Black Hole Mass with Conformal Prediction

Precise measurements of the black hole mass are essential to gain insight on the black hole and host galaxy co-evolution. A direct measure of the black hole mass is often restricted to nearest galaxies and instead, an indirect method using the single-epoch virial black hole mass estimation is used for objects at high redshifts. However, this method is subjected to biases and uncertainties as it is reliant on the scaling relation from a small sample of local active galactic nuclei. In this study, we propose the application of conformalised quantile regression (CQR) to quantify the uncertainties of the black hole predictions in a machine learning setting. We compare CQR with various prediction interval techniques and demonstrated that CQR can provide a more useful prediction interval indicator. In contrast to baseline approaches for prediction interval estimation, we show that the CQR method provides prediction intervals that adjust to the black hole mass and its related properties. That is it yields a tighter constraint on the prediction interval (hence more certain) for a larger black hole mass, and accordingly, bright and broad spectral line width source. Using a combination of neural network model and CQR framework, the recovered virial black hole mass predictions and uncertainties are comparable to those measured from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/yongsukyee/uncertain_blackholemass.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Factorized Fourier Neural Operators

We propose the Factorized Fourier Neural Operator (F-FNO), a learning-based approach for simulating partial differential equations (PDEs). Starting from a recently proposed Fourier representation of flow fields, the F-FNO bridges the performance gap between pure machine learning approaches to that of the best numerical or hybrid solvers. This is achieved with new representations - separable spectral layers and improved residual connections - and a combination of training strategies such as the Markov assumption, Gaussian noise, and cosine learning rate decay. On several challenging benchmark PDEs on regular grids, structured meshes, and point clouds, the F-FNO can scale to deeper networks and outperform both the FNO and the geo-FNO, reducing the error by 83% on the Navier-Stokes problem, 31% on the elasticity problem, 57% on the airfoil flow problem, and 60% on the plastic forging problem. Compared to the state-of-the-art pseudo-spectral method, the F-FNO can take a step size that is an order of magnitude larger in time and achieve an order of magnitude speedup to produce the same solution quality.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Quantile Bandits for Best Arms Identification

We consider a variant of the best arm identification task in stochastic multi-armed bandits. Motivated by risk-averse decision-making problems, our goal is to identify a set of $m$ arms with the highest $τ$-quantile values within a fixed budget. We prove asymmetric two-sided concentration inequalities for order statistics and quantiles of random variables that have non-decreasing hazard rate, which may be of independent interest. With these inequalities, we analyse a quantile version of Successive Accepts and Rejects (Q-SAR). We derive an upper bound for the probability of arm misidentification, the first justification of a quantile based algorithm for fixed budget multiple best arms identification. We show illustrative experiments for best arm identification.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Deep equilibrium models as estimators for continuous latent variables

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and its exponential family extensions have three components: observations, latents and parameters of a linear transformation. We consider a generalised setting where the canonical parameters of the exponential family are a nonlinear transformation of the latents. We show explicit relationships between particular neural network architectures and the corresponding statistical models. We find that deep equilibrium models -- a recently introduced class of implicit neural networks -- solve maximum a-posteriori (MAP) estimates for the latents and parameters of the transformation. Our analysis provides a systematic way to relate activation functions, dropout, and layer structure, to statistical assumptions about the observations, thus providing foundational principles for unsupervised DEQs. For hierarchical latents, individual neurons can be interpreted as nodes in a deep graphical model. Our DEQ feature maps are end-to-end differentiable, enabling fine-tuning for downstream tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Two-Stage Neural Contextual Bandits for Personalised News Recommendation

We consider the problem of personalised news recommendation where each user consumes news in a sequential fashion. Existing personalised news recommendation methods focus on exploiting user interests and ignores exploration in recommendation, which leads to biased feedback loops and hurt recommendation quality in the long term. We build on contextual bandits recommendation strategies which naturally address the exploitation-exploration trade-off. The main challenges are the computational efficiency for exploring the large-scale item space and utilising the deep representations with uncertainty. We propose a two-stage hierarchical topic-news deep contextual bandits framework to efficiently learn user preferences when there are many news items. We use deep learning representations for users and news, and generalise the neural upper confidence bound (UCB) policies to generalised additive UCB and bilinear UCB. Empirical results on a large-scale news recommendation dataset show that our proposed policies are efficient and outperform the baseline bandit policies.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

New Tricks for Estimating Gradients of Expectations

We introduce a family of pairwise stochastic gradient estimators for gradients of expectations, which are related to the log-derivative trick, but involve pairwise interactions between samples. The simplest example of our new estimator, dubbed the fundamental trick estimator, is shown to arise from either a) introducing and approximating an integral representation based on the fundamental theorem of calculus, or b) applying the reparameterisation trick to an implicit parameterisation under infinitesimal perturbation of the parameters. From the former perspective we generalise to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space representation, giving rise to a locality parameter in the pairwise interactions mentioned above, yielding our representer trick estimator. The resulting estimators are unbiased and shown to offer an independent component of useful information in comparison with the log-derivative estimator. We provide a further novel theoretical analysis which further characterises the variance reduction afforded by the new techniques. Promising analytical and numerical examples confirm the theory and intuitions behind the new estimators.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Gaussian Process Bandits with Aggregated Feedback

