Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Detecting anomalies in data is a vital task, with numerous high-impact applications in areas such as security, finance, health care, and law enforcement. While numerous techniques have been developed in past years for spotting outliers and anomalies in unstructured collections of multi-dimensional points, with graph data becoming ubiquitous, techniques for structured graph data have been of focus recently. As objects in graphs have long-range correlations, a suite of novel technology has been developed for anomaly detection in graph data. This survey aims to provide a general, comprehensive, and structured overview of the state-of-the-art methods for anomaly detection in data represented as graphs. As a key contribution, we give a general framework for the algorithms categorized under various settings: unsupervised versus (semi-)supervised approaches, for static versus dynamic graphs, for attributed versus plain graphs. We highlight the effectiveness, scalability, generality, and robustness aspects of the methods. What is more, we stress the importance of anomaly attribution and highlight the major techniques that facilitate digging out the root cause, or the `why', of the detected anomalies for further analysis and sense-making. Finally, we present several real-world applications of graph-based anomaly detection in diverse domains, including financial, auction, computer traffic, and social networks. We conclude our survey with a discussion on open theoretical and practical challenges in the field.

http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~leman/pubs/14-dami-graphanomalysurvey.pdf

Graph based anomaly detection and description: a survey

Detecting anomalies in data is a vital task, with numerous high-impact applications in areas such as security, finance, health care, and law enforcement. While numerous techniques have been developed in past years for spotting outliers and anomalies in unstructured collections of multi-dimensional points, with graph data becoming ubiquitous, techniques for structured {\em graph} data have been of focus recently. As objects in graphs have long-range correlations, a suite of novel technology has been developed for anomaly detection in graph data. 
This survey aims to provide a general, comprehensive, and structured overview of the state-of-the-art methods for anomaly detection in data represented as graphs. As a key contribution, we provide a comprehensive exploration of both data mining and machine learning algorithms for these {\em detection} tasks. we give a general framework for the algorithms categorized under various settings: unsupervised vs. (semi-)supervised approaches, for static vs. dynamic graphs, for attributed vs. plain graphs. We highlight the effectiveness, scalability, generality, and robustness aspects of the methods. What is more, we stress the importance of anomaly {\em attribution} and highlight the major techniques that facilitate digging out the root cause, or the `why', of the detected anomalies for further analysis and sense-making. Finally, we present several real-world applications of graph-based anomaly detection in diverse domains, including financial, auction, computer traffic, and social networks. We conclude our survey with a discussion on open theoretical and practical challenges in the field.

Graph-based Anomaly Detection and Description: A Survey

The need for appropriate ways to measure the distance or similarity between data is ubiquitous in machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining, but handcrafting such good metrics for specific problems is generally difficult. This has led to the emergence of metric learning, which aims at automatically learning a metric from data and has attracted a lot of interest in machine learning and related fields for the past ten years. This survey paper proposes a systematic review of the metric learning literature, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. We pay particular attention to Mahalanobis distance metric learning, a well-studied and successful framework, but additionally present a wide range of methods that have recently emerged as powerful alternatives, including nonlinear metric learning, similarity learning and local metric learning. Recent trends and extensions, such as semi-supervised metric learning, metric learning for histogram data and the derivation of generalization guarantees, are also covered. Finally, this survey addresses metric learning for structured data, in particular edit distance learning, and attempts to give an overview of the remaining challenges in metric learning for the years to come.

A Survey on Metric Learning for Feature Vectors and Structured Data

Inexact graph matching has been one of the significant research foci in the area of pattern analysis. As an important way to measure the similarity between pairwise graphs error-tolerantly, graph edit distance (GED) is the base of inexact graph matching. The research advance of GED is surveyed in order to provide a review of the existing literatures and offer some insights into the studies of GED. Since graphs may be attributed or non-attributed and the definition of costs for edit operations is various, the existing GED algorithms are categorized according to these two factors and described in detail. After these algorithms are analyzed and their limitations are identified, several promising directions for further research are proposed.

http://nlpr-web.ia.ac.cn/2010papers/%E5%BC%80%E6%94%BE%E8%AF%BE%E9%A2%98/%E5%9B%BD%E9%99%85%E5%88%8A%E7%89%A9/Xinbo%20Gao,%20A%20survey%20of%20graph%20edit%20distance.pdf

Bing Xiao

Papers

A survey of graph edit distance

A new approach for face recognition by sketches in photos

Image categorization: Graph edit distance+edge direction histogram

Photo-sketch synthesis and recognition based on subspace learning

Adaptive frame rate up-conversion based on motion classification