Towards On-line Domain-Independent Big Data Learning: Novel Theories and Applications

Feature extraction is an extremely important pre-processing step to pattern recognition, and machine learning problems. This thesis highlights how one can best extract features from the data in an exhaustively online and purely adaptive manner. The solution to this problem is given for both labeled and unlabeled datasets, by presenting a number of novel on-line learning approaches. Specifically, the differential equation method for solving the generalized eigenvalue problem is used to derive a number of novel machine learning and feature extraction algorithms. The incremental eigen-solution method is used to derive a novel incremental extension of linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Further the proposed incremental version is combined with extreme learning machine (ELM) in which the ELM is used as a preprocessor before learning. In this first key contribution, the dynamic random expansion characteristic of ELM is combined with the proposed incremental LDA technique, and shown to offer a significant improvement in maximizing the discrimination between points in two different classes, while minimizing the distance within each class, in comparison with other standard state-of-the-art incremental and batch techniques. In the second contribution, the differential equation method for solving the generalized eigenvalue problem is used to derive a novel state-of-the-art purely incremental version of slow feature analysis (SLA) algorithm, termed the generalized eigenvalue based slow feature analysis (GENEIGSFA) technique. Further the time series expansion of echo state network (ESN) and radial basis functions (EBF) are used as a pre-processor before learning. In addition, the higher order derivatives are used as a smoothing constraint in the output signal. Finally, an online extension of the generalized eigenvalue problem, derived from James Stone’s criterion, is tested, evaluated and compared with the standard batch version of the slow feature analysis technique, to demonstrate its comparative effectiveness. In the third contribution, light-weight extensions of the statistical technique known as canonical correlation analysis (CCA) for both twinned and multiple data streams, are derived by using the same existing method of solving the generalized eigenvalue problem. Further the proposed method is enhanced by maximizing the covariance between data streams while simultaneously maximizing the rate of change of variances within each data stream. A recurrent set of connections used by ESN are used as a pre-processor between the inputs and the canonical projections in order to capture shared temporal information in two or more data streams. A solution to the problem of identifying a low dimensional manifold on a high dimensional dataspace is then presented in an incremental and adaptive manner. Finally, an online locally optimized extension of Laplacian Eigenmaps is derived termed the generalized incremental laplacian eigenmaps technique (GENILE). Apart from exploiting the benefit of the incremental nature of the proposed manifold based dimensionality reduction technique, most of the time the projections produced by this method are shown to produce a better classification accuracy in comparison with standard batch versions of these techniques - on both artificial and real datasets

Residual Parameter Transfer for Deep Domain Adaptation

The goal of Deep Domain Adaptation is to make it possible to use Deep Nets trained in one domain where there is enough annotated training data in another where there is little or none. Most current approaches have focused on learning feature representations that are invariant to the changes that occur when going from one domain to the other, which means using the same network parameters in both domains. While some recent algorithms explicitly model the changes by adapting the network parameters, they either severely restrict the possible domain changes, or significantly increase the number of model parameters. By contrast, we introduce a network architecture that includes auxiliary residual networks, which we train to predict the parameters in the domain with little annotated data from those in the other one. This architecture enables us to flexibly preserve the similarities between domains where they exist and model the differences when necessary. We demonstrate that our approach yields higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods without undue complexity

Converting Your Thoughts to Texts: Enabling Brain Typing via Deep Feature Learning of EEG Signals

An electroencephalography (EEG) based Brain Computer Interface (BCI) enables people to communicate with the outside world by interpreting the EEG signals of their brains to interact with devices such as wheelchairs and intelligent robots. More specifically, motor imagery EEG (MI-EEG), which reflects a subjects active intent, is attracting increasing attention for a variety of BCI applications. Accurate classification of MI-EEG signals while essential for effective operation of BCI systems, is challenging due to the significant noise inherent in the signals and the lack of informative correlation between the signals and brain activities. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network based learning framework that affords perceptive insights into the relationship between the MI-EEG data and brain activities. We design a joint convolutional recurrent neural network that simultaneously learns robust high-level feature presentations through low-dimensional dense embeddings from raw MI-EEG signals. We also employ an Autoencoder layer to eliminate various artifacts such as background activities. The proposed approach has been evaluated extensively on a large- scale public MI-EEG dataset and a limited but easy-to-deploy dataset collected in our lab. The results show that our approach outperforms a series of baselines and the competitive state-of-the- art methods, yielding a classification accuracy of 95.53%. The applicability of our proposed approach is further demonstrated with a practical BCI system for typing.Comment: 10 page

Brain covariance selection: better individual functional connectivity models using population prior

Spontaneous brain activity, as observed in functional neuroimaging, has been shown to display reproducible structure that expresses brain architecture and carries markers of brain pathologies. An important view of modern neuroscience is that such large-scale structure of coherent activity reflects modularity properties of brain connectivity graphs. However, to date, there has been no demonstration that the limited and noisy data available in spontaneous activity observations could be used to learn full-brain probabilistic models that generalize to new data. Learning such models entails two main challenges: i) modeling full brain connectivity is a difficult estimation problem that faces the curse of dimensionality and ii) variability between subjects, coupled with the variability of functional signals between experimental runs, makes the use of multiple datasets challenging. We describe subject-level brain functional connectivity structure as a multivariate Gaussian process and introduce a new strategy to estimate it from group data, by imposing a common structure on the graphical model in the population. We show that individual models learned from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data using this population prior generalize better to unseen data than models based on alternative regularization schemes. To our knowledge, this is the first report of a cross-validated model of spontaneous brain activity. Finally, we use the estimated graphical model to explore the large-scale characteristics of functional architecture and show for the first time that known cognitive networks appear as the integrated communities of functional connectivity graph.Comment: in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Vancouver : Canada (2010

Second-order Temporal Pooling for Action Recognition

Deep learning models for video-based action recognition usually generate features for short clips (consisting of a few frames); such clip-level features are aggregated to video-level representations by computing statistics on these features. Typically zero-th (max) or the first-order (average) statistics are used. In this paper, we explore the benefits of using second-order statistics. Specifically, we propose a novel end-to-end learnable feature aggregation scheme, dubbed temporal correlation pooling that generates an action descriptor for a video sequence by capturing the similarities between the temporal evolution of clip-level CNN features computed across the video. Such a descriptor, while being computationally cheap, also naturally encodes the co-activations of multiple CNN features, thereby providing a richer characterization of actions than their first-order counterparts. We also propose higher-order extensions of this scheme by computing correlations after embedding the CNN features in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. We provide experiments on benchmark datasets such as HMDB-51 and UCF-101, fine-grained datasets such as MPII Cooking activities and JHMDB, as well as the recent Kinetics-600. Our results demonstrate the advantages of higher-order pooling schemes that when combined with hand-crafted features (as is standard practice) achieves state-of-the-art accuracy.Comment: Accepted in the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV