Yin Zhang

Bio: Yin Zhang is an academic researcher from Carnegie Mellon University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Curse of dimensionality & Usability. The author has an hindex of 9, co-authored 12 publications receiving 1381 citations. Previous affiliations of Yin Zhang include Nanjing University.

Understanding bag-of-words model: A statistical framework

Abstract: The bag-of-words model is one of the most popular representation methods for object categorization. The key idea is to quantize each extracted key point into one of visual words, and then represent each image by a histogram of the visual words. For this purpose, a clustering algorithm (e.g., K-means), is generally used for generating the visual words. Although a number of studies have shown encouraging results of the bag-of-words representation for object categorization, theoretical studies on properties of the bag-of-words model is almost untouched, possibly due to the difficulty introduced by using a heuristic clustering process. In this paper, we present a statistical framework which generalizes the bag-of-words representation. In this framework, the visual words are generated by a statistical process rather than using a clustering algorithm, while the empirical performance is competitive to clustering-based method. A theoretical analysis based on statistical consistency is presented for the proposed framework. Moreover, based on the framework we developed two algorithms which do not rely on clustering, while achieving competitive performance in object categorization when compared to clustering-based bag-of-words representations.

Multilabel dimensionality reduction via dependence maximization

Abstract: Multilabel learning deals with data associated with multiple labels simultaneously. Like other data mining and machine learning tasks, multilabel learning also suffers from the curse of dimensionality. Dimensionality reduction has been studied for many years, however, multilabel dimensionality reduction remains almost untouched. In this article, we propose a multilabel dimensionality reduction method, MDDM, with two kinds of projection strategies, attempting to project the original data into a lower-dimensional feature space maximizing the dependence between the original feature description and the associated class labels. Based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion, we derive a eigen-decomposition problem which enables the dimensionality reduction process to be efficient. Experiments validate the performance of MDDM.

Multi-label learning with weak label

Abstract: Multi-label learning deals with data associated with multiple labels simultaneously. Previous work on multi-label learning assumes that for each instance, the "full" label set associated with each training instance is given by users. In many applications, however, to get the full label set for each instance is difficult and only a "partial" set of labels is available. In such cases, the appearance of a label means that the instance is associated with this label, while the absence of a label does not imply that this label is not proper for the instance. We call this kind of problem "weak label" problem. In this paper, we propose the WELL (WEak Label Learning) method to solve the weak label problem. We consider that the classification boundary for each label should go across low density regions, and that each label generally has much smaller number of positive examples than negative examples. The objective is formulated as a convex optimization problem which can be solved efficiently. Moreover, we exploit the correlation between labels by assuming that there is a group of low-rank base similarities, and the appropriate similarities between instances for different labels can be derived from these base similarities. Experiments validate the performance of WELL.

Cost-Sensitive Face Recognition

Abstract: Most traditional face recognition systems attempt to achieve a low recognition error rate, implicitly assuming that the losses of all misclassifications are the same. In this paper, we argue that this is far from a reasonable setting because, in almost all application scenarios of face recognition, different kinds of mistakes will lead to different losses. For example, it would be troublesome if a door locker based on a face recognition system misclassified a family member as a stranger such that she/he was not allowed to enter the house, but it would be a much more serious disaster if a stranger was misclassified as a family member and allowed to enter the house. We propose a framework which formulates the face recognition problem as a multiclass cost-sensitive learning task, and develop two theoretically sound methods for this task. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods.

Multi-label dimensionality reduction via dependence maximization

Abstract: Multi-label learning deals with data associated with multiple labels simultaneously. Like other machine learning and data mining tasks, multi-label learning also suffers from the curse of dimensionality. Although dimensionality reduction has been studied for many years, multi-label dimensionality reduction remains almost untouched. In this paper, we propose a multi-label dimensionality reduction method, MDDM, which attempts to project the original data into a lower-dimensional feature space maximizing the dependence between the original feature description and the associated class labels. Based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion, we derive a closed-form solution which enables the dimensionality reduction process to be efficient. Experiments validate the performance of MDDM.

A Review On Multi-Label Learning Algorithms

Abstract: Multi-label learning studies the problem where each example is represented by a single instance while associated with a set of labels simultaneously. During the past decade, significant amount of progresses have been made toward this emerging machine learning paradigm. This paper aims to provide a timely review on this area with emphasis on state-of-the-art multi-label learning algorithms. Firstly, fundamentals on multi-label learning including formal definition and evaluation metrics are given. Secondly and primarily, eight representative multi-label learning algorithms are scrutinized under common notations with relevant analyses and discussions. Thirdly, several related learning settings are briefly summarized. As a conclusion, online resources and open research problems on multi-label learning are outlined for reference purposes.

Mining Multi-label Data

Abstract: A large body of research in supervised learning deals with the analysis of single-label data, where training examples are associated with a single label λ from a set of disjoint labels L. However, training examples in several application domains are often associated with a set of labels Y ⊆ L. Such data are called multi-label.

A brief introduction to weakly supervised learning

Abstract: Supervised learning techniques construct predictive models by learning from a large number of training examples, where each training example has a label indicating its ground-truth output. Though current techniques have achieved great success, it is noteworthy that in many tasks it is difficult to get strong supervision information like fully ground-truth labels due to the high cost of the data-labeling process. Thus, it is desirable for machine-learning techniques to work with weak supervision. This article reviews some research progress of weakly supervised learning, focusing on three typical types of weak supervision: incomplete supervision, where only a subset of training data is given with labels; inexact supervision, where the training data are given with only coarse-grained labels; and inaccurate supervision, where the given labels are not always ground-truth.

Measuring statistical dependence with Hilbert-Schmidt norms

Abstract: We propose an independence criterion based on the eigen-spectrum of covariance operators in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), consisting of an empirical estimate of the Hilbert-Schmidt norm of the cross-covariance operator (we term this a Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion, or HSIC). This approach has several advantages, compared with previous kernel-based independence criteria. First, the empirical estimate is simpler than any other kernel dependence test, and requires no user-defined regularisation. Second, there is a clearly defined population quantity which the empirical estimate approaches in the large sample limit, with exponential convergence guaranteed between the two: this ensures that independence tests based on HSIC do not suffer from slow learning rates. Finally, we show in the context of independent component analysis (ICA) that the performance of HSIC is competitive with that of previously published kernel-based criteria, and of other recently published ICA methods.