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An Initial Seed Selection Algorithm for K-means Clustering of Georeferenced Data to Improve Replicability of Cluster Assignments for Mapping Application

cs.LG

K-means is one of the most widely used clustering algorithms in various disciplines, especially for large datasets. However the method is known to be highly sensitive to initial seed selection of cluster centers. K-means++ has been proposed to overcome this problem and has been shown to have better accuracy and computational efficiency than k-means. In many clustering problems though -such as when classifying georeferenced data for mapping applications- standardization of clustering methodology, specifically, the ability to arrive at the same cluster assignment for every run of the method i.e. replicability of the methodology, may be of greater significance than any perceived measure of accuracy, especially when the solution is known to be non-unique, as in the case of k-means clustering. Here we propose a simple initial seed selection algorithm for k-means clustering along one attribute that draws initial cluster boundaries along the 'deepest valleys' or greatest gaps in dataset. Thus, it incorporates a measure to maximize distance between consecutive cluster centers which augments the conventional k-means optimization for minimum distance between cluster center and cluster members. Unlike existing initialization methods, no additional parameters or degrees of freedom are introduced to the clustering algorithm. This improves the replicability of cluster assignments by as much as 100% over k-means and k-means++, virtually reducing the variance over different runs to zero, without introducing any additional parameters to the clustering process. Further, the proposed method is more computationally efficient than k-means++ and in some cases, more accurate.

computer science

CT-Mapper: Mapping Sparse Multimodal Cellular Trajectories using a Multilayer Transportation Network

cs.SI

Mobile phone data have recently become an attractive source of information about mobility behavior. Since cell phone data can be captured in a passive way for a large user population, they can be harnessed to collect well-sampled mobility information. In this paper, we propose CT-Mapper, an unsupervised algorithm that enables the mapping of mobile phone traces over a multimodal transport network. One of the main strengths of CT-Mapper is its capability to map noisy sparse cellular multimodal trajectories over a multilayer transportation network where the layers have different physical properties and not only to map trajectories associated with a single layer. Such a network is modeled by a large multilayer graph in which the nodes correspond to metro/train stations or road intersections and edges correspond to connections between them. The mapping problem is modeled by an unsupervised HMM where the observations correspond to sparse user mobile trajectories and the hidden states to the multilayer graph nodes. The HMM is unsupervised as the transition and emission probabilities are inferred using respectively the physical transportation properties and the information on the spatial coverage of antenna base stations. To evaluate CT-Mapper we collected cellular traces with their corresponding GPS trajectories for a group of volunteer users in Paris and vicinity (France). We show that CT-Mapper is able to accurately retrieve the real cell phone user paths despite the sparsity of the observed trace trajectories. Furthermore our transition probability model is up to 20% more accurate than other naive models.

computer science

Observing and Recommending from a Social Web with Biases

cs.DB

The research question this report addresses is: how, and to what extent, those directly involved with the design, development and employment of a specific black box algorithm can be certain that it is not unlawfully discriminating (directly and/or indirectly) against particular persons with protected characteristics (e.g. gender, race and ethnicity)?

computer science

Unbiased Comparative Evaluation of Ranking Functions

cs.IR

Eliciting relevance judgments for ranking evaluation is labor-intensive and costly, motivating careful selection of which documents to judge. Unlike traditional approaches that make this selection deterministically, probabilistic sampling has shown intriguing promise since it enables the design of estimators that are provably unbiased even when reusing data with missing judgments. In this paper, we first unify and extend these sampling approaches by viewing the evaluation problem as a Monte Carlo estimation task that applies to a large number of common IR metrics. Drawing on the theoretical clarity that this view offers, we tackle three practical evaluation scenarios: comparing two systems, comparing $k$ systems against a baseline, and ranking $k$ systems. For each scenario, we derive an estimator and a variance-optimizing sampling distribution while retaining the strengths of sampling-based evaluation, including unbiasedness, reusability despite missing data, and ease of use in practice. In addition to the theoretical contribution, we empirically evaluate our methods against previously used sampling heuristics and find that they generally cut the number of required relevance judgments at least in half.

computer science

Towards Reduced Reference Parametric Models for Estimating Audiovisual Quality in Multimedia Services

cs.MM

We have developed reduced reference parametric models for estimating perceived quality in audiovisual multimedia services. We have created 144 unique configurations for audiovisual content including various application and network parameters such as bitrates and distortions in terms of bandwidth, packet loss rate and jitter. To generate the data needed for model training and validation we have tasked 24 subjects, in a controlled environment, to rate the overall audiovisual quality on the absolute category rating (ACR) 5-level quality scale. We have developed models using Random Forest and Neural Network based machine learning methods in order to estimate Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) values. We have used information retrieved from the packet headers and side information provided as network parameters for model training. Random Forest based models have performed better in terms of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Pearson correlation coefficient. The side information proved to be very effective in developing the model. We have found that, while the model performance might be improved by replacing the side information with more accurate bit stream level measurements, they are performing well in estimating perceived quality in audiovisual multimedia services.

computer science

Convolutional Neural Networks For Automatic State-Time Feature Extraction in Reinforcement Learning Applied to Residential Load Control

cs.LG

Direct load control of a heterogeneous cluster of residential demand flexibility sources is a high-dimensional control problem with partial observability. This work proposes a novel approach that uses a convolutional neural network to extract hidden state-time features to mitigate the curse of partial observability. More specific, a convolutional neural network is used as a function approximator to estimate the state-action value function or Q-function in the supervised learning step of fitted Q-iteration. The approach is evaluated in a qualitative simulation, comprising a cluster of thermostatically controlled loads that only share their air temperature, whilst their envelope temperature remains hidden. The simulation results show that the presented approach is able to capture the underlying hidden features and successfully reduce the electricity cost the cluster.

computer science

Detection of epileptic seizure in EEG signals using linear least squares preprocessing

cs.LG

An epileptic seizure is a transient event of abnormal excessive neuronal discharge in the brain. This unwanted event can be obstructed by detection of electrical changes in the brain that happen before the seizure takes place. The automatic detection of seizures is necessary since the visual screening of EEG recordings is a time consuming task and requires experts to improve the diagnosis. Four linear least squares-based preprocessing models are proposed to extract key features of an EEG signal in order to detect seizures. The first two models are newly developed. The original signal (EEG) is approximated by a sinusoidal curve. Its amplitude is formed by a polynomial function and compared with the pre developed spline function.Different statistical measures namely classification accuracy, true positive and negative rates, false positive and negative rates and precision are utilized to assess the performance of the proposed models. These metrics are derived from confusion matrices obtained from classifiers. Different classifiers are used over the original dataset and the set of extracted features. The proposed models significantly reduce the dimension of the classification problem and the computational time while the classification accuracy is improved in most cases. The first and third models are promising feature extraction methods. Logistic, LazyIB1, LazyIB5 and J48 are the best classifiers. Their true positive and negative rates are $1$ while false positive and negative rates are zero and the corresponding precision values are $1$. Numerical results suggest that these models are robust and efficient for detecting epileptic seizure.

computer science

A movie genre prediction based on Multivariate Bernoulli model and genre correlations

cs.IR

Movie ratings play an important role both in determining the likelihood of a potential viewer to watch the movie and in reflecting the current viewer satisfaction with the movie. They are available in several sources like the television guide, best-selling reference books, newspaper columns, and television programs. Furthermore, movie ratings are crucial for recommendation engines that track the behavior of all users and utilize the information to suggest items they might like. Movie ratings in most cases, thus, provide information that might be more important than movie feature-based data. It is intuitively appealing that information about the viewing preferences in movie genres is sufficient for predicting a genre of an unlabeled movie. In order to predict movie genres, we treat ratings as a feature vector, apply the Bernoulli event model to estimate the likelihood of a movies given genre, and evaluate the posterior probability of the genre of a given movie using the Bayes rule. The goal of the proposed technique is to efficiently use the movie ratings for the task of predicting movie genres. In our approach we attempted to answer the question: "Given the set of users who watched a movie, is it possible to predict the genre of a movie based on its ratings?" Our simulation results with MovieLens 100k data demonstrated the efficiency and accuracy of our proposed technique, achieving 59% prediction rate for exact prediction and 69% when including correlated genres.

computer science

Music transcription modelling and composition using deep learning

cs.SD

We apply deep learning methods, specifically long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, to music transcription modelling and composition. We build and train LSTM networks using approximately 23,000 music transcriptions expressed with a high-level vocabulary (ABC notation), and use them to generate new transcriptions. Our practical aim is to create music transcription models useful in particular contexts of music composition. We present results from three perspectives: 1) at the population level, comparing descriptive statistics of the set of training transcriptions and generated transcriptions; 2) at the individual level, examining how a generated transcription reflects the conventions of a music practice in the training transcriptions (Celtic folk); 3) at the application level, using the system for idea generation in music composition. We make our datasets, software and sound examples open and available: \url{https://github.com/IraKorshunova/folk-rnn}.

computer science

Joint Sound Source Separation and Speaker Recognition

cs.SD

Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has already been applied to learn speaker characterizations from single or non-simultaneous speech for speaker recognition applications. It is also known for its good performance in (blind) source separation for simultaneous speech. This paper explains how NMF can be used to jointly solve the two problems in a multichannel speaker recognizer for simultaneous speech. It is shown how state-of-the-art multichannel NMF for blind source separation can be easily extended to incorporate speaker recognition. Experiments on the CHiME corpus show that this method outperforms the sequential approach of first applying source separation, followed by speaker recognition that uses state-of-the-art i-vector techniques.

computer science

A game-theoretic version of Oakes' example for randomized forecasting

cs.LG

Using the game-theoretic framework for probability, Vovk and Shafer. have shown that it is always possible, using randomization, to make sequential probability forecasts that pass any countable set of well-behaved statistical tests. This result generalizes work by other authors, who consider only tests of calbration. We complement this result with a lower bound. We show that Vovk and Shafer's result is valid only when the forecasts are computed with unrestrictedly increasing degree of accuracy. When some level of discreteness is fixed, we present a game-theoretic generalization of Oakes' example for randomized forecasting that is a test failing any given method of deferministic forecasting; originally, this example was presented for deterministic calibration.

computer science

Craniofacial reconstruction as a prediction problem using a Latent Root Regression model

cs.LG

In this paper, we present a computer-assisted method for facial reconstruction. This method provides an estimation of the facial shape associated with unidentified skeletal remains. Current computer-assisted methods using a statistical framework rely on a common set of extracted points located on the bone and soft-tissue surfaces. Most of the facial reconstruction methods then consist of predicting the position of the soft-tissue surface points, when the positions of the bone surface points are known. We propose to use Latent Root Regression for prediction. The results obtained are then compared to those given by Principal Components Analysis linear models. In conjunction, we have evaluated the influence of the number of skull landmarks used. Anatomical skull landmarks are completed iteratively by points located upon geodesics which link these anatomical landmarks, thus enabling us to artificially increase the number of skull points. Facial points are obtained using a mesh-matching algorithm between a common reference mesh and individual soft-tissue surface meshes. The proposed method is validated in term of accuracy, based on a leave-one-out cross-validation test applied to a homogeneous database. Accuracy measures are obtained by computing the distance between the original face surface and its reconstruction. Finally, these results are discussed referring to current computer-assisted reconstruction facial techniques.

computer science

Near-optimal Coresets For Least-Squares Regression

cs.DS

We study (constrained) least-squares regression as well as multiple response least-squares regression and ask the question of whether a subset of the data, a coreset, suffices to compute a good approximate solution to the regression. We give deterministic, low order polynomial-time algorithms to construct such coresets with approximation guarantees, together with lower bounds indicating that there is not much room for improvement upon our results.

