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As global fertilizer application rates increase, high-quality datasets are paramount for comprehensive analyses to support informed decision-making and policy formulation in crucial areas such as food security or climate change. This study aims to fill existing data gaps by employing two machine learning models, eXtreme Gradient Boosting and HistGradientBoosting algorithms to produce precise country-level predictions of nitrogen ($N$), phosphorus pentoxide ($P_2O_5$), and potassium oxide ($K_2O$) application rates. Subsequently, we created a comprehensive dataset of 5-arcmin resolution maps depicting the application rates of each fertilizer for 13 major crop groups from 1961 to 2019. The predictions were validated by both comparing with existing databases and by assessing the drivers of fertilizer application rates using the model's SHapley Additive exPlanations. This extensive dataset is poised to be a valuable resource for assessing fertilization trends, identifying the socioeconomic, agricultural, and environmental drivers of fertilizer application rates, and serving as an input for various applications, including environmental modeling, causal analysis, fertilizer price predictions, and forecasting., Comment: 47 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables

Estimating conditional average dose responses (CADR) is an important but challenging problem. Estimators must correctly model the potentially complex relationships between covariates, interventions, doses, and outcomes. In recent years, the machine learning community has shown great interest in developing tailored CADR estimators that target specific challenges. Their performance is typically evaluated against other methods on (semi-) synthetic benchmark datasets. Our paper analyses this practice and shows that using popular benchmark datasets without further analysis is insufficient to judge model performance. Established benchmarks entail multiple challenges, whose impacts must be disentangled. Therefore, we propose a novel decomposition scheme that allows the evaluation of the impact of five distinct components contributing to CADR estimator performance. We apply this scheme to eight popular CADR estimators on four widely-used benchmark datasets, running nearly 1,500 individual experiments. Our results reveal that most established benchmarks are challenging for reasons different from their creators' claims. Notably, confounding, the key challenge tackled by most estimators, is not an issue in any of the considered datasets. We discuss the major implications of our findings and present directions for future research., Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures

Money laundering presents a pervasive challenge, burdening society by financing illegal activities. To more effectively combat and detect money laundering, the use of network information is increasingly being explored, exploiting that money laundering necessarily involves interconnected parties. This has lead to a surge in literature on network analytics (NA) for anti-money laundering (AML). The literature, however, is fragmented and a comprehensive overview of existing work is missing. This results in limited understanding of the methods that may be applied and their comparative detection power. Therefore, this paper presents an extensive and systematic review of the literature. We identify and analyse 97 papers in the Web of Science and Scopus databases, resulting in a taxonomy of approaches following the fraud analytics framework of Bockel-Rickermann et al.. Moreover, this paper presents a comprehensive experimental framework to evaluate and compare the performance of prominent NA methods in a uniform setup. The framework is applied on the publicly available Elliptic data set and implements manual feature engineering, random walk-based methods, and deep learning GNNs. We conclude from the results that network analytics increases the predictive power of the AML model with graph neural networks giving the best results. An open source implementation of the experimental framework is provided to facilitate researchers and practitioners to extend upon these results and experiment on proprietary data. As such, we aim to promote a standardised approach towards the analysis and evaluation of network analytics for AML.

Changes in climate can greatly affect the phenology of plants, which can have important feedback effects, such as altering the carbon cycle. These phenological feedback effects are often induced by a shift in the start or end dates of the growing season of plants. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) serves as a straightforward indicator for assessing the presence of green vegetation and can also provide an estimation of the plants' growing season. In this study, we investigated the effect of soil temperature on the timing of the start of the season (SOS), timing of the peak of the season (POS), and the maximum annual NDVI value (PEAK) in subarctic grassland ecosystems between 2014 and 2019. We also explored the impact of other meteorological variables, including air temperature, precipitation, and irradiance, on the inter-annual variation in vegetation phenology. Using machine learning (ML) techniques and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) values, we analyzed the relative importance and contribution of each variable to the phenological predictions. Our results reveal a significant relationship between soil temperature and SOS and POS, indicating that higher soil temperatures lead to an earlier start and peak of the growing season. However, the Peak NDVI values showed just a slight increase with higher soil temperatures. The analysis of other meteorological variables demonstrated their impacts on the inter-annual variation of the vegetation phenology. Ultimately, this study contributes to our knowledge of the relationships between soil temperature, meteorological variables, and vegetation phenology, providing valuable insights for predicting vegetation phenology characteristics and managing subarctic grasslands in the face of climate change. Additionally, this work provides a solid foundation for future ML-based vegetation phenology studies., Comment: 31 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables

Accurate forecasts for day-ahead photovoltaic (PV) power generation are crucial to support a high PV penetration rate in the local electricity grid and to assure stability in the grid. We use state-of-the-art tree-based machine learning methods to produce such forecasts and, unlike previous studies, we hereby account for (i) the effects various meteorological as well as astronomical features have on PV power production, and this (ii) at coarse as well as granular spatial locations. To this end, we use data from Belgium and forecast day-ahead PV power production at an hourly resolution. The insights from our study can assist utilities, decision-makers, and other stakeholders in optimizing grid operations, economic dispatch, and in facilitating the integration of distributed PV power into the electricity grid.

