Clustering documents with active learning using Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been applied as a background knowledge base to various text mining problems, but very few attempts have been made to utilize it for document clustering. In this paper we propose to exploit the semantic knowledge in Wikipedia for clustering, enabling the automatic grouping of documents with similar themes. Although clustering is intrinsically unsupervised, recent research has shown that incorporating supervision improves clustering performance, even when limited supervision is provided. The approach presented in this paper applies supervision using active learning. We first utilize Wikipedia to create a concept-based representation of a text document, with each concept associated to a Wikipedia article. We then exploit the semantic relatedness between Wikipedia concepts to find pair-wise instance-level constraints for supervised clustering, guiding clustering towards the direction indicated by the constraints. We test our approach on three standard text document datasets. Empirical results show that our basic document representation strategy yields comparable performance to previous attempts; and adding constraints improves clustering performance further by up to 20%

Multi-view constrained clustering with an incomplete mapping between views

Multi-view learning algorithms typically assume a complete bipartite mapping between the different views in order to exchange information during the learning process. However, many applications provide only a partial mapping between the views, creating a challenge for current methods. To address this problem, we propose a multi-view algorithm based on constrained clustering that can operate with an incomplete mapping. Given a set of pairwise constraints in each view, our approach propagates these constraints using a local similarity measure to those instances that can be mapped to the other views, allowing the propagated constraints to be transferred across views via the partial mapping. It uses co-EM to iteratively estimate the propagation within each view based on the current clustering model, transfer the constraints across views, and then update the clustering model. By alternating the learning process between views, this approach produces a unified clustering model that is consistent with all views. We show that this approach significantly improves clustering performance over several other methods for transferring constraints and allows multi-view clustering to be reliably applied when given a limited mapping between the views. Our evaluation reveals that the propagated constraints have high precision with respect to the true clusters in the data, explaining their benefit to clustering performance in both single- and multi-view learning scenarios

Multiple Instance Learning: A Survey of Problem Characteristics and Applications

Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a form of weakly supervised learning where training instances are arranged in sets, called bags, and a label is provided for the entire bag. This formulation is gaining interest because it naturally fits various problems and allows to leverage weakly labeled data. Consequently, it has been used in diverse application fields such as computer vision and document classification. However, learning from bags raises important challenges that are unique to MIL. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the characteristics which define and differentiate the types of MIL problems. Until now, these problem characteristics have not been formally identified and described. As a result, the variations in performance of MIL algorithms from one data set to another are difficult to explain. In this paper, MIL problem characteristics are grouped into four broad categories: the composition of the bags, the types of data distribution, the ambiguity of instance labels, and the task to be performed. Methods specialized to address each category are reviewed. Then, the extent to which these characteristics manifest themselves in key MIL application areas are described. Finally, experiments are conducted to compare the performance of 16 state-of-the-art MIL methods on selected problem characteristics. This paper provides insight on how the problem characteristics affect MIL algorithms, recommendations for future benchmarking and promising avenues for research

A Survey on Metric Learning for Feature Vectors and Structured Data

The need for appropriate ways to measure the distance or similarity between data is ubiquitous in machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining, but handcrafting such good metrics for specific problems is generally difficult. This has led to the emergence of metric learning, which aims at automatically learning a metric from data and has attracted a lot of interest in machine learning and related fields for the past ten years. This survey paper proposes a systematic review of the metric learning literature, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. We pay particular attention to Mahalanobis distance metric learning, a well-studied and successful framework, but additionally present a wide range of methods that have recently emerged as powerful alternatives, including nonlinear metric learning, similarity learning and local metric learning. Recent trends and extensions, such as semi-supervised metric learning, metric learning for histogram data and the derivation of generalization guarantees, are also covered. Finally, this survey addresses metric learning for structured data, in particular edit distance learning, and attempts to give an overview of the remaining challenges in metric learning for the years to come.Comment: Technical report, 59 pages. Changes in v2: fixed typos and improved presentation. Changes in v3: fixed typos. Changes in v4: fixed typos and new method

Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning

In this paper, we propose the MIML (Multi-Instance Multi-Label learning) framework where an example is described by multiple instances and associated with multiple class labels. Compared to traditional learning frameworks, the MIML framework is more convenient and natural for representing complicated objects which have multiple semantic meanings. To learn from MIML examples, we propose the MimlBoost and MimlSvm algorithms based on a simple degeneration strategy, and experiments show that solving problems involving complicated objects with multiple semantic meanings in the MIML framework can lead to good performance. Considering that the degeneration process may lose information, we propose the D-MimlSvm algorithm which tackles MIML problems directly in a regularization framework. Moreover, we show that even when we do not have access to the real objects and thus cannot capture more information from real objects by using the MIML representation, MIML is still useful. We propose the InsDif and SubCod algorithms. InsDif works by transforming single-instances into the MIML representation for learning, while SubCod works by transforming single-label examples into the MIML representation for learning. Experiments show that in some tasks they are able to achieve better performance than learning the single-instances or single-label examples directly.Comment: 64 pages, 10 figures; Artificial Intelligence, 201