computer science

Finding a most biased coin with fewest flips

cs.DS

We study the problem of learning a most biased coin among a set of coins by tossing the coins adaptively. The goal is to minimize the number of tosses until we identify a coin i* whose posterior probability of being most biased is at least 1-delta for a given delta. Under a particular probabilistic model, we give an optimal algorithm, i.e., an algorithm that minimizes the expected number of future tosses. The problem is closely related to finding the best arm in the multi-armed bandit problem using adaptive strategies. Our algorithm employs an optimal adaptive strategy -- a strategy that performs the best possible action at each step after observing the outcomes of all previous coin tosses. Consequently, our algorithm is also optimal for any starting history of outcomes. To our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that employs an optimal adaptive strategy under a Bayesian setting for this problem. Our proof of optimality employs tools from the field of Markov games.

computer science

Guaranteed clustering and biclustering via semidefinite programming

math.OC

Identifying clusters of similar objects in data plays a significant role in a wide range of applications. As a model problem for clustering, we consider the densest k-disjoint-clique problem, whose goal is to identify the collection of k disjoint cliques of a given weighted complete graph maximizing the sum of the densities of the complete subgraphs induced by these cliques. In this paper, we establish conditions ensuring exact recovery of the densest k cliques of a given graph from the optimal solution of a particular semidefinite program. In particular, the semidefinite relaxation is exact for input graphs corresponding to data consisting of k large, distinct clusters and a smaller number of outliers. This approach also yields a semidefinite relaxation for the biclustering problem with similar recovery guarantees. Given a set of objects and a set of features exhibited by these objects, biclustering seeks to simultaneously group the objects and features according to their expression levels. This problem may be posed as partitioning the nodes of a weighted bipartite complete graph such that the sum of the densities of the resulting bipartite complete subgraphs is maximized. As in our analysis of the densest k-disjoint-clique problem, we show that the correct partition of the objects and features can be recovered from the optimal solution of a semidefinite program in the case that the given data consists of several disjoint sets of objects exhibiting similar features. Empirical evidence from numerical experiments supporting these theoretical guarantees is also provided.

computer science

The best of both worlds: stochastic and adversarial bandits

cs.LG

We present a new bandit algorithm, SAO (Stochastic and Adversarial Optimal), whose regret is, essentially, optimal both for adversarial rewards and for stochastic rewards. Specifically, SAO combines the square-root worst-case regret of Exp3 (Auer et al., SIAM J. on Computing 2002) and the (poly)logarithmic regret of UCB1 (Auer et al., Machine Learning 2002) for stochastic rewards. Adversarial rewards and stochastic rewards are the two main settings in the literature on (non-Bayesian) multi-armed bandits. Prior work on multi-armed bandits treats them separately, and does not attempt to jointly optimize for both. Our result falls into a general theme of achieving good worst-case performance while also taking advantage of "nice" problem instances, an important issue in the design of algorithms with partially known inputs.

computer science

Min Max Generalization for Two-stage Deterministic Batch Mode Reinforcement Learning: Relaxation Schemes

cs.SY

We study the minmax optimization problem introduced in [22] for computing policies for batch mode reinforcement learning in a deterministic setting. First, we show that this problem is NP-hard. In the two-stage case, we provide two relaxation schemes. The first relaxation scheme works by dropping some constraints in order to obtain a problem that is solvable in polynomial time. The second relaxation scheme, based on a Lagrangian relaxation where all constraints are dualized, leads to a conic quadratic programming problem. We also theoretically prove and empirically illustrate that both relaxation schemes provide better results than those given in [22].

computer science

Nonlinear Laplacian spectral analysis: Capturing intermittent and low-frequency spatiotemporal patterns in high-dimensional data

cs.LG

We present a technique for spatiotemporal data analysis called nonlinear Laplacian spectral analysis (NLSA), which generalizes singular spectrum analysis (SSA) to take into account the nonlinear manifold structure of complex data sets. The key principle underlying NLSA is that the functions used to represent temporal patterns should exhibit a degree of smoothness on the nonlinear data manifold M; a constraint absent from classical SSA. NLSA enforces such a notion of smoothness by requiring that temporal patterns belong in low-dimensional Hilbert spaces V_l spanned by the leading l Laplace-Beltrami eigenfunctions on M. These eigenfunctions can be evaluated efficiently in high ambient-space dimensions using sparse graph-theoretic algorithms. Moreover, they provide orthonormal bases to expand a family of linear maps, whose singular value decomposition leads to sets of spatiotemporal patterns at progressively finer resolution on the data manifold. The Riemannian measure of M and an adaptive graph kernel width enhances the capability of NLSA to detect important nonlinear processes, including intermittency and rare events. The minimum dimension of V_l required to capture these features while avoiding overfitting is estimated here using spectral entropy criteria.

computer science

A Stochastic Gradient Method with an Exponential Convergence Rate for Finite Training Sets

math.OC

We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed method incorporates a memory of previous gradient values in order to achieve a linear convergence rate. In a machine learning context, numerical experiments indicate that the new algorithm can dramatically outperform standard algorithms, both in terms of optimizing the training error and reducing the test error quickly.

computer science

A Route Confidence Evaluation Method for Reliable Hierarchical Text Categorization

cs.IR

Hierarchical Text Categorization (HTC) is becoming increasingly important with the rapidly growing amount of text data available in the World Wide Web. Among the different strategies proposed to cope with HTC, the Local Classifier per Node (LCN) approach attains good performance by mirroring the underlying class hierarchy while enforcing a top-down strategy in the testing step. However, the problem of embedding hierarchical information (parent-child relationship) to improve the performance of HTC systems still remains open. A confidence evaluation method for a selected route in the hierarchy is proposed to evaluate the reliability of the final candidate labels in an HTC system. In order to take into account the information embedded in the hierarchy, weight factors are used to take into account the importance of each level. An acceptance/rejection strategy in the top-down decision making process is proposed, which improves the overall categorization accuracy by rejecting a few percentage of samples, i.e., those with low reliability score. Experimental results on the Reuters benchmark dataset (RCV1- v2) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, compared to other state-of-the art HTC methods.

computer science

A Machine Learning Approach For Opinion Holder Extraction In Arabic Language

cs.IR

Opinion mining aims at extracting useful subjective information from reliable amounts of text. Opinion mining holder recognition is a task that has not been considered yet in Arabic Language. This task essentially requires deep understanding of clauses structures. Unfortunately, the lack of a robust, publicly available, Arabic parser further complicates the research. This paper presents a leading research for the opinion holder extraction in Arabic news independent from any lexical parsers. We investigate constructing a comprehensive feature set to compensate the lack of parsing structural outcomes. The proposed feature set is tuned from English previous works coupled with our proposed semantic field and named entities features. Our feature analysis is based on Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and semi-supervised pattern recognition techniques. Different research models are evaluated via cross-validation experiments achieving 54.03 F-measure. We publicly release our own research outcome corpus and lexicon for opinion mining community to encourage further research.

computer science

Memory-Efficient Topic Modeling

cs.LG

As one of the simplest probabilistic topic modeling techniques, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) has found many important applications in text mining, computer vision and computational biology. Recent training algorithms for LDA can be interpreted within a unified message passing framework. However, message passing requires storing previous messages with a large amount of memory space, increasing linearly with the number of documents or the number of topics. Therefore, the high memory usage is often a major problem for topic modeling of massive corpora containing a large number of topics. To reduce the space complexity, we propose a novel algorithm without storing previous messages for training LDA: tiny belief propagation (TBP). The basic idea of TBP relates the message passing algorithms with the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithms, which absorb the message updating into the message passing process, and thus avoid storing previous messages. Experimental results on four large data sets confirm that TBP performs comparably well or even better than current state-of-the-art training algorithms for LDA but with a much less memory consumption. TBP can do topic modeling when massive corpora cannot fit in the computer memory, for example, extracting thematic topics from 7 GB PUBMED corpora on a common desktop computer with 2GB memory.

computer science

PRISMA: PRoximal Iterative SMoothing Algorithm

math.OC

Motivated by learning problems including max-norm regularized matrix completion and clustering, robust PCA and sparse inverse covariance selection, we propose a novel optimization algorithm for minimizing a convex objective which decomposes into three parts: a smooth part, a simple non-smooth Lipschitz part, and a simple non-smooth non-Lipschitz part. We use a time variant smoothing strategy that allows us to obtain a guarantee that does not depend on knowing in advance the total number of iterations nor a bound on the domain.

computer science

Sparse Distributed Learning Based on Diffusion Adaptation

cs.LG

This article proposes diffusion LMS strategies for distributed estimation over adaptive networks that are able to exploit sparsity in the underlying system model. The approach relies on convex regularization, common in compressive sensing, to enhance the detection of sparsity via a diffusive process over the network. The resulting algorithms endow networks with learning abilities and allow them to learn the sparse structure from the incoming data in real-time, and also to track variations in the sparsity of the model. We provide convergence and mean-square performance analysis of the proposed method and show under what conditions it outperforms the unregularized diffusion version. We also show how to adaptively select the regularization parameter. Simulation results illustrate the advantage of the proposed filters for sparse data recovery.

computer science

Improved Spectral-Norm Bounds for Clustering

cs.LG

Aiming to unify known results about clustering mixtures of distributions under separation conditions, Kumar and Kannan[2010] introduced a deterministic condition for clustering datasets. They showed that this single deterministic condition encompasses many previously studied clustering assumptions. More specifically, their proximity condition requires that in the target $k$-clustering, the projection of a point $x$ onto the line joining its cluster center $\mu$ and some other center $\mu'$, is a large additive factor closer to $\mu$ than to $\mu'$. This additive factor can be roughly described as $k$ times the spectral norm of the matrix representing the differences between the given (known) dataset and the means of the (unknown) target clustering. Clearly, the proximity condition implies center separation -- the distance between any two centers must be as large as the above mentioned bound. In this paper we improve upon the work of Kumar and Kannan along several axes. First, we weaken the center separation bound by a factor of $\sqrt{k}$, and secondly we weaken the proximity condition by a factor of $k$. Using these weaker bounds we still achieve the same guarantees when all points satisfy the proximity condition. We also achieve better guarantees when only $(1-\epsilon)$-fraction of the points satisfy the weaker proximity condition. The bulk of our analysis relies only on center separation under which one can produce a clustering which (i) has low error, (ii) has low $k$-means cost, and (iii) has centers very close to the target centers. Our improved separation condition allows us to match the results of the Planted Partition Model of McSherry[2001], improve upon the results of Ostrovsky et al[2006], and improve separation results for mixture of Gaussian models in a particular setting.

computer science

A Novel Approach for Protein Structure Prediction

cs.LG

The idea of this project is to study the protein structure and sequence relationship using the hidden markov model and artificial neural network. In this context we have assumed two hidden markov models. In first model we have taken protein secondary structures as hidden and protein sequences as observed. In second model we have taken protein sequences as hidden and protein structures as observed. The efficiencies for both the hidden markov models have been calculated. The results show that the efficiencies of first model is greater that the second one .These efficiencies are cross validated using artificial neural network. This signifies the importance of protein secondary structures as the main hidden controlling factors due to which we observe a particular amino acid sequence. This also signifies that protein secondary structure is more conserved in comparison to amino acid sequence.