We consider the continuum-armed bandits problem, under a novel setting of recommending the best arms within a fixed budget under aggregated feedback. This is motivated by applications where the precise rewards are impossible or expensive to obtain, while an aggregated reward or feedback, such as the average over a subset, is available. We constrain the set of reward functions by assuming that they are from a Gaussian Process and propose the Gaussian Process Optimistic Optimisation (GPOO) algorithm. We adaptively construct a tree with nodes as subsets of the arm space, where the feedback is the aggregated reward of representatives of a node. We propose a new simple regret notion with respect to aggregated feedback on the recommended arms. We provide theoretical analysis for the proposed algorithm, and recover single point feedback as a special case. We illustrate GPOO and compare it with related algorithms on simulated data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Radflow: A Recurrent, Aggregated, and Decomposable Model for Networks of Time Series

We propose a new model for networks of time series that influence each other. Graph structures among time series are found in diverse domains, such as web traffic influenced by hyperlinks, product sales influenced by recommendation, or urban transport volume influenced by road networks and weather. There has been recent progress in graph modeling and in time series forecasting, respectively, but an expressive and scalable approach for a network of series does not yet exist. We introduce Radflow, a novel model that embodies three key ideas: a recurrent neural network to obtain node embeddings that depend on time, the aggregation of the flow of influence from neighboring nodes with multi-head attention, and the multi-layer decomposition of time series. Radflow naturally takes into account dynamic networks where nodes and edges change over time, and it can be used for prediction and data imputation tasks. On real-world datasets ranging from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand nodes, we observe that Radflow variants are the best performing model across a wide range of settings. The recurrent component in Radflow also outperforms N-BEATS, the state-of-the-art time series model. We show that Radflow can learn different trends and seasonal patterns, that it is robust to missing nodes and edges, and that correlated temporal patterns among network neighbors reflect influence strength. We curate WikiTraffic, the largest dynamic network of time series with 366K nodes and 22M time-dependent links spanning five years. This dataset provides an open benchmark for developing models in this area, with applications that include optimizing resources for the web. More broadly, Radflow has the potential to improve forecasts in correlated time series networks such as the stock market, and impute missing measurements in geographically dispersed networks of natural phenomena.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Monge blunts Bayes: Hardness Results for Adversarial Training

The last few years have seen a staggering number of empirical studies of the robustness of neural networks in a model of adversarial perturbations of their inputs. Most rely on an adversary which carries out local modifications within prescribed balls. None however has so far questioned the broader picture: how to frame a resource-bounded adversary so that it can be severely detrimental to learning, a non-trivial problem which entails at a minimum the choice of loss and classifiers. We suggest a formal answer for losses that satisfy the minimal statistical requirement of being proper. We pin down a simple sufficient property for any given class of adversaries to be detrimental to learning, involving a central measure of "harmfulness" which generalizes the well-known class of integral probability metrics. A key feature of our result is that it holds for all proper losses, and for a popular subset of these, the optimisation of this central measure appears to be independent of the loss. When classifiers are Lipschitz -- a now popular approach in adversarial training --, this optimisation resorts to optimal transport to make a low-budget compression of class marginals. Toy experiments reveal a finding recently separately observed: training against a sufficiently budgeted adversary of this kind improves generalization.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Cold-start Playlist Recommendation with Multitask Learning

Playlist recommendation involves producing a set of songs that a user might enjoy. We investigate this problem in three cold-start scenarios: (i) cold playlists, where we recommend songs to form new personalised playlists for an existing user; (ii) cold users, where we recommend songs to form new playlists for a new user; and (iii) cold songs, where we recommend newly released songs to extend users' existing playlists. We propose a flexible multitask learning method to deal with all three settings. The method learns from user-curated playlists, and encourages songs in a playlist to be ranked higher than those that are not by minimising a bipartite ranking loss. Inspired by an equivalence between bipartite ranking and binary classification, we show how one can efficiently approximate an optimal solution of the multitask learning objective by minimising a classification loss. Empirical results on two real playlist datasets show the proposed approach has good performance for cold-start playlist recommendation.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2018

Radio Galaxy Zoo: ClaRAN - A Deep Learning Classifier for Radio Morphologies

The upcoming next-generation large area radio continuum surveys can expect tens of millions of radio sources, rendering the traditional method for radio morphology classification through visual inspection unfeasible. We present ClaRAN - Classifying Radio sources Automatically with Neural networks - a proof-of-concept radio source morphology classifier based upon the Faster Region-based Convolutional Neutral Networks (Faster R-CNN) method. Specifically, we train and test ClaRAN on the FIRST and WISE images from the Radio Galaxy Zoo Data Release 1 catalogue. ClaRAN provides end users with automated identification of radio source morphology classifications from a simple input of a radio image and a counterpart infrared image of the same region. ClaRAN is the first open-source, end-to-end radio source morphology classifier that is capable of locating and associating discrete and extended components of radio sources in a fast (< 200 milliseconds per image) and accurate (>= 90 %) fashion. Future work will improve ClaRAN's relatively lower success rates in dealing with multi-source fields and will enable ClaRAN to identify sources on much larger fields without loss in classification accuracy.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2018

