Usman Qamar

Bio: Usman Qamar is an academic researcher from College of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. The author has contributed to research in topics: Feature selection & Rough set. The author has an hindex of 23, co-authored 161 publications receiving 1864 citations. Previous affiliations of Usman Qamar include University of the Sciences & National University of Science and Technology.

TOM: Twitter opinion mining framework using hybrid classification scheme

Abstract: Twitter has become one of the most popular micro-blogging platform recently. Millions of users can share their thoughts and opinions about different aspects and events on the micro-blogging platform. Therefore, Twitter is considered as a rich source of information for decision making and sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis refers to a classification problem where the main focus is to predict the polarity of words and then classify them into positive and negative feelings with the aim of identifying attitude and opinions that are expressed in any form or language. Sentiment analysis over Twitter offers organisations a fast and effective way to monitor the publics' feelings towards their brand, business, directors, etc. A wide range of features and methods for training sentiment classifiers for Twitter datasets have been researched in recent years with varying results. The primary issues in previous techniques are classification accuracy, data sparsity and sarcasm, as they incorrectly classify most of the tweets with a very high percentage of tweets incorrectly classified as neutral. This research paper focuses on these problems and presents an algorithm for twitter feeds classification based on a hybrid approach. The proposed method includes various pre-processing steps before feeding the text to the classifier. Experimental results show that the proposed technique overcomes the previous limitations and achieves higher accuracy when compared to similar techniques.

Using Blockchain for Electronic Health Records

Abstract: Blockchain have been an interesting research area for a long time and the benefits it provides have been used by a number of various industries. Similarly, the healthcare sector stands to benefit immensely from the blockchain technology due to security, privacy, confidentiality and decentralization. Nevertheless, the Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems face problems regarding data security, integrity and management. In this paper, we discuss how the blockchain technology can be used to transform the EHR systems and could be a solution of these issues. We present a framework that could be used for the implementation of blockchain technology in healthcare sector for EHR. The aim of our proposed framework is firstly to implement blockchain technology for EHR and secondly to provide secure storage of electronic records by defining granular access rules for the users of the proposed framework. Moreover, this framework also discusses the scalability problem faced by the blockchain technology in general via use of off-chain storage of the records. This framework provides the EHR system with the benefits of having a scalable, secure and integral blockchain-based solution.

Texture Classification Using Rotation- and Scale-Invariant Gabor Texture Features

Abstract: This letter introduces a novel approach to rotation and scale invariant texture classification. The proposed approach is based on Gabor filters that have the capability to collapse the filter responses according to the scale and orientation of the textures. These characteristics are exploited to first calculate the homogeneous texture of images followed by the rearrangement of features as a two-dimensional matrix (scale and orientation), where scaling and rotation of images correspond to shifting in this matrix. The shift invariance property of discrete fourier transform is used to propose rotation and scale invariant image features. The performance of the proposed feature set is evaluated on Brodatz texture album. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed descriptor as compared to other methods considered in this letter.

A semi-supervised approach to sentiment analysis using revised sentiment strength based on SentiWordNet

Abstract: An immense amount of data is available with the advent of social media in the last decade. This data can be used for sentiment analysis and decision making. The data present on blogs, news/review sites, social networks, etc., are so enormous that manual labeling is not feasible and an automatic approach is required for its analysis. The sentiment of the masses can be understood by analyzing this large scale and opinion rich data. The major issues in the application of automated approaches are data unavailability, data sparsity, domain independence and inadequate performance. This research proposes a semi-supervised sentiment analysis approach that incorporates lexicon-based methodology with machine learning in order to improve sentiment analysis performance. Mathematical models such as information gain and cosine similarity are employed to revise the sentiment scores defined in SentiWordNet. This research also emphasizes on the importance of nouns and employs them as semantic features with other parts of speech. The evaluation of performance measures and comparison with state-of-the-art techniques proves that the proposed approach is superior.

Machine learning

Abstract: 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.).

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Abstract: 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.

A survey on opinion mining and sentiment analysis

Abstract: With the advent of Web 2.0, people became more eager to express and share their opinions on web regarding day-to-day activities and global issues as well. Evolution of social media has also contributed immensely to these activities, thereby providing us a transparent platform to share views across the world. These electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) statements expressed on the web are much prevalent in business and service industry to enable customer to share his/her point of view. In the last one and half decades, research communities, academia, public and service industries are working rigorously on sentiment analysis, also known as, opinion mining, to extract and analyze public mood and views. In this regard, this paper presents a rigorous survey on sentiment analysis, which portrays views presented by over one hundred articles published in the last decade regarding necessary tasks, approaches, and applications of sentiment analysis. Several sub-tasks need to be performed for sentiment analysis which in turn can be accomplished using various approaches and techniques. This survey covering published literature during 2002-2015, is organized on the basis of sub-tasks to be performed, machine learning and natural language processing techniques used and applications of sentiment analysis. The paper also presents open issues and along with a summary table of a hundred and sixty-one articles.