Bayesian methods are theoretically optimal in many situations. Bayesian model averaging is generally considered the standard model for creating ensembles of learners using Bayesian methods, but this technique is often outperformed by more ad hoc methods in empirical studies. The reason for this failure has important theoretical implications for our understanding of why ensembles work. It has been proposed that Bayesian model averaging struggles in practice because it accounts for uncertainty about which model is correct but still operates under the assumption that only one of them is. In order to more effectively access the benefits inherent in ensembles, Bayesian strategies should therefore be directed more towards model combination rather than the model selection implicit in Bayesian model averaging. This work provides empirical verification for this hypothesis using several different Bayesian model combination approaches tested on a wide variety of classification problems. We show that even the most simplistic of Bayesian model combination strategies outperforms the traditional ad hoc techniques of bagging and boosting, as well as outperforming BMA over a wide variety of cases. This suggests that the power of ensembles does not come from their ability to account for model uncertainty, but instead comes from the changes in representational and preferential bias inherent in the process of combining several different models.
Abstract-In optimization problems involving large amounts of data, such as web content, commercial transaction information, or bioinformatics data, individual function evaluations may take minutes or even hours. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) must be parallelized for such functions. However, large-scale parallel programs must communicate efficiently, balance work across all processors, and address problems such as failed nodes.We present MapReduce Particle Swarm Optimization (MRPSO), a PSO implementation based on the MapReduce parallel programming model. We describe MapReduce and show how PSO can be naturally expressed in this model, without explicitly addressing any of the details of parallelization. We present a benchmark function for evaluating MRPSO and note that MRPSO is not appropriate for optimizing easily evaluated functions. We demonstrate that MRPSO scales to 256 processors on moderately difficult problems and tolerates node failures.
Much previous work has been done in attempting to identify humor in text. In this paper we extend that capability by proposing a new task: assessing whether or not a joke is humorous. We present a novel way of approaching this problem by building a model that learns to identify humorous jokes based on ratings gleaned from Reddit pages, consisting of almost 16,000 labeled instances. Using these ratings to determine the level of humor, we then employ a Transformer architecture for its advantages in learning from sentence context. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach and show results that are comparable to human performance. We further demonstrate our model's increased capabilities on humor identification problems, such as the previously created datasets for short jokes and puns. These experiments show that this method outperforms all previous work done on these tasks, with an F-measure of 93.1% for the Puns dataset and 98.6% on the Short Jokes dataset.
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