AutoDOViz: Human-Centered Automation for Decision Optimization

We present AutoDOViz, an interactive user interface for automated decision optimization (AutoDO) using reinforcement learning (RL). Decision optimization (DO) has classically being practiced by dedicated DO researchers where experts need to spend long periods of time fine tuning a solution through trial-and-error. AutoML pipeline search has sought to make it easier for a data scientist to find the best machine learning pipeline by leveraging automation to search and tune the solution. More recently, these advances have been applied to the domain of AutoDO, with a similar goal to find the best reinforcement learning pipeline through algorithm selection and parameter tuning. However, Decision Optimization requires significantly more complex problem specification when compared to an ML problem. AutoDOViz seeks to lower the barrier of entry for data scientists in problem specification for reinforcement learning problems, leverage the benefits of AutoDO algorithms for RL pipeline search and finally, create visualizations and policy insights in order to facilitate the typical interactive nature when communicating problem formulation and solution proposals between DO experts and domain experts. In this paper, we report our findings from semi-structured expert interviews with DO practitioners as well as business consultants, leading to design requirements for human-centered automation for DO with RL. We evaluate a system implementation with data scientists and find that they are significantly more open to engage in DO after using our proposed solution. AutoDOViz further increases trust in RL agent models and makes the automated training and evaluation process more comprehensible. As shown for other automation in ML tasks, we also conclude automation of RL for DO can benefit from user and vice-versa when the interface promotes human-in-the-loop.

A spatio-temporal LSTM model to forecast across multiple temporal and spatial scales

This paper presents a novel spatio-temporal LSTM (SPATIAL) architecture for time series forecasting applied to environmental datasets. The framework was evaluated across multiple sensors and for three different oceanic variables: current speed, temperature, and dissolved oxygen. Network implementation proceeded in two directions that are nominally separated but connected as part of a natural environmental system -- across the spatial (between individual sensors) and temporal components of the sensor data. Data from four sensors sampling current speed, and eight measuring both temperature and dissolved oxygen evaluated the framework. Results were compared against RF and XGB baseline models that learned on the temporal signal of each sensor independently by extracting the date-time features together with the past history of data using sliding window matrix. Results demonstrated ability to accurately replicate complex signals and provide comparable performance to state-of-the-art benchmarks. Notably, the novel framework provided a simpler pre-processing and training pipeline that handles missing values via a simple masking layer. Enabling learning across the spatial and temporal directions, this paper addresses two fundamental challenges of ML applications to environmental science: 1) data sparsity and the challenges and costs of collecting measurements of environmental conditions such as ocean dynamics, and 2) environmental datasets are inherently connected in the spatial and temporal directions while classical ML approaches only consider one of these directions. Furthermore, sharing of parameters across all input steps makes SPATIAL a fast, scalable, and easily-parameterized forecasting framework.

TSML (Time Series Machine Learnng)

Over the past years, the industrial sector has seen many innovations brought about by automation. Inherent in this automation is the installation of sensor networks for status monitoring and data collection. One of the major challenges in these data-rich environments is how to extract and exploit information from these large volume of data to detect anomalies, discover patterns to reduce downtimes and manufacturing errors, reduce energy usage, predict faults/failures, effective maintenance schedules, etc. To address these issues, we developed TSML. Its technology is based on using the pipeline of lightweight filters as building blocks to process huge amount of industrial time series data in parallel.