computer science

Unsupervised adaptation of brain machine interface decoders

cs.LG

The performance of neural decoders can degrade over time due to nonstationarities in the relationship between neuronal activity and behavior. In this case, brain-machine interfaces (BMI) require adaptation of their decoders to maintain high performance across time. One way to achieve this is by use of periodical calibration phases, during which the BMI system (or an external human demonstrator) instructs the user to perform certain movements or behaviors. This approach has two disadvantages: (i) calibration phases interrupt the autonomous operation of the BMI and (ii) between two calibration phases the BMI performance might not be stable but continuously decrease. A better alternative would be that the BMI decoder is able to continuously adapt in an unsupervised manner during autonomous BMI operation, i.e. without knowing the movement intentions of the user. In the present article, we present an efficient method for such unsupervised training of BMI systems for continuous movement control. The proposed method utilizes a cost function derived from neuronal recordings, which guides a learning algorithm to evaluate the decoding parameters. We verify the performance of our adaptive method by simulating a BMI user with an optimal feedback control model and its interaction with our adaptive BMI decoder. The simulation results show that the cost function and the algorithm yield fast and precise trajectories towards targets at random orientations on a 2-dimensional computer screen. For initially unknown and non-stationary tuning parameters, our unsupervised method is still able to generate precise trajectories and to keep its performance stable in the long term. The algorithm can optionally work also with neuronal error signals instead or in conjunction with the proposed unsupervised adaptation.

computer science

ConeRANK: Ranking as Learning Generalized Inequalities

cs.LG

We propose a new data mining approach in ranking documents based on the concept of cone-based generalized inequalities between vectors. A partial ordering between two vectors is made with respect to a proper cone and thus learning the preferences is formulated as learning proper cones. A pairwise learning-to-rank algorithm (ConeRank) is proposed to learn a non-negative subspace, formulated as a polyhedral cone, over document-pair differences. The algorithm is regularized by controlling the `volume' of the cone. The experimental studies on the latest and largest ranking dataset LETOR 4.0 shows that ConeRank is competitive against other recent ranking approaches.

computer science

Parsimonious Mahalanobis Kernel for the Classification of High Dimensional Data

cs.NA

The classification of high dimensional data with kernel methods is considered in this article. Exploit- ing the emptiness property of high dimensional spaces, a kernel based on the Mahalanobis distance is proposed. The computation of the Mahalanobis distance requires the inversion of a covariance matrix. In high dimensional spaces, the estimated covariance matrix is ill-conditioned and its inversion is unstable or impossible. Using a parsimonious statistical model, namely the High Dimensional Discriminant Analysis model, the specific signal and noise subspaces are estimated for each considered class making the inverse of the class specific covariance matrix explicit and stable, leading to the definition of a parsimonious Mahalanobis kernel. A SVM based framework is used for selecting the hyperparameters of the parsimonious Mahalanobis kernel by optimizing the so-called radius-margin bound. Experimental results on three high dimensional data sets show that the proposed kernel is suitable for classifying high dimensional data, providing better classification accuracies than the conventional Gaussian kernel.

computer science

Projection-free Online Learning

cs.LG

The computational bottleneck in applying online learning to massive data sets is usually the projection step. We present efficient online learning algorithms that eschew projections in favor of much more efficient linear optimization steps using the Frank-Wolfe technique. We obtain a range of regret bounds for online convex optimization, with better bounds for specific cases such as stochastic online smooth convex optimization. Besides the computational advantage, other desirable features of our algorithms are that they are parameter-free in the stochastic case and produce sparse decisions. We apply our algorithms to computationally intensive applications of collaborative filtering, and show the theoretical improvements to be clearly visible on standard datasets.

computer science

Provable ICA with Unknown Gaussian Noise, and Implications for Gaussian Mixtures and Autoencoders

cs.LG

We present a new algorithm for Independent Component Analysis (ICA) which has provable performance guarantees. In particular, suppose we are given samples of the form $y = Ax + \eta$ where $A$ is an unknown $n \times n$ matrix and $x$ is a random variable whose components are independent and have a fourth moment strictly less than that of a standard Gaussian random variable and $\eta$ is an $n$-dimensional Gaussian random variable with unknown covariance $\Sigma$: We give an algorithm that provable recovers $A$ and $\Sigma$ up to an additive $\epsilon$ and whose running time and sample complexity are polynomial in $n$ and $1 / \epsilon$. To accomplish this, we introduce a novel "quasi-whitening" step that may be useful in other contexts in which the covariance of Gaussian noise is not known in advance. We also give a general framework for finding all local optima of a function (given an oracle for approximately finding just one) and this is a crucial step in our algorithm, one that has been overlooked in previous attempts, and allows us to control the accumulation of error when we find the columns of $A$ one by one via local search.

computer science

Discrete Elastic Inner Vector Spaces with Application in Time Series and Sequence Mining

cs.LG

This paper proposes a framework dedicated to the construction of what we call discrete elastic inner product allowing one to embed sets of non-uniformly sampled multivariate time series or sequences of varying lengths into inner product space structures. This framework is based on a recursive definition that covers the case of multiple embedded time elastic dimensions. We prove that such inner products exist in our general framework and show how a simple instance of this inner product class operates on some prospective applications, while generalizing the Euclidean inner product. Classification experimentations on time series and symbolic sequences datasets demonstrate the benefits that we can expect by embedding time series or sequences into elastic inner spaces rather than into classical Euclidean spaces. These experiments show good accuracy when compared to the euclidean distance or even dynamic programming algorithms while maintaining a linear algorithmic complexity at exploitation stage, although a quadratic indexing phase beforehand is required.

computer science

Sequential Document Representations and Simplicial Curves

cs.IR

The popular bag of words assumption represents a document as a histogram of word occurrences. While computationally efficient, such a representation is unable to maintain any sequential information. We present a continuous and differentiable sequential document representation that goes beyond the bag of words assumption, and yet is efficient and effective. This representation employs smooth curves in the multinomial simplex to account for sequential information. We discuss the representation and its geometric properties and demonstrate its applicability for the task of text classification.

computer science

Distributed Adaptive Networks: A Graphical Evolutionary Game-Theoretic View

cs.GT

Distributed adaptive filtering has been considered as an effective approach for data processing and estimation over distributed networks. Most existing distributed adaptive filtering algorithms focus on designing different information diffusion rules, regardless of the nature evolutionary characteristic of a distributed network. In this paper, we study the adaptive network from the game theoretic perspective and formulate the distributed adaptive filtering problem as a graphical evolutionary game. With the proposed formulation, the nodes in the network are regarded as players and the local combiner of estimation information from different neighbors is regarded as different strategies selection. We show that this graphical evolutionary game framework is very general and can unify the existing adaptive network algorithms. Based on this framework, as examples, we further propose two error-aware adaptive filtering algorithms. Moreover, we use graphical evolutionary game theory to analyze the information diffusion process over the adaptive networks and evolutionarily stable strategy of the system. Finally, simulation results are shown to verify the effectiveness of our analysis and proposed methods.

computer science

Learning Mixtures of Arbitrary Distributions over Large Discrete Domains

cs.LG

We give an algorithm for learning a mixture of {\em unstructured} distributions. This problem arises in various unsupervised learning scenarios, for example in learning {\em topic models} from a corpus of documents spanning several topics. We show how to learn the constituents of a mixture of $k$ arbitrary distributions over a large discrete domain $[n]=\{1,2,\dots,n\}$ and the mixture weights, using $O(n\polylog n)$ samples. (In the topic-model learning setting, the mixture constituents correspond to the topic distributions.) This task is information-theoretically impossible for $k>1$ under the usual sampling process from a mixture distribution. However, there are situations (such as the above-mentioned topic model case) in which each sample point consists of several observations from the same mixture constituent. This number of observations, which we call the {\em "sampling aperture"}, is a crucial parameter of the problem. We obtain the {\em first} bounds for this mixture-learning problem {\em without imposing any assumptions on the mixture constituents.} We show that efficient learning is possible exactly at the information-theoretically least-possible aperture of $2k-1$. Thus, we achieve near-optimal dependence on $n$ and optimal aperture. While the sample-size required by our algorithm depends exponentially on $k$, we prove that such a dependence is {\em unavoidable} when one considers general mixtures. A sequence of tools contribute to the algorithm, such as concentration results for random matrices, dimension reduction, moment estimations, and sensitivity analysis.

computer science

Mining Techniques in Network Security to Enhance Intrusion Detection Systems

cs.CR

In intrusion detection systems, classifiers still suffer from several drawbacks such as data dimensionality and dominance, different network feature types, and data impact on the classification. In this paper two significant enhancements are presented to solve these drawbacks. The first enhancement is an improved feature selection using sequential backward search and information gain. This, in turn, extracts valuable features that enhance positively the detection rate and reduce the false positive rate. The second enhancement is transferring nominal network features to numeric ones by exploiting the discrete random variable and the probability mass function to solve the problem of different feature types, the problem of data dominance, and data impact on the classification. The latter is combined to known normalization methods to achieve a significant hybrid normalization approach. Finally, an intensive and comparative study approves the efficiency of these enhancements and shows better performance comparing to other proposed methods.

computer science

Efficient Gradient Estimation for Motor Control Learning

cs.LG

The task of estimating the gradient of a function in the presence of noise is central to several forms of reinforcement learning, including policy search methods. We present two techniques for reducing gradient estimation errors in the presence of observable input noise applied to the control signal. The first method extends the idea of a reinforcement baseline by fitting a local linear model to the function whose gradient is being estimated; we show how to find the linear model that minimizes the variance of the gradient estimate, and how to estimate the model from data. The second method improves this further by discounting components of the gradient vector that have high variance. These methods are applied to the problem of motor control learning, where actuator noise has a significant influence on behavior. In particular, we apply the techniques to learn locally optimal controllers for a dart-throwing task using a simulated three-link arm; we demonstrate that proposed methods significantly improve the reward function gradient estimate and, consequently, the learning curve, over existing methods.

computer science

Know Your Personalization: Learning Topic level Personalization in Online Services

cs.LG

Online service platforms (OSPs), such as search engines, news-websites, ad-providers, etc., serve highly pe rsonalized content to the user, based on the profile extracted from his history with the OSP. Although personalization (generally) leads to a better user experience, it also raises privacy concerns for the user---he does not know what is present in his profile and more importantly, what is being used to per sonalize content for him. In this paper, we capture OSP's personalization for an user in a new data structure called the person alization vector ($\eta$), which is a weighted vector over a set of topics, and present techniques to compute it for users of an OSP. Our approach treats OSPs as black-boxes, and extracts $\eta$ by mining only their output, specifical ly, the personalized (for an user) and vanilla (without any user information) contents served, and the differences in these content. We formulate a new model called Latent Topic Personalization (LTP) that captures the personalization vector into a learning framework and present efficient inference algorithms for it. We do extensive experiments for search result personalization using both data from real Google users and synthetic datasets. Our results show high accuracy (R-pre = 84%) of LTP in finding personalized topics. For Google data, our qualitative results show how LTP can also identifies evidences---queries for results on a topic with high $\eta$ value were re-ranked. Finally, we show how our approach can be used to build a new Privacy evaluation framework focused at end-user privacy on commercial OSPs.

computer science

A metric for software vulnerabilities classification

cs.SE

Vulnerability discovery and exploits detection are two wide areas of study in software engineering. This preliminary work tries to combine existing methods with machine learning techniques to define a metric classification of vulnerable computer programs. First a feature set has been defined and later two models have been tested against real world vulnerabilities. A relation between the classifier choice and the features has also been outlined.

