Classic IR (information retrieval) is inherently predicated on users searching for information, the so-called "information need". But the need behind a web search is often not informational -- it might be navigational (give me the url of the site I want to reach) or transactional (show me sites where I can perform a certain transaction, e.g. shop, download a file, or find a map). We explore this taxonomy of web searches and discuss how global search engines evolved to deal with web-specific needs.

/pdf/a-taxonomy-of-web-search-1c1wfauugs.pdf

A taxonomy of web search

Objective: Most current Electroencephalography (EEG)-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are based on machine learning algorithms. There is a large diversity of classifier types that are used in this field, as described in our 2007 review paper. Now, approximately 10 years after this review publication, many new algorithms have been developed and tested to classify EEG signals in BCIs. The time is therefore ripe for an updated review of EEG classification algorithms for BCIs. Approach: We surveyed the BCI and machine learning literature from 2007 to 2017 to identify the new classification approaches that have been investigated to design BCIs. We synthesize these studies in order to present such algorithms, to report how they were used for BCIs, what were the outcomes, and to identify their pros and cons. Main results: We found that the recently designed classification algorithms for EEG-based BCIs can be divided into four main categories: adaptive classifiers, matrix and tensor classifiers, transfer learning and deep learning, plus a few other miscellaneous classifiers. Among these, adaptive classifiers were demonstrated to be generally superior to static ones, even with unsupervised adaptation. Transfer learning can also prove useful although the benefits of transfer learning remain unpredictable. Riemannian geometry-based methods have reached state-of-the-art performances on multiple BCI problems and deserve to be explored more thoroughly, along with tensor-based methods. Shrinkage linear discriminant analysis and random forests also appear particularly useful for small training samples settings. On the other hand, deep learning methods have not yet shown convincing improvement over state-of-the-art BCI methods. Significance: This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the modern classification algorithms used in EEG-based BCIs, presents the principles of these Review of Classification Algorithms for EEG-based BCI 2 methods and guidelines on when and how to use them. It also identifies a number of challenges to further advance EEG classification in BCI.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/aab2f2/pdf

A Review of Classification Algorithms for EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces: A 10-year Update

Audio- and video-based biometric person authentication

The family of gradient boosting algorithms has been recently extended with several interesting proposals (i.e. XGBoost, LightGBM and CatBoost) that focus on both speed and accuracy. XGBoost is a scalable ensemble technique that has demonstrated to be a reliable and efficient machine learning challenge solver. LightGBM is an accurate model focused on providing extremely fast training performance using selective sampling of high gradient instances. CatBoost modifies the computation of gradients to avoid the prediction shift in order to improve the accuracy of the model. This work proposes a practical analysis of how these novel variants of gradient boosting work in terms of training speed, generalization performance and hyper-parameter setup. In addition, a comprehensive comparison between XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, random forests and gradient boosting has been performed using carefully tuned models as well as using their default settings. The results of this comparison indicate that CatBoost obtains the best results in generalization accuracy and AUC in the studied datasets although the differences are small. LightGBM is the fastest of all methods but not the most accurate. Finally, XGBoost places second both in accuracy and in training speed. Finally an extensive analysis of the effect of hyper-parameter tuning in XGBoost, LightGBM and CatBoost is carried out using two novel proposed tools.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10462-020-09896-5.pdf

A comparative analysis of gradient boosting algorithms

Deep learning can be applied to the field of fault diagnosis for its powerful feature representation capabilities. When a certain class fault samples available are very limited, it is inevitably to be unbalanced. The fault feature extracted from unbalanced data via deep learning is inaccurate, which can lead to high misclassification rate. To solve this problem, new generator and discriminator of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) are designed in this paper to generate more discriminant fault samples using a scheme of global optimization. The generator is designed to generate those fault feature extracted from a few fault samples via Auto Encoder (AE) instead of fault data sample. The training of the generator is guided by fault feature and fault diagnosis error instead of the statistical coincidence of traditional GAN. The discriminator is designed to filter the unqualified generated samples in the sense that qualified samples are helpful for more accurate fault diagnosis. The experimental results of rolling bearings verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Deep Learning Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Global Optimization GAN for Unbalanced Data

Up-to-date report on the accuracy and efficiency of state-of-the-art classifiers.We compare the accuracy of 11 classification algorithms pairwise and groupwise.We examine separately the training, parameter-tuning, and testing time.GBDT and Random Forests yield highest accuracy, outperforming SVM.GBDT is the fastest in testing, Naive Bayes the fastest in training. Current benchmark reports of classification algorithms generally concern common classifiers and their variants but do not include many algorithms that have been introduced in recent years. Moreover, important properties such as the dependency on number of classes and features and CPU running time are typically not examined. In this paper, we carry out a comparative empirical study on both established classifiers and more recently proposed ones on 71 data sets originating from different domains, publicly available at UCI and KEEL repositories. The list of 11 algorithms studied includes Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), Sparse Representation based Classification (SRC), and Deep Learning (DL), which have not been thoroughly investigated in existing comparative studies. It is found that Stochastic Gradient Boosting Trees (GBDT) matches or exceeds the prediction performance of Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Random Forests (RF), while being the fastest algorithm in terms of prediction efficiency. ELM also yields good accuracy results, ranking in the top-5, alongside GBDT, RF, SVM, and C4.5 but this performance varies widely across all data sets. Unsurprisingly, top accuracy performers have average or slow training time efficiency. DL is the worst performer in terms of accuracy but second fastest in prediction efficiency. SRC shows good accuracy performance but it is the slowest classifier in both training and testing.

An up-to-date comparison of state-of-the-art classification algorithms

Combining text and link analysis for focused crawling-An application for vertical search engines

http://poseidon.csd.auth.gr/papers/PUBLISHED/JOURNAL/pdf/Almpanidis08a.pdf

Phonemic segmentation using the generalised Gamma distribution and small sample Bayesian information criterion

Language identification in web documents using discrete HMMs

Boosting algorithms, as a class of ensemble learning methods, have become very popular in data classification, owing to their strong theoretical guarantees and outstanding prediction performance. However, most of these boosting algorithms were designed for static data, thus they can not be directly applied to on-line learning and incremental learning. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that incrementally updates the classification model built upon gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT), namely iGBDT. The main idea of iGBDT is to incrementally learn a new model but without running GBDT from scratch, when new data is dynamically arriving in batch. We conduct large-scale experiments to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of iGBDT. All the experimental results show that, in terms of model building/updating time, iGBDT obtains significantly better performance than the conventional practice that always runs GBDT from scratch when a new batch of data arrives, while still keeping the same classification accuracy. iGBDT can be used in many applications that require in-time analysis of continuously arriving or real-time user-generated data, such as behaviour targeting, Internet advertising, recommender systems, etc.

George Almpanidis

Papers

An up-to-date comparison of state-of-the-art classification algorithms

Combining text and link analysis for focused crawling-An application for vertical search engines

Phonemic segmentation using the generalised Gamma distribution and small sample Bayesian information criterion

Language identification in web documents using discrete HMMs

On Incremental Learning for Gradient Boosting Decision Trees