maths & AI

off to BayesComp 20, Gainesville

BayesComp 2020 at a glance

no dichotomy between efficiency and interpretability

“…there are actually a lot of applications where people do not try to construct an interpretable model, because they might believe that for a complex data set, an interpretable model could not possibly be as accurate as a black box. Or perhaps they want to preserve the model as proprietary.”

One article I found quite interesting in the second issue of HDSR is “Why are we using black box models in AI when we don’t need to? A lesson from an explainable AI competition” by Cynthia Rudin and Joanna Radin, which describes the setting of a NeurIPS competition last year, the Explainable Machine Learning Challenge, of which I was blissfully unaware. The goal was to construct an operational black box predictor fpr credit scoring and turn it into something interpretable. The authors explain how they built instead a white box predictor (my terms!), namely a linear model, which could not be improved more than marginally by a black box algorithm. (It appears from the references that these authors have a record of analysing black-box models in various setting and demonstrating that they do not always bring more efficiency than interpretable versions.) While this is but one example and even though the authors did not win the challenge (I am unclear why as I did not check the background story, writing on the plane to pre-NeuriPS 2019).

I find this column quite refreshing and worth disseminating, as it challenges the current creed that intractable functions with hundreds of parameters will always do better, if only because they are calibrated within the box and have eventually difficulties to fight over-fitting within (and hence under-fitting outside). This is also a difficulty with common statistical models, but having the ability to construct error evaluations that show how quickly the prediction efficiency deteriorates may prove the more structured and more sparsely parameterised models the winner (of real world competitions).

BayesComp 20 [schedule]

The schedule for the program is now available on the conference webpage of BayesComp 20, for the days of 7-10 Jan 2020. There are twelve invited sessions, including one j-ISBA session, and a further thirteen contributed sessions were selected by the scientific committee. And two tutorials on the first day. Looking forward seeing you in Florida! (Poster submissions still welcomed!)

MHC2020

There is a conference on mixtures (M) and hidden Markov models (H) and clustering (C) taking place in Orsay on June 17-19, next year. Registration is free if compulsory. With about twenty confirmed speakers. (Irrelevant as the following remark is, this is the opportunity to recall the conference on mixtures I organised in Aussois 25 years before! Which website is amazingly still alive at Duke, thanks to Mike West, my co-organiser along with Kathryn Roeder and Gilles Celeux. When checking the abstracts, I found only two presenters common to both conferences, Christophe Biernaki and Jiahua Chen. And alas several names of departed friends.)

don’t be late for BayesComp’2020

An important reminder that October 14 is the deadline for regular registration to BayesComp 2020 as late fees will apply afterwards!!! The conference looks attractive enough to agree to pay more, but still…