Contrastive Hierarchical ClusteringMichał Znaleźniak, Przemysław Rola, Patryk Kaszuba et al.
Deep clustering has been dominated by flat models, which split a dataset into a predefined number of groups. Although recent methods achieve an extremely high similarity with the ground truth on popular benchmarks, the information contained in the flat partition is limited. In this paper, we introduce CoHiClust, a Contrastive Hierarchical Clustering model based on deep neural networks, which can be applied to typical image data. By employing a self-supervised learning approach, CoHiClust distills the base network into a binary tree without access to any labeled data. The hierarchical clustering structure can be used to analyze the relationship between clusters, as well as to measure the similarity between data points. Experiments demonstrate that CoHiClust generates a reasonable structure of clusters, which is consistent with our intuition and image semantics. Moreover, it obtains superior clustering accuracy on most of the image datasets compared to the state-of-the-art flat clustering models.
2.3STApr 12, 2022
Prediction of motor insurance claims occurrence as an imbalanced machine learning problemSebastian Baran, Przemysław Rola
The insurance industry, with its large datasets, is a natural place to use big data solutions. However it must be stressed, that significant number of applications for machine learning in insurance industry, like fraud detection or claim prediction, deals with the problem of machine learning on an imbalanced data set. This is due to the fact that frauds or claims are rare events when compared with the entire population of drivers. The problem of imbalanced learning is often hard to overcome. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to present and apply various methods of dealing with an imbalanced dataset in the context of claim occurrence prediction in car insurance. In addition, the above techniques are used to compare the results of machine learning algorithms in the context of claim occurrence prediction in car insurance. Our study covers the following techniques: logistic-regression, decision tree, random forest, xgBoost, feed-forward network. The problem is the classification one.
1.2LGJul 7
EntroPath: Maximum Entropy Path Ensemble Embedding for Manifold LearningPrzemysław Rola
We introduce EntroPath, a manifold learning method that recovers geodesic geometry from data graphs through ensembles of diffusion paths. Many existing graph-based embeddings rely either on locally normalised random walks or on shortest-path distances. The former can concentrate diffusion in densely sampled regions, while the latter are sensitive to spurious shortcut edges in the graph. EntroPath instead builds its dissimilarities from the maximum entropy random walk (MERW), which aggregates the full ensemble of k-step paths between points rather than relying on any single trajectory. We show that the resulting free-energy dissimilarity converges to squared geodesic distance in the short-time limit, via Varadhan's heat-kernel formula. The diffusion depth k interpolates smoothly between local neighbourhood structure and global manifold geometry, and the symmetrised kernel admits an exact Gram factorisation connecting EntroPath to kernel methods. We further provide scalable extensions via landmark projection and diffusion-potential pseudotime. Across synthetic manifolds and single-cell benchmarks, EntroPath consistently matches or outperforms diffusion- and shortest-path-based methods, while remaining competitive with neighbourhood-preserving embeddings (UMAP, t-SNE) on local-structure metrics. Its gains are most pronounced on manifolds with non-uniform sampling density and well-separated branching trajectories, where path-ensemble diffusion more faithfully preserves the underlying geodesic geometry.