Can DALEX be used for mlr3 surv models? - mlr3

I am not sure if I can use DALEX for my mlr3 survival models because y argument does not accept Surv(time, status). I also don't think results are correct when I use "status" for y since this ignores the censoring information.
https://modeloriented.github.io/DALEXtra/reference/explain_mlr3.html
If I can't use DALEX, are there alternative XAI tools for survival models?

The DALEX package cannot deal with survival models directly.
However, recently the survex package has been created for explanations of survival models with the same intuitive API.
If you work specifically with mlr3 survival models, explainers for them can be created automatically, so if this issue is still of interest to you give it a look!

Related

Can Word2Vec be used for information extraction?

I am using Gensim to train Word2Vec. I know word similarities are deteremined by if the words can replace each other and make sense in a sentence. But can word similarities be used to extract relationships between entities?
Example:
I have a bunch of interview documents and in each interview, the interviewee always says the name of their manager. If I wanted to extract the name of the manager from these interview transcripts could I just get a list of all human name's in the document (using nlp), and the name that is the most similar to the word "manager" using Word2Vec, is most likely the manager.
Does this thought process make any sense with Word2Vec? If it doesn't, would the ML solution to this problem then be to input my word embeddings into a sequence to sequence model?
Yes, word-vector similarities & relative-arrangements can indicate relationships.
In the original Word2Vec paper, this was demonstrated by using word-vectors to solve word-analogies. The most famous example involves the analogy "'man' is to 'king' as 'woman' is to ?".
By starting with the word-vector for 'king', then subtracting the vector for 'man', and adding the vector for 'woman', you arrive at a new point in the coordinate system. And then, if you look for other words close to that new point, often the closest word will be queen. Essentially, the directions & distances have helped find a word that's related in a particular way – a gender-reversed equivalent.
And, in large news-based corpuses, famous names like 'Obama' or 'Bush' do wind up with vectors closer to their well-known job titles like 'president'. (There will be many contexts in such corpuses where the words appear immediately together – "President Obama today signed…" – or simply in similar roles – "The President appointed…" or "Obama appointed…", etc.)
However, I suspect that's less-likely to work with your 'manager' interview-transcripts example. Achieving meaningful word-to-word arrangements depends on lots of varied examples of the words in shared usage contexts. Strong vectors require large corpuses of millions to billions of words. So the transcripts with a single manager wouldn't likely be enough to get a good model – you'd need transcripts across many managers.
And in such a corpus each manager's name might not be strongly associated with just manager-like contexts. The same name(s) will be repeated when also mentioning other roles, and transcripts may not especially refer to managerial-action in helpful third-person ways that make specific name-vectors well-positioned. (That is, there won't be clean expository statements like, "John_Smith called a staff meeting", or "John_Smith cancelled the project, alongside others like "…manager John_Smith…" or "The manager cancelled the project".)

Matching TV and Movie File names with NLP/Machine Learning?

So i've wondered if there would be a way to tokenize/tag TV or Movie Files using NLP/Machine Learing.
I know there are a lot of regexp approaches out there which do this already but shouldn't it be possible to get this done with NLP/Machine Learning as well?
Example:
The.Heart.Guy.S01E07.Die.Belastungsprobe.German.DL.720p.HDTV.x264-GDR
Should be something like:
The Heart Guy SHOW-NAME
1 SEASON
7 EPISODE
Die Belastungsprobe EP-NAME
German DL LANGUAGE
720p RESOLUTION
HDTV SOURCE
x264 CODEC
GDR GROUP
Anyone ever tried something like this? Or any hints where one should start or if it's even possible to get something like this working.
Machine learning approaches would cost more than rule-based approaches. But if you want to try a machine learning solution the best solution that comes to my mind is to use markov models as the problem has sequential observations and you can handle it with finite state automatas. You can use this paper as a reference.
I suspect using regexes is the easiest solution to this, but if you're willing to put in some time Conditional Random Fields are also a great solution. Here's an article about the New York Times using a CRF based model on recipe data.
Another example of CRFs on short text is libpostal, which extracts parts of postal addresses.