Estimating a unit's responses to interventions with an associated dose, the "conditional average dose response" (CADR), is relevant in a variety of domains, from healthcare to business, economics, and beyond. Such a response typically needs to be estimated from observational data, which introduces several challenges. That is why the machine learning (ML) community has proposed several tailored CADR estimators. Yet, the proposal of most of these methods requires strong assumptions on the distribution of data and the assignment of interventions, which go beyond the standard assumptions in causal inference. Whereas previous works have so far focused on smooth shifts in covariate distributions across doses, in this work, we will study estimating CADR from clustered data and where different doses are assigned to different segments of a population. On a novel benchmarking dataset, we show the impacts of clustered data on model performance and propose an estimator, CBRNet, that learns cluster-agnostic and hence dose-agnostic covariate representations through representation balancing for unbiased CADR inference. We run extensive experiments to illustrate the workings of our method and compare it with the state of the art in ML for CADR estimation., Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, v2: updated methodology and experiments

In lending, where prices are specific to both customers and products, having a well-functioning personalized pricing policy in place is essential to effective business making. Typically, such a policy must be derived from observational data, which introduces several challenges. While the problem of ``endogeneity'' is prominently studied in the established pricing literature, the problem of selection bias (or, more precisely, bid selection bias) is not. We take a step towards understanding the effects of selection bias by posing pricing as a problem of causal inference. Specifically, we consider the reaction of a customer to price a treatment effect. In our experiments, we simulate varying levels of selection bias on a semi-synthetic dataset on mortgage loan applications in Belgium. We investigate the potential of parametric and nonparametric methods for the identification of individual bid-response functions. Our results illustrate how conventional methods such as logistic regression and neural networks suffer adversely from selection bias. In contrast, we implement state-of-the-art methods from causal machine learning and show their capability to overcome selection bias in pricing data., Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures

One of the established approaches to causal discovery consists of combining directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with structural causal models (SCMs) to describe the functional dependencies of effects on their causes. Possible identifiability of SCMs given data depends on assumptions made on the noise variables and the functional classes in the SCM. For instance, in the LiNGAM model, the functional class is restricted to linear functions and the disturbances have to be non-Gaussian. In this work, we propose TSLiNGAM, a new method for identifying the DAG of a causal model based on observational data. TSLiNGAM builds on DirectLiNGAM, a popular algorithm which uses simple OLS regression for identifying causal directions between variables. TSLiNGAM leverages the non-Gaussianity assumption of the error terms in the LiNGAM model to obtain more efficient and robust estimation of the causal structure. TSLiNGAM is justified theoretically and is studied empirically in an extensive simulation study. It performs significantly better on heavy-tailed and skewed data and demonstrates a high small-sample efficiency. In addition, TSLiNGAM also shows better robustness properties as it is more resilient to contamination., Comment: 35 pages, 10 figures

Outliers contaminating data sets are a challenge to statistical estimators. Even a small fraction of outlying observations can heavily influence most classical statistical methods. In this paper we propose generalized spherical principal component analysis, a new robust version of principal component analysis that is based on the generalized spatial sign covariance matrix. Supporting theoretical properties of the proposed method including influence functions, breakdown values and asymptotic efficiencies are studied, and a simulation study is conducted to compare our new method to existing methods. We also propose an adjustment of the generalized spatial sign covariance matrix to achieve better Fisher consistency properties. We illustrate that generalized spherical principal component analysis, depending on a chosen radial function, has both great robustness and efficiency properties in addition to a low computational cost.

Linear model trees are regression trees that incorporate linear models in the leaf nodes. This preserves the intuitive interpretation of decision trees and at the same time enables them to better capture linear relationships, which is hard for standard decision trees. But most existing methods for fitting linear model trees are time consuming and therefore not scalable to large data sets. In addition, they are more prone to overfitting and extrapolation issues than standard regression trees. In this paper we introduce PILOT, a new algorithm for linear model trees that is fast, regularized, stable and interpretable. PILOT trains in a greedy fashion like classic regression trees, but incorporates an $L^2$ boosting approach and a model selection rule for fitting linear models in the nodes. The abbreviation PILOT stands for $PI$ecewise $L$inear $O$rganic $T$ree, where `organic' refers to the fact that no pruning is carried out. PILOT has the same low time and space complexity as CART without its pruning. An empirical study indicates that PILOT tends to outperform standard decision trees and other linear model trees on a variety of data sets. Moreover, we prove its consistency in an additive model setting under weak assumptions. When the data is generated by a linear model, the convergence rate is polynomial.

