A Neural Network Approach To Shape From Shading
In this paper, we propose a method of recovering shape from shading that solves directly for the surface height using neural networks. The main motivation of this paper is to provide an answer to the open problem proposed by Zhou and Chellappa [11]. We first formulate the shape from shading problem by combining a triangular element surface model with a linearized reflectance map. Then, we use a linear feed-forward network architecture with six layers to compute the surface height with a singular value decomposition. The weights in the model initialized using eigenvectors and eigen-values of the stiffness matrix of objective functional. Experimental results show that our solution is very effective.

title: Characterizing the dynamic connectivity between genes by variable parameter regression and Kalman filtering based on temporal gene expression data
abstract: One popular method for analyzing functional connectivity between genes is to cluster genes with similar expression profiles. The most popular metrics measuring the similarity (or dissimilarity) among genes include Pearson's correlation, linear regression coefficient and Euclidean distance. As these metrics only give some constant values, they can only depict a stationary connectivity between genes. However, the functional connectivity between genes usually changes with time. Here, we introduce a novel insight for characterizing the relationship between genes and find out a proper mathematical model, variable parameter regression and Kalman filtering to model it.



We applied our algorithm to some simulated data and two pairs of real gene expression data. The changes of connectivity in simulated data are closely identical with the truth and the results of two pairs of gene expression data show that our method has successfully demonstrated the dynamic connectivity between genes.

title: Post-Analysis of Learned Rules
abstract: Rule induction research implicitly assumes that after producing the rules from a dataset, these rules will be used directly by an expert system or a human user. In real-life applications, the situation may not be as simple as that, particularly, when the user of the rules is a human being. The human user almost always has some previous concepts or knowledge about the domain represented by the dataset. Naturally, he/she wishes to know how the new rules compare with his/her existing knowledge. In dynamic domains where the rules may change over time, it is important to know what the changes are. These aspects of research have largely been ignored in the past. With the increasing use of machine leaming tcclmiques in practical applications such as data mining, this issue of post analysis of rules warrants greater emphasis and attention. In this paper, we propose a technique to deal with this problem. A system has been implemented to perform the post analysis of classification rules genemted by systems such as C4.5. The proposed technique is general and highly interactive. It will be particularly useful in data mining and data analysis.

title: Mining Comparative Sentences and Relations
abstract: This paper studies a text mining problem, comparative sentence mining (CSM). A comparative sentence expresses an ordering relation between two sets of entities with respect to some common features. For example, the comparative sentence "Canon's optics are better than those of Sony and Nikon" expresses the comparative relation: (better, {optics}, {Canon}, {Sony, Nikon}). Given a set of evaluative texts on the Web, e.g., reviews, forum postings, and news articles, the task of comparative sentence mining is (1) to identify comparative sentences from the texts and (2) to extract comparative relations from the identified comparative sentences. This problem has many applications. For example, a product manufacturer wants to know customer opinions of its products in comparison with those of its competitors. In this paper, we propose two novel techniques based on two new types of sequential rules to perform the tasks. Experimental evaluation has been conducted using different types of evaluative texts from the Web. Results show that our techniques are very promising.

title: A Novel Fuzzy Neural Network with Fast Training and Accurate Generalization
abstract: For the reason of all parameters in a conventional fuzzy neural network (FNN) needed to be adjusted iteratively, learning can be very slow and may suffer from local minima. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel FNN in this paper, which shows a fast speed and accurate generalization. First we state the universal approximation theorem for an FNN with random membership function parameters (FNN-RM). Since all the membership function parameters are arbitrarily chosen, the proposed FNN-RM algorithm needs to adjust only the output weights of FNNs. Experimental results on function approximation and classification problems show that the new algorithm not only provides thousands of times of speed-up over traditional learning algorithms, but also produces better generalization performance in comparison to other FNNs.

title: Stability Analysis of Social Foraging Swarm with Interaction Time Delays
abstract: This paper considers a swarm model with an attraction-repulsion function involving variable communication time lags and an attractant/repellent. It is proved that for quadratic attractant/repellent profiles the members of the swarm with time delays will aggregate and form a cohesive cluster of finite size in a finite time. Moreover, all the swarm members will converge to more favorable areas of the quadratic attractant/repellent profiles under certain conditions in the presence of communication delays.

title: Neural Network Identification Method Applied to the Nonlinear System
abstract: A kind of neural network solution method has been proposed in the paper aiming at a class of non-linear process control system with the characteristic of time delay. In this scheme, a new-type associative memory neural network is used to model the controlled system, and the fuzzy neural network with inverse identification structure is adopted to control the nonlinear process system. This fuzzy neural network control method adopts the structure of three layers combine neural network identifier with inverse structure. Computer simulation and lab application show that it is effective to adopt this scheme to control on-linear process system with time delay.