People

Isabel Valera

​Saarland Informatics Campus
Building E1 1, R. 225

For administrative services, contact ml-office@lists.saarland-informatics-campus.de
To apply for PhD/PostDoc/HiWi/Thesis, see the information on the “Positions” page for the correct e-mail to use.
Otherwise, contact ivalera@cs.uni-saarland.de.

About me

I am a full Professor on Machine Learning at the Department of Computer Science of Saarland University (Saarbrücken, Germany), and Adjunct Faculty at MPI for Software Systems in Saarbrücken (Saarbrücken, Germany).

I am a fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), where I am part of the Robust Machine Learning Program and of the Saarbrücken Artificial Intelligence & Machine learning (Sam) Unit.

Prior to this, I was an independent group leader at the MPI for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen (Germany) until the end of the year. I have held a German Humboldt Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and a “Minerva fast track” fellowship from the Max Planck Society. I obtained my PhD in 2014 and MSc degree in 2012 from the University Carlos III in Madrid (Spain), and worked as postdoctoral researcher at the MPI for Software Systems (Germany) and at the University of Cambridge (UK).

Publications

57 entries « 1 of 2 »

2023

Javaloy, Adrián; Sánchez-Mart'ın, Pablo; Valera, Isabel

Causal normalizing flows: from theory to practice Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2306.05415, 2023.

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Koyuncu, Batuhan; Sánchez-Mart'ın, Pablo; Peis, Ignacio; Olmos, Pablo M.; Valera, Isabel

Variational Mixture of HyperGenerators for Learning Distributions Over Functions Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2302.06223, 2023.

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Javaloy, Adrián; Sánchez-Mart'ın, Pablo; Levi, Amit; Valera, Isabel

Learnable Graph Convolutional Attention Networks Proceedings Article

In: The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2023, Kigali, Rwanda, May 1-5, 2023, OpenReview.net, 2023.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Barthe, Gilles; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Valera, Isabel

A Survey of Algorithmic Recourse: Contrastive Explanations and Consequential Recommendations Journal Article

In: ACM Comput. Surv., vol. 55, no. 5, pp. 95:1–95:29, 2023.

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2022

Javaloy, Adrián; Meghdadi, Maryam; Valera, Isabel

Mitigating Modality Collapse in Multimodal VAEs via Impartial Optimization Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2206.04496, 2022.

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Kügelgen, Julius; Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Bhatt, Umang; Valera, Isabel; Weller, Adrian; Schölkopf, Bernhard

On the Fairness of Causal Algorithmic Recourse Proceedings Article

In: Thirty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2022, Thirty-Fourth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, IAAI 2022, The Twelveth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2022 Virtual Event, February 22 - March 1, 2022, pp. 9584–9594, AAAI Press, 2022.

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Javaloy, Adrián; Valera, Isabel

RotoGrad: Gradient Homogenization in Multitask Learning Proceedings Article

In: The Tenth International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2022, Virtual Event, April 25-29, 2022, OpenReview.net, 2022.

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Camps-Valls, Gustau; Ruiz, Francisco J. R.; Valera, Isabel (Ed.)

International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, AISTATS 2022, 28-30 March 2022, Virtual Event Proceedings

PMLR, vol. 151, 2022.

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Sánchez-Mart'ın, Pablo; Rateike, Miriam; Valera, Isabel

VACA: Designing Variational Graph Autoencoders for Causal Queries Proceedings Article

In: Thirty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2022, Thirty-Fourth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, IAAI 2022, The Twelveth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2022 Virtual Event, February 22 - March 1, 2022, pp. 8159–8168, AAAI Press, 2022.

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Rateike, Miriam; Majumdar, Ayan; Mineeva, Olga; Gummadi, Krishna P.; Valera, Isabel

Don't Throw it Away! The Utility of Unlabeled Data in Fair Decision Making Proceedings Article

In: FAccT '22: 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Seoul, Republic of Korea, June 21 - 24, 2022, pp. 1421–1433, ACM, 2022.

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2021

Javaloy, Adrián; Meghdadi, Maryam; Valera, Isabel

Boosting heterogeneous VAEs via multi-objective optimization Workshop

2021.

