Xinran Miao

Jiacheng Miao, Xinran Miao, Yixuan Wu et al.

A primary challenge facing modern scientific research is the limited availability of gold-standard data which can be costly, labor-intensive, or invasive to obtain. With the rapid development of machine learning (ML), scientists can now employ ML algorithms to predict gold-standard outcomes with variables that are easier to obtain. However, these predicted outcomes are often used directly in subsequent statistical analyses, ignoring imprecision and heterogeneity introduced by the prediction procedure. This will likely result in false positive findings and invalid scientific conclusions. In this work, we introduce PoSt-Prediction Adaptive inference (PSPA) that allows valid and powerful inference based on ML-predicted data. Its "assumption-lean" property guarantees reliable statistical inference without assumptions on the ML prediction. Its "data-adaptive" feature guarantees an efficiency gain over existing methods, regardless of the accuracy of ML prediction. We demonstrate the statistical superiority and broad applicability of our method through simulations and real-data applications.

Xinran Miao, Kris Sankaran

Models that perform out-of-domain generalization borrow knowledge from heterogeneous source data and apply it to a related but distinct target task. Transfer learning has proven effective for accomplishing this generalization in many applications. However, poor selection of a source dataset can lead to poor performance on the target, a phenomenon called negative transfer. In order to take full advantage of available source data, this work studies source data selection with respect to a target task. We propose two source selection methods that are based on the multi-bandit theory and random search, respectively. We conduct a thorough empirical evaluation on both simulated and real data. Our proposals can be also viewed as diagnostics for the existence of a reweighted source subsamples that perform better than the random selection of available samples.

Minxing Zheng, Xinran Miao, Kris Sankaran

Interpretability has attracted increasing attention in earth observation problems. We apply interactive visualization and representation analysis to guide interpretation of glacier segmentation models. We visualize the activations from a U-Net to understand and evaluate the model performance. We build an online interface using the Shiny R package to provide comprehensive error analysis of the predictions. Users can interact with the panels and discover model failure modes. Further, we discuss how visualization can provide sanity checks during data preprocessing and model training.