How to use Bayesian analysis to compute and combine weights for multiple rules to identify books

I am experimenting with machine learning in general, and Bayesian analysis in particular, by writing a tool to help me identify my collection of e-books. The input data consist of a set of e-book files, whose names and in some cases contents contain hints as to the book they correspond to.
Some are obvious to the human reader, like:
Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach 3rd.pdf
Microsoft Press - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Inside Out.pdf
The Complete Guide to PC Repair 5th Ed [2011].pdf
Hamlet.txt
Others are not so obvious:
Vsphere5.prc (Actually 'Mastering VSphere 5' by Scott Lowe)
as.ar.pdf (Actually 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand)
Rather than try to code various parsers for different formats of file names, I thought I would build a few dozen simple rules, each with a score.
For example, one rule would look in the first few pages of the file for something resembling an ISBN number, and if found would propose a hypothesis that the file corresponds to the book identified by that ISBN number.
Another rule would look to see if the file name is in 'Author - Title' format and, if so, would propose a hypothesis that the author is 'Author' and the title is 'Title'. Similar rules for other formats.
I thought I could also get a list of book titles and authors from Amazon or an ISBN database, and search the file name and first few pages of the file for any of these; any matches found would result in a hypothesis being suggested by that rule.
In the end I would have a set of tuples like this:
[rulename,hypothesis]
I expect that some rules, such as the ISBN match, will have a high probability of being correct, when they are available. Other rules, like matches based on known book titles and authors, would be more common but not as accurate.
My questions are:
Is this a good approach for solving this problem?
If so, is Bayesian analysis a good candidate for combining all of these rules' hypotheses into compound score to help determine which hypothesis is the strongest, or most likely?
Is there a better way to solve this problem, or some research paper or book which you can suggest I turn to for more information?
It depends on the size of your collection and the time you want to spend training the classifier. It will be difficult to get good generalization that will save you time. For any type of classifier you will have to create a large training set, and also find a lot of rules before you get good accuracy. It will probably be more efficient (less false positives) to create the rules and use them only to suggest title alternatives for you to choose from, and not to implement the classifier. But, if the purpose is learning, then go ahead.

Computer AI algorithm to write sentences?

I am searching for information on algorithms to process text sentences or to follow a structure when creating sentences that are valid in a normal human language such as English. I would like to know if there are projects working in this field that I can go learn from or start using.
For example, if I gave a program a noun, provided it with a thesaurus (for related words) and part-of-speech (so it understood where each word belonged in a sentence) - could it create a random, valid sentence?
I'm sure there are many sub-sections of this kind of research so any leads into this would be great.
The field you're looking for is called natural language generation, a subfield of natural language processing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing
Sentence generation is either really easy or really hard depending on how good you want the sentences to be. Currently, there aren't programs that will be able to generate 100% sensible sentences about given nouns (even with a thesaurus) -- if that is what you mean.
If, on the other hand, you would be satisfied with nonsense that was sometimes ungrammatical, then you could try an n-gram based sentence generator. These just chain together of words that tend to appear in sequence, and 3-4-gram generators look quite okay sometimes (although you'll recognize them as what generates a lot of spam email).
Here's an intro to the basics of n-gram based generation, using NLTK:
http://www.nltk.org/book/ch02.html#generating-random-text-with-bigrams
This is called NLG (Natural Language Generation), although that is mainly the task of generating text that describes a set of data. There is also a lot of research on completely random sentence generation as well.
One starting point is to use Markov chains to generate sentences. How this is done is that you have a transition matrix that says how likely it is to transition between every every part-of-speech. You also have the most likely starting and ending part-of-speech of a sentence. Put this all together and you can generate likely sequences of parts-of-speech.
Now, you are far from done, this will first of all not offer a very good result as you are only considering the probability between adjacent words (also called bi-grams), so what you want to do is to extend this to look for instance at the transition matrix between three parts-of-speech (this makes a 3D matrix and gives you trigrams). You can extend it to 4-grams, 5-grams, etc. depending on the processing power and if your corpus can fill such matrix.
Lastly, you need to patch up things such as object agreement (subject-verb-agreement, adjective-verb-agreement (not in English though), etc.) and tense, so that everything is congruent.
Yes. There is some work dealing with solving problems in NLG with AI techniques. As far as I know, currently, there is no method that you can use for any practical use.
If you have the background, I suggest getting familiar with some work by Alexander Koller from Saarland University. He describes how to code NLG to PDDL. The main article you'll want to read is "Sentence generating as a planning problem".
If you do not have any background in NLP, just search for the online courses or course materials by Michael Collings or Dan Jurafsky.
Writing random sentences is not that hard. Any parser textbook's simple-english-grammar example can be run in reverse to generate grammatically correct nonsense sentences.
Another way is the word-tuple-random-walk, made popular by the old BYTE magazine TRAVESTY, or stuff like
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=94856

