Prof. Dr.

Wrobel, Stefan

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  • Publication
    Robustness in Fatigue Strength Estimation
    ( 2022-12-02)
    Weichert, Dorina
    ;
    Kister, Alexander
    ;
    Houben, Sebastian
    ;
    Ernis, Gunar
    ;
    Wrobel, Stefan
    Fatigue strength estimation is a costly manual material characterization process in which state-of-the-art approaches follow a standardized experiment and analysis procedure. In this paper, we examine a modular, Machine Learning-based approach for fatigue strength estimation that is likely to reduce the number of experiments and, thus, the overall experimental costs. Despite its high potential, deployment of a new approach in a real-life lab requires more than the theoretical definition and simulation. Therefore, we study the robustness of the approach against misspecification of the prior and discretization of the specified loads. We identify its applicability and its advantageous behavior over the state-of-the-art methods, potentially reducing the number of costly experiments.
  • Publication
    A Fast Heuristic for Computing Geodesic Closures in Large Networks
    ( 2022-11-06)
    Seiffarth, Florian
    ;
    Horvath, Tamas
    ;
    Wrobel, Stefan
    Motivated by the increasing interest in applications of graph geodesic convexity in machine learning and data mining, we present a heuristic for approximating the geodesic convex hull of node sets in large networks. It generates a small set of (almost) maximal outerplanar spanning subgraphs for the input graph, computes the geodesic closure in each of these graphs, and regards a node as an element of the convex hull if it belongs to the closed sets for at least a user specified number of outerplanar graphs. Our heuristic algorithm runs in time linear in the number of edges of the input graph, i.e., it is faster with one order of magnitude than the standard algorithm computing the closure exactly. Its performance is evaluated empirically by approximating convexity based core-periphery decomposition of networks. Our experimental results with large real-world networks show that for most networks, the proposed heuristic was able to produce close approximations significantly faster than the standard algorithm computing the exact convex hulls. For example, while our algorithm calculated an approximate core-periphery decomposition in 5 h or less for networks with more than 20 million edges, the standard algorithm did not terminate within 50 days.
  • Publication
    Wasserstein Dropout
    ( 2022-09-08)
    Sicking, Joachim
    ;
    Akila, Maram
    ;
    Pintz, Maximilian Alexander
    ;
    Wirtz, Tim
    ;
    Wrobel, Stefan
    ;
    Fischer, Asja
    Despite of its importance for safe machine learning, uncertainty quantification for neural networks is far from being solved. State-of-the-art approaches to estimate neural uncertainties are often hybrid, combining parametric models with explicit or implicit (dropout-based) ensembling. We take another pathway and propose a novel approach to uncertainty quantification for regression tasks, Wasserstein dropout, that is purely non-parametric. Technically, it captures aleatoric uncertainty by means of dropout-based sub-network distributions. This is accomplished by a new objective which minimizes the Wasserstein distance between the label distribution and the model distribution. An extensive empirical analysis shows that Wasserstein dropout outperforms state-of-the-art methods, on vanilla test data as well as under distributional shift in terms of producing more accurate and stable uncertainty estimates.
  • Publication
    The why and how of trustworthy AI
    ( 2022-09-03)
    Schmitz, Anna
    ;
    Akila, Maram
    ;
    Hecker, Dirk
    ;
    Poretschkin, Maximilian
    ;
    Wrobel, Stefan
    Artificial intelligence is increasingly penetrating industrial applications as well as areas that affect our daily lives. As a consequence, there is a need for criteria to validate whether the quality of AI applications is sufficient for their intended use. Both in the academic community and societal debate, an agreement has emerged under the term “trustworthiness” as the set of essential quality requirements that should be placed on an AI application. At the same time, the question of how these quality requirements can be operationalized is to a large extent still open. In this paper, we consider trustworthy AI from two perspectives: the product and organizational perspective. For the former, we present an AI-specific risk analysis and outline how verifiable arguments for the trustworthiness of an AI application can be developed. For the second perspective, we explore how an AI management system can be employed to assure the trustworthiness of an organization with respect to its handling of AI. Finally, we argue that in order to achieve AI trustworthiness, coordinated measures from both product and organizational perspectives are required.
  • Publication
    Data Ecosystems: A New Dimension of Value Creation Using AI and Machine Learning
    ( 2022-07-22)
    Hecker, Dirk
    ;
    Voß, Angelika
    ;
    Wrobel, Stefan
    Machine learning and artificial intelligence have become crucial factors for the competitiveness of individual companies and entire economies. Yet their successful deployment requires access to a large volume of training data often not even available to the largest corporations. The rise of trustworthy federated digital ecosystems will significantly improve data availability for all participants and thus will allow a quantum leap for the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence at all scales of companies and in all sectors of the economy. In this chapter, we will explain how AI systems are built with data science and machine learning principles and describe how this leads to AI platforms. We will detail the principles of distributed learning which represents a perfect match with the principles of distributed data ecosystems and discuss how trust, as a central value proposition of modern ecosystems, carries over to creating trustworthy AI systems.
