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

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

Deep convolutional neural networks have performed remarkably well on many Computer Vision tasks. However, these networks are heavily reliant on big data to avoid overfitting. Overfitting refers to the phenomenon when a network learns a function with very high variance such as to perfectly model the training data. Unfortunately, many application domains do not have access to big data, such as medical image analysis. This survey focuses on Data Augmentation, a data-space solution to the problem of limited data. Data Augmentation encompasses a suite of techniques that enhance the size and quality of training datasets such that better Deep Learning models can be built using them. The image augmentation algorithms discussed in this survey include geometric transformations, color space augmentations, kernel filters, mixing images, random erasing, feature space augmentation, adversarial training, generative adversarial networks, neural style transfer, and meta-learning. The application of augmentation methods based on GANs are heavily covered in this survey. In addition to augmentation techniques, this paper will briefly discuss other characteristics of Data Augmentation such as test-time augmentation, resolution impact, final dataset size, and curriculum learning. This survey will present existing methods for Data Augmentation, promising developments, and meta-level decisions for implementing Data Augmentation. Readers will understand how Data Augmentation can improve the performance of their models and expand limited datasets to take advantage of the capabilities of big data.

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A survey on Image Data Augmentation for Deep Learning

Statistical Analysis with Missing Data

An overview of the self-organizing map algorithm, on which the papers in this issue are based, is presented in this article.

The Self-Organizing Map

Big Data Analytics and Deep Learning are two high-focus of data science. Big Data has become important as many organizations both public and private have been collecting massive amounts of domain-specific information, which can contain useful information about problems such as national intelligence, cyber security, fraud detection, marketing, and medical informatics. Companies such as Google and Microsoft are analyzing large volumes of data for business analysis and decisions, impacting existing and future technology. Deep Learning algorithms extract high-level, complex abstractions as data representations through a hierarchical learning process. Complex abstractions are learnt at a given level based on relatively simpler abstractions formulated in the preceding level in the hierarchy. A key benefit of Deep Learning is the analysis and learning of massive amounts of unsupervised data, making it a valuable tool for Big Data Analytics where raw data is largely unlabeled and un-categorized. In the present study, we explore how Deep Learning can be utilized for addressing some important problems in Big Data Analytics, including extracting complex patterns from massive volumes of data, semantic indexing, data tagging, fast information retrieval, and simplifying discriminative tasks. We also investigate some aspects of Deep Learning research that need further exploration to incorporate specific challenges introduced by Big Data Analytics, including streaming data, high-dimensional data, scalability of models, and distributed computing. We conclude by presenting insights into relevant future works by posing some questions, including defining data sampling criteria, domain adaptation modeling, defining criteria for obtaining useful data abstractions, improving semantic indexing, semi-supervised learning, and active learning.

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Deep learning applications and challenges in big data analytics

In a majority–minority classification problem, class imbalance in the dataset(s) can dramatically skew the performance of classifiers, introducing a prediction bias for the majority class. Assuming the positive (minority) class is the group of interest and the given application domain dictates that a false negative is much costlier than a false positive, a negative (majority) class prediction bias could have adverse consequences. With big data, the mitigation of class imbalance poses an even greater challenge because of the varied and complex structure of the relatively much larger datasets. This paper provides a large survey of published studies within the last 8 years, focusing on high-class imbalance (i.e., a majority-to-minority class ratio between 100:1 and 10,000:1) in big data in order to assess the state-of-the-art in addressing adverse effects due to class imbalance. In this paper, two techniques are covered which include Data-Level (e.g., data sampling) and Algorithm-Level (e.g., cost-sensitive and hybrid/ensemble) Methods. Data sampling methods are popular in addressing class imbalance, with Random Over-Sampling methods generally showing better overall results. At the Algorithm-Level, there are some outstanding performers. Yet, in the published studies, there are inconsistent and conflicting results, coupled with a limited scope in evaluated techniques, indicating the need for more comprehensive, comparative studies.

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A survey on addressing high-class imbalance in big data

The selection of software metrics for building software quality prediction models is a search-based software engineering problem. An exhaustive search for such metrics is usually not feasible due to limited project resources, especially if the number of available metrics is large. Defect prediction models are necessary in aiding project managers for better utilizing valuable project resources for software quality improvement. The efficacy and usefulness of a fault-proneness prediction model is only as good as the quality of the software measurement data. This study focuses on the problem of attribute selection in the context of software quality estimation. A comparative investigation is presented for evaluating our proposed hybrid attribute selection approach, in which feature ranking is first used to reduce the search space, followed by a feature subset selection. A total of seven different feature ranking techniques are evaluated, while four different feature subset selection approaches are considered. The models are trained using five commonly used classification algorithms. The case study is based on software metrics and defect data collected from multiple releases of a large real-world software system. The results demonstrate that while some feature ranking techniques performed similarly, the automatic hybrid search algorithm performed the best among the feature subset selection methods. Moreover, performances of the defect prediction models either improved or remained unchanged when over 85were eliminated. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Choosing software metrics for defect prediction: an investigation on feature selection techniques

For software quality estimation, software development practitioners typically construct quality-classification or fault prediction models using software metrics and fault data from a previous system release or a similar software project. Engineers then use these models to predict the fault proneness of software modules in development. Software quality estimation using supervised-learning approaches is difficult without software fault measurement data from similar projects or earlier system releases. Cluster analysis with expert input is a viable unsupervised-learning solution for predicting software modules' fault proneness and potential noisy modules. Data analysts and software engineering experts can collaborate more closely to construct and collect more informative software metrics.

Analyzing software measurement data with clustering techniques

Software metrics-based quality classification models predict a software module as either fault-prone (fp) or not fault-prone (nfp) Timely application of such models can assist in directing quality improvement efforts to modules that are likely to be fp during operations, thereby cost-effectively utilizing the software quality testing and enhancement resources Since several classification techniques are available, a relative comparative study of some commonly used classification techniques can be useful to practitioners We present a comprehensive evaluation of the relative performances of seven classification techniques and/or tools These include logistic regression, case-based reasoning, classification and regression trees (CART), tree-based classification with S-PLUS, and the Sprint-Sliq, C45, and Treedisc algorithms The use of expected cost of misclassification (ECM), is introduced as a singular unified measure to compare the performances of different software quality classification models A function of the costs of the Type I (a nfp module misclassified as fp) and Type II (a fp module misclassified as nfp) misclassifications, ECM is computed for different cost ratios Evaluating software quality classification models in the presence of varying cost ratios is important, because the usefulness of a model is dependent on the system-specific costs of misclassifications Moreover, models should be compared and preferred for cost ratios that fall within the range of interest for the given system and project domain Software metrics were collected from four successive releases of a large legacy telecommunications system A two-way ANOVA randomized-complete block design modeling approach is used, in which the system release is treated as a block, while the modeling method is treated as a factor It is observed that predictive performances of the models is significantly different across the system releases, implying that in the software engineering domain prediction models are influenced by the characteristics of the data and the system being modeled Multiple-pairwise comparisons are performed to evaluate the relative performances of the seven models for the cost ratios of interest to the case study In addition, the performance of the seven classification techniques is also compared with a classification based on lines of code The comparative approach presented in this paper can also be applied to other software systems

Naeem Seliya

Papers

Deep learning applications and challenges in big data analytics

A survey on addressing high-class imbalance in big data

Choosing software metrics for defect prediction: an investigation on feature selection techniques

Analyzing software measurement data with clustering techniques

Comparative Assessment of Software Quality Classification Techniques: An Empirical Case Study