computer science

Maximally Informative Observables and Categorical Perception

cs.LG

We formulate the problem of perception in the framework of information theory, and prove that categorical perception is equivalent to the existence of an observable that has the maximum possible information on the target of perception. We call such an observable maximally informative. Regardless whether categorical perception is real, maximally informative observables can form the basis of a theory of perception. We conclude with the implications of such a theory for the problem of speech perception.

computer science

Fuzzy soft rough K-Means clustering approach for gene expression data

cs.LG

Clustering is one of the widely used data mining techniques for medical diagnosis. Clustering can be considered as the most important unsupervised learning technique. Most of the clustering methods group data based on distance and few methods cluster data based on similarity. The clustering algorithms classify gene expression data into clusters and the functionally related genes are grouped together in an efficient manner. The groupings are constructed such that the degree of relationship is strong among members of the same cluster and weak among members of different clusters. In this work, we focus on a similarity relationship among genes with similar expression patterns so that a consequential and simple analytical decision can be made from the proposed Fuzzy Soft Rough K-Means algorithm. The algorithm is developed based on Fuzzy Soft sets and Rough sets. Comparative analysis of the proposed work is made with bench mark algorithms like K-Means and Rough K-Means and efficiency of the proposed algorithm is illustrated in this work by using various cluster validity measures such as DB index and Xie-Beni index.

computer science

Soft Set Based Feature Selection Approach for Lung Cancer Images

cs.LG

Lung cancer is the deadliest type of cancer for both men and women. Feature selection plays a vital role in cancer classification. This paper investigates the feature selection process in Computed Tomographic (CT) lung cancer images using soft set theory. We propose a new soft set based unsupervised feature selection algorithm. Nineteen features are extracted from the segmented lung images using gray level co-occurence matrix (GLCM) and gray level different matrix (GLDM). In this paper, an efficient Unsupervised Soft Set based Quick Reduct (SSUSQR) algorithm is presented. This method is used to select features from the data set and compared with existing rough set based unsupervised feature selection methods. Then K-Means and Self Organizing Map (SOM) clustering algorithms are used to cluster the data. The performance of the feature selection algorithms is evaluated based on performance of clustering techniques. The results show that the proposed method effectively removes redundant features.

computer science

Reinforcement learning for port-Hamiltonian systems

cs.SY

Passivity-based control (PBC) for port-Hamiltonian systems provides an intuitive way of achieving stabilization by rendering a system passive with respect to a desired storage function. However, in most instances the control law is obtained without any performance considerations and it has to be calculated by solving a complex partial differential equation (PDE). In order to address these issues we introduce a reinforcement learning approach into the energy-balancing passivity-based control (EB-PBC) method, which is a form of PBC in which the closed-loop energy is equal to the difference between the stored and supplied energies. We propose a technique to parameterize EB-PBC that preserves the systems's PDE matching conditions, does not require the specification of a global desired Hamiltonian, includes performance criteria, and is robust to extra non-linearities such as control input saturation. The parameters of the control law are found using actor-critic reinforcement learning, enabling learning near-optimal control policies satisfying a desired closed-loop energy landscape. The advantages are that near-optimal controllers can be generated using standard energy shaping techniques and that the solutions learned can be interpreted in terms of energy shaping and damping injection, which makes it possible to numerically assess stability using passivity theory. From the reinforcement learning perspective, our proposal allows for the class of port-Hamiltonian systems to be incorporated in the actor-critic framework, speeding up the learning thanks to the resulting parameterization of the policy. The method has been successfully applied to the pendulum swing-up problem in simulations and real-life experiments.

computer science

Transfer Learning Using Logistic Regression in Credit Scoring

cs.LG

The credit scoring risk management is a fast growing field due to consumer's credit requests. Credit requests, of new and existing customers, are often evaluated by classical discrimination rules based on customers information. However, these kinds of strategies have serious limits and don't take into account the characteristics difference between current customers and the future ones. The aim of this paper is to measure credit worthiness for non customers borrowers and to model potential risk given a heterogeneous population formed by borrowers customers of the bank and others who are not. We hold on previous works done in generalized gaussian discrimination and transpose them into the logistic model to bring out efficient discrimination rules for non customers' subpopulation. Therefore we obtain several simple models of connection between parameters of both logistic models associated respectively to the two subpopulations. The German credit data set is selected to experiment and to compare these models. Experimental results show that the use of links between the two subpopulations improve the classification accuracy for the new loan applicants.

computer science

Fast Solutions to Projective Monotone Linear Complementarity Problems

cs.LG

We present a new interior-point potential-reduction algorithm for solving monotone linear complementarity problems (LCPs) that have a particular special structure: their matrix $M\in{\mathbb R}^{n\times n}$ can be decomposed as $M=\Phi U + \Pi_0$, where the rank of $\Phi$ is $k<n$, and $\Pi_0$ denotes Euclidean projection onto the nullspace of $\Phi^\top$. We call such LCPs projective. Our algorithm solves a monotone projective LCP to relative accuracy $\epsilon$ in $O(\sqrt n \ln(1/\epsilon))$ iterations, with each iteration requiring $O(nk^2)$ flops. This complexity compares favorably with interior-point algorithms for general monotone LCPs: these algorithms also require $O(\sqrt n \ln(1/\epsilon))$ iterations, but each iteration needs to solve an $n\times n$ system of linear equations, a much higher cost than our algorithm when $k\ll n$. Our algorithm works even though the solution to a projective LCP is not restricted to lie in any low-rank subspace.

computer science

A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Lossy Population Recovery

cs.DS

We give a polynomial time algorithm for the lossy population recovery problem. In this problem, the goal is to approximately learn an unknown distribution on binary strings of length $n$ from lossy samples: for some parameter $\mu$ each coordinate of the sample is preserved with probability $\mu$ and otherwise is replaced by a `?'. The running time and number of samples needed for our algorithm is polynomial in $n$ and $1/\varepsilon$ for each fixed $\mu>0$. This improves on algorithm of Wigderson and Yehudayoff that runs in quasi-polynomial time for any $\mu > 0$ and the polynomial time algorithm of Dvir et al which was shown to work for $\mu \gtrapprox 0.30$ by Batman et al. In fact, our algorithm also works in the more general framework of Batman et al. in which there is no a priori bound on the size of the support of the distribution. The algorithm we analyze is implicit in previous work; our main contribution is to analyze the algorithm by showing (via linear programming duality and connections to complex analysis) that a certain matrix associated with the problem has a robust local inverse even though its condition number is exponentially small. A corollary of our result is the first polynomial time algorithm for learning DNFs in the restriction access model of Dvir et al.

computer science

Prediction and Clustering in Signed Networks: A Local to Global Perspective

cs.SI

The study of social networks is a burgeoning research area. However, most existing work deals with networks that simply encode whether relationships exist or not. In contrast, relationships in signed networks can be positive ("like", "trust") or negative ("dislike", "distrust"). The theory of social balance shows that signed networks tend to conform to some local patterns that, in turn, induce certain global characteristics. In this paper, we exploit both local as well as global aspects of social balance theory for two fundamental problems in the analysis of signed networks: sign prediction and clustering. Motivated by local patterns of social balance, we first propose two families of sign prediction methods: measures of social imbalance (MOIs), and supervised learning using high order cycles (HOCs). These methods predict signs of edges based on triangles and \ell-cycles for relatively small values of \ell. Interestingly, by examining measures of social imbalance, we show that the classic Katz measure, which is used widely in unsigned link prediction, actually has a balance theoretic interpretation when applied to signed networks. Furthermore, motivated by the global structure of balanced networks, we propose an effective low rank modeling approach for both sign prediction and clustering. For the low rank modeling approach, we provide theoretical performance guarantees via convex relaxations, scale it up to large problem sizes using a matrix factorization based algorithm, and provide extensive experimental validation including comparisons with local approaches. Our experimental results indicate that, by adopting a more global viewpoint of balance structure, we get significant performance and computational gains in prediction and clustering tasks on signed networks. Our work therefore highlights the usefulness of the global aspect of balance theory for the analysis of signed networks.

computer science

The adaptive Gril estimator with a diverging number of parameters

stat.ME

We consider the problem of variables selection and estimation in linear regression model in situations where the number of parameters diverges with the sample size. We propose the adaptive Generalized Ridge-Lasso (\mbox{AdaGril}) which is an extension of the the adaptive Elastic Net. AdaGril incorporates information redundancy among correlated variables for model selection and estimation. It combines the strengths of the quadratic regularization and the adaptively weighted Lasso shrinkage. In this paper, we highlight the grouped selection property for AdaCnet method (one type of AdaGril) in the equal correlation case. Under weak conditions, we establish the oracle property of AdaGril which ensures the optimal large performance when the dimension is high. Consequently, it achieves both goals of handling the problem of collinearity in high dimension and enjoys the oracle property. Moreover, we show that AdaGril estimator achieves a Sparsity Inequality, i. e., a bound in terms of the number of non-zero components of the 'true' regression coefficient. This bound is obtained under a similar weak Restricted Eigenvalue (RE) condition used for Lasso. Simulations studies show that some particular cases of AdaGril outperform its competitors.

computer science

ML4PG in Computer Algebra verification

cs.LO

ML4PG is a machine-learning extension that provides statistical proof hints during the process of Coq/SSReflect proof development. In this paper, we use ML4PG to find proof patterns in the CoqEAL library -- a library that was devised to verify the correctness of Computer Algebra algorithms. In particular, we use ML4PG to help us in the formalisation of an efficient algorithm to compute the inverse of triangular matrices.

computer science

Source Separation using Regularized NMF with MMSE Estimates under GMM Priors with Online Learning for The Uncertainties

cs.LG

We propose a new method to enforce priors on the solution of the nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). The proposed algorithm can be used for denoising or single-channel source separation (SCSS) applications. The NMF solution is guided to follow the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) estimates under Gaussian mixture prior models (GMM) for the source signal. In SCSS applications, the spectra of the observed mixed signal are decomposed as a weighted linear combination of trained basis vectors for each source using NMF. In this work, the NMF decomposition weight matrices are treated as a distorted image by a distortion operator, which is learned directly from the observed signals. The MMSE estimate of the weights matrix under GMM prior and log-normal distribution for the distortion is then found to improve the NMF decomposition results. The MMSE estimate is embedded within the optimization objective to form a novel regularized NMF cost function. The corresponding update rules for the new objectives are derived in this paper. Experimental results show that, the proposed regularized NMF algorithm improves the source separation performance compared with using NMF without prior or with other prior models.

computer science

Fast Feature Reduction in intrusion detection datasets

cs.CR

In the most intrusion detection systems (IDS), a system tries to learn characteristics of different type of attacks by analyzing packets that sent or received in network. These packets have a lot of features. But not all of them is required to be analyzed to detect that specific type of attack. Detection speed and computational cost is another vital matter here, because in these types of problems, datasets are very huge regularly. In this paper we tried to propose a very simple and fast feature selection method to eliminate features with no helpful information on them. Result faster learning in process of redundant feature omission. We compared our proposed method with three most successful similarity based feature selection algorithm including Correlation Coefficient, Least Square Regression Error and Maximal Information Compression Index. After that we used recommended features by each of these algorithms in two popular classifiers including: Bayes and KNN classifier to measure the quality of the recommendations. Experimental result shows that although the proposed method can't outperform evaluated algorithms with high differences in accuracy, but in computational cost it has huge superiority over them.