Modeling lies at the core of both the financial and the insurance industry for a wide variety of tasks. The rise and development of machine learning and deep learning models have created many opportunities to improve our modeling toolbox. Breakthroughs in these fields often come with the requirement of large amounts of data. Such large datasets are often not publicly available in finance and insurance, mainly due to privacy and ethics concerns. This lack of data is currently one of the main hurdles in developing better models. One possible option to alleviating this issue is generative modeling. Generative models are capable of simulating fake but realistic-looking data, also referred to as synthetic data, that can be shared more freely. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is such a model that increases our capacity to fit very high-dimensional distributions of data. While research on GANs is an active topic in fields like computer vision, they have found limited adoption within the human sciences, like economics and insurance. Reason for this is that in these fields, most questions are inherently about identification of causal effects, while to this day neural networks, which are at the center of the GAN framework, focus mostly on high-dimensional correlations. In this paper we study the causal preservation capabilities of GANs and whether the produced synthetic data can reliably be used to answer causal questions. This is done by performing causal analyses on the synthetic data, produced by a GAN, with increasingly more lenient assumptions. We consider the cross-sectional case, the time series case and the case with a complete structural model. It is shown that in the simple cross-sectional scenario where correlation equals causation the GAN preserves causality, but that challenges arise for more advanced analyses.

The literature on fraud analytics and fraud detection has seen a substantial increase in output in the past decade. This has led to a wide range of research topics and overall little organization of the many aspects of fraud analytical research. The focus of academics ranges from identifying fraudulent credit card payments to spotting illegitimate insurance claims. In addition, there is a wide range of methods and research objectives. This paper aims to provide an overview of fraud analytics in research and aims to more narrowly organize the discipline and its many subfields. We analyze a sample of almost 300 records on fraud analytics published between 2011 and 2020. In a systematic way, we identify the most prominent domains of application, challenges faced, performance metrics, and methods used. In addition, we build a framework for fraud analytical methods and propose a keywording strategy for future research. One of the key challenges in fraud analytics is access to public datasets. To further aid the community, we provide eight requirements for suitable data sets in research motivated by our research. We structure our sample of the literature in an online database. The database is available online for fellow researchers to investigate and potentially build upon.

This paper presents a multinomial multi-state micro-level reserving model, denoted mCube. We propose a unified framework for modelling the time and the payment process for IBNR and RBNS claims and for modeling IBNR claim counts. We use multinomial distributions for the time process and spliced mixture models for the payment process. We illustrate the excellent performance of the proposed model on a real data set of a major insurance company consisting of bodily injury claims. It is shown that the proposed model produces a best estimate distribution that is centered around the true reserve.

Machine maintenance is a challenging operational problem, where the goal is to plan sufficient preventive maintenance to avoid machine failures and overhauls. Maintenance is often imperfect in reality and does not make the asset as good as new. Although a variety of imperfect maintenance policies have been proposed in the literature, these rely on strong assumptions regarding the effect of maintenance on the machine's condition, assuming the effect is (1) deterministic or governed by a known probability distribution, and (2) machine-independent. This work proposes to relax both assumptions by learning the effect of maintenance conditional on a machine's characteristics from observational data on similar machines using existing methodologies for causal inference. By predicting the maintenance effect, we can estimate the number of overhauls and failures for different levels of maintenance and, consequently, optimize the preventive maintenance frequency to minimize the total estimated cost. We validate our proposed approach using real-life data on more than 4,000 maintenance contracts from an industrial partner. Empirical results show that our novel, causal approach accurately predicts the maintenance effect and results in individualized maintenance schedules that are more accurate and cost-effective than supervised or non-individualized approaches.

A central problem in business concerns the optimal allocation of limited resources to a set of available tasks, where the payoff of these tasks is inherently uncertain. In credit card fraud detection, for instance, a bank can only assign a small subset of transactions to their fraud investigations team. Typically, such problems are solved using a classification framework, where the focus is on predicting task outcomes given a set of characteristics. Resources are then allocated to the tasks that are predicted to be the most likely to succeed. However, we argue that using classification to address task uncertainty is inherently suboptimal as it does not take into account the available capacity. Therefore, we first frame the problem as a type of assignment problem. Then, we present a novel solution using learning to rank by directly optimizing the assignment's expected profit given limited, stochastic capacity. This is achieved by optimizing a specific instance of the net discounted cumulative gain, a commonly used class of metrics in learning to rank. Empirically, we demonstrate that our new method achieves higher expected profit and expected precision compared to a classification approach for a wide variety of application areas and data sets. This illustrates the benefit of an integrated approach and of explicitly considering the available resources when learning a predictive model.