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Mohammadi, Kiarash; Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Barthe, Gilles; Valera, Isabel

Scaling Guarantees for Nearest Counterfactual Explanations Proceedings Article

In: Fourcade, Marion; Kuipers, Benjamin; Lazar, Seth; Mulligan, Deirdre K. (Ed.): AIES '21: AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, Virtual Event, USA, May 19-21, 2021, pp. 177–187, ACM, 2021.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Valera, Isabel

Algorithmic Recourse: from Counterfactual Explanations to Interventions Proceedings Article

In: Elish, Madeleine Clare; Isaac, William; Zemel, Richard S. (Ed.): FAccT '21: 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Virtual Event / Toronto, Canada, March 3-10, 2021, pp. 353–362, ACM, 2021.

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Schöffer, Jakob; Kuehl, Niklas; Valera, Isabel

A Ranking Approach to Fair Classification Proceedings Article

In: COMPASS '21: ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, Virtual Event, Australia, 28 June 2021 - 2 July 2021, pp. 115–125, ACM, 2021.

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Hutter, Frank; Kersting, Kristian; Lijffijt, Jefrey; Valera, Isabel (Ed.)

Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML PKDD 2020, Ghent, Belgium, September 14-18, 2020, Proceedings, Part I Proceedings

Springer, vol. 12457, 2021, ISBN: 978-3-030-67657-5.

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Hutter, Frank; Kersting, Kristian; Lijffijt, Jefrey; Valera, Isabel (Ed.)

Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML PKDD 2020, Ghent, Belgium, September 14-18, 2020, Proceedings, Part II Proceedings

Springer, vol. 12458, 2021, ISBN: 978-3-030-67660-5.

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Hutter, Frank; Kersting, Kristian; Lijffijt, Jefrey; Valera, Isabel (Ed.)

Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML PKDD 2020, Ghent, Belgium, September 14-18, 2020, Proceedings, Part III Proceedings

Springer, vol. 12459, 2021, ISBN: 978-3-030-67663-6.

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2020

Javaloy, Adrián; Valera, Isabel

Lipschitz standardization for robust multivariate learning Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2002.11369, 2020.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Barthe, Gilles; Balle, Borja; Valera, Isabel

Model-Agnostic Counterfactual Explanations for Consequential Decisions Proceedings Article

In: Chiappa, Silvia; Calandra, Roberto (Ed.): The 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, AISTATS 2020, 26-28 August 2020, Online [Palermo, Sicily, Italy], pp. 895–905, PMLR, 2020.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Kügelgen, Bodo Julius; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Valera, Isabel

Algorithmic recourse under imperfect causal knowledge: a probabilistic approach Proceedings Article

In: Larochelle, Hugo; Ranzato, Marc'Aurelio; Hadsell, Raia; Balcan, Maria-Florina; Lin, Hsuan-Tien (Ed.): Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2020, NeurIPS 2020, December 6-12, 2020, virtual, 2020.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Barthe, Gilles; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Valera, Isabel

A survey of algorithmic recourse: definitions, formulations, solutions, and prospects Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2010.04050, 2020.

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Valera, Isabel; Pradier, Melanie F.; Lomeli, Maria; Ghahramani, Zoubin

General Latent Feature Models for Heterogeneous Datasets Journal Article

In: J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 21, pp. 100:1–100:49, 2020.

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Kilbertus, Niki; Rodriguez, Manuel Gomez; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Muandet, Krikamol; Valera, Isabel

Fair Decisions Despite Imperfect Predictions Proceedings Article

In: Chiappa, Silvia; Calandra, Roberto (Ed.): The 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, AISTATS 2020, 26-28 August 2020, Online [Palermo, Sicily, Italy], pp. 277–287, PMLR, 2020.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Kügelgen, Julius; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Valera, Isabel

Towards Causal Algorithmic Recourse Proceedings Article

In: Holzinger, Andreas; Goebel, Randy; Fong, Ruth; Moon, Taesup; Müller, Klaus-Robert; Samek, Wojciech (Ed.): xxAI - Beyond Explainable AI - International Workshop, Held in Conjunction with ICML 2020, July 18, 2020, Vienna, Austria, Revised and Extended Papers, pp. 139–166, Springer, 2020.

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2019

Zafar, Muhammad Bilal; Valera, Isabel; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel; Gummadi, Krishna P.

Fairness Constraints: A Flexible Approach for Fair Classification Journal Article

In: J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 20, pp. 75:1–75:42, 2019.

