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

Despite widespread adoption, machine learning models remain mostly black boxes. Understanding the reasons behind predictions is, however, quite important in assessing trust, which is fundamental if one plans to take action based on a prediction, or when choosing whether to deploy a new model. Such understanding also provides insights into the model, which can be used to transform an untrustworthy model or prediction into a trustworthy one. In this work, we propose LIME, a novel explanation technique that explains the predictions of any classifier in an interpretable and faithful manner, by learning an interpretable model locally varound the prediction. We also propose a method to explain models by presenting representative individual predictions and their explanations in a non-redundant way, framing the task as a submodular optimization problem. We demonstrate the flexibility of these methods by explaining different models for text (e.g. random forests) and image classification (e.g. neural networks). We show the utility of explanations via novel experiments, both simulated and with human subjects, on various scenarios that require trust: deciding if one should trust a prediction, choosing between models, improving an untrustworthy classifier, and identifying why a classifier should not be trusted.

/pdf/why-should-i-trust-you-explaining-the-predictions-of-any-ejtlrtykxr.pdf

"Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier

This paper presents an overview of the field of recommender systems and describes the current generation of recommendation methods that are usually classified into the following three main categories: content-based, collaborative, and hybrid recommendation approaches. This paper also describes various limitations of current recommendation methods and discusses possible extensions that can improve recommendation capabilities and make recommender systems applicable to an even broader range of applications. These extensions include, among others, an improvement of understanding of users and items, incorporation of the contextual information into the recommendation process, support for multicriteria ratings, and a provision of more flexible and less intrusive types of recommendations.

/pdf/toward-the-next-generation-of-recommender-systems-a-survey-4wwsv77rns.pdf

Toward the next generation of recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions

As the Netflix Prize competition has demonstrated, matrix factorization models are superior to classic nearest neighbor techniques for producing product recommendations, allowing the incorporation of additional information such as implicit feedback, temporal effects, and confidence levels

/pdf/matrix-factorization-techniques-for-recommender-systems-1ygvnzk1c8.pdf

Matrix Factorization Techniques for Recommender Systems

Recommender systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to the problem of making personalized recommendations for information, products or services during a live interaction. These systems, especially the k-nearest neighbor collaborative ltering based ones, are achieving widespread success on the Web. The tremendous growth in the amount of available information and the number of visitors to Web sites in recent years poses some key challenges for recommender systems. These are: producing high quality recommendations, performing many recommendations per second for millions of users and items and achieving high coverage in the face of data sparsity. In traditional collaborative ltering systems the amount of work increases with the number of participants in the system. New recommender system technologies are needed that can quickly produce high quality recommendations, even for very large-scale problems. To address these issues we have explored item-based collaborative ltering techniques. Item-based techniques rst analyze the user-item matrix to identify relationships between di erent items, and then use these relationships to indirectly compute recommendations for users. In this paper we analyze di erent item-based recommendation generation algorithms. We look into di erent techniques for computing item-item similarities (e.g., item-item correlation vs. cosine similarities between item vectors) and di erent techniques for obtaining recommendations from them (e.g., weighted sum vs. regression model). Finally, we experimentally evaluate our results and compare them to the basic k-nearest neighbor approach. Our experiments suggest that item-based algorithms provide dramatically better performance than user-based algorithms, while at the same time providing better quality than the best available userbased algorithms.

/pdf/item-based-collaborative-filtering-recommendation-algorithms-55n6bcyed4.pdf

Item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms

Recommender systems have been evaluated in many, often incomparable, ways. In this article, we review the key decisions in evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems: the user tasks being evaluated, the types of analysis and datasets being used, the ways in which prediction quality is measured, the evaluation of prediction attributes other than quality, and the user-based evaluation of the system as a whole. In addition to reviewing the evaluation strategies used by prior researchers, we present empirical results from the analysis of various accuracy metrics on one content domain where all the tested metrics collapsed roughly into three equivalence classes. Metrics within each equivalency class were strongly correlated, while metrics from different equivalency classes were uncorrelated.

/pdf/evaluating-collaborative-filtering-recommender-systems-au0a9p6z94.pdf

Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems

Collaborative filters help people make choices based on the opinions of other people. GroupLens is a system for collaborative filtering of netnews, to help people find articles they will like in the huge stream of available articles. News reader clients display predicted scores and make it easy for users to rate articles after they read them. Rating servers, called Better Bit Bureaus, gather and disseminate the ratings. The rating servers predict scores based on the heuristic that people who agreed in the past will probably agree again. Users can protect their privacy by entering ratings under pseudonyms, without reducing the effectiveness of the score prediction. The entire architecture is open: alternative software for news clients and Better Bit Bureaus can be developed independently and can interoperate with the components we have developed.

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~saul/601.13/readings/p175-resnick.pdf

GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews

An algorithmic framework for performing collaborative filtering

newsgroups carry a wide enough spread of messages to make most individuals consider Usenet news to be a high noise information resource. Furthermore, each user values a different set of messages. Both taste and prior knowledge are major factors in evaluating news articles. For example, readers of the rec.humor newsgroup, a group designed for jokes and other humorous postings, value articles based on whether they perceive them to be funny. Readers of technical groups, such as comp.lang.c11 value articles based on interest and usefulness to them—introductory questions and answers may be uninteresting to an expert C11 programmer just as debates over subtle and advanced language features may be useless to the novice. The combination of high volume and personal taste made Usenet news a promising candidate for collaborative filtering. More formally, we determined the potential predictive utility for Usenet news was very high. The GroupLens project started in 1992 and completed a pilot study at two sites to establish the feasibility of using collaborative filtering for Usenet news [8]. Several critical design decisions were made as part of that pilot study, including:

John Riedl

Papers

Item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms

Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems

GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews

An algorithmic framework for performing collaborative filtering

GroupLens: applying collaborative filtering to Usenet news