A stochastic algorithm for feature selection in pattern recognition

Abstract We introduce a new model adressing feature selection from a large dictionary of variables that can be computed from a signal or an image. Features are extracted according to an efficiency criterion, on the basis of specified classification or recognition tasks. This is done by estimating a probability distribution P on the complete dictionary, which distributes its mass over the more efficient, or informative, components. We implement a stochastic gradient descent algorithm, using the probability as a state variable and optimizing a multitask goodness of fit criterion for classifiers based on variable randomly chosen according to P. We then generate classifiers from the optimal distribution of weights learned on the training set. The method is first tested on several pattern recognition problems including face detection, handwritten digit recognition, spam classification and micro-array analysis. We then compare our approach with other step-wise algorithms like random forests or recursive feature elimination

Feature Selection via Binary Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation

Feature selection (FS) has become an indispensable task in dealing with today's highly complex pattern recognition problems with massive number of features. In this study, we propose a new wrapper approach for FS based on binary simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (BSPSA). This pseudo-gradient descent stochastic algorithm starts with an initial feature vector and moves toward the optimal feature vector via successive iterations. In each iteration, the current feature vector's individual components are perturbed simultaneously by random offsets from a qualified probability distribution. We present computational experiments on datasets with numbers of features ranging from a few dozens to thousands using three widely-used classifiers as wrappers: nearest neighbor, decision tree, and linear support vector machine. We compare our methodology against the full set of features as well as a binary genetic algorithm and sequential FS methods using cross-validated classification error rate and AUC as the performance criteria. Our results indicate that features selected by BSPSA compare favorably to alternative methods in general and BSPSA can yield superior feature sets for datasets with tens of thousands of features by examining an extremely small fraction of the solution space. We are not aware of any other wrapper FS methods that are computationally feasible with good convergence properties for such large datasets.Comment: This is the Istanbul Sehir University Technical Report #SHR-ISE-2016.01. A short version of this report has been accepted for publication at Pattern Recognition Letter

FickleNet: Weakly and Semi-supervised Semantic Image Segmentation using Stochastic Inference

The main obstacle to weakly supervised semantic image segmentation is the difficulty of obtaining pixel-level information from coarse image-level annotations. Most methods based on image-level annotations use localization maps obtained from the classifier, but these only focus on the small discriminative parts of objects and do not capture precise boundaries. FickleNet explores diverse combinations of locations on feature maps created by generic deep neural networks. It selects hidden units randomly and then uses them to obtain activation scores for image classification. FickleNet implicitly learns the coherence of each location in the feature maps, resulting in a localization map which identifies both discriminative and other parts of objects. The ensemble effects are obtained from a single network by selecting random hidden unit pairs, which means that a variety of localization maps are generated from a single image. Our approach does not require any additional training steps and only adds a simple layer to a standard convolutional neural network; nevertheless it outperforms recent comparable techniques on the Pascal VOC 2012 benchmark in both weakly and semi-supervised settings.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201