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

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

(Section Headings): Preface. Thinking Aloud. Studying the Content of Cognitive Processes. The Think Aloud Method. Practical Procedures in Obtaining Think Aloud Protocols. Building Models of Problem Solving. Languages for Task Analysis and Psychological Modelling. Analysing the Protocols. Examples of the Think Aloud Method. Exercises. Instructions for Two Problem Solving Tasks. Example: Learning Word Meanings. Analysing Expert Problem Solving. Coding Scheme Architectural Design. Bibliography.

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The Think Aloud Method: A Practical Guide to Modelling Cognitive Processes

https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/3000/thesis.pdf;sequence=1

Cost-sensitive boosting for classification of imbalanced data

The increasing availability of (digital) cultural heritage artefacts offers great potential for increased access to art content, but also necessitates tools to help users deal with such abundance of information. User-adaptive art recommender systems aim to present their users with art content tailored to their interests. These systems try to adapt to the user based on feedback from the user on which artworks he or she finds interesting. Users need to be able to depend on the system to competently adapt to their feedback and find the artworks that are most interesting to them. This paper investigates the influence of transparency on user trust in and acceptance of content-based recommender systems. A between-subject experiment (N = 60) evaluated interaction with three versions of a content-based art recommender in the cultural heritage domain. This recommender system provides users with artworks that are of interest to them, based on their ratings of other artworks. Version 1 was not transparent, version 2 explained to the user why a recommendation had been made and version 3 showed a rating of how certain the system was that a recommendation would be of interest to the user. Results show that explaining to the user why a recommendation was made increased acceptance of the recommendations. Trust in the system itself was not improved by transparency. Showing how certain the system was of a recommendation did not influence trust and acceptance. A number of guidelines for design of recommender systems in the cultural heritage domain have been derived from the study's results.

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The effects of transparency on trust in and acceptance of a content-based art recommender

We consider semi-supervised learning, learning task from both labeled and unlabeled instances and in particular, self-training with decision tree learners as base learners. We show that standard decision tree learning as the base learner cannot be effective in a self-training algorithm to semi-supervised learning. The main reason is that the basic decision tree learner does not produce reliable probability estimation to its predictions. Therefore, it cannot be a proper selection criterion in self-training. We consider the effect of several modifications to the basic decision tree learner that produce better probability estimation than using the distributions at the leaves of the tree. We show that these modifications do not produce better performance when used on the labeled data only, but they do benefit more from the unlabeled data in self-training. The modifications that we consider are Naive Bayes Tree, a combination of No-pruning and Laplace correction, grafting, and using a distance-based measure. We then extend this improvement to algorithms for ensembles of decision trees and we show that the ensemble learner gives an extra improvement over the adapted decision tree learners.

/pdf/semi-supervised-self-training-for-decision-tree-classifiers-4qja56ok86.pdf

Semi-supervised self-training for decision tree classifiers

In this paper we present a machine learning framework to analyze moving object trajectories from maritime vessels. Within this framework we perform the tasks of clustering, classification and outlier detection with vessel trajectory data. First, we apply a piecewise linear segmentation method to the trajectories to compress them. We adapt an existing technique to better retain stop and move information and show the better performance of our method with experimental results. Second, we use a similarity based approach to perform the clustering, classification and outlier detection tasks using kernel methods. We present experiments that investigate different alignment kernels and the effect of piecewise linear segmentation in the three different tasks. The experimental results show that compression does not negatively impact task performance and greatly reduces computation time for the alignment kernels. Finally, the alignment kernels allow for easy integration of geographical domain knowledge. In experiments we show that this added domain knowledge enhances performance in the clustering and classification tasks.

Machine learning for vessel trajectories using compression, alignments and domain knowledge

The CoIL Challenge 2000 data mining competition attracted a wide variety of solutions, both in terms of approaches and performance. The goal of the competition was to predict who would be interested in buying a specific insurance product and to explain why people would buy. Unlike in most other competitions, the majority of participants provided a report describing the path to their solution. In this article we use the framework of bias-variance decomposition of error to analyze what caused the wide range of prediction performance. We characterize the challenge problem to make it comparable to other problems and evaluate why certain methods work or not. We also include an evaluation of the submitted explanations by a marketing expert. We find that variance is the key component of error for this problem. Participants use various strategies in data preparation and model development that reduce variance error, such as feature selection and the use of simple, robust and low variance learners like Naive Bayes. Adding constructed features, modeling with complex, weak bias learners and extensive fine tuning by the participants often increase the variance error.

/pdf/a-bias-variance-analysis-of-a-real-world-learning-problem-41wnra300v.pdf

A Bias-Variance Analysis of a Real World Learning Problem: The CoIL Challenge 2000

In this paper we present GAMYGDALA, an emotional appraisal engine that enables game developers to easily add emotions to their Non-Player Characters (NPC). Our approach proposes a solution that is positioned between event coding of affect, where individual events have predetermined annotated emotional consequences for NPCs, and a full blown cognitive appraisal model. Instead, for an NPC that needs emotions the game developer defines goals and annotates game events with a relation to these goals. Based on this input, GAMYGDALA produces an emotion for that NPC according to the well-known OCC model. In this paper we provide evidence for the following: GAMYGDALA provides black-box Game-AI independent emotion support, is efficient for large numbers of NPCs, and is psychologically grounded.

/pdf/gamygdala-an-emotion-engine-for-games-59bpoa5pph.pdf

Maarten van Someren

Papers

The effects of transparency on trust in and acceptance of a content-based art recommender

Semi-supervised self-training for decision tree classifiers

Machine learning for vessel trajectories using compression, alignments and domain knowledge

A Bias-Variance Analysis of a Real World Learning Problem: The CoIL Challenge 2000

GAMYGDALA: An Emotion Engine for Games