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Showing papers by "George E. Dahl published in 2015"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is shown that DNNs can routinely make better prospective predictions than RF on a set of large diverse QSAR data sets that are taken from Merck's drug discovery effort.
Abstract: Neural networks were widely used for quantitative structure–activity relationships (QSAR) in the 1990s. Because of various practical issues (e.g., slow on large problems, difficult to train, prone to overfitting, etc.), they were superseded by more robust methods like support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF), which arose in the early 2000s. The last 10 years has witnessed a revival of neural networks in the machine learning community thanks to new methods for preventing overfitting, more efficient training algorithms, and advancements in computer hardware. In particular, deep neural nets (DNNs), i.e. neural nets with more than one hidden layer, have found great successes in many applications, such as computer vision and natural language processing. Here we show that DNNs can routinely make better prospective predictions than RF on a set of large diverse QSAR data sets that are taken from Merck’s drug discovery effort. The number of adjustable parameters needed for DNNs is fairly large, but our ...

877 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper determines the appropriate architecture to make CNNs effective compared to DNNs for LVCSR tasks, and investigates how to incorporate speaker-adapted features, which cannot directly be modeled by CNNs as they do not obey locality in frequency, into the CNN framework.

447 citations


Dissertation
01 Jun 2015
TL;DR: A new neural network generative model of parsed sentences capable of generating reasonable samples is introduced and demonstrated, which results in a model for molecular activity prediction substantially more effective than production systems used in the pharmaceutical industry.
Abstract: Deep learning approaches to problems in speech recognition, computational chemistry, and natural language text processing George Edward Dahl Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 2015 The deep learning approach to machine learning emphasizes high-capacity, scalable models that learn distributed representations of their input. This dissertation demonstrates the efficacy and generality of this approach in a series of diverse case studies in speech recognition, computational chemistry, and natural language processing. Throughout these studies, I extend and modify the neural network models as needed to be more effective for each task. In the area of speech recognition, I develop a more accurate acoustic model using a deep neural network. This model, which uses rectified linear units and dropout, improves word error rates on a 50 hour broadcast news task. A similar neural network results in a model for molecular activity prediction substantially more effective than production systems used in the pharmaceutical industry. Even though training assays in drug discovery are not typically very large, it is still possible to train very large models by leveraging data from multiple assays in the same model and by using effective regularization schemes. In the area of natural language processing, I first describe a new restricted Boltzmann machine training algorithm suitable for text data. Then, I introduce a new neural network generative model of parsed sentences capable of generating reasonable samples and demonstrate a performance advantage for deeper variants of the model.

24 citations