LIBSVM is a library for Support Vector Machines (SVMs). We have been actively developing this package since the year 2000. The goal is to help users to easily apply SVM to their applications. LIBSVM has gained wide popularity in machine learning and many other areas. In this article, we present all implementation details of LIBSVM. Issues such as solving SVM optimization problems theoretical convergence multiclass classification probability estimates and parameter selection are discussed in detail.

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LIBSVM: A library for support vector machines

There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

The increasing volume of data in modern business and science calls for more complex and sophisticated tools. Although advances in data mining technology have made extensive data collection much easier, it's still always evolving and there is a constant need for new techniques and tools that can help us transform this data into useful information and knowledge. Since the previous edition's publication, great advances have been made in the field of data mining. Not only does the third of edition of Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques continue the tradition of equipping you with an understanding and application of the theory and practice of discovering patterns hidden in large data sets, it also focuses on new, important topics in the field: data warehouses and data cube technology, mining stream, mining social networks, and mining spatial, multimedia and other complex data. Each chapter is a stand-alone guide to a critical topic, presenting proven algorithms and sound implementations ready to be used directly or with strategic modification against live data. This is the resource you need if you want to apply today's most powerful data mining techniques to meet real business challenges. * Presents dozens of algorithms and implementation examples, all in pseudo-code and suitable for use in real-world, large-scale data mining projects. * Addresses advanced topics such as mining object-relational databases, spatial databases, multimedia databases, time-series databases, text databases, the World Wide Web, and applications in several fields. *Provides a comprehensive, practical look at the concepts and techniques you need to get the most out of real business data

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques offers a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying machine learning tools and techniques in real-world data mining situations. This highly anticipated third edition of the most acclaimed work on data mining and machine learning will teach you everything you need to know about preparing inputs, interpreting outputs, evaluating results, and the algorithmic methods at the heart of successful data mining. Thorough updates reflect the technical changes and modernizations that have taken place in the field since the last edition, including new material on Data Transformations, Ensemble Learning, Massive Data Sets, Multi-instance Learning, plus a new version of the popular Weka machine learning software developed by the authors. Witten, Frank, and Hall include both tried-and-true techniques of today as well as methods at the leading edge of contemporary research. *Provides a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying the tools and techniques to your data mining projects *Offers concrete tips and techniques for performance improvement that work by transforming the input or output in machine learning methods *Includes downloadable Weka software toolkit, a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks-in an updated, interactive interface. Algorithms in toolkit cover: data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, visualization

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

The tutorial starts with an overview of the concepts of VC dimension and structural risk minimization. We then describe linear Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for separable and non-separable data, working through a non-trivial example in detail. We describe a mechanical analogy, and discuss when SVM solutions are unique and when they are global. We describe how support vector training can be practically implemented, and discuss in detail the kernel mapping technique which is used to construct SVM solutions which are nonlinear in the data. We show how Support Vector machines can have very large (even infinite) VC dimension by computing the VC dimension for homogeneous polynomial and Gaussian radial basis function kernels. While very high VC dimension would normally bode ill for generalization performance, and while at present there exists no theory which shows that good generalization performance is guaranteed for SVMs, there are several arguments which support the observed high accuracy of SVMs, which we review. Results of some experiments which were inspired by these arguments are also presented. We give numerous examples and proofs of most of the key theorems. There is new material, and I hope that the reader will find that even old material is cast in a fresh light.

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A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition

Bayesian algorithms for Neural Networks are known to produce classiiers which are very resistent to overrt-ting. It is often claimed that one of the main distinctive features of Bayesian Learning Algorithms is that they don't simply output one hypothesis, but rather an entire distribution of probability over an hypothesis set: the Bayes posterior. An alternative perspective is that they output a linear combination of classiiers, whose coeecients are given by Bayes theorem. One of the concepts used to deal with thresholded convex combinations is thèmargin' of the hyperplane with respect to the training sample, which is correlated to the predictive power of the hypothesis itself. We provide a novel theoretical analysis of such clas-siiers, based on Data-Dependent VC theory, proving that they can be expected to be large margin hyper-planes in a Hilbert space. We then present experimental evidence that the predictions of our model are correct , i.e. that bayesian classifers really nd hypotheses which have large margin on the training examples. This not only explains the remarkable resistance to overrtting exhibited by such classiiers, but also co-locates them in the same class of other systems, like Support Vector machines and Adaboost, which have a similar performance.

Bayesian Classifiers Are Large Margin Hyperplanes in a Hilbert Space

We present an extensive experimental study of Phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation, from the point of view of its learning capabilities. Very accurate Learning Curves are obtained, using high-performance computing, and extrapolations of the projected performance of the system under different conditions are provided. Our experiments confirm existing and mostly unpublished beliefs about the learning capabilities of statistical machine translation systems. We also provide insight into the way statistical machine translation learns from data, including the respective influence of translation and language models, the impact of phrase length on performance, and various unlearning and perturbation analyses. Our results support and illustrate the fact that performance improves by a constant amount for each doubling of the data, across different language pairs, and different systems. This fundamental limitation seems to be a direct consequence of Zipf law governing textual data. Although the rate of improvement may depend on both the data and the estimation method, it is unlikely that the general shape of the learning curve will change withoutmajor changes in the modeling and inference phases. Possible research directions that address this issue include the integration of linguistic rules or the development of active learning procedures.

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Learning to translate: a statistical and computational analysis

As we increasingly delegate decision-making to algorithms, whether directly or indirectly, important questions emerge in circumstances where those decisions have direct consequences for individual rights and personal opportunities, as well as for the collective good. A key problem for policymakers is that the social implications of these new methods can only be grasped if there is an adequate comprehension of their general technical underpinnings. The discussion here focuses primarily on the case of enforcement decisions in the criminal justice system, but draws on similar situations emerging from other algorithms utilised in controlling access to opportunities, to explain how machine learning works and, as a result, how decisions are made by modern intelligent algorithms or 'classifiers'. It examines the key aspects of the performance of classifiers, including how classifiers learn, the fact that they operate on the basis of correlation rather than causation, and that the term 'bias' in machine learning has a different meaning to common usage. An example of a real world 'classifier', the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART), is examined, through identification of its technical features: the classification method, the training data and the test data, the features and the labels, validation and performance measures. Four normative benchmarks are then considered by reference to HART: (a) prediction accuracy (b) fairness and equality before the law (c) transparency and accountability (d) informational privacy and freedom of expression, in order to demonstrate how its technical features have important normative dimensions that bear directly on the extent to which the system can be regarded as a viable and legitimate support for, or even alternative to, existing human decision-makers.

Machine Decisions and Human Consequences

We present a working system for large scale quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) of news corpora, which includes various recent ideas from text mining and pattern analysis in order to solve a problem arising in computational social sciences. The task is that of identifying the key actors in a body of news, and the actions they perform, so that further analysis can be carried out. This step is normally performed by hand and is very labour intensive. We then characterise the actors by: studying their position in the overall network of actors and actions; studying the time series associated with some of their properties; generating scatter plots describing the subject/object bias of each actor; and investigating the types of actions each actor is most associated with. The system is demonstrated on a set of 100,000 articles about crime appeared on the New York Times between 1987 and 2007. As an example, we nd that Men were most commonly responsible for crimes against the person, while Women and Children were most often victims of those crimes.

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Nello Cristianini

Papers

Bayesian Classifiers Are Large Margin Hyperplanes in a Hilbert Space

Learning to translate: a statistical and computational analysis

Machine Decisions and Human Consequences

Automating quantitative narrative analysis of news data

2010 Special Issue: Are we there yet?