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Adel, Tameem; Valera, Isabel; Ghahramani, Zoubin; Weller, Adrian

One-Network Adversarial Fairness Proceedings Article

In: The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2019, The Thirty-First Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, IAAI 2019, The Ninth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2019, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, January 27 - February 1, 2019, pp. 2412–2420, AAAI Press, 2019.

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Vergari, Antonio; Molina, Alejandro; Peharz, Robert; Ghahramani, Zoubin; Kersting, Kristian; Valera, Isabel

Automatic Bayesian Density Analysis Proceedings Article

In: The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2019, The Thirty-First Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, IAAI 2019, The Ninth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2019, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, January 27 - February 1, 2019, pp. 5207–5215, AAAI Press, 2019.

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Kilbertus, Niki; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Muandet, Krikamol; Valera, Isabel

Improving Consequential Decision Making under Imperfect Predictions Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/1902.02979, 2019.

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2018

Ruiz, Francisco J. R.; Valera, Isabel; Svensson, Lennart; Pérez-Cruz, Fernando

Infinite Factorial Finite State Machine for Blind Multiuser Channel Estimation Journal Article

In: IEEE Trans. Cogn. Commun. Netw., vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 177–191, 2018.

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Valera, Isabel; Singla, Adish; Rodriguez, Manuel Gomez

Enhancing the Accuracy and Fairness of Human Decision Making Proceedings Article

In: Bengio, Samy; Wallach, Hanna M.; Larochelle, Hugo; Grauman, Kristen; Cesa-Bianchi, Nicolò; Garnett, Roman (Ed.): Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2018, NeurIPS 2018, December 3-8, 2018, Montréal, Canada, pp. 1774–1783, 2018.

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Locatello, Francesco; Dresdner, Gideon; Khanna, Rajiv; Valera, Isabel; Rätsch, Gunnar

Boosting Black Box Variational Inference Proceedings Article

In: Bengio, Samy; Wallach, Hanna M.; Larochelle, Hugo; Grauman, Kristen; Cesa-Bianchi, Nicolò; Garnett, Roman (Ed.): Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2018, NeurIPS 2018, December 3-8, 2018, Montréal, Canada, pp. 3405–3415, 2018.

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Nazábal, Alfredo; Olmos, Pablo M.; Ghahramani, Zoubin; Valera, Isabel

Handling Incomplete Heterogeneous Data using VAEs Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/1807.03653, 2018.

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2017

Zafar, Muhammad Bilal; Valera, Isabel; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel; Gummadi, Krishna P.

Fairness Constraints: Mechanisms for Fair Classification Proceedings Article

In: Singh, Aarti; Zhu, Xiaojin (Jerry) (Ed.): Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, AISTATS 2017, 20-22 April 2017, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA, pp. 962–970, PMLR, 2017.

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Valera, Isabel; Ghahramani, Zoubin

Automatic Discovery of the Statistical Types of Variables in a Dataset Proceedings Article

In: Precup, Doina; Teh, Yee Whye (Ed.): Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2017, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 6-11 August 2017, pp. 3521–3529, PMLR, 2017.

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Zafar, Muhammad Bilal; Valera, Isabel; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel; Gummadi, Krishna P.; Weller, Adrian

From Parity to Preference-based Notions of Fairness in Classification Proceedings Article

In: Guyon, Isabelle; Luxburg, Ulrike; Bengio, Samy; Wallach, Hanna M.; Fergus, Rob; Vishwanathan, S. V. N.; Garnett, Roman (Ed.): Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2017, December 4-9, 2017, Long Beach, CA, USA, pp. 229–239, 2017.

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Upadhyay, Utkarsh; Valera, Isabel; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel

Uncovering the Dynamics of Crowdlearning and the Value of Knowledge Proceedings Article

In: Rijke, Maarten; Shokouhi, Milad; Tomkins, Andrew; Zhang, Min (Ed.): Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM 2017, Cambridge, United Kingdom, February 6-10, 2017, pp. 61–70, ACM, 2017.

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Tabibian, Behzad; Valera, Isabel; Farajtabar, Mehrdad; Song, Le; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel

Distilling Information Reliability and Source Trustworthiness from Digital Traces Proceedings Article

In: Barrett, Rick; Cummings, Rick; Agichtein, Eugene; Gabrilovich, Evgeniy (Ed.): Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2017, Perth, Australia, April 3-7, 2017, pp. 847–855, ACM, 2017.

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Zafar, Muhammad Bilal; Valera, Isabel; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel; Gummadi, Krishna P.