computer science

Bandits with Knapsacks

cs.DS

Multi-armed bandit problems are the predominant theoretical model of exploration-exploitation tradeoffs in learning, and they have countless applications ranging from medical trials, to communication networks, to Web search and advertising. In many of these application domains the learner may be constrained by one or more supply (or budget) limits, in addition to the customary limitation on the time horizon. The literature lacks a general model encompassing these sorts of problems. We introduce such a model, called "bandits with knapsacks", that combines aspects of stochastic integer programming with online learning. A distinctive feature of our problem, in comparison to the existing regret-minimization literature, is that the optimal policy for a given latent distribution may significantly outperform the policy that plays the optimal fixed arm. Consequently, achieving sublinear regret in the bandits-with-knapsacks problem is significantly more challenging than in conventional bandit problems. We present two algorithms whose reward is close to the information-theoretic optimum: one is based on a novel "balanced exploration" paradigm, while the other is a primal-dual algorithm that uses multiplicative updates. Further, we prove that the regret achieved by both algorithms is optimal up to polylogarithmic factors. We illustrate the generality of the problem by presenting applications in a number of different domains including electronic commerce, routing, and scheduling. As one example of a concrete application, we consider the problem of dynamic posted pricing with limited supply and obtain the first algorithm whose regret, with respect to the optimal dynamic policy, is sublinear in the supply.

computer science

HRF estimation improves sensitivity of fMRI encoding and decoding models

cs.LG

Extracting activation patterns from functional Magnetic Resonance Images (fMRI) datasets remains challenging in rapid-event designs due to the inherent delay of blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal. The general linear model (GLM) allows to estimate the activation from a design matrix and a fixed hemodynamic response function (HRF). However, the HRF is known to vary substantially between subjects and brain regions. In this paper, we propose a model for jointly estimating the hemodynamic response function (HRF) and the activation patterns via a low-rank representation of task effects.This model is based on the linearity assumption behind the GLM and can be computed using standard gradient-based solvers. We use the activation patterns computed by our model as input data for encoding and decoding studies and report performance improvement in both settings.

computer science

Real Time Bid Optimization with Smooth Budget Delivery in Online Advertising

cs.GT

Today, billions of display ad impressions are purchased on a daily basis through a public auction hosted by real time bidding (RTB) exchanges. A decision has to be made for advertisers to submit a bid for each selected RTB ad request in milliseconds. Restricted by the budget, the goal is to buy a set of ad impressions to reach as many targeted users as possible. A desired action (conversion), advertiser specific, includes purchasing a product, filling out a form, signing up for emails, etc. In addition, advertisers typically prefer to spend their budget smoothly over the time in order to reach a wider range of audience accessible throughout a day and have a sustainable impact. However, since the conversions occur rarely and the occurrence feedback is normally delayed, it is very challenging to achieve both budget and performance goals at the same time. In this paper, we present an online approach to the smooth budget delivery while optimizing for the conversion performance. Our algorithm tries to select high quality impressions and adjust the bid price based on the prior performance distribution in an adaptive manner by distributing the budget optimally across time. Our experimental results from real advertising campaigns demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

computer science

Scalable Audience Reach Estimation in Real-time Online Advertising

cs.LG

Online advertising has been introduced as one of the most efficient methods of advertising throughout the recent years. Yet, advertisers are concerned about the efficiency of their online advertising campaigns and consequently, would like to restrict their ad impressions to certain websites and/or certain groups of audience. These restrictions, known as targeting criteria, limit the reachability for better performance. This trade-off between reachability and performance illustrates a need for a forecasting system that can quickly predict/estimate (with good accuracy) this trade-off. Designing such a system is challenging due to (a) the huge amount of data to process, and, (b) the need for fast and accurate estimates. In this paper, we propose a distributed fault tolerant system that can generate such estimates fast with good accuracy. The main idea is to keep a small representative sample in memory across multiple machines and formulate the forecasting problem as queries against the sample. The key challenge is to find the best strata across the past data, perform multivariate stratified sampling while ensuring fuzzy fall-back to cover the small minorities. Our results show a significant improvement over the uniform and simple stratified sampling strategies which are currently widely used in the industry.

computer science

Qualitative detection of oil adulteration with machine learning approaches

cs.CE

The study focused on the machine learning analysis approaches to identify the adulteration of 9 kinds of edible oil qualitatively and answered the following three questions: Is the oil sample adulterant? How does it constitute? What is the main ingredient of the adulteration oil? After extracting the high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) data on triglyceride from 370 oil samples, we applied the adaptive boosting with multi-class Hamming loss (AdaBoost.MH) to distinguish the oil adulteration in contrast with the support vector machine (SVM). Further, we regarded the adulterant oil and the pure oil samples as ones with multiple labels and with only one label, respectively. Then multi-label AdaBoost.MH and multi-label learning vector quantization (ML-LVQ) model were built to determine the ingredients and their relative ratio in the adulteration oil. The experimental results on six measures show that ML-LVQ achieves better performance than multi-label AdaBoost.MH.

computer science

Transfer Learning for Content-Based Recommender Systems using Tree Matching

cs.LG

In this paper we present a new approach to content-based transfer learning for solving the data sparsity problem in cases when the users' preferences in the target domain are either scarce or unavailable, but the necessary information on the preferences exists in another domain. We show that training a system to use such information across domains can produce better performance. Specifically, we represent users' behavior patterns based on topological graph structures. Each behavior pattern represents the behavior of a set of users, when the users' behavior is defined as the items they rated and the items' rating values. In the next step we find a correlation between behavior patterns in the source domain and behavior patterns in the target domain. This mapping is considered a bridge between the two domains. Based on the correlation and content-attributes of the items, we train a machine learning model to predict users' ratings in the target domain. When we compare our approach to the popularity approach and KNN-cross-domain on a real world dataset, the results show that on an average of 83$%$ of the cases our approach outperforms both methods.

computer science

Multi-View Learning for Web Spam Detection

cs.IR

Spam pages are designed to maliciously appear among the top search results by excessive usage of popular terms. Therefore, spam pages should be removed using an effective and efficient spam detection system. Previous methods for web spam classification used several features from various information sources (page contents, web graph, access logs, etc.) to detect web spam. In this paper, we follow page-level classification approach to build fast and scalable spam filters. We show that each web page can be classified with satisfiable accuracy using only its own HTML content. In order to design a multi-view classification system, we used state-of-the-art spam classification methods with distinct feature sets (views) as the base classifiers. Then, a fusion model is learned to combine the output of the base classifiers and make final prediction. Results show that multi-view learning significantly improves the classification performance, namely AUC by 22%, while providing linear speedup for parallel execution.

computer science

Generalized Centroid Estimators in Bioinformatics

cs.LG

In a number of estimation problems in bioinformatics, accuracy measures of the target problem are usually given, and it is important to design estimators that are suitable to those accuracy measures. However, there is often a discrepancy between an employed estimator and a given accuracy measure of the problem. In this study, we introduce a general class of efficient estimators for estimation problems on high-dimensional binary spaces, which representmany fundamental problems in bioinformatics. Theoretical analysis reveals that the proposed estimators generally fit with commonly-used accuracy measures (e.g. sensitivity, PPV, MCC and F-score) as well as it can be computed efficiently in many cases, and cover a wide range of problems in bioinformatics from the viewpoint of the principle of maximum expected accuracy (MEA). It is also shown that some important algorithms in bioinformatics can be interpreted in a unified manner. Not only the concept presented in this paper gives a useful framework to design MEA-based estimators but also it is highly extendable and sheds new light on many problems in bioinformatics.

computer science

Robustness of Random Forest-based gene selection methods

cs.LG

Gene selection is an important part of microarray data analysis because it provides information that can lead to a better mechanistic understanding of an investigated phenomenon. At the same time, gene selection is very difficult because of the noisy nature of microarray data. As a consequence, gene selection is often performed with machine learning methods. The Random Forest method is particularly well suited for this purpose. In this work, four state-of-the-art Random Forest-based feature selection methods were compared in a gene selection context. The analysis focused on the stability of selection because, although it is necessary for determining the significance of results, it is often ignored in similar studies. The comparison of post-selection accuracy in the validation of Random Forest classifiers revealed that all investigated methods were equivalent in this context. However, the methods substantially differed with respect to the number of selected genes and the stability of selection. Of the analysed methods, the Boruta algorithm predicted the most genes as potentially important. The post-selection classifier error rate, which is a frequently used measure, was found to be a potentially deceptive measure of gene selection quality. When the number of consistently selected genes was considered, the Boruta algorithm was clearly the best. Although it was also the most computationally intensive method, the Boruta algorithm's computational demands could be reduced to levels comparable to those of other algorithms by replacing the Random Forest importance with a comparable measure from Random Ferns (a similar but simplified classifier). Despite their design assumptions, the minimal optimal selection methods, were found to select a high fraction of false positives.

computer science

Power to the Points: Validating Data Memberships in Clusterings

cs.LG

A clustering is an implicit assignment of labels of points, based on proximity to other points. It is these labels that are then used for downstream analysis (either focusing on individual clusters, or identifying representatives of clusters and so on). Thus, in order to trust a clustering as a first step in exploratory data analysis, we must trust the labels assigned to individual data. Without supervision, how can we validate this assignment? In this paper, we present a method to attach affinity scores to the implicit labels of individual points in a clustering. The affinity scores capture the confidence level of the cluster that claims to "own" the point. This method is very general: it can be used with clusterings derived from Euclidean data, kernelized data, or even data derived from information spaces. It smoothly incorporates importance functions on clusters, allowing us to eight different clusters differently. It is also efficient: assigning an affinity score to a point depends only polynomially on the number of clusters and is independent of the number of points in the data. The dimensionality of the underlying space only appears in preprocessing. We demonstrate the value of our approach with an experimental study that illustrates the use of these scores in different data analysis tasks, as well as the efficiency and flexibility of the method. We also demonstrate useful visualizations of these scores; these might prove useful within an interactive analytics framework.

computer science

Zero-sum repeated games: Counterexamples to the existence of the asymptotic value and the conjecture $\operatorname{maxmin}=\operatorname{lim}v_n$

math.OC

Mertens [In Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians (Berkeley, Calif., 1986) (1987) 1528-1577 Amer. Math. Soc.] proposed two general conjectures about repeated games: the first one is that, in any two-person zero-sum repeated game, the asymptotic value exists, and the second one is that, when Player 1 is more informed than Player 2, in the long run Player 1 is able to guarantee the asymptotic value. We disprove these two long-standing conjectures by providing an example of a zero-sum repeated game with public signals and perfect observation of the actions, where the value of the $\lambda$-discounted game does not converge when $\lambda$ goes to 0. The aforementioned example involves seven states, two actions and two signals for each player. Remarkably, players observe the payoffs, and play in turn.

computer science

Supervised Feature Selection for Diagnosis of Coronary Artery Disease Based on Genetic Algorithm

cs.LG

Feature Selection (FS) has become the focus of much research on decision support systems areas for which data sets with tremendous number of variables are analyzed. In this paper we present a new method for the diagnosis of Coronary Artery Diseases (CAD) founded on Genetic Algorithm (GA) wrapped Bayes Naive (BN) based FS. Basically, CAD dataset contains two classes defined with 13 features. In GA BN algorithm, GA generates in each iteration a subset of attributes that will be evaluated using the BN in the second step of the selection procedure. The final set of attribute contains the most relevant feature model that increases the accuracy. The algorithm in this case produces 85.50% classification accuracy in the diagnosis of CAD. Thus, the asset of the Algorithm is then compared with the use of Support Vector Machine (SVM), MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP) and C4.5 decision tree Algorithm. The result of classification accuracy for those algorithms are respectively 83.5%, 83.16% and 80.85%. Consequently, the GA wrapped BN Algorithm is correspondingly compared with other FS algorithms. The Obtained results have shown very promising outcomes for the diagnosis of CAD.

