Archive for the ‘Machine Learning’ Category

Machine Learning in Life Insurance: Applications and Benefits – BBN Times

From fraud detection to simplified underwriting, machine learning is improving life insurance.

It is a critical component of any financial plan. Life insurance offers financial protection to individuals and their loved ones in case of unforeseen events like illness, disability, or death.

In the past, the life insurance industry has relied on traditional underwriting methods to determine premiums and policy terms.

With the advent of machine learning, the life insurance industry is experiencing a significant digital shift in the way policies are priced, marketed, and underwritten.

One of the most significant advantages of using machine learning in life insurance is its ability to improve pricing and underwriting accuracy. Insurers traditionally relied on static underwriting factors, such as age, gender, and medical history, to assess risk and determine premiums. It's important to state that this approach is often limited in its scope and fails to capture the complex relationships between risk factors.

Machine learning algorithms can analyze large datasets and identify patterns and relationships that were previously unknown. By incorporating non-traditional data sources, such as social media activity or wearable device data, insurers can create a more comprehensive risk profile for policyholders. This approach can lead to more accurate risk assessments and pricing models, reducing errors and improving policyholder satisfaction.

Another area where machine learning is transforming the life insurance industry is in the creation of personalized policies. Personalized policies are tailored to individual policyholders based on their unique characteristics and risk profiles. Traditional underwriting methods often rely on broad categories, such as age or gender, to determine policy terms. However, this approach fails to capture the individual nuances of each policyholder's risk profile.

Machine learning techniques can analyze vast amounts of data to create personalized policies that better reflect a policyholder's individual risk profile. These policies can be tailored to the specific needs and goals of each policyholder, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Another significant area where machine learning is transforming the life insurance industry is in claims processing. Traditional claims processing is often time-consuming and involves significant manual labor. Insurers must review documents, communicate with policyholders and medical professionals, and make complex calculations to determine payouts.

Machine learning techniques can automate many of these processes, leading to faster and more accurate claims processing. By analyzing data from various sources, such as medical records or police reports, machine learning algorithms can assess the validity of claims and calculate payouts accurately.

Insurance fraud is a significant issue for the life insurance industry. Fraudulent claims can lead to significant financial losses for insurers, which can ultimately impact policyholders. Traditional methods of fraud detection often rely on manual review processes or simple rules-based systems, which can miss more complex cases of fraud.

Machine learning algorithms can analyze large amounts of data to identify patterns and anomalies that may indicate fraudulent behavior. By using advanced techniques such as anomaly detection or clustering, insurers can more accurately detect and prevent fraud, reducing losses and improving policyholder satisfaction.

Machine learning is revolutionizing the life insurance industry in many ways. By improving pricing and underwriting accuracy, creating personalized policies, streamlining claims processing, and detecting fraud, insurers can better meet the needs of policyholders and improve the overall customer experience. There are still challenges to overcome, such as data privacy concerns and the need for continued innovation and adoption. As the life insurance industry continues to evolve, it is clear that machine learning will play a critical role in shaping its future.

More:
Machine Learning in Life Insurance: Applications and Benefits - BBN Times

Uncovering expression signatures of synergistic drug responses via … – Nature.com

Khwaja, A. et al. Acute myeloid leukaemia. Nat. Rev. Dis. Prim. 2, Article 16010 (2016).

Kurtz, S. E. et al. Molecularly targeted drug combinations demonstrate selective effectiveness for myeloid- and lymphoid-derived hematologic malignancies. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1703094114 (2017).

Day, D. & Siu, L. L. Approaches to modernize the combination drug development paradigm. Genome Med. 8, 115 (2016).

Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

ONeil, J. et al. An unbiased oncology compound screen to identify novel combination strategies. Mol. Cancer Ther. 15, 11551162 (2016).

