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

Statistical approaches to processing natural language text have become dominant in recent years This foundational text is the first comprehensive introduction to statistical natural language processing (NLP) to appear The book contains all the theory and algorithms needed for building NLP tools It provides broad but rigorous coverage of mathematical and linguistic foundations, as well as detailed discussion of statistical methods, allowing students and researchers to construct their own implementations The book covers collocation finding, word sense disambiguation, probabilistic parsing, information retrieval, and other applications

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Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

2 1 The innovative transport systems and the CityMobil project 10 1.1 The research questions 10 2 The state of art in the field of automatic transport systems 12 2.1 Case studies and demand studies for innovative transport systems 12 3 The design and implementation of surveys 14 3.1 Definition of experimental design 14 3.2 Questionnaire design and delivery 16 3.3 First analyses on the collected sample 18 4 Calibration of Logit Multionomial demand models 21 4.1 Methodology 21 4.2 Calibration of the “full” model. 22 4.3 Calibration of the “final” model 24 4.4 The demand analysis through the final Multinomial Logit model 25 5 The analysis of interaction between the demand and socioeconomic attributes 31 5.1 Methodology 31 5.2 Application of Mixed Logit models to the demand 31 5.3 Analysis of the interactions between demand and socioeconomic attributes through Mixed Logit models 32 5.4 Mixed Logit model and interaction between age and the demand for the CTS 38 5.5 Demand analysis with Mixed Logit model 39 6 Final analyses and conclusions 45 6.1 Comparison between the results of the analyses 45 6.2 Conclusions 48 6.3 Answers to the research questions and future developments 52

The European commission

Feature selection techniques have become an apparent need in many bioinformatics applications. In addition to the large pool of techniques that have already been developed in the machine learning and data mining fields, specific applications in bioinformatics have led to a wealth of newly proposed techniques.

In this article, we make the interested reader aware of the possibilities of feature selection, providing a basic taxonomy of feature selection techniques, and discussing their use, variety and potential in a number of both common as well as upcoming bioinformatics applications.

Contact: yvan.saeys@psb.ugent.be

Supplementary information: http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/supplementary_data/yvsae/fsreview

A review of feature selection techniques in bioinformatics

TiMBL: Tilburg Memory Based Learner, version 4.3, Reference Guide

Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Memory-based language processing--a machine learning and problem solving method for language technology--is based on the idea that the direct re-use of examples using analogical reasoning is more suited for solving language processing problems than the application of rules extracted from those examples. This book discusses the theory and practice of memory-based language processing, showing its comparative strengths over alternative methods of language modelling. Language is complex, with few generalizations, many sub-regularities and exceptions, and the advantage of memory-based language processing is that it does not abstract away from this valuable low-frequency information.

Memory-based language processing

Pattern is a package for Python 2.4+ with functionality for web mining (Google + Twitter + Wikipedia, web spider, HTML DOM parser), natural language processing (tagger/chunker, n-gram search, sentiment analysis, WordNet), machine learning (vector space model, k-means clustering, Naive Bayes + k-NN + SVM classifiers) and network analysis (graph centrality and visualization). It is well documented and bundled with 30+ examples and 350+ unit tests. The source code is licensed under BSD and available from http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/pages/pattern.

Pattern for python

We introduce a memory-based approach to part of speech tagging. Memory-based learning is a form of supervised learning based on similarity-based reasoning. The part of speech tag of a word in a particular context is extrapolated from the most similar cases held in memory. Supervised learning approaches are useful when a tagged corpus is available as an example of the desired output of the tagger. Based on such a corpus, the tagger-generator automatically builds a tagger which is able to tag new text the same way, diminishing development time for the construction of a tagger considerably. Memory-based tagging shares this advantage with other statistical or machine learning approaches. Additional advantages specific to a memory-based approach include (i) the relatively small tagged corpus size sufficient for training, (ii) incremental learning, (iii) explanation capabilities, (iv) flexible integration of information in case representations, (v) its non-parametric nature, (vi) reasonably good results on unknown words without morphological analysis, and (vii) fast learning and tagging. In this paper we show that a large-scale application of the memory-based approach is feasible: we obtain a tagging accuracy that is on a par with that of known statistical approaches, and with attractive space and time complexity properties when using {\em IGTree}, a tree-based formalism for indexing and searching huge case bases.} The use of IGTree has as additional advantage that optimal context size for disambiguation is dynamically computed.

Walter Daelemans

Papers

TiMBL: Tilburg Memory Based Learner, version 4.3, Reference Guide

Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Memory-based language processing

Pattern for python

MBT: A Memory-Based Part of Speech Tagger-Generator