Amitai Armon

Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Amitai Armon

A key element in solving real-life data science problems is selecting the types of models to use. Tree ensemble models (such as XGBoost) are usually recommended for classification and regression problems with tabular data. However, several deep learning models for tabular data have recently been proposed, claiming to outperform XGBoost for some use cases. This paper explores whether these deep models should be a recommended option for tabular data by rigorously comparing the new deep models to XGBoost on various datasets. In addition to systematically comparing their performance, we consider the tuning and computation they require. Our study shows that XGBoost outperforms these deep models across the datasets, including the datasets used in the papers that proposed the deep models. We also demonstrate that XGBoost requires much less tuning. On the positive side, we show that an ensemble of deep models and XGBoost performs better on these datasets than XGBoost alone.

Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Itamar Ben Ari, Amitai Armon

In this work we present a spatial-temporal convolutional neural network for predicting future COVID-19 related symptoms severity among a population, per region, given its past reported symptoms. This can help approximate the number of future Covid-19 patients in each region, thus enabling a faster response, e.g., preparing the local hospital or declaring a local lockdown where necessary. Our model is based on a national symptom survey distributed in Israel and can predict symptoms severity for different regions daily. The model includes two main parts - (1) learned region-based survey responders profiles used for aggregating questionnaires data into features (2) Spatial-Temporal 3D convolutional neural network which uses the above features to predict symptoms progression.

Adi Szeskin, Lev Faivishevsky, Ashwin K Muppalla et al.

We present a deep learning system for testing graphics units by detecting novel visual corruptions in videos. Unlike previous work in which manual tagging was required to collect labeled training data, our weak supervision method is fully automatic and needs no human labelling. This is achieved by reproducing driver bugs that increase the probability of generating corruptions, and by making use of ideas and methods from the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) setting. In our experiments, we significantly outperform unsupervised methods such as GAN-based models and discover novel corruptions undetected by baselines, while adhering to strict requirements on accuracy and efficiency of our real-time system.