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Jia, J. et al. Mechanisms of drug combinations: interaction and network perspectives. Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. 8, 111128 (2009).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Nair, R., Salinas-Illarena, A. & Baldauf, H.-M. New strategies to treat AML: novel insights into AML survival pathways and combination therapies. Leukemia 35, 299311 (2021).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Tyner, J. W. & Others, A. Functional genomic landscape of acute myeloid leukaemia. Nature 562, 526531 (2018).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Schenone, M., Dank, V., Wagner, B. K. & Clemons, P. A. Target identification and mechanism of action in chemical biology and drug discovery. Nat. Chem. Biol. 9, 232240 (2013).

Hopkins, A. L. Network pharmacology: the next paradigm in drug discovery. Nat. Chem. Biol. 4, 682690 (2008).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Calzolari, D. et al. Search algorithms as a framework for the optimization of drug combinations. PLoS Comput. Biol. 4, e1000249 (2008).

Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Feala, J. D. et al. Systems approaches and algorithms for discovery of combinatorial therapies. Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Syst. Biol. Med. 2, 181193 (2010).

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Wong, P. K. et al. Closed-loop control of cellular functions using combinatory drugs guided by a stochastic search algorithm. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 51055110 (2008).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Menden, M. P. et al. Community assessment to advance computational prediction of cancer drug combinations in a pharmacogenomic screen. Nat. Commun. 10, 2674 (2019).

Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Preuer, K. et al. DeepSynergy: predicting anti-cancer drug synergy with Deep Learning. Bioinformatics 34, 15381546 (2018).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Garnett, M. J. et al. Systematic identification of genomic markers of drug sensitivity in cancer cells. Nature 483, 570575 (2012).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Barretina, J. et al. The Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia enables predictive modelling of anticancer drug sensitivity. Nature 483, 603607 (2012).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Lundberg, S. M. & Lee, S.-I. in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (eds Guyon, I., Von Luxburg, U., Bengio, S., Wallach, H., Fergus, R., Vishwanathan, S., & Garnett, R.) 47654774 (Curran Associates, Inc., 2017).

Lundberg, S. M. et al. From local explanations to global understanding with explainable AI for trees. Nat. Mach. Intell. 2, 5667 (2020).

Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Shrikumar, A., Greenside, P. & Kundaje, A. Learning important features through propagating activation differences. In Proc. 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (eds Precup, D. & Teh, Y. W.) 31453153 (PMLR, 2017).

Sundararajan, M., Taly, A. & Yan, Q. Axiomatic attribution for deep networks. In Proc. 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR (eds Precup, D. & Teh, Y. W.) 33193328 (JMLR.org, 2017).

Shapley, L. S. A value for n-person games. Class. game theory 69 (1997).

Aas, K., Jullum, M. & Lland, A. Explaining individual predictions when features are dependent: more accurate approximations to Shapley values. Artif. Intell. 298, 103502 (2021).

Article Google Scholar

Koo, P. K. & Ploenzke, M. Improving representations of genomic sequence motifs in convolutional networks with exponential activations. Nat. Mach. Intell. 3, 258266 (2021).

Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Schreiber, J. & Singh, R. Machine learning for profile prediction in genomics. Curr. Opin. Chem. Biol. 65, 3541 (2021).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Covert, I., Lundberg, S. & Lee, S.-I. Explaining by removing: a unified framework for model explanation. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 22, 190 (2021).

Google Scholar

Kim, N. et al. Prediction of the sequence-specific cleavage activity of Cas9 variants. Nat. Biotechnol. 38, 13281336 (2020).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Kim, H. K. et al. Predicting the efficiency of prime editing guide RNAs in human cells. Nat. Biotechnol. 39, 198206 (2021).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Schultebraucks, K. et al. A validated predictive algorithm of post-traumatic stress course following emergency department admission after a traumatic stressor. Nat. Med. 26, 10841088 (2020).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Hyland, S. L. et al. Early prediction of circulatory failure in the intensive care unit using machine learning. Nat. Med. 26, 364373 (2020).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Meier, F. et al. Deep learning the collisional cross sections of the peptide universe from a million experimental values. Nat. Commun. 12, Article 1185 (2021).

Bar, N. et al. A reference map of potential determinants for the human serum metabolome. Nature 588, 135140 (2020).

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Rodriguez-Perez, R. & Bajorath, J. Interpretation of compound activity predictions from complex machine learning models using local approximations and shapley values. J. Med. Chem. 63, 87618777 (2019).

