Vincent Lemaire

Vincent Lemaire, Nathan Le Boudec, Victor Guyomard et al.

There are now many explainable AI methods for understanding the decisions of a machine learning model. Among these are those based on counterfactual reasoning, which involve simulating features changes and observing the impact on the prediction. This article proposes to view this simulation process as a source of creating a certain amount of knowledge that can be stored to be used, later, in different ways. This process is illustrated in the additive model and, more specifically, in the case of the naive Bayes classifier, whose interesting properties for this purpose are shown.

Aurélien Renault, Alexis Bondu, Antoine Cornuéjols et al.

In many situations, the measurements of a studied phenomenon are provided sequentially, and the prediction of its class needs to be made as early as possible so as not to incur too high a time penalty, but not too early and risk paying the cost of misclassification. This problem has been particularly studied in the case of time series, and is known as Early Classification of Time Series (ECTS). Although it has been the subject of a growing body of literature, there is still a lack of a systematic, shared evaluation protocol to compare the relative merits of the various existing methods. In this paper, we highlight the two components of an ECTS system: decision and prediction, and focus on the approaches that separate them. This document begins by situating these methods within a principle-based taxonomy. It defines dimensions for organizing their evaluation and then reports the results of a very extensive set of experiments along these dimensions involving nine state-of-the-art ECTS algorithms. In addition, these and other experiments can be carried out using an open-source library in which most of the existing ECTS algorithms have been implemented (see https://github.com/ML-EDM/ml_edm).

Aurélien Renault, Alexis Bondu, Antoine Cornuéjols et al.

Early Classification of Time Series (ECTS) has been recognized as an important problem in many areas where decisions have to be taken as soon as possible, before the full data availability, while time pressure increases. Numerous ECTS approaches have been proposed, based on different triggering functions, each taking into account various pieces of information related to the incoming time series and/or the output of a classifier. Although their performances have been empirically compared in the literature, no studies have been carried out on the optimality of these triggering functions that involve ``man-tailored'' decision rules. Based on the same information, could there be better triggering functions? This paper presents one way to investigate this question by showing first how to translate ECTS problems into Reinforcement Learning (RL) ones, where the very same information is used in the state space. A thorough comparison of the performance obtained by ``handmade'' approaches and their ``RL-based'' counterparts has been carried out. A second question investigated in this paper is whether a different combination of information, defining the state space in RL systems, can achieve even better performance. Experiments show that the system we describe, called \textsc{Alert}, significantly outperforms its state-of-the-art competitors on a large number of datasets.

Pierre Nodet, Vincent Lemaire, Alexis Bondu et al.

In this paper we show that the combination of a Contrastive representation with a label noise-robust classification head requires fine-tuning the representation in order to achieve state-of-the-art performances. Since fine-tuned representations are shown to outperform frozen ones, one can conclude that noise-robust classification heads are indeed able to promote meaningful representations if provided with a suitable starting point. Experiments are conducted to draw a comprehensive picture of performances by featuring six methods and nine noise instances of three different kinds (none, symmetric, and asymmetric). In presence of noise the experiments show that fine tuning of Contrastive representation allows the six methods to achieve better results than end-to-end learning and represent a new reference compare to the recent state of art. Results are also remarkable stable versus the noise level.

Youssef Achenchabe, Alexis Bondu, Antoine Cornuéjols et al.

Many approaches have been proposed for early classification of time series in light of its significance in a wide range of applications including healthcare, transportation and finance. However, recently a preprint saved on Arxiv claim that all research done for almost 20 years now on the Early Classification of Time Series is useless, or, at the very least, ill-oriented because severely lacking a strong ground. In this paper, we answer in detail the main issues and misunderstandings raised by the authors of the preprint, and propose directions to further expand the fields of application of early classification of time series.

Louis Desreumaux, Vincent Lemaire

Active learning aims to reduce annotation cost by predicting which samples are useful for a human expert to label. Although this field is quite old, several important challenges to using active learning in real-world settings still remain unsolved. In particular, most selection strategies are hand-designed, and it has become clear that there is no best active learning strategy that consistently outperforms all others in all applications. This has motivated research into meta-learning algorithms for "learning how to actively learn". In this paper, we compare this kind of approach with the association of a Random Forest with the margin sampling strategy, reported in recent comparative studies as a very competitive heuristic. To this end, we present the results of a benchmark performed on 20 datasets that compares a strategy learned using a recent meta-learning algorithm with margin sampling. We also present some lessons learned and open future perspectives.