  • Publication
    A generalized Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernel
    ( 2022-04-27)
    Schulz, Till Hendrik
    ;
    Horvath, Tamas
    ;
    Welke, Pascal
    ;
    Wrobel, Stefan
    After more than one decade, Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernels are still among the most prevalent graph kernels due to their remarkable predictive performance and time complexity. They are based on a fast iterative partitioning of vertices, originally designed for deciding graph isomorphism with one-sided error. The Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernels retain this idea and compare such labels with respect to equality. This binary valued comparison is, however, arguably too rigid for defining suitable graph kernels for certain graph classes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a generalization of Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernels which takes into account a more natural and finer grade of similarity between Weisfeiler-Lehman labels than equality. We show that the proposed similarity can be calculated efficiently by means of the Wasserstein distance between certain vectors representing Weisfeiler-Lehman labels. This and other facts give rise to the natural choice of partitioning the vertices with the Wasserstein k-means algorithm. We empirically demonstrate on the Weisfeiler-Lehman subtree kernel, which is one of the most prominent Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernels, that our generalization significantly outperforms this and other state-of-the-art graph kernels in terms of predictive performance on datasets which contain structurally more complex graphs beyond the typically considered molecular graphs.
  • Publication
    Visual Analytics for Human-Centered Machine Learning
    ( 2022-01-25)
    Andrienko, Natalia
    ;
    Andrienko, Gennady
    ;
    Adilova, Linara
    ;
    Wrobel, Stefan
    We introduce a new research area in visual analytics (VA) aiming to bridge existing gaps between methods of interactive machine learning (ML) and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), on one side, and human minds, on the other side. The gaps are, first, a conceptual mismatch between ML/XAI outputs and human mental models and ways of reasoning, and second, a mismatch between the information quantity and level of detail and human capabilities to perceive and understand. A grand challenge is to adapt ML and XAI to human goals, concepts, values, and ways of thinking. Complementing the current efforts in XAI towards solving this challenge, VA can contribute by exploiting the potential of visualization as an effective way of communicating information to humans and a strong trigger of human abstractive perception and thinking. We propose a cross-disciplinary research framework and formulate research directions for VA.
  • Publication
    A Simple Heuristic for the Graph Tukey Depth Problem with Potential Applications to Graph Mining
    ( 2022)
    Seiffarth, Florian
    ;
    Horvath, Tamas
    ;
    Wrobel, Stefan
    We study a recently introduced adaptation of Tukey depth to graphs and discuss its algorithmic properties and potential applications to mining and learning with graphs. In particular, since it is NP-hard to compute the Tukey depth of a node, as a first contribution we provide a simple heuristic based on maximal closed set separation in graphs and show empirically on different graph datasets that its approximation error is small. Our second contribution is concerned with geodesic core-periphery decompositions of graphs. We show empirically that the geodesic core of a graph consists of those nodes that have a high Tukey depth. This information allows for a parameterized deterministic definition of the geodesic core of a graph.
  • Publication
    Learning Weakly Convex Sets in Metric Spaces
    ( 2021-09-10)
    Stadtländer, Eike
    ;
    Horvath, Tamas
    ;
    Wrobel, Stefan
    We introduce the notion of weak convexity in metric spaces, a generalization of ordinary convexity commonly used in machine learning. It is shown that weakly convex sets can be characterized by a closure operator and have a unique decomposition into a set of pairwise disjoint connected blocks. We give two generic efficient algorithms, an extensional and an intensional one for learning weakly convex concepts and study their formal properties. Our experimental results concerning vertex classification clearly demonstrate the excellent predictive performance of the extensional algorithm. Two non-trivial applications of the intensional algorithm to polynomial PAC-learnability are presented. The first one deals with learning k-convex Boolean functions, which are already known to be efficiently PAC-learnable. It is shown how to derive this positive result in a fairly easy way by the generic intensional algorithm. The second one is concerned with the Euclidean space equipped with the Manhattan distance. For this metric space, weakly convex sets form a union of pairwise disjoint axis-aligned hyperrectangles. We show that a weakly convex set that is consistent with a set of examples and contains a minimum number of hyperrectangles can be found in polynomial time. In contrast, this problem is known to be NP-complete if the hyperrectangles may be overlapping.
  • Publication
    Decision Snippet Features
    ( 2021-05-05)
    Welke, Pascal
    ;
    Alkhoury, Fouad
    ;
    Bauckhage, Christian
    ;
    Wrobel, Stefan
    Decision trees excel at interpretability of their prediction results. To achieve required prediction accuracies, however, often large ensembles of decision trees random forests are considered, reducing interpretability due to large size. Additionally, their size slows down inference on modern hardware and restricts their applicability in low-memory embedded devices. We introduce Decision Snippet Features, which are obtained from small subtrees that appear frequently in trained random forests. We subsequently show that linear models on top of these features achieve comparable and sometimes even better predictive performance than the original random forest, while reducing the model size by up to two orders of magnitude.