Topological data analysis is a recent and fast growing field that approaches the analysis of datasets using techniques from (algebraic) topology. Its main tool, persistent homology (PH), has seen a notable increase in applications in the last decade. Often cited as the most favourable property of PH and the main reason for practical success are the stability theorems that give theoretical results about noise robustness, since real data is typically contaminated with noise or measurement errors. However, little attention has been paid to what these stability theorems mean in practice. To gain some insight into this question, we evaluate the noise robustness of PH on the MNIST dataset of greyscale images. More precisely, we investigate to what extent PH changes under typical forms of image noise, and quantify the loss of performance in classifying the MNIST handwritten digits when noise is added to the data. The results show that the sensitivity to noise of PH is influenced by the choice of filtrations and persistence signatures (respectively the input and output of PH), and in particular, that PH features are often not robust to noise in a classification task., Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables

Performance measurement is an essential task once a statistical model is created. The Area Under the receiving operating characteristics Curve (AUC) is the most popular measure for evaluating the quality of a binary classifier. In this case, AUC is equal to the concordance probability, a frequently used measure to evaluate the discriminatory power of the model. Contrary to AUC, the concordance probability can also be extended to the situation with a continuous response variable. Due to the staggering size of data sets nowadays, determining this discriminatory measure requires a tremendous amount of costly computations and is hence immensely time consuming, certainly in case of a continuous response variable. Therefore, we propose two estimation methods that calculate the concordance probability in a fast and accurate way and that can be applied to both the discrete and continuous setting. Extensive simulation studies show the excellent performance and fast computing times of both estimators. Finally, experiments on two real-life data sets confirm the conclusions of the artificial simulations., Comment: 40 pages, 3 figures

In many practical applications, such as fraud detection, credit risk modeling or medical decision making, classification models for assigning instances to a predefined set of classes are required to be both precise as well as interpretable. Linear modeling methods such as logistic regression are often adopted, since they offer an acceptable balance between precision and interpretability. Linear methods, however, are not well equipped to handle categorical predictors with high-cardinality or to exploit non-linear relations in the data. As a solution, data preprocessing methods such as weight-of-evidence are typically used for transforming the predictors. The binning procedure that underlies the weight-of-evidence approach, however, has been little researched and typically relies on ad-hoc or expert driven procedures. The objective in this paper, therefore, is to propose a formalized, data-driven and powerful method. To this end, we explore the discretization of continuous variables through the binning of spline functions, which allows for capturing non-linear effects in the predictor variables and yields highly interpretable predictors taking only a small number of discrete values. Moreover, we extend upon the weight-of-evidence approach and propose to estimate the proportions using shrinkage estimators. Together, this offers an improved ability to exploit both non-linear and categorical predictors for achieving increased classification precision, while maintaining interpretability of the resulting model and decreasing the risk of overfitting. We present the results of a series of experiments in a fraud detection setting, which illustrate the effectiveness of the presented approach. We facilitate reproduction of the presented results and adoption of the proposed approaches by providing both the dataset and the code for implementing the experiments and the presented approach., Comment: New version: duplicate paragraph omitted

As its name suggests, sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) targets to estimate a subspace from data that contains all information sufficient to explain a dependent variable. Ample approaches exist to SDR, some of the most recent of which rely on minimal to no model assumptions. These are defined according to an optimization criterion that maximizes a nonparametric measure of association. The original estimators are nonsparse, which means that all variables contribute to the model. However, in many practical applications, an SDR technique may be called for that is sparse and as such, intrinsically performs sufficient variable selection (SVS). This paper examines how such a sparse SDR estimator can be constructed. Three variants are investigated, depending on different measures of association: distance covariance, martingale difference divergence and ball covariance. A simulation study shows that each of these estimators can achieve correct variable selection in highly nonlinear contexts, yet are sensitive to outliers and computationally intensive. The study sheds light on the subtle differences between the methods. Two examples illustrate how these new estimators can be applied in practice, with a slight preference for the option based on martingale difference divergence in the bioinformatics example.

