THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS. By Oscar Kempthorne. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1952. 631 pp. $8.50. This book by a teacher of statistics (as well as a consultant for \"experimenters\") is a comprehensive study of the philosophical background for the statistical design of experiment. It is necessary to have some facility with algebraic notation and manipulation to be able to use the volume intelligently. The problems are presented from the theoretical point of view, without such practical examples as would be helpful for those not acquainted with mathematics. The mathematical justification for the techniques is given. As a somewhat advanced treatment of the design and analysis of experiments, this volume will be interesting and helpful for many who approach statistics theoretically as well as practically. With emphasis on the \"why,\" and with description given broadly, the author relates the subject matter to the general theory of statistics and to the general problem of experimental inference. MARGARET J. ROBERTSON

The Design and Analysis of Experiments

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Data Mining - Concepts and Techniques.

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

An adaptive Cuckoo search algorithm for optimisation

In this paper, we perform a comparative evaluation of seven most commonly used first-order stochastic gradient-based optimization techniques in a simple Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) architectural setup. The investigated techniques are the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), with vanilla (vSGD), with momentum (SGDm), with momentum and nesterov (SGDm+n)), Root Mean Square Propagation (RMSProp), Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam), Adaptive Gradient (AdaGrad), Adaptive Delta (AdaDelta), Adaptive moment estimation Extension based on infinity norm (Adamax) and Nesterov-accelerated Adaptive Moment Estimation (Nadam). We trained the model and evaluated the optimization techniques in terms of convergence speed, accuracy and loss function using three randomly selected publicly available image classification datasets. The overall experimental results obtained show Nadam achieved better performance across the three datasets in comparison to the other optimization techniques, while AdaDelta performed the worst.

A Comparative Analysis of Gradient Descent-Based Optimization Algorithms on Convolutional Neural Networks

Credit risk prediction models seek to predict quality factors such as whether an individual will default (bad applicant) on a loan or not (good applicant). This can be treated as a kind of machine learning (ML) problem. Recently, the use of ML algorithms has proven to be of great practical value in solving a variety of risk problems including credit risk prediction. One of the most active areas of recent research in ML has been the use of ensemble (combining) classifiers. Research indicates that ensemble individual classifiers lead to a significant improvement in classification performance by having them vote for the most popular class. This paper explores the predicted behaviour of five classifiers for different types of noise in terms of credit risk prediction accuracy, and how such accuracy could be improved by using classifier ensembles. Benchmarking results on four credit datasets and comparison with the performance of each individual classifier on predictive accuracy at various attribute noise levels are presented. The experimental evaluation shows that the ensemble of classifiers technique has the potential to improve prediction accuracy.

Multiple classifier application to credit risk assessment

Increasing the awareness of how incomplete data affects learning and classification accuracy has led to increasing numbers of missing data techniques. This article investigates the robustness and accuracy of seven popular techniques for tolerating incomplete training and test data for different patterns of missing data—different proportions and mechanisms of missing data on resulting tree-based models. The seven missing data techniques were compared by artificially simulating different proportions, patterns, and mechanisms of missing data using 21 complete datasets (i.e., with no missing values) obtained from the University of California, Irvine repository of machine-learning databases (Blake and Merz, 1998). A four-way repeated measures design was employed to analyze the data. The simulation results suggest important differences. All methods have their strengths and weaknesses. However, listwise deletion is substantially inferior to the other six techniques, while multiple imputation, that utilizes the expectation maximization algorithm, represents a superior approach to handling incomplete data. Decision tree single imputation and surrogate variables splitting are more severely impacted by missing values distributed among all attributes compared to when they are only on a single attribute. Otherwise, the imputation—versus model-based imputation procedures gave—reasonably good results although some discrepancies remained. Different techniques for addressing missing values when using decision trees can give substantially diverse results, and must be carefully considered to protect against biases and spurious findings. Multiple imputation should always be used, especially if the data contain many missing values. If few values are missing, any of the missing data techniques might be considered. The choice of technique should be guided by the proportion, pattern, and mechanisms of missing data, especially the latter two. However, the use of older techniques like listwise deletion and mean or mode single imputation is no longer justifiable given the accessibility and ease of use of more advanced techniques, such as multiple imputation and supervised learning imputation.

/pdf/an-empirical-comparison-of-techniques-for-handling-4kbe5dfnuc.pdf

An empirical comparison of techniques for handling incomplete data using decision trees

http://oro.open.ac.uk/22531/1/decision_trees.pdf

Bhekisipho Twala

Papers

An adaptive Cuckoo search algorithm for optimisation

A Comparative Analysis of Gradient Descent-Based Optimization Algorithms on Convolutional Neural Networks

Multiple classifier application to credit risk assessment

An empirical comparison of techniques for handling incomplete data using decision trees

Good methods for coping with missing data in decision trees