A Primer on Causal Analysis

We provide a conceptual map to navigate causal analysis problems. Focusing on the case of discrete random variables, we consider the case of causal effect estimation from observational data. The presented approaches apply also to continuous variables, but the issue of estimation becomes more complex. We then introduce the four schools of thought for causal analysis

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Provably Fair Representations

Machine learning systems are increasingly used to make decisions about people's lives, such as whether to give someone a loan or whether to interview someone for a job. This has led to considerable interest in making such machine learning systems fair. One approach is to transform the input data used by the algorithm. This can be achieved by passing each input data point through a representation function prior to its use in training or testing. Techniques for learning such representation functions from data have been successful empirically, but typically lack theoretical fairness guarantees. We show that it is possible to prove that a representation function is fair according to common measures of both group and individual fairness, as well as useful with respect to a target task. These provable properties can be used in a governance model involving a data producer, a data user and a data regulator, where there is a separation of concerns between fairness and target task utility to ensure transparency and prevent perverse incentives. We formally define the 'cost of mistrust' of using this model compared to the setting where there is a single trusted party, and provide bounds on this cost in particular cases. We present a practical approach to learning fair representation functions and apply it to financial and criminal justice datasets. We evaluate the fairness and utility of these representation functions using measures motivated by our theoretical results.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Revisiting revisits in trajectory recommendation

Trajectory recommendation is the problem of recommending a sequence of places in a city for a tourist to visit. It is strongly desirable for the recommended sequence to avoid loops, as tourists typically would not wish to revisit the same location. Given some learned model that scores sequences, how can we then find the highest-scoring sequence that is loop-free? This paper studies this problem, with three contributions. First, we detail three distinct approaches to the problem -- graph-based heuristics, integer linear programming, and list extensions of the Viterbi algorithm -- and qualitatively summarise their strengths and weaknesses. Second, we explicate how two ostensibly different approaches to the list Viterbi algorithm are in fact fundamentally identical. Third, we conduct experiments on real-world trajectory recommendation datasets to identify the tradeoffs imposed by each of the three approaches. Overall, our results indicate that a greedy graph-based heuristic offer excellent performance and runtime, leading us to recommend its use for removing loops at prediction time.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

PathRec: Visual Analysis of Travel Route Recommendations

We present an interactive visualisation tool for recommending travel trajectories. This system is based on new machine learning formulations and algorithms for the sequence recommendation problem. The system starts from a map-based overview, taking an interactive query as starting point. It then breaks down contributions from different geographical and user behavior features, and those from individual points-of-interest versus pairs of consecutive points on a route. The system also supports detailed quantitative interrogation by comparing a large number of features for multiple points. Effective trajectory visualisations can potentially benefit a large cohort of online map users and assist their decision-making. More broadly, the design of this system can inform visualisations of other structured prediction tasks, such as for sequences or trees.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2017

Structured Recommendation

Current recommender systems largely focus on static, unstructured content. In many scenarios, we would like to recommend content that has structure, such as a trajectory of points-of-interests in a city, or a playlist of songs. Dubbed Structured Recommendation, this problem differs from the typical structured prediction problem in that there are multiple correct answers for a given input. Motivated by trajectory recommendation, we focus on sequential structures but in contrast to classical Viterbi decoding we require that valid predictions are sequences with no repeated elements. We propose an approach to sequence recommendation based on the structured support vector machine. For prediction, we modify the inference procedure to avoid predicting loops in the sequence. For training, we modify the objective function to account for the existence of multiple ground truths for a given input. We also modify the loss-augmented inference procedure to exclude the known ground truths. Experiments on real-world trajectory recommendation datasets show the benefits of our approach over existing, non-structured recommendation approaches.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2016

Multivariate Spearman's rho for aggregating ranks using copulas

We study the problem of rank aggregation: given a set of ranked lists, we want to form a consensus ranking. Furthermore, we consider the case of extreme lists: i.e., only the rank of the best or worst elements are known. We impute missing ranks by the average value and generalise Spearman's ρto extreme ranks. Our main contribution is the derivation of a non-parametric estimator for rank aggregation based on multivariate extensions of Spearman's ρ, which measures correlation between a set of ranked lists. Multivariate Spearman's ρis defined using copulas, and we show that the geometric mean of normalised ranks maximises multivariate correlation. Motivated by this, we propose a weighted geometric mean approach for learning to rank which has a closed form least squares solution. When only the best or worst elements of a ranked list are known, we impute the missing ranks by the average value, allowing us to apply Spearman's ρ. Finally, we demonstrate good performance on the rank aggregation benchmarks MQ2007 and MQ2008.

stat.ML↗