The direpack package aims to establish a set of modern statistical dimension reduction techniques into the Python universe as a single, consistent package. The dimension reduction methods included resort into three categories: projection pursuit based dimension reduction, sufficient dimension reduction, and robust M estimators for dimension reduction. As a corollary, regularized regression estimators based on these reduced dimension spaces are provided as well, ranging from classical principal component regression up to sparse partial robust M regression. The package also contains a set of classical and robust pre-processing utilities, including generalized spatial signs, as well as dedicated plotting functionality and cross-validation utilities. Finally, direpack has been written consistent with the scikit-learn API, such that the estimators can flawlessly be included into (statistical and/or machine) learning pipelines in that framework.

Card transaction fraud is a growing problem affecting card holders worldwide. Financial institutions increasingly rely upon data-driven methods for developing fraud detection systems, which are able to automatically detect and block fraudulent transactions. From a machine learning perspective, the task of detecting fraudulent transactions is a binary classification problem. Classification models are commonly trained and evaluated in terms of statistical performance measures, such as likelihood and AUC, respectively. These measures, however, do not take into account the actual business objective, which is to minimize the financial losses due to fraud. Fraud detection is to be acknowledged as an instance-dependent cost-sensitive classification problem, where the costs due to misclassification vary between instances, and requiring adapted approaches for learning a classification model. In this article, an instance-dependent threshold is derived, based on the instance-dependent cost matrix for transfer fraud detection, that allows for making the optimal cost-based decision for each transaction. Two novel classifiers are presented, based on lasso-regularized logistic regression and gradient tree boosting, which directly minimize the proposed instance-dependent cost measure when learning a classification model. The proposed methods are implemented in the R packages cslogit and csboost, and compared against state-of-the-art methods on a publicly available data set from the machine learning competition website Kaggle and a proprietary card transaction data set. The results of the experiments highlight the potential of reducing fraud losses by adopting the proposed methods., Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, submitted

A major challenge when trying to detect fraud is that the fraudulent activities form a minority class which make up a very small proportion of the data set. In most data sets, fraud occurs in typically less than 0.5% of the cases. Detecting fraud in such a highly imbalanced data set typically leads to predictions that favor the majority group, causing fraud to remain undetected. We discuss some popular oversampling techniques that solve the problem of imbalanced data by creating synthetic samples that mimic the minority class. A frequent problem when analyzing real data is the presence of anomalies or outliers. When such atypical observations are present in the data, most oversampling techniques are prone to create synthetic samples that distort the detection algorithm and spoil the resulting analysis. A useful tool for anomaly detection is robust statistics, which aims to find the outliers by first fitting the majority of the data and then flagging data observations that deviate from it. In this paper, we present a robust version of ROSE, called robROSE, which combines several promising approaches to cope simultaneously with the problem of imbalanced data and the presence of outliers. The proposed method achieves to enhance the presence of the fraud cases while ignoring anomalies. The good performance of our new sampling technique is illustrated on simulated and real data sets and it is shown that robROSE can provide better insight in the structure of the data. The source code of the robROSE algorithm is made freely available.

The cellwise robust M regression estimator is introduced as the first estimator of its kind that intrinsically yields both a map of cellwise outliers consistent with the linear model, and a vector of regression coefficients that is robust against vertical outliers and leverage points. As a by-product, the method yields a weighted and imputed data set that contains estimates of what the values in cellwise outliers would need to amount to if they had fit the model. The method is illustrated to be equally robust as its casewise counterpart, MM regression. The cellwise regression method discards less information than any casewise robust estimator. Therefore, predictive power can be expected to be at least as good as casewise alternatives. These results are corroborated in a simulation study. Moreover, while the simulations show that predictive performance is at least on par with casewise methods if not better, an application to a data set consisting of compositions of Swiss nutrients, shows that in individual cases, CRM can achieve a significantly higher predictive accuracy compared to MM regression.

The concordance probability or C-index is a popular measure to capture the discriminatory ability of a regression model. In this article, the definition of this measure is adapted to the specific needs of the frequency and severity model, typically used during the technical pricing of a non-life insurance product. Due to the typical large sample size of the frequency data in particular, two different adaptations of the estimation procedure of the concordance probability are presented. Note that the latter procedures can be applied to all different versions of the concordance probability.

In this paper, a multivariate constrained robust M-regression (MCRM) method is developed to estimate shaping coefficients for electricity forward prices. An important benefit of the new method is that model arbitrage can be ruled out at an elementary level, as all shaping coefficients are treated simultaneously. Moreover, the new method is robust to outliers, such that the provided results are stable and not sensitive to isolated sparks or dips in the market. An efficient algorithm is presented to estimate all shaping coefficients at a low computational cost. To illustrate its good performance, the method is applied to German electricity prices.