computer science

Speeding-Up Convergence via Sequential Subspace Optimization: Current State and Future Directions

cs.NA

This is an overview paper written in style of research proposal. In recent years we introduced a general framework for large-scale unconstrained optimization -- Sequential Subspace Optimization (SESOP) and demonstrated its usefulness for sparsity-based signal/image denoising, deconvolution, compressive sensing, computed tomography, diffraction imaging, support vector machines. We explored its combination with Parallel Coordinate Descent and Separable Surrogate Function methods, obtaining state of the art results in above-mentioned areas. There are several methods, that are faster than plain SESOP under specific conditions: Trust region Newton method - for problems with easily invertible Hessian matrix; Truncated Newton method - when fast multiplication by Hessian is available; Stochastic optimization methods - for problems with large stochastic-type data; Multigrid methods - for problems with nested multilevel structure. Each of these methods can be further improved by merge with SESOP. One can also accelerate Augmented Lagrangian method for constrained optimization problems and Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for problems with separable objective function and non-separable constraints.

computer science

Robust Hierarchical Clustering

cs.LG

One of the most widely used techniques for data clustering is agglomerative clustering. Such algorithms have been long used across many different fields ranging from computational biology to social sciences to computer vision in part because their output is easy to interpret. Unfortunately, it is well known, however, that many of the classic agglomerative clustering algorithms are not robust to noise. In this paper we propose and analyze a new robust algorithm for bottom-up agglomerative clustering. We show that our algorithm can be used to cluster accurately in cases where the data satisfies a number of natural properties and where the traditional agglomerative algorithms fail. We also show how to adapt our algorithm to the inductive setting where our given data is only a small random sample of the entire data set. Experimental evaluations on synthetic and real world data sets show that our algorithm achieves better performance than other hierarchical algorithms in the presence of noise.

computer science

Modeling Attractiveness and Multiple Clicks in Sponsored Search Results

cs.IR

Click models are an important tool for leveraging user feedback, and are used by commercial search engines for surfacing relevant search results. However, existing click models are lacking in two aspects. First, they do not share information across search results when computing attractiveness. Second, they assume that users interact with the search results sequentially. Based on our analysis of the click logs of a commercial search engine, we observe that the sequential scan assumption does not always hold, especially for sponsored search results. To overcome the above two limitations, we propose a new click model. Our key insight is that sharing information across search results helps in identifying important words or key-phrases which can then be used to accurately compute attractiveness of a search result. Furthermore, we argue that the click probability of a position as well as its attractiveness changes during a user session and depends on the user's past click experience. Our model seamlessly incorporates the effect of externalities (quality of other search results displayed in response to a user query), user fatigue, as well as pre and post-click relevance of a sponsored search result. We propose an efficient one-pass inference scheme and empirically evaluate the performance of our model via extensive experiments using the click logs of a large commercial search engine.

computer science

Least Squares Policy Iteration with Instrumental Variables vs. Direct Policy Search: Comparison Against Optimal Benchmarks Using Energy Storage

math.OC

This paper studies approximate policy iteration (API) methods which use least-squares Bellman error minimization for policy evaluation. We address several of its enhancements, namely, Bellman error minimization using instrumental variables, least-squares projected Bellman error minimization, and projected Bellman error minimization using instrumental variables. We prove that for a general discrete-time stochastic control problem, Bellman error minimization using instrumental variables is equivalent to both variants of projected Bellman error minimization. An alternative to these API methods is direct policy search based on knowledge gradient. The practical performance of these three approximate dynamic programming methods are then investigated in the context of an application in energy storage, integrated with an intermittent wind energy supply to fully serve a stochastic time-varying electricity demand. We create a library of test problems using real-world data and apply value iteration to find their optimal policies. These benchmarks are then used to compare the developed policies. Our analysis indicates that API with instrumental variables Bellman error minimization prominently outperforms API with least-squares Bellman error minimization. However, these approaches underperform our direct policy search implementation.

computer science

PSMACA: An Automated Protein Structure Prediction Using MACA (Multiple Attractor Cellular Automata)

cs.CE

Protein Structure Predication from sequences of amino acid has gained a remarkable attention in recent years. Even though there are some prediction techniques addressing this problem, the approximate accuracy in predicting the protein structure is closely 75%. An automated procedure was evolved with MACA (Multiple Attractor Cellular Automata) for predicting the structure of the protein. Most of the existing approaches are sequential which will classify the input into four major classes and these are designed for similar sequences. PSMACA is designed to identify ten classes from the sequences that share twilight zone similarity and identity with the training sequences. This method also predicts three states (helix, strand, and coil) for the structure. Our comprehensive design considers 10 feature selection methods and 4 classifiers to develop MACA (Multiple Attractor Cellular Automata) based classifiers that are build for each of the ten classes. We have tested the proposed classifier with twilight-zone and 1-high-similarity benchmark datasets with over three dozens of modern competing predictors shows that PSMACA provides the best overall accuracy that ranges between 77% and 88.7% depending on the dataset.

computer science

Use Case Point Approach Based Software Effort Estimation using Various Support Vector Regression Kernel Methods

cs.SE

The job of software effort estimation is a critical one in the early stages of the software development life cycle when the details of requirements are usually not clearly identified. Various optimization techniques help in improving the accuracy of effort estimation. The Support Vector Regression (SVR) is one of several different soft-computing techniques that help in getting optimal estimated values. The idea of SVR is based upon the computation of a linear regression function in a high dimensional feature space where the input data are mapped via a nonlinear function. Further, the SVR kernel methods can be applied in transforming the input data and then based on these transformations, an optimal boundary between the possible outputs can be obtained. The main objective of the research work carried out in this paper is to estimate the software effort using use case point approach. The use case point approach relies on the use case diagram to estimate the size and effort of software projects. Then, an attempt has been made to optimize the results obtained from use case point analysis using various SVR kernel methods to achieve better prediction accuracy.

computer science

Infinite Mixed Membership Matrix Factorization

cs.LG

Rating and recommendation systems have become a popular application area for applying a suite of machine learning techniques. Current approaches rely primarily on probabilistic interpretations and extensions of matrix factorization, which factorizes a user-item ratings matrix into latent user and item vectors. Most of these methods fail to model significant variations in item ratings from otherwise similar users, a phenomenon known as the "Napoleon Dynamite" effect. Recent efforts have addressed this problem by adding a contextual bias term to the rating, which captures the mood under which a user rates an item or the context in which an item is rated by a user. In this work, we extend this model in a nonparametric sense by learning the optimal number of moods or contexts from the data, and derive Gibbs sampling inference procedures for our model. We evaluate our approach on the MovieLens 1M dataset, and show significant improvements over the optimal parametric baseline, more than twice the improvements previously encountered for this task. We also extract and evaluate a DBLP dataset, wherein we predict the number of papers co-authored by two authors, and present improvements over the parametric baseline on this alternative domain as well.

computer science

A Multiagent Reinforcement Learning Algorithm with Non-linear Dynamics

cs.LG

Several multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms have been proposed to optimize agents decisions. Due to the complexity of the problem, the majority of the previously developed MARL algorithms assumed agents either had some knowledge of the underlying game (such as Nash equilibria) and/or observed other agents actions and the rewards they received. We introduce a new MARL algorithm called the Weighted Policy Learner (WPL), which allows agents to reach a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in benchmark 2-player-2-action games with minimum knowledge. Using WPL, the only feedback an agent needs is its own local reward (the agent does not observe other agents actions or rewards). Furthermore, WPL does not assume that agents know the underlying game or the corresponding Nash Equilibrium a priori. We experimentally show that our algorithm converges in benchmark two-player-two-action games. We also show that our algorithm converges in the challenging Shapleys game where previous MARL algorithms failed to converge without knowing the underlying game or the NE. Furthermore, we show that WPL outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in a more realistic setting of 100 agents interacting and learning concurrently. An important aspect of understanding the behavior of a MARL algorithm is analyzing the dynamics of the algorithm: how the policies of multiple learning agents evolve over time as agents interact with one another. Such an analysis not only verifies whether agents using a given MARL algorithm will eventually converge, but also reveals the behavior of the MARL algorithm prior to convergence. We analyze our algorithm in two-player-two-action games and show that symbolically proving WPLs convergence is difficult, because of the non-linear nature of WPLs dynamics, unlike previous MARL algorithms that had either linear or piece-wise-linear dynamics. Instead, we numerically solve WPLs dynamics differential equations and compare the solution to the dynamics of previous MARL algorithms.

computer science

RoxyBot-06: Stochastic Prediction and Optimization in TAC Travel

cs.GT

In this paper, we describe our autonomous bidding agent, RoxyBot, who emerged victorious in the travel division of the 2006 Trading Agent Competition in a photo finish. At a high level, the design of many successful trading agents can be summarized as follows: (i) price prediction: build a model of market prices; and (ii) optimization: solve for an approximately optimal set of bids, given this model. To predict, RoxyBot builds a stochastic model of market prices by simulating simultaneous ascending auctions. To optimize, RoxyBot relies on the sample average approximation method, a stochastic optimization technique.

computer science

An Active Learning Approach for Jointly Estimating Worker Performance and Annotation Reliability with Crowdsourced Data

cs.LG

Crowdsourcing platforms offer a practical solution to the problem of affordably annotating large datasets for training supervised classifiers. Unfortunately, poor worker performance frequently threatens to compromise annotation reliability, and requesting multiple labels for every instance can lead to large cost increases without guaranteeing good results. Minimizing the required training samples using an active learning selection procedure reduces the labeling requirement but can jeopardize classifier training by focusing on erroneous annotations. This paper presents an active learning approach in which worker performance, task difficulty, and annotation reliability are jointly estimated and used to compute the risk function guiding the sample selection procedure. We demonstrate that the proposed approach, which employs active learning with Bayesian networks, significantly improves training accuracy and correctly ranks the expertise of unknown labelers in the presence of annotation noise.

computer science

Policy Invariance under Reward Transformations for General-Sum Stochastic Games

cs.GT

We extend the potential-based shaping method from Markov decision processes to multi-player general-sum stochastic games. We prove that the Nash equilibria in a stochastic game remains unchanged after potential-based shaping is applied to the environment. The property of policy invariance provides a possible way of speeding convergence when learning to play a stochastic game.

computer science

Towards the selection of patients requiring ICD implantation by automatic classification from Holter monitoring indices

cs.LG

The purpose of this study is to optimize the selection of prophylactic cardioverter defibrillator implantation candidates. Currently, the main criterion for implantation is a low Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction (LVEF) whose specificity is relatively poor. We designed two classifiers aimed to predict, from long term ECG recordings (Holter), whether a low-LVEF patient is likely or not to undergo ventricular arrhythmia in the next six months. One classifier is a single hidden layer neural network whose variables are the most relevant features extracted from Holter recordings, and the other classifier has a structure that capitalizes on the physiological decomposition of the arrhythmogenic factors into three disjoint groups: the myocardial substrate, the triggers and the autonomic nervous system (ANS). In this ad hoc network, the features were assigned to each group; one neural network classifier per group was designed and its complexity was optimized. The outputs of the classifiers were fed to a single neuron that provided the required probability estimate. The latter was thresholded for final discrimination A dataset composed of 186 pre-implantation 30-mn Holter recordings of patients equipped with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) in primary prevention was used in order to design and test this classifier. 44 out of 186 patients underwent at least one treated ventricular arrhythmia during the six-month follow-up period. Performances of the designed classifier were evaluated using a cross-test strategy that consists in splitting the database into several combinations of a training set and a test set. The average arrhythmia prediction performances of the ad-hoc classifier are NPV = 77% $\pm$ 13% and PPV = 31% $\pm$ 19% (Negative Predictive Value $\pm$ std, Positive Predictive Value $\pm$ std). According to our study, improving prophylactic ICD-implantation candidate selection by automatic classification from ECG features may be possible, but the availability of a sizable dataset appears to be essential to decrease the number of False Negatives.