Fairness Beyond Disparate Treatment & Disparate Impact: Learning Classification without Disparate Mistreatment Proceedings Article

In: Barrett, Rick; Cummings, Rick; Agichtein, Eugene; Gabrilovich, Evgeniy (Ed.): Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2017, Perth, Australia, April 3-7, 2017, pp. 1171–1180, ACM, 2017.

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Mavroforakis, Charalampos; Valera, Isabel; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel

Modeling the Dynamics of Learning Activity on the Web Proceedings Article

In: Barrett, Rick; Cummings, Rick; Agichtein, Eugene; Gabrilovich, Evgeniy (Ed.): Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2017, Perth, Australia, April 3-7, 2017, pp. 1421–1430, ACM, 2017.

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2016

Valera, Isabel; Ruiz, Francisco J. R.; Olmos, Pablo M.; Blanco, Carlos; Pérez-Cruz, Fernando

Infinite Continuous Feature Model for Psychiatric Comorbidity Analysis Journal Article

In: Neural Comput., vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 354–381, 2016.

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Valera, Isabel; Ruiz, Francisco J. R.; Pérez-Cruz, Fernando

Infinite Factorial Unbounded-State Hidden Markov Model Journal Article

In: IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., vol. 38, no. 9, pp. 1816–1828, 2016.

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De, Abir; Valera, Isabel; Ganguly, Niloy; Bhattacharya, Sourangshu; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel

Learning and Forecasting Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks Proceedings Article

In: Lee, Daniel D.; Sugiyama, Masashi; Luxburg, Ulrike; Guyon, Isabelle; Garnett, Roman (Ed.): Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2016, December 5-10, 2016, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 397–405, 2016.

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Babaei, Mahmoudreza; Grabowicz, Przemyslaw A.; Valera, Isabel; Gummadi, Krishna P.; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel

On the Efficiency of the Information Networks in Social Media Proceedings Article

In: Bennett, Paul N.; Josifovski, Vanja; Neville, Jennifer; Radlinski, Filip (Ed.): Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, San Francisco, CA, USA, February 22-25, 2016, pp. 83–92, ACM, 2016.

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Mavroforakis, Charalampos; Valera, Isabel; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel

Modeling the Dynamics of Online Learning Activity Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/1610.05775, 2016.

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2015

Valera, Isabel; Ruiz, Francisco J. R.; Svensson, Lennart; Pérez-Cruz, Fernando

A Bayesian nonparametric approach for blind multiuser channel estimation Proceedings Article

In: 23rd European Signal Processing Conference, EUSIPCO 2015, Nice, France, August 31 - September 4, 2015, pp. 2766–2770, IEEE, 2015.

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Valera, Isabel; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel

Modeling Adoption and Usage of Competing Products Proceedings Article

In: Aggarwal, Charu C.; Zhou, Zhi-Hua; Tuzhilin, Alexander; Xiong, Hui; Wu, Xindong (Ed.): 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM 2015, Atlantic City, NJ, USA, November 14-17, 2015, pp. 409–418, IEEE Computer Society, 2015.

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Babaei, Mahmoudreza; Grabowicz, Przemyslaw A.; Valera, Isabel; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel

On the Users' Efficiency in the Twitter Information Network Proceedings Article

In: Cha, Meeyoung; Mascolo, Cecilia; Sandvig, Christian (Ed.): Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2015, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, May 26-29, 2015, pp. 570–573, AAAI Press, 2015.

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Valera, Isabel; Ruiz, Francisco J. R.; Svensson, Lennart; Pérez-Cruz, Fernando

Infinite Factorial Dynamical Model Proceedings Article

In: Cortes, Corinna; Lawrence, Neil D.; Lee, Daniel D.; Sugiyama, Masashi; Garnett, Roman (Ed.): Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2015, December 7-12, 2015, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, pp. 1666–1674, 2015.

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De, Abir; Valera, Isabel; Ganguly, Niloy; Bhattacharya, Sourangshu; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel

Modeling Opinion Dynamics in Diffusion Networks Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/1506.05474, 2015.

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2014

Ruiz, Francisco J. R.; Valera, Isabel; Blanco, Carlos; Pérez-Cruz, Fernando

Bayesian nonparametric comorbidity analysis of psychiatric disorders Journal Article

In: J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1215–1247, 2014.

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57 entries « 1 of 2 »