FF19
Being able to recommend an item of interest to a user (based on their past preferences) is a highly relevant problem in practice. A key trend over the past few years has been session-based recommendation algorithms that provide recommendations solely based on a user’s interactions in an ongoing session, and which do not require the existence of user profiles or their entire historical preferences. This report explores a simple, yet powerful, NLP-based approach (word2vec) to recommend a next item to a user. While NLP-based approaches are generally employed for linguistic tasks, here we exploit them to learn the structure induced by a user’s behavior or an item’s nature.
FF18
Text classification can be used for sentiment analysis, topic assignment, document identification, article recommendation, and more. While dozens of techniques now exist for this fundamental task, many of them require massive amounts of labeled data in order to be useful. Collecting annotations for your use case is typically one of the most costly parts of any machine learning application. In this report, we explore how latent text embeddings can be used with few (or even zero) training examples and provide insights into best practices for implementing this method.
FF16
Time series data is ubiquitous. This report examines generalized additive models, which give us a simple, flexible, and interpretable means for modeling time series by decomposing them into structural components. We look at the benefits and trade-offs of taking a curve-fitting approach to time series, and demonstrate its use via Facebook’s Prophet library on a demand forecasting problem.
FF15
In contrast to how humans learn, deep learning algorithms need vast amounts of data and compute and may yet struggle to generalize. Humans are successful in adapting quickly because they leverage their knowledge acquired from prior experience when faced with new problems. In this report, we explain how meta-learning can leverage previous knowledge acquired from data to solve novel tasks quickly and more efficiently during test time
FF14
Automated question answering is a user-friendly way to extract information from data using natural language. Thanks to recent advances in natural language processing, question answering capabilities from unstructured text data have grown rapidly. This blog series offers a walk-through detailing the technical and practical aspects of building an end-to-end question answering system.
FF13
The intersection of causal inference and machine learning is a rapidly expanding area of research that's already yielding capabilities to enable building more robust, reliable, and fair machine learning systems. This report offers an introduction to causal reasoning including causal graphs and invariant prediction and how to apply causal inference tools together with classic machine learning techniques in multiple use-cases.
FF06-2020
Interpretability, or the ability to explain why and how a system makes a decision, can help us improve models, satisfy regulations, and build better products. Black-box techniques like deep learning have delivered breakthrough capabilities at the cost of interpretability. In this report, recently updated to include techniques like SHAP, we show how to make models interpretable without sacrificing their capabilities or accuracy.
FF12
From fraud detection to flagging abnormalities in imaging data, there are countless applications for automatic identification of abnormal data. This process can be challenging, especially when working with large, complex data. This report explores deep learning approaches (sequence models, VAEs, GANs) for anomaly detection, when to use them, performance benchmarks, and product possibilities.
FF09
Federated Learning makes it possible to build machine learning systems without direct access to training data. The data remains in its original location, which helps to ensure privacy and reduces communication costs. Federated learning is a great fit for smartphones and edge hardware, healthcare and other privacy-sensitive use cases, and industrial applications such as predictive maintenance.
FF03-2019
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) excel at learning meaningful representations of features and concepts within images. These capabilities make CNNs extremely valuable for solving problems in domains such as medical imaging, autonomous driving, manufacturing, robotics, and urban planning. In this report, we show how to select the right deep learning models for image analysis tasks and techniques for debugging deep learning models.
FF03
Deep learning, or highly-connected neural networks, offers fascinating new capabilities for image analysis. Using deep learning, computers can now learn to identify objects in images. This report explores the history and current state of the field, predicts future developments, and explains how to apply deep learning today.
