Theoretical Interpretations and Applications of Radial Basis Function Networks

Medical applications usually used Radial Basis Function Networks just as Artificial Neural Networks. However, RBFNs are Knowledge-Based Networks that can be interpreted in several way: Artificial Neural Networks, Regularization Networks, Support Vector Machines, Wavelet Networks, Fuzzy Controllers, Kernel Estimators, Instanced-Based Learners. A survey of their interpretations and of their corresponding learning algorithms is provided as well as a brief survey on dynamic learning algorithms. RBFNs' interpretations can suggest applications that are particularly interesting in medical domains

A review of domain adaptation without target labels

Domain adaptation has become a prominent problem setting in machine learning and related fields. This review asks the question: how can a classifier learn from a source domain and generalize to a target domain? We present a categorization of approaches, divided into, what we refer to as, sample-based, feature-based and inference-based methods. Sample-based methods focus on weighting individual observations during training based on their importance to the target domain. Feature-based methods revolve around on mapping, projecting and representing features such that a source classifier performs well on the target domain and inference-based methods incorporate adaptation into the parameter estimation procedure, for instance through constraints on the optimization procedure. Additionally, we review a number of conditions that allow for formulating bounds on the cross-domain generalization error. Our categorization highlights recurring ideas and raises questions important to further research.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

Data complexity in machine learning

We investigate the role of data complexity in the context of binary classification problems. The universal data complexity is defined for a data set as the Kolmogorov complexity of the mapping enforced by the data set. It is closely related to several existing principles used in machine learning such as Occam's razor, the minimum description length, and the Bayesian approach. The data complexity can also be defined based on a learning model, which is more realistic for applications. We demonstrate the application of the data complexity in two learning problems, data decomposition and data pruning. In data decomposition, we illustrate that a data set is best approximated by its principal subsets which are Pareto optimal with respect to the complexity and the set size. In data pruning, we show that outliers usually have high complexity contributions, and propose methods for estimating the complexity contribution. Since in practice we have to approximate the ideal data complexity measures, we also discuss the impact of such approximations