40,939 research outputs found
Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives
The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data
representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different
representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory
factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be
used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be
used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful
representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews
recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning,
covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning,
and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the
appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing
representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between
representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning
Bio-Inspired Multi-Layer Spiking Neural Network Extracts Discriminative Features from Speech Signals
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) enable power-efficient implementations due to
their sparse, spike-based coding scheme. This paper develops a bio-inspired SNN
that uses unsupervised learning to extract discriminative features from speech
signals, which can subsequently be used in a classifier. The architecture
consists of a spiking convolutional/pooling layer followed by a fully connected
spiking layer for feature discovery. The convolutional layer of leaky,
integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons represents primary acoustic features. The
fully connected layer is equipped with a probabilistic spike-timing-dependent
plasticity learning rule. This layer represents the discriminative features
through probabilistic, LIF neurons. To assess the discriminative power of the
learned features, they are used in a hidden Markov model (HMM) for spoken digit
recognition. The experimental results show performance above 96% that compares
favorably with popular statistical feature extraction methods. Our results
provide a novel demonstration of unsupervised feature acquisition in an SNN
On Quantifying Qualitative Geospatial Data: A Probabilistic Approach
Living in the era of data deluge, we have witnessed a web content explosion,
largely due to the massive availability of User-Generated Content (UGC). In
this work, we specifically consider the problem of geospatial information
extraction and representation, where one can exploit diverse sources of
information (such as image and audio data, text data, etc), going beyond
traditional volunteered geographic information. Our ambition is to include
available narrative information in an effort to better explain geospatial
relationships: with spatial reasoning being a basic form of human cognition,
narratives expressing such experiences typically contain qualitative spatial
data, i.e., spatial objects and spatial relationships.
To this end, we formulate a quantitative approach for the representation of
qualitative spatial relations extracted from UGC in the form of texts. The
proposed method quantifies such relations based on multiple text observations.
Such observations provide distance and orientation features which are utilized
by a greedy Expectation Maximization-based (EM) algorithm to infer a
probability distribution over predefined spatial relationships; the latter
represent the quantified relationships under user-defined probabilistic
assumptions. We evaluate the applicability and quality of the proposed approach
using real UGC data originating from an actual travel blog text corpus. To
verify the quality of the result, we generate grid-based maps visualizing the
spatial extent of the various relations
Hybrid image representation methods for automatic image annotation: a survey
In most automatic image annotation systems, images are represented with low level features using either global
methods or local methods. In global methods, the entire image is used as a unit. Local methods divide images into blocks where fixed-size sub-image blocks are adopted as sub-units; or into regions by using segmented regions as sub-units in images. In contrast to typical automatic image annotation methods that use either global or local features exclusively, several recent methods have considered incorporating the two kinds of information, and believe that the combination of the two levels of features is
beneficial in annotating images. In this paper, we provide a
survey on automatic image annotation techniques according to
one aspect: feature extraction, and, in order to complement
existing surveys in literature, we focus on the emerging image annotation methods: hybrid methods that combine both global and local features for image representation
Photometric redshift estimation via deep learning
The need to analyze the available large synoptic multi-band surveys drives
the development of new data-analysis methods. Photometric redshift estimation
is one field of application where such new methods improved the results,
substantially. Up to now, the vast majority of applied redshift estimation
methods have utilized photometric features. We aim to develop a method to
derive probabilistic photometric redshift directly from multi-band imaging
data, rendering pre-classification of objects and feature extraction obsolete.
A modified version of a deep convolutional network was combined with a mixture
density network. The estimates are expressed as Gaussian mixture models
representing the probability density functions (PDFs) in the redshift space. In
addition to the traditional scores, the continuous ranked probability score
(CRPS) and the probability integral transform (PIT) were applied as performance
criteria. We have adopted a feature based random forest and a plain mixture
density network to compare performances on experiments with data from SDSS
(DR9). We show that the proposed method is able to predict redshift PDFs
independently from the type of source, for example galaxies, quasars or stars.
Thereby the prediction performance is better than both presented reference
methods and is comparable to results from the literature. The presented method
is extremely general and allows us to solve of any kind of probabilistic
regression problems based on imaging data, for example estimating metallicity
or star formation rate of galaxies. This kind of methodology is tremendously
important for the next generation of surveys.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. Accepted for publication on A&
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