computer science

General factorization framework for context-aware recommendations

cs.IR

Context-aware recommendation algorithms focus on refining recommendations by considering additional information, available to the system. This topic has gained a lot of attention recently. Among others, several factorization methods were proposed to solve the problem, although most of them assume explicit feedback which strongly limits their real-world applicability. While these algorithms apply various loss functions and optimization strategies, the preference modeling under context is less explored due to the lack of tools allowing for easy experimentation with various models. As context dimensions are introduced beyond users and items, the space of possible preference models and the importance of proper modeling largely increases. In this paper we propose a General Factorization Framework (GFF), a single flexible algorithm that takes the preference model as an input and computes latent feature matrices for the input dimensions. GFF allows us to easily experiment with various linear models on any context-aware recommendation task, be it explicit or implicit feedback based. The scaling properties makes it usable under real life circumstances as well. We demonstrate the framework's potential by exploring various preference models on a 4-dimensional context-aware problem with contexts that are available for almost any real life datasets. We show in our experiments -- performed on five real life, implicit feedback datasets -- that proper preference modelling significantly increases recommendation accuracy, and previously unused models outperform the traditional ones. Novel models in GFF also outperform state-of-the-art factorization algorithms. We also extend the method to be fully compliant to the Multidimensional Dataspace Model, one of the most extensive data models of context-enriched data. Extended GFF allows the seamless incorporation of information into the fac[truncated]

computer science

miRNA and Gene Expression based Cancer Classification using Self- Learning and Co-Training Approaches

cs.CE

miRNA and gene expression profiles have been proved useful for classifying cancer samples. Efficient classifiers have been recently sought and developed. A number of attempts to classify cancer samples using miRNA/gene expression profiles are known in literature. However, the use of semi-supervised learning models have been used recently in bioinformatics, to exploit the huge corpuses of publicly available sets. Using both labeled and unlabeled sets to train sample classifiers, have not been previously considered when gene and miRNA expression sets are used. Moreover, there is a motivation to integrate both miRNA and gene expression for a semi-supervised cancer classification as that provides more information on the characteristics of cancer samples. In this paper, two semi-supervised machine learning approaches, namely self-learning and co-training, are adapted to enhance the quality of cancer sample classification. These approaches exploit the huge public corpuses to enrich the training data. In self-learning, miRNA and gene based classifiers are enhanced independently. While in co-training, both miRNA and gene expression profiles are used simultaneously to provide different views of cancer samples. To our knowledge, it is the first attempt to apply these learning approaches to cancer classification. The approaches were evaluated using breast cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and lung cancer expression sets. Results show up to 20% improvement in F1-measure over Random Forests and SVM classifiers. Co-Training also outperforms Low Density Separation (LDS) approach by around 25% improvement in F1-measure in breast cancer.

computer science

HMACA: Towards Proposing a Cellular Automata Based Tool for Protein Coding, Promoter Region Identification and Protein Structure Prediction

cs.CE

Human body consists of lot of cells, each cell consist of DeOxaRibo Nucleic Acid (DNA). Identifying the genes from the DNA sequences is a very difficult task. But identifying the coding regions is more complex task compared to the former. Identifying the protein which occupy little place in genes is a really challenging issue. For understating the genes coding region analysis plays an important role. Proteins are molecules with macro structure that are responsible for a wide range of vital biochemical functions, which includes acting as oxygen, cell signaling, antibody production, nutrient transport and building up muscle fibers. Promoter region identification and protein structure prediction has gained a remarkable attention in recent years. Even though there are some identification techniques addressing this problem, the approximate accuracy in identifying the promoter region is closely 68% to 72%. We have developed a Cellular Automata based tool build with hybrid multiple attractor cellular automata (HMACA) classifier for protein coding region, promoter region identification and protein structure prediction which predicts the protein and promoter regions with an accuracy of 76%. This tool also predicts the structure of protein with an accuracy of 80%.

computer science

Numerical weather prediction or stochastic modeling: an objective criterion of choice for the global radiation forecasting

stat.AP

Numerous methods exist and were developed for global radiation forecasting. The two most popular types are the numerical weather predictions (NWP) and the predictions using stochastic approaches. We propose to compute a parameter noted constructed in part from the mutual information which is a quantity that measures the mutual dependence of two variables. Both of these are calculated with the objective to establish the more relevant method between NWP and stochastic models concerning the current problem.

computer science

Iterative Universal Hash Function Generator for Minhashing

cs.LG

Minhashing is a technique used to estimate the Jaccard Index between two sets by exploiting the probability of collision in a random permutation. In order to speed up the computation, a random permutation can be approximated by using an universal hash function such as the $h_{a,b}$ function proposed by Carter and Wegman. A better estimate of the Jaccard Index can be achieved by using many of these hash functions, created at random. In this paper a new iterative procedure to generate a set of $h_{a,b}$ functions is devised that eliminates the need for a list of random values and avoid the multiplication operation during the calculation. The properties of the generated hash functions remains that of an universal hash function family. This is possible due to the random nature of features occurrence on sparse datasets. Results show that the uniformity of hashing the features is maintaned while obtaining a speed up of up to $1.38$ compared to the traditional approach.

computer science

Identification of Protein Coding Regions in Genomic DNA Using Unsupervised FMACA Based Pattern Classifier

cs.CE

Genes carry the instructions for making proteins that are found in a cell as a specific sequence of nucleotides that are found in DNA molecules. But, the regions of these genes that code for proteins may occupy only a small region of the sequence. Identifying the coding regions play a vital role in understanding these genes. In this paper we propose a unsupervised Fuzzy Multiple Attractor Cellular Automata (FMCA) based pattern classifier to identify the coding region of a DNA sequence. We propose a distinct K-Means algorithm for designing FMACA classifier which is simple, efficient and produces more accurate classifier than that has previously been obtained for a range of different sequence lengths. Experimental results confirm the scalability of the proposed Unsupervised FCA based classifier to handle large volume of datasets irrespective of the number of classes, tuples and attributes. Good classification accuracy has been established.

computer science

Security Evaluation of Support Vector Machines in Adversarial Environments

cs.LG

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are among the most popular classification techniques adopted in security applications like malware detection, intrusion detection, and spam filtering. However, if SVMs are to be incorporated in real-world security systems, they must be able to cope with attack patterns that can either mislead the learning algorithm (poisoning), evade detection (evasion), or gain information about their internal parameters (privacy breaches). The main contributions of this chapter are twofold. First, we introduce a formal general framework for the empirical evaluation of the security of machine-learning systems. Second, according to our framework, we demonstrate the feasibility of evasion, poisoning and privacy attacks against SVMs in real-world security problems. For each attack technique, we evaluate its impact and discuss whether (and how) it can be countered through an adversary-aware design of SVMs. Our experiments are easily reproducible thanks to open-source code that we have made available, together with all the employed datasets, on a public repository.

computer science

Empirically Evaluating Multiagent Learning Algorithms

cs.GT

There exist many algorithms for learning how to play repeated bimatrix games. Most of these algorithms are justified in terms of some sort of theoretical guarantee. On the other hand, little is known about the empirical performance of these algorithms. Most such claims in the literature are based on small experiments, which has hampered understanding as well as the development of new multiagent learning (MAL) algorithms. We have developed a new suite of tools for running multiagent experiments: the MultiAgent Learning Testbed (MALT). These tools are designed to facilitate larger and more comprehensive experiments by removing the need to build one-off experimental code. MALT also provides baseline implementations of many MAL algorithms, hopefully eliminating or reducing differences between algorithm implementations and increasing the reproducibility of results. Using this test suite, we ran an experiment unprecedented in size. We analyzed the results according to a variety of performance metrics including reward, maxmin distance, regret, and several notions of equilibrium convergence. We confirmed several pieces of conventional wisdom, but also discovered some surprising results. For example, we found that single-agent $Q$-learning outperformed many more complicated and more modern MAL algorithms.

computer science

Local Gaussian Regression

cs.LG

Locally weighted regression was created as a nonparametric learning method that is computationally efficient, can learn from very large amounts of data and add data incrementally. An interesting feature of locally weighted regression is that it can work with spatially varying length scales, a beneficial property, for instance, in control problems. However, it does not provide a generative model for function values and requires training and test data to be generated identically, independently. Gaussian (process) regression, on the other hand, provides a fully generative model without significant formal requirements on the distribution of training data, but has much higher computational cost and usually works with one global scale per input dimension. Using a localising function basis and approximate inference techniques, we take Gaussian (process) regression to increasingly localised properties and toward the same computational complexity class as locally weighted regression.

computer science

Localized epidemic detection in networks with overwhelming noise

cs.SI

We consider the problem of detecting an epidemic in a population where individual diagnoses are extremely noisy. The motivation for this problem is the plethora of examples (influenza strains in humans, or computer viruses in smartphones, etc.) where reliable diagnoses are scarce, but noisy data plentiful. In flu/phone-viruses, exceedingly few infected people/phones are professionally diagnosed (only a small fraction go to a doctor) but less reliable secondary signatures (e.g., people staying home, or greater-than-typical upload activity) are more readily available. These secondary data are often plagued by unreliability: many people with the flu do not stay home, and many people that stay home do not have the flu. This paper identifies the precise regime where knowledge of the contact network enables finding the needle in the haystack: we provide a distributed, efficient and robust algorithm that can correctly identify the existence of a spreading epidemic from highly unreliable local data. Our algorithm requires only local-neighbor knowledge of this graph, and in a broad array of settings that we describe, succeeds even when false negatives and false positives make up an overwhelming fraction of the data available. Our results show it succeeds in the presence of partial information about the contact network, and also when there is not a single "patient zero", but rather many (hundreds, in our examples) of initial patient-zeroes, spread across the graph.

computer science

Dictionary Learning over Distributed Models

cs.LG

In this paper, we consider learning dictionary models over a network of agents, where each agent is only in charge of a portion of the dictionary elements. This formulation is relevant in Big Data scenarios where large dictionary models may be spread over different spatial locations and it is not feasible to aggregate all dictionaries in one location due to communication and privacy considerations. We first show that the dual function of the inference problem is an aggregation of individual cost functions associated with different agents, which can then be minimized efficiently by means of diffusion strategies. The collaborative inference step generates dual variables that are used by the agents to update their dictionaries without the need to share these dictionaries or even the coefficient models for the training data. This is a powerful property that leads to an effective distributed procedure for learning dictionaries over large networks (e.g., hundreds of agents in our experiments). Furthermore, the proposed learning strategy operates in an online manner and is able to respond to streaming data, where each data sample is presented to the network once.