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Rodriguez-Perez, R. & Bajorath, J. Interpretation of machine learning models using shapley values: application to compound potency and multi-target activity predictions. J. Comput. Aided Mol. Des. 34, 10131026 (2020).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Tang, Y.-C. & Gottlieb, A. Explainable drug sensitivity prediction through cancer pathway enrichment. Sci. Rep. 11, Article 3128 (2021).

Braithwaite, B. et al. Detection of medications associated with Alzheimers disease using ensemble methods and cooperative game theory. Int. J. Med. Inform. 141, 104142 (2020).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Breiman, L. Statistical modeling: the two cultures (with comments and a rejoinder by the author). Stat. Sci. 16, 199231 (2001).

Article Google Scholar

Dong, J. & Rudin, C. Variable importance clouds: a way to explore variable importance for the set of good models. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1901.03209 (2019).

Hooker, S., Erhan, D., Kindermans, P.-J. & Kim, B. A benchmark for interpretability methods in deep neural networks. In 33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (eds Wallach, H., Larochelle, H., Beygelzimer, A., d'Alch-Buc, F., Fox, E. & Garnett, R.) (Curran Associates, Inc., 2019).

Song, L., Bedo, J., Borgwardt, K. M., Gretton, A. & Smola, A. Gene selection via the BAHSIC family of algorithms. Bioinformatics 23, i490i498 (2007).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Zou, H. & Hastie, T. Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net. J. R. Stat. Soc. B 67, 301320 (2005).

Article Google Scholar

Guyon, I., Weston, J., Barnhill, S. & Vapnik, V. Gene selection for cancer classification using support vector machines. Mach. Learn. 46, 389422 (2002).

Article Google Scholar

Avsec, . et al. Base-resolution models of transcription-factor binding reveal soft motif syntax. Nat. Genet. 53, 354366 (2021).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Maslova, A. et al. Deep learning of immune cell differentiation. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 117, 2565525666 (2020).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Farzaneh, N., Williamson, C. A., Gryak, J. & Najarian, K. A hierarchical expert-guided machine learning framework for clinical decision support systems: an application to traumatic brain injury prognostication. npj Digit. Med. 4, 78 (2021).

Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Breiman, L. Random forests. Mach. Learn. 45, 532 (2001).

Article Google Scholar

Chen, T. & Guestrin, C. XGBoost: a scalable tree boosting system. In Proc. 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 785794 (ACM, 2016).

King, R. D., Orhobor, O. I. & Taylor, C. C. Cross-validation is safe to use. Nat. Mach. Intell. 3, 276 (2021).

Article Google Scholar

Shwartz-Ziv, R. & Armon, A. Tabular data: deep learning is not all you need. Inf. Fusion 81, 8490 (2022).

Article Google Scholar

Gurska, L. M., Ames, K. & Gritsman, K. Signaling pathways in leukemic stem cells. Adv. Exp. Med. Biol. 1143, 139 (2019).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Kumar, A. R., Sarver, A. L., Wu, B. & Kersey, J. H. Meis1 maintains stemness signature in MLL-AF9 leukemia. Blood 115, 36423643 (2010).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Liu, J. et al. Meis1 is critical to the maintenance of human acute myeloid leukemia cells independent of MLL rearrangements. Ann. Hematol. 96, 567574 (2017).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Pei, S. et al. Monocytic subclones confer resistance to venetoclax-based therapy in patients with acute myeloid leukemia. Cancer Discov. 10, 536551 (2020).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Takam Kamga, P. et al. Prognostic impact of notch signaling in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Blood 132, 5242 (2018).

Article Google Scholar

Kranc, K. R. et al. Cited2 is an essential regulator of adult hematopoietic stem cells. Cell Stem Cell 5, 659665 (2009).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Korthuis, P. M. et al. CITED2-mediated human hematopoietic stem cell maintenance is critical for acute myeloid leukemia. Leukemia 29, 625635 (2015).

Tanaka, M. et al. Targeted disruption of oncostatin M receptor results in altered hematopoiesis. Blood 102, 31543162 (2003).

