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

Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

Data Mining - Concepts and Techniques.

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

The PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge

Label ranking studies the problem of learning a mapping from instances to rankings over a predefined set of labels. Hitherto existing approaches to label ranking implicitly operate on an underlying (utility) scale which is not calibrated in the sense that it lacks a natural zero point. We propose a suitable extension of label ranking that incorporates the calibrated scenario and substantially extends the expressive power of these approaches. In particular, our extension suggests a conceptually novel technique for extending the common learning by pairwise comparison approach to the multilabel scenario, a setting previously not being amenable to the pairwise decomposition technique. The key idea of the approach is to introduce an artificial calibration label that, in each example, separates the relevant from the irrelevant labels. We show that this technique can be viewed as a combination of pairwise preference learning and the conventional relevance classification technique, where a separate classifier is trained to predict whether a label is relevant or not. Empirical results in the area of text categorization, image classification and gene analysis underscore the merits of the calibrated model in comparison to state-of-the-art multilabel learning methods.

/pdf/multilabel-classification-via-calibrated-label-ranking-4rox9uo2jl.pdf

Multilabel classification via calibrated label ranking

https://www.ke.tu-darmstadt.de/~juffi/publications/aij-08.pdf

Label ranking by learning pairwise preferences

The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with standard probability and probabilistic predictions. Yet, due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications and related issues such as safety requirements, new problems and challenges have recently been identified by machine learning scholars, and these problems may call for new methodological developments. In particular, this includes the importance of distinguishing between (at least) two different types of uncertainty, often referred to as aleatoric and epistemic. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of uncertainty in machine learning as well as an overview of attempts so far at handling uncertainty in general and formalizing this distinction in particular.

/pdf/aleatoric-and-epistemic-uncertainty-in-machine-learning-an-5c7lignu40.pdf

Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Machine Learning: An Introduction to Concepts and Methods

This paper introduces a novel fuzzy rule-based classification method called FURIA, which is short for Fuzzy Unordered Rule Induction Algorithm. FURIA extends the well-known RIPPER algorithm, a state-of-the-art rule learner, while preserving its advantages, such as simple and comprehensible rule sets. In addition, it includes a number of modifications and extensions. In particular, FURIA learns fuzzy rules instead of conventional rules and unordered rule sets instead of rule lists. Moreover, to deal with uncovered examples, it makes use of an efficient rule stretching method. Experimental results show that FURIA significantly outperforms the original RIPPER, as well as other classifiers such as C4.5, in terms of classification accuracy.

/pdf/furia-an-algorithm-for-unordered-fuzzy-rule-induction-5eba52xjsk.pdf

FURIA: an algorithm for unordered fuzzy rule induction

Coping with uncertainty in dynamical systems has recently received some attention in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the fields of qualitative and model-based reasoning. In this paper, we propose an approach to modelling and simulation of uncertain dynamics which is based on the following ideas: We consider (linguistic) descriptions of uncertain functional relationships characterizing the behavior of some dynamical system. Based on a certain interpretation of such rule-based models, we derive a fuzzy function $\tilde{F}$. It will be shown that all (reasonable) fuzzy functions can be approximated to any degree of accuracy in this way. The function $\tilde{F}$ is then used as the "fuzzy" right hand side of a set of differential equations, which leads us to consider fuzzy initial value problems. We are going to propose an interpretation of such problems. Moreover, several aspects of simulation methods for characterizing the set of all system behaviors compatible with this interpretation will be...

Eyke Hüllermeier

Papers

Multilabel classification via calibrated label ranking

Label ranking by learning pairwise preferences

Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Machine Learning: An Introduction to Concepts and Methods

FURIA: an algorithm for unordered fuzzy rule induction

An Approach to Modelling and Simulation of Uncertain Dynamical Systems