Related papers: Optimizing F-measure: A Tale of Two Approaches
In this paper, we settle the problem of learning optimal linear contracts from data in the offline setting, where agent types are drawn from an unknown distribution and the principal's goal is to design a contract that maximizes her…
A decision maker typically (i) incorporates training data to learn about the relative effectiveness of treatments, and (ii) chooses an implementation mechanism that implies an ``optimal'' predicted outcome distribution according to some…
Expectation Maximization (EM) is among the most popular algorithms for maximum likelihood estimation, but it is generally only guaranteed to find its stationary points of the log-likelihood objective. The goal of this article is to present…
The task of learning to pick a single preferred example out a finite set of examples, an "optimal choice problem", is a supervised machine learning problem with complex, structured input. Problems of optimal choice emerge often in various…
Decision making algorithms are used in a multitude of different applications. Conventional approaches for designing decision algorithms employ principled and simplified modelling, based on which one can determine decisions via tractable…
Machine learning algorithms have been used widely in various applications and areas. To fit a machine learning model into different problems, its hyper-parameters must be tuned. Selecting the best hyper-parameter configuration for machine…
Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and heuristic predictive estimation (HPE) are two widely used approaches in industrial uncertainty analysis. We review them from the point of view of decision theory, using Bayesian inference as a gold…
Decision tree learning is a widely used approach in machine learning, favoured in applications that require concise and interpretable models. Heuristic methods are traditionally used to quickly produce models with reasonably high accuracy.…
Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a widely used iterative algorithm for computing maximum likelihood estimate when dealing with Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). When the sample size is smaller than the data dimension, this could lead…
Optimization of expensive computer models with the help of Gaussian process emulators in now commonplace. However, when several (competing) objectives are considered, choosing an appropriate sampling strategy remains an open question. We…
Several performance measures can be used for evaluating classification results: accuracy, F-measure, and many others. Can we say that some of them are better than others, or, ideally, choose one measure that is best in all situations? To…
Maximum likelihood is the most widely used statistical estimation technique. Recent work by the authors introduced a general methodology for the construction of estimators for functionals in parametric models, and demonstrated improvements…
When predictions are performative, the choice of which predictor to deploy influences the distribution of future observations. The overarching goal in learning under performativity is to find a predictor that has low \emph{performative…
The expected improvement (EI) algorithm is a popular strategy for information collection in optimization under uncertainty. The algorithm is widely known to be too greedy, but nevertheless enjoys wide use due to its simplicity and ability…
Aligning large language models (LLMs) depends on high-quality datasets of human preference labels, which are costly to collect. Although active learning has been studied to improve sample efficiency relative to passive collection, many…
(Neal and Hinton, 1998) recast maximum likelihood estimation of any given latent variable model as the minimization of a free energy functional $F$, and the EM algorithm as coordinate descent applied to $F$. Here, we explore alternative…
We consider learning to optimize a classification metric defined by a black-box function of the confusion matrix. Such black-box learning settings are ubiquitous, for example, when the learner only has query access to the metric of…
Networked data, in which every training example involves two objects and may share some common objects with others, is used in many machine learning tasks such as learning to rank and link prediction. A challenge of learning from networked…
Reinforcement learning with evaluation metrics as rewards is widely used to enhance specific capabilities of language models. However, for tasks such as factually consistent summarisation, existing metrics remain underdeveloped, limiting…
The selection of the best classification algorithm for a given dataset is a very widespread problem. It is also a complex one, in the sense it requires to make several important methodological choices. Among them, in this work we focus on…