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Zhao, X., Li, Y. & Wu, H. A novel scoring system for acute myeloid leukemia risk assessment based on the expression levels of six genes. Int. J. Mol. Med. 42, 14951507 (2018).

Go here to read the rest:
Uncovering expression signatures of synergistic drug responses via ... - Nature.com

A path to resourceful autonomous agents | Berkeley News – UC Berkeley

In this talk, Sergey Levine discusses how advances in offline reinforcement learning can enable machine learning systems to learn to make more optimal decisions from data. (Video by: CITRIS and the Banatao Institute)

On Wednesday, April 12, Sergey Levine, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and the leader of the Robotic AI & Learning (RAIL) Lab at UC Berkeley, delivered the second of four Distinguished Lectures on the Status and Future of AI, co-hosted by CITRIS Research Exchange and the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Group (BAIR).

Levines lecture examined algorithmic advances that can help machine learning systems retain both discernment and flexibility. By training machines with offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods, machines can solve problems in new environments by drawing on large sets of data and lessons previously learned while still maintaining the adaptability to introduce new behaviors, and thus new solutions.

As Levine explained, data-driven, or generative, AI techniques, such as the image generator DALL-E 2, are capable of producing seemingly human-made creations, while RL methods, such as the algorithms that control robots and beat humans at board games, can develop solutions that solve problems in unexpected ways. His research aims to discover how machine learning systems can adapt to unknown situations and make ideal decisions when faced with the full complexity of the real world.

Sergey Levine speaks about using large datasets for reinforcement learning at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley.

If we really want agents that are goal-directed, that have purpose, that can come up with inventive solutions, itll take more than just learning, said Levine. Learning is important, and the data is important, but the combination of learning and search is a really powerful recipe.

Data without optimization doesnt allow us to solve new problems in new ways. Optimization without data is hard to apply to the real world outside of simulators, he said. If we can get both of those things, maybe we can get closer to this space explorer robot and actually have it come up with novel solutions to new and unexpected problems.

See the original post:
A path to resourceful autonomous agents | Berkeley News - UC Berkeley

What Are Adversarial Attacks in Machine Learning and How Can We … – MUO – MakeUseOf

Technology often means our lives are more convenient and secure. At the same time, however, such advances have unlocked more sophisticated ways for cybercriminals to attack us and corrupt our security systems, making them powerless.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be utilized by cybersecurity professionals and cybercriminals alike; similarly, machine learning (ML) systems can be used for both good and evil. This lack of moral compass has made adversarial attacks in ML a growing challenge. So what actually are adversarial attacks? What are their purpose? And how can you protect against them?

Adversarial ML or adversarial attacks are cyberattacks that aim to trick an ML model with malicious input and thus lead to lower accuracy and poor performance. So, despite its name, adversarial ML is not a type of machine learning but a variety of techniques that cybercriminalsaka adversariesuse to target ML systems.

The main objective of such attacks is usually to trick the model into handing out sensitive information, failing to detect fraudulent activities, producing incorrect predictions, or corrupting analysis-based reports. While there are several types of adversarial attacks, they frequently target deep learning-based spam detection.

Youve probably heard about an adversary-in-the-middle attack, which is a new and more effective sophisticated phishing technique that involves the theft of private information, session cookies, and even bypassing multi-factor authentication (MFA) methods. Fortunately, you can combat these with phishing-resistant MFA technology.

The simplest way to classify types of adversarial attacks is to separate them into two main categoriestargeted attacks and untargeted attacks. As is suggested, targeted attacks have a specific target (like a particular person) while untargeted ones dont have anyone specific in mind: they can target almost anybody. Not surprisingly, untargeted attacks are less time-consuming but also less successful than their targeted counterparts.

These two types can be further subdivided into white-box and black-box adversarial attacks, where the color suggests the knowledge or the lack of knowledge of the targeted ML model. Before we dive deeper into white-box and black-box attacks, lets take a quick look at the most common types of adversarial attacks.

