A Deep Representation for Invariance And Music Classification

Representations in the auditory cortex might be based on mechanisms similar to the visual ventral stream; modules for building invariance to transformations and multiple layers for compositionality and selectivity. In this paper we propose the use of such computational modules for extracting invariant and discriminative audio representations. Building on a theory of invariance in hierarchical architectures, we propose a novel, mid-level representation for acoustical signals, using the empirical distributions of projections on a set of templates and their transformations. Under the assumption that, by construction, this dictionary of templates is composed from similar classes, and samples the orbit of variance-inducing signal transformations (such as shift and scale), the resulting signature is theoretically guaranteed to be unique, invariant to transformations and stable to deformations. Modules of projection and pooling can then constitute layers of deep networks, for learning composite representations. We present the main theoretical and computational aspects of a framework for unsupervised learning of invariant audio representations, empirically evaluated on music genre classification.Comment: 5 pages, CBMM Memo No. 002, (to appear) IEEE 2014 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2014

Peaks detection and alignment for mass spectrometry data

The goal of this paper is to review existing methods for protein mass spectrometry data analysis, and to present a new methodology for automatic extraction of significant peaks (biomarkers). For the pre-processing step required for data from MALDI-TOF or SELDI- TOF spectra, we use a purely nonparametric approach that combines stationary invariant wavelet transform for noise removal and penalized spline quantile regression for baseline correction. We further present a multi-scale spectra alignment technique that is based on identification of statistically significant peaks from a set of spectra. This method allows one to find common peaks in a set of spectra that can subsequently be mapped to individual proteins. This may serve as useful biomarkers in medical applications, or as individual features for further multidimensional statistical analysis. MALDI-TOF spectra obtained from serum samples are used throughout the paper to illustrate the methodology