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

With the continuous expansion of data availability in many large-scale, complex, and networked systems, such as surveillance, security, Internet, and finance, it becomes critical to advance the fundamental understanding of knowledge discovery and analysis from raw data to support decision-making processes. Although existing knowledge discovery and data engineering techniques have shown great success in many real-world applications, the problem of learning from imbalanced data (the imbalanced learning problem) is a relatively new challenge that has attracted growing attention from both academia and industry. The imbalanced learning problem is concerned with the performance of learning algorithms in the presence of underrepresented data and severe class distribution skews. Due to the inherent complex characteristics of imbalanced data sets, learning from such data requires new understandings, principles, algorithms, and tools to transform vast amounts of raw data efficiently into information and knowledge representation. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the development of research in learning from imbalanced data. Our focus is to provide a critical review of the nature of the problem, the state-of-the-art technologies, and the current assessment metrics used to evaluate learning performance under the imbalanced learning scenario. Furthermore, in order to stimulate future research in this field, we also highlight the major opportunities and challenges, as well as potential important research directions for learning from imbalanced data.

Learning from Imbalanced Data

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Medscape

CA : A Cancer Journal for Clinicians

Social Network Analysis

We present a heuristic method for learning error correcting output codes matrices based on a hierarchical partition of the class space that maximizes a discriminative criterion. To achieve this goal, the optimal codeword separation is sacrificed in favor of a maximum class discrimination in the partitions. The creation of the hierarchical partition set is performed using a binary tree. As a result, a compact matrix with high discrimination power is obtained. Our method is validated using the UCI database and applied to a real problem, the classification of traffic sign images.

/pdf/discriminant-ecoc-a-heuristic-method-for-application-4pkespoont.pdf

Discriminant ECOC: a heuristic method for application dependent design of error correcting output codes

The high variability of sign appearance in uncontrolled environments has made the detection and classification of road signs a challenging problem in computer vision. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for the detection and classification of traffic signs. Detection is based on a boosted detectors cascade, trained with a novel evolutionary version of Adaboost, which allows the use of large feature spaces. Classification is defined as a multiclass categorization problem. A battery of classifiers is trained to split classes in an Error-Correcting Output Code (ECOC) framework. We propose an ECOC design through a forest of optimal tree structures that are embedded in the ECOC matrix. The novel system offers high performance and better accuracy than the state-of-the-art strategies and is potentially better in terms of noise, affine deformation, partial occlusions, and reduced illumination.

Traffic Sign Recognition Using Evolutionary Adaboost Detection and Forest-ECOC Classification

http://xrm.phys.northwestern.edu/research/pdf_papers/2003/guillamet_patrecoglett_2003.pdf

Introducing a weighted non-negative matrix factorization for image classification

The computer vision problem of face classification under several ambient and unfavorable conditions is considered in this study Changes in expression, different lighting conditions and occlusions are the relevant factors that are studied in this present contribution Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) technique is introduced in the context of face classification and a direct comparison with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is also analyzed Two leading techniques in face recognition are also considered in this study noticing that NMF is able to improve these techniques when a high dimensional feature space is used Finally, different distance metrics (L1, L2 and correlation) are evaluated in the feature space defined by NMF in order to determine the best one for this specific problem Experiments demonstrate that the correlation is the most suitable metric for this problem

/pdf/non-negative-matrix-factorization-for-face-recognition-33t1jloo12.pdf

Jordi Vitrià

Papers

Discriminant ECOC: a heuristic method for application dependent design of error correcting output codes

Traffic Sign Recognition Using Evolutionary Adaboost Detection and Forest-ECOC Classification

Introducing a weighted non-negative matrix factorization for image classification

Non-negative Matrix Factorization for Face Recognition

Nonparametric discriminant analysis and nearest neighbor classification