What sets these three types of adversarial attacks apart is the amount of knowledge adversaries have about the inner workings of the ML systems theyre planning to attack. While the white-box method requires exhaustive information about the targeted ML model (including its architecture and parameters), the black-box method requires no information and can only observe its outputs.

The grey-box model, meanwhile, stands in the middle of these two extremes. According to it, adversaries can have some information about the data set or other details about the ML model but not all of it.

While humans are still the critical component in strengthening cybersecurity, AI and ML have learned how to detect and prevent malicious attacksthey can increase the accuracy of detecting malicious threats, monitoring user activity, identifying suspicious content, and much more. But can they push back adversarial attacks and protect ML models?

One way we can combat cyberattacks is to train ML systems to recognize adversarial attacks ahead of time by adding examples to their training procedure.

Unlike this brute force approach, the defensive distillation method proposes we use the primary, more efficient model to figure out the critical features of a secondary, less efficient model and then improve the accuracy of the secondary with the primary one. ML models trained with defensive distillation are less sensitive to adversarial samples, which makes them less susceptible to exploitation.

We could also constantly modify the algorithms the ML models use for data classification, which could make adversarial attacks less successful.

Another notable technique is feature squeezing, which will cut back the search space available to adversaries by squeezing out unnecessary input features. Here, the aim is to minimize false positives and make adversarial examples detection more effective.

Adversarial attacks have shown us that many ML models can be shattered in surprising ways. After all, adversarial machine learning is still a new research field within the realm of cybersecurity, and it comes with many complex problems for AI and ML.

While there isnt a magical solution for protecting these models against all adversarial attacks, the future will likely bring more advanced techniques and smarter strategies for tackling this terrible adversary.

View post:
What Are Adversarial Attacks in Machine Learning and How Can We ... - MUO - MakeUseOf

IIT Madras researchers develop machine learning tool to detect tumours in brain, spinal cord – Deccan Herald

Researchers with the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) have developed a machine learning-based computational tool for better detection of cancer-causing tumours in the brain and spinal cord. The web server known as GBMDriver (GlioBlastoma Mutiforme Drivers) is now publicly available online.

The GBMDriver was developed specifically to identify driver mutations and passenger mutations (passenger mutations are neutral mutations) in Glioblastoma. In order to develop this web server, a variety of factors such as amino acid properties, di- and tri-peptide motifs, conservation scores, and Position Specific Scoring Matrices (PSSM) were taken into account.

In this study, 9,386 driver mutations and 8728 passenger mutations in glioblastoma were analysed. Driver mutations in glioblastoma were identified with an accuracy of 81.99 per cent, in a blind set of 1809 mutants, which is better than existing computational methods. This method is completely dependent on the protein sequence.

Also Read |IIT Guwahati research team develops catalyst to produce hydrogen from wood alcohol

Glioblastoma is a fast and aggressively growing tumour in the brain and spinal cord. Although there has been research undertaken to understand this tumour, therapeutic options remain limited with an expected survival rate of less than two years from the initial diagnosis, the IIT-M said,

The research was led by Prof. M. Michael Gromiha, Department of Biotechnology, IIT-M and the findings have been published in the reputed peer-reviewed journal Briefings in Bioinformatics.

We have identified the important amino acid features for identifying cancer-causing mutations and achieved the highest accuracy for distinguishing between driver and neutral mutations. We hope that this tool (GBMDriver) could help to prioritize driver mutations in glioblastoma and assist in identifying potential therapeutic targets, thus helping to develop drug design strategies, Prof Gromiha said.

The Key Applications of this research include the methodology and features that are portable to apply for other diseases, and this could serve as one of the important criteria for disease prognosis.

Our method showed an accuracy and AUC of 73.59% and 0.82 respectively on 10-fold cross-validation and 81.99% and 0.87 in a blind set of 1809 mutants. We envisage that the present method is helpful to prioritize driver mutations in glioblastoma and assist in identifying therapeutic targets, Ms Medha Pandey, a PhD Student at IIT-M, said.

The rest is here:
IIT Madras researchers develop machine learning tool to detect tumours in brain, spinal cord - Deccan Herald