computer science

Characterizing the Sample Complexity of Private Learners

cs.CR

In 2008, Kasiviswanathan et al. defined private learning as a combination of PAC learning and differential privacy. Informally, a private learner is applied to a collection of labeled individual information and outputs a hypothesis while preserving the privacy of each individual. Kasiviswanathan et al. gave a generic construction of private learners for (finite) concept classes, with sample complexity logarithmic in the size of the concept class. This sample complexity is higher than what is needed for non-private learners, hence leaving open the possibility that the sample complexity of private learning may be sometimes significantly higher than that of non-private learning. We give a combinatorial characterization of the sample size sufficient and necessary to privately learn a class of concepts. This characterization is analogous to the well known characterization of the sample complexity of non-private learning in terms of the VC dimension of the concept class. We introduce the notion of probabilistic representation of a concept class, and our new complexity measure RepDim corresponds to the size of the smallest probabilistic representation of the concept class. We show that any private learning algorithm for a concept class C with sample complexity m implies RepDim(C)=O(m), and that there exists a private learning algorithm with sample complexity m=O(RepDim(C)). We further demonstrate that a similar characterization holds for the database size needed for privately computing a large class of optimization problems and also for the well studied problem of private data release.

computer science

Computational Limits for Matrix Completion

cs.CC

Matrix Completion is the problem of recovering an unknown real-valued low-rank matrix from a subsample of its entries. Important recent results show that the problem can be solved efficiently under the assumption that the unknown matrix is incoherent and the subsample is drawn uniformly at random. Are these assumptions necessary? It is well known that Matrix Completion in its full generality is NP-hard. However, little is known if make additional assumptions such as incoherence and permit the algorithm to output a matrix of slightly higher rank. In this paper we prove that Matrix Completion remains computationally intractable even if the unknown matrix has rank $4$ but we are allowed to output any constant rank matrix, and even if additionally we assume that the unknown matrix is incoherent and are shown $90%$ of the entries. This result relies on the conjectured hardness of the $4$-Coloring problem. We also consider the positive semidefinite Matrix Completion problem. Here we show a similar hardness result under the standard assumption that $\mathrm{P}\ne \mathrm{NP}.$ Our results greatly narrow the gap between existing feasibility results and computational lower bounds. In particular, we believe that our results give the first complexity-theoretic justification for why distributional assumptions are needed beyond the incoherence assumption in order to obtain positive results. On the technical side, we contribute several new ideas on how to encode hard combinatorial problems in low-rank optimization problems. We hope that these techniques will be helpful in further understanding the computational limits of Matrix Completion and related problems.

computer science

Discretization of Temporal Data: A Survey

cs.DB

In real world, the huge amount of temporal data is to be processed in many application areas such as scientific, financial, network monitoring, sensor data analysis. Data mining techniques are primarily oriented to handle discrete features. In the case of temporal data the time plays an important role on the characteristics of data. To consider this effect, the data discretization techniques have to consider the time while processing to resolve the issue by finding the intervals of data which are more concise and precise with respect to time. Here, this research is reviewing different data discretization techniques used in temporal data applications according to the inclusion or exclusion of: class label, temporal order of the data and handling of stream data to open the research direction for temporal data discretization to improve the performance of data mining technique.

computer science

Diffusion Least Mean Square: Simulations

cs.LG

In this technical report we analyse the performance of diffusion strategies applied to the Least-Mean-Square adaptive filter. We configure a network of cooperative agents running adaptive filters and discuss their behaviour when compared with a non-cooperative agent which represents the average of the network. The analysis provides conditions under which diversity in the filter parameters is beneficial in terms of convergence and stability. Simulations drive and support the analysis.

computer science

Open science in machine learning

cs.LG

We present OpenML and mldata, open science platforms that provides easy access to machine learning data, software and results to encourage further study and application. They go beyond the more traditional repositories for data sets and software packages in that they allow researchers to also easily share the results they obtained in experiments and to compare their solutions with those of others.

computer science

Oracle-Based Robust Optimization via Online Learning

math.OC

Robust optimization is a common framework in optimization under uncertainty when the problem parameters are not known, but it is rather known that the parameters belong to some given uncertainty set. In the robust optimization framework the problem solved is a min-max problem where a solution is judged according to its performance on the worst possible realization of the parameters. In many cases, a straightforward solution of the robust optimization problem of a certain type requires solving an optimization problem of a more complicated type, and in some cases even NP-hard. For example, solving a robust conic quadratic program, such as those arising in robust SVM, ellipsoidal uncertainty leads in general to a semidefinite program. In this paper we develop a method for approximately solving a robust optimization problem using tools from online convex optimization, where in every stage a standard (non-robust) optimization program is solved. Our algorithms find an approximate robust solution using a number of calls to an oracle that solves the original (non-robust) problem that is inversely proportional to the square of the target accuracy.

computer science

Outlier Detection using Improved Genetic K-means

cs.LG

The outlier detection problem in some cases is similar to the classification problem. For example, the main concern of clustering-based outlier detection algorithms is to find clusters and outliers, which are often regarded as noise that should be removed in order to make more reliable clustering. In this article, we present an algorithm that provides outlier detection and data clustering simultaneously. The algorithmimprovesthe estimation of centroids of the generative distribution during the process of clustering and outlier discovery. The proposed algorithm consists of two stages. The first stage consists of improved genetic k-means algorithm (IGK) process, while the second stage iteratively removes the vectors which are far from their cluster centroids.

computer science

Data-driven HRF estimation for encoding and decoding models

cs.CE

Despite the common usage of a canonical, data-independent, hemodynamic response function (HRF), it is known that the shape of the HRF varies across brain regions and subjects. This suggests that a data-driven estimation of this function could lead to more statistical power when modeling BOLD fMRI data. However, unconstrained estimation of the HRF can yield highly unstable results when the number of free parameters is large. We develop a method for the joint estimation of activation and HRF using a rank constraint causing the estimated HRF to be equal across events/conditions, yet permitting it to be different across voxels. Model estimation leads to an optimization problem that we propose to solve with an efficient quasi-Newton method exploiting fast gradient computations. This model, called GLM with Rank-1 constraint (R1-GLM), can be extended to the setting of GLM with separate designs which has been shown to improve decoding accuracy in brain activity decoding experiments. We compare 10 different HRF modeling methods in terms of encoding and decoding score in two different datasets. Our results show that the R1-GLM model significantly outperforms competing methods in both encoding and decoding settings, positioning it as an attractive method both from the points of view of accuracy and computational efficiency.

computer science

Real-time Topic-aware Influence Maximization Using Preprocessing

cs.SI

Influence maximization is the task of finding a set of seed nodes in a social network such that the influence spread of these seed nodes based on certain influence diffusion model is maximized. Topic-aware influence diffusion models have been recently proposed to address the issue that influence between a pair of users are often topic-dependent and information, ideas, innovations etc. being propagated in networks (referred collectively as items in this paper) are typically mixtures of topics. In this paper, we focus on the topic-aware influence maximization task. In particular, we study preprocessing methods for these topics to avoid redoing influence maximization for each item from scratch. We explore two preprocessing algorithms with theoretical justifications. Our empirical results on data obtained in a couple of existing studies demonstrate that one of our algorithms stands out as a strong candidate providing microsecond online response time and competitive influence spread, with reasonable preprocessing effort.

computer science

Network Traffic Decomposition for Anomaly Detection

cs.LG

In this paper we focus on the detection of network anomalies like Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and port scans in a unified manner. While there has been an extensive amount of research in network anomaly detection, current state of the art methods are only able to detect one class of anomalies at the cost of others. The key tool we will use is based on the spectral decomposition of a trajectory/hankel matrix which is able to detect deviations from both between and within correlation present in the observed network traffic data. Detailed experiments on synthetic and real network traces shows a significant improvement in detection capability over competing approaches. In the process we also address the issue of robustness of anomaly detection systems in a principled fashion.

computer science

An Extensive Repot on the Efficiency of AIS-INMACA (A Novel Integrated MACA based Clonal Classifier for Protein Coding and Promoter Region Prediction)

cs.CE

This paper exclusively reports the efficiency of AIS-INMACA. AIS-INMACA has created good impact on solving major problems in bioinformatics like protein region identification and promoter region prediction with less time (Pokkuluri Kiran Sree, 2014). This AIS-INMACA is now came with several variations (Pokkuluri Kiran Sree, 2014) towards projecting it as a tool in bioinformatics for solving many problems in bioinformatics. So this paper will be very much useful for so many researchers who are working in the domain of bioinformatics with cellular automata.

computer science

Statistical Structure Learning, Towards a Robust Smart Grid

cs.LG

Robust control and maintenance of the grid relies on accurate data. Both PMUs and state estimators are prone to false data injection attacks. Thus, it is crucial to have a mechanism for fast and accurate detection of an agent maliciously tampering with the data---for both preventing attacks that may lead to blackouts, and for routine monitoring and control tasks of current and future grids. We propose a decentralized false data injection detection scheme based on Markov graph of the bus phase angles. We utilize the Conditional Covariance Test (CCT) to learn the structure of the grid. Using the DC power flow model, we show that under normal circumstances, and because of walk-summability of the grid graph, the Markov graph of the voltage angles can be determined by the power grid graph. Therefore, a discrepancy between calculated Markov graph and learned structure should trigger the alarm. Local grid topology is available online from the protection system and we exploit it to check for mismatch. Should a mismatch be detected, we use correlation anomaly score to detect the set of attacked nodes. Our method can detect the most recent stealthy deception attack on the power grid that assumes knowledge of bus-branch model of the system and is capable of deceiving the state estimator, damaging power network observatory, control, monitoring, demand response and pricing schemes. Specifically, under the stealthy deception attack, the Markov graph of phase angles changes. In addition to detect a state of attack, our method can detect the set of attacked nodes. To the best of our knowledge, our remedy is the first to comprehensively detect this sophisticated attack and it does not need additional hardware. Moreover, our detection scheme is successful no matter the size of the attacked subset. Simulation of various power networks confirms our claims.

computer science

Combination of PCA with SMOTE Resampling to Boost the Prediction Rate in Lung Cancer Dataset

cs.LG

Classification algorithms are unable to make reliable models on the datasets with huge sizes. These datasets contain many irrelevant and redundant features that mislead the classifiers. Furthermore, many huge datasets have imbalanced class distribution which leads to bias over majority class in the classification process. In this paper combination of unsupervised dimensionality reduction methods with resampling is proposed and the results are tested on Lung-Cancer dataset. In the first step PCA is applied on Lung-Cancer dataset to compact the dataset and eliminate irrelevant features and in the second step SMOTE resampling is carried out to balance the class distribution and increase the variety of sample domain. Finally, Naive Bayes classifier is applied on the resulting dataset and the results are compared and evaluation metrics are calculated. The experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method across four evaluation metrics: Overall accuracy, False Positive Rate, Precision, Recall.

computer science

Transfer Learning across Networks for Collective Classification

cs.LG

This paper addresses the problem of transferring useful knowledge from a source network to predict node labels in a newly formed target network. While existing transfer learning research has primarily focused on vector-based data, in which the instances are assumed to be independent and identically distributed, how to effectively transfer knowledge across different information networks has not been well studied, mainly because networks may have their distinct node features and link relationships between nodes. In this paper, we propose a new transfer learning algorithm that attempts to transfer common latent structure features across the source and target networks. The proposed algorithm discovers these latent features by constructing label propagation matrices in the source and target networks, and mapping them into a shared latent feature space. The latent features capture common structure patterns shared by two networks, and serve as domain-independent features to be transferred between networks. Together with domain-dependent node features, we thereafter propose an iterative classification algorithm that leverages label correlations to predict node labels in the target network. Experiments on real-world networks demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can successfully achieve knowledge transfer between networks to help improve the accuracy of classifying nodes in the target network.

computer science