Erik Štrumbelj receives the Jožef Stefan Golden Emblem

• Posted On: March 26, 2015
• Posted By: tilen

Dr. Erik Štrumbelj received the Jožef Stefan Golden Emblem for his doctoral dissertation in the field of computer science and informatics titled “Efficient Explanation of Predictions of Classification and Regression Models.” The award is presented annually by the Jožef Stefan Institute (IJS) to the most outstanding doctoral theses.

Erik Štrumbelj earned his PhD in 2011 at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Igor Kononenko. His doctoral work falls within the field of machine learning and addresses the problem of evaluating the contribution of individual input variables in predictive models and their predictions.

The contributions of input variables provide insight into models, offering explanations that are extremely important in practical applications involving complex and difficult-to-understand predictive models in machine learning, such as SVMs, neural networks, and random forests. In his work, the author developed and theoretically grounded a general method that considers the contributions of all subsets. He avoided exponential time complexity by using an adaptive Monte Carlo approximation algorithm, making the method efficient enough for practical use.

He published the results of his research in several high-impact scientific journals, including one of the most prestigious journals in machine learning, the Journal of Machine Learning Research. Both the author and other researchers have applied methods derived from his doctoral work as tools in various practical machine learning applications: predicting breast cancer recurrence, diagnosing cardiovascular diseases, forecasting business outcomes, predicting maximum shear stress on vessel walls, and explaining predictive models for data streams.

The Jožef Stefan Golden Emblem is awarded annually for the most outstanding doctoral works. To date, 66 Jožef Stefan Golden Emblems have been awarded. It was first awarded in 1993, on the centenary of Jožef Stefan’s death. At that time, the Golden Emblem was awarded to Dr. Igor Kononenko and Dr. Bojan Cestnik, both supervised by Prof. Dr. Ivan Bratko.

In addition to Dr. Erik Štrumbelj, this year the Golden Emblem was also awarded to Dr. Aljaž Godec for his doctoral thesis in physics titled “Many-body correlations in hydrophobic interactions.”