Overview of Statistical Machine Learning 💻

MSSC 6250 Statistical Machine Learning

Dr. Cheng-Han Yu
Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
Marquette University

Image/Object Recognition

• Machine learning is everywhere.
• Can we train a machine to have an ability to recognize dogs and cats?
• hundreds of thousands of objects?

Recommender System

• watch one video on YouTube, then lots of other videos that never show up pop up.
• Check some items on Amazon, then it recommends some other items saying “you may also like XXX”
• This kind of recommendation relies on machine learning.
• How does the model know you may also like those items. Well the model learn this from other customer surfing and purchasing history.

COVID Detection

Stock Price Forecasting

Risk Factors for Cancer

How We Solve Real-Life Problems?

• We describe and formulate our problems/questions by models.

• Solve problems/Answer questions by doing inference and/or predictions from the built model using the information from the data and computer algorithms.

So what is Machine Learning?

• Mathematical/statistical or machine learning models.
• we know the eating habits from a data of 100 american people. How do we know the the eating habits of all the people in the united states.
• If we know someone’s GPA and major, how can we predict his salary after graduation?

Machine Learning vs. Statistical Learning

• Machine learning (ML) is a field in Computer Science (CS).

“A computer program is said to learn from experience (E) with respect to some class of tasks (T) and performance measure (P) if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.” – Tom Mitchell, Professor of ML at Carnegie Mellon University

• computer programs = software and algorithms

• experience = data

• tasks = problems

• The ML algorithms are mainly for predictive modeling problems, and many have been borrowed from Statistics, for example, linear regression.

• ML is a CS perspective on modeling data with a focus on algorithmic methods.

• Wait, I am a statistical modeler (computational statistician), and this is exactly what I am doing!

Machine Learning vs. Statistical Learning

• Statistical learning, used to be called Applied Statistics (what a “fancy” name, 🤣), arose as a subfield of Statistics.

Statistical learning refers to a set of tools for modeling and understanding complex datasets. – An Introduction to Statistical Learning

…to extract important patterns and trends, and understand “what the data says.” We call this learning from data. – The Elements of Statistical Learning

• tools = mathematics, computing hardware/software/architecture, programming languages, algorithms, etc.

• Statistical learning is a mathematical perspective on modeling data with a focus on data models and on goodness of fit.

Machine Learning vs. Statistical Learning

• Machine learning emphasizes algorithms and automation.

• Statistical learning emphasizes modeling, interpretability, and uncertainty.

• The distinction is blur:
  • A machine learner needs a well-built statistical model that quantifies uncertainty about prediction
  • A statistical learner needs a computationally efficient algorithm to deal with large complex data.

• BUT, one thing for sure. Machine learning has the upper hand in marketing!

Fancy Terms and Larger Grant!

Source: http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/stat315a/glossary.pdf

Source: All of Statistics

Types of Learning

Supervised Learning

• Response Y (output, outcome, target, label, dependent/endogenous variable)

• Vector of p predictors X = (X_1, X_2, \dots, X_p) (inputs, features, regressors, covariates, explanatory/exogenous/independent variable).

• Regression: Y is numeric (e.g price, blood pressure). (if p = 1, simple regression; if p > 1, multiple regression)

• Classification: Y is categorical (e.g survived/died, digit 0-9, cancer class of tissue sample).

• Training data \mathcal{D} = \{(x_1, y_1), \dots ,(x_n , y_n)\} =\{(x_i, y_i)\}_{i=1}^n, x_i \in \mathbf{R}^p.

Goal: Use training data (E) to train our model for better inference/prediction on the response (T)

• Learn a mapping from inputs to outputs.

Regression Example

• Goal: Establish the relationship between salary and demographic variables.

Source: ISL Fig. 1.1

Statistics Nah… Machine Learning Neat!

Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/the-actual-difference-between-statistics-and-machine-learning-64b49f07ea3

Statistics Nah… Machine Learning Neat!

Classification Example

• Goal: Build a customized spam filtering system

Source: http://penplusbytes.org/strategies-for-dealing-with-e-mail-spam/

Classification Example

Source: https://www.yesware.com/blog/email-spam/

• Data: 4601 emails sent to George at HP, before 2000. Each is labeled as spam or email.
• Inputs: relative frequencies of 57 of the commonly occurring words and punctuation marks.

Source: The elements of statistical learning

Objectives of Supervised Learning

On the basis of the training data (E) we’d like to :

• (T) Prediction: Accurately predict unseen test cases.
  • Given a new test input (age, year, education), what is predicted salary level?
  • Given a new bunch of words in the email, does the model classify the email correctly?

• (T) Inference Understand which inputs affect the outcome, and how.
  • If education is up one level, how much salary will increase on average?
  • If “!” increases one more time, how much percentage does the probability of being labeled as spam go up?

• (P) Assess the quality of our predictions and inferences.
  • Use evalution metrics to assess the performance of a machine learning model/algorithm.

Unsupervised Learning

• No outcome variable, just a set of features measured on a set of samples.
• Our training sample is \mathcal{D} = \{x_1, \dots, x_n\}, x_i \in \mathbf{R}^p.

• Objective is more fuzzy
  • find groups of samples or features that behave similarly (Clustering)
  • find linear combinations of features with the most variation (Dimension Reduction).

• Difficult to know how well you are doing.
• Can be useful as a pre-processing step for supervised learning.

Clustering Example

• Customer Segmentation: dividing customers into groups or clusters on the basis of common characteristics.

Source: https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/introduction-customer-segmentation-python

Deep Learning

• An (artifical) neural network is a machine learning model inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains.

Source: Wiki

A neural network with several hidden layers is called a deep neural network, or deep learning.

Source: ISL Ch 10

Accuracy and Interpretability Trade-Off

Source: ISL Fig. 2.7