Joshua S. Harvey

Joshua S. Harvey, Guanchao Feng, Sai Anusha Meesala et al.

Despite their enormous predictive power, machine learning models are often unsuitable for applications in regulated industries such as finance, due to their limited capacity to provide explanations. While model-agnostic frameworks such as Shapley values have proved to be convenient and popular, they rarely align with the kinds of causal explanations that are typically sought after. Counterfactual case-based explanations, where an individual is informed of which circumstances would need to be different to cause a change in outcome, may be more intuitive and actionable. However, finding appropriate counterfactual cases is an open challenge, as is interpreting which features are most critical for the change in outcome. Here, we pose the question of counterfactual search and interpretation in terms of similarity learning, exploiting the representation learned by the random forest predictive model itself. Once a counterfactual is found, the feature importance of the explanation is computed as a function of which random forest partitions are crossed in order to reach it from the original instance. We demonstrate this method on both the MNIST hand-drawn digit dataset and the German credit dataset, finding that it generates explanations that are sparser and more useful than Shapley values.

Joshua S. Harvey, Joshua Rosaler, Mingshu Li et al.

We describe the use of an unsupervised Random Forest for similarity learning and improved unsupervised anomaly detection. By training a Random Forest to discriminate between real data and synthetic data sampled from a uniform distribution over the real data bounds, a distance measure is obtained that anisometrically transforms the data, expanding distances at the boundary of the data manifold. We show that using distances recovered from this transformation improves the accuracy of unsupervised anomaly detection, compared to other commonly used detectors, demonstrated over a large number of benchmark datasets. As well as improved performance, this method has advantages over other unsupervised anomaly detection methods, including minimal requirements for data preprocessing, native handling of missing data, and potential for visualizations. By relating outlier scores to partitions of the Random Forest, we develop a method for locally explainable anomaly predictions in terms of feature importance.

Vivek Agarwal, Joshua Harvey, Dmitry Rinberg et al.

Advances in neural sensing technology are making it possible to observe the olfactory process in great detail. In this paper, we conceptualize smell from a Data Science and AI perspective, that relates the properties of odorants to how they are sensed and analyzed in the olfactory system from the nose to the brain. Drawing distinctions to color vision, we argue that smell presents unique measurement challenges, including the complexity of stimuli, the high dimensionality of the sensory apparatus, as well as what constitutes ground truth. In the face of these challenges, we argue for the centrality of odorant-receptor interactions in developing a theory of olfaction. Such a theory is likely to find widespread industrial applications, and enhance our understanding of smell, and in the longer-term, how it relates to other senses and language. As an initial use case of the data, we present results using machine learning-based classification of neural responses to odors as they are recorded in the mouse olfactory bulb with calcium imaging.

Oleksii Sidorov, Joshua S. Harvey, Hannah E. Smithson et al.

This work covers multiple aspects of overt visual attention on 3D renders: measurement, projection, visualization, and application to studying the influence of material appearance on looking behaviour. In the scope of this work, we ran an eye-tracking experiment in which the observers are presented with animations of rotating 3D objects. The objects were rendered to simulate different metallic appearance, particularly smooth (glossy), rough (matte), and coated gold. The eye-tracking results illustrate how material appearance itself influences the observer's attention, while all the other parameters remain unchanged. In order to make visualization of the attention maps more natural and also make the analysis more accurate, we develop a novel technique of projection of gaze fixations on the 3D surface of the figure itself, instead of the conventional 2D plane of the screen. The proposed methodology will be useful for further studies of attention and saliency in the computer graphics domain.