Probabilistic Generation of Semantic Networks

I've studied some simple semantic network implementations and basic techniques for parsing natural language. However, I haven't seen many projects that try and bridge the gap between the two.
For example, consider the dialog:
"the man has a hat"
"he has a coat"
"what does he have?" => "a hat and coat"
A simple semantic network, based on the grammar tree parsing of the above sentences, might look like:
the_man = Entity('the man')
has = Entity('has')
a_hat = Entity('a hat')
a_coat = Entity('a coat')
Relation(the_man, has, a_hat)
Relation(the_man, has, a_coat)
print the_man.relations(has) => ['a hat', 'a coat']
However, this implementation assumes the prior knowledge that the text segments "the man" and "he" refer to the same network entity.
How would you design a system that "learns" these relationships between segments of a semantic network? I'm used to thinking about ML/NL problems based on creating a simple training set of attribute/value pairs, and feeding it to a classification or regression algorithm, but I'm having trouble formulating this problem that way.
Ultimately, it seems I would need to overlay probabilities on top of the semantic network, but that would drastically complicate an implementation. Is there any prior art along these lines? I've looked at a few libaries, like NLTK and OpenNLP, and while they have decent tools to handle symbolic logic and parse natural language, neither seems to have any kind of proabablilstic framework for converting one to the other.
There is quite a lot of history behind this kind of task. Your best start is probably by looking at Question Answering.
The general advice I always give is that if you have some highly restricted domain where you know about all the things that might be mentioned and all the ways they interact then you can probably be quite successful. If this is more of an 'open-world' problem then it will be extremely difficult to come up with something that works acceptably.
The task of extracting relationship from natural language is called 'relationship extraction' (funnily enough) and sometimes fact extraction. This is a pretty large field of research, this guy did a PhD thesis on it, as have many others. There are a large number of challenges here, as you've noticed, like entity detection, anaphora resolution, etc. This means that there will probably be a lot of 'noise' in the entities and relationships you extract.
As for representing facts that have been extracted in a knowledge base, most people tend not to use a probabilistic framework. At the simplest level, entities and relationships are stored as triples in a flat table. Another approach is to use an ontology to add structure and allow reasoning over the facts. This makes the knowledge base vastly more useful, but adds a lot of scalability issues. As for adding probabilities, I know of the Prowl project that is aimed at creating a probabilistic ontology, but it doesn't look very mature to me.
There is some research into probabilistic relational modelling, mostly into Markov Logic Networks at the University of Washington and Probabilstic Relational Models at Stanford and other places. I'm a little out of touch with the field, but this is is a difficult problem and it's all early-stage research as far as I know. There are a lot of issues, mostly around efficient and scalable inference.
All in all, it's a good idea and a very sensible thing to want to do. However, it's also very difficult to achieve. If you want to look at a slick example of the state of the art, (i.e. what is possible with a bunch of people and money) maybe check out PowerSet.
Interesting question, I've been doing some work on a strongly-typed NLP engine in C#: http://blog.abodit.com/2010/02/a-strongly-typed-natural-language-engine-c-nlp/ and have recently begun to connect it to an ontology store.
To me it looks like the issue here is really: How do you parse the natural language input to figure out that 'He' is the same thing as "the man"? By the time it's in the Semantic Network it's too late: you've lost the fact that statement 2 followed statement 1 and the ambiguity in statement 2 can be resolved using statement 1. Adding a third relation after the fact to say that "He" and "the man" are the same is another option but you still need to understand the sequence of those assertions.
Most NLP parsers seem to focus on parsing single sentences or large blocks of text but less frequently on handling conversations. In my own NLP engine there's a conversation history which allows one sentence to be understood in the context of all the sentences that came before it (and also the parsed, strongly-typed objects that they referred to). So the way I would handle this is to realize that "He" is ambiguous in the current sentence and then look back to try to figure out who the last male person was that was mentioned.
In the case of my home for example, it might tell you that you missed a call from a number that's not in its database. You can type "It was John Smith" and it can figure out that "It" means the call that was just mentioned to you. But if you typed "Tag it as Party Music" right after the call it would still resolve to the song that's currently playing because the house is looking back for something that is ITaggable.
I'm not exactly sure if this is what you want, but take a look at natural language generation wikipedia, the "reverse" of parsing, constructing derivations that conform to the given semantical constraints.

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