Ordinal regression methods: survey and experimental study

Abstract—Ordinal regression problems are those machine learning problems where the objective is to classify patterns using a categorical scale which shows a natural order between the labels. Many real-world applications present this labelling structure and that has increased the number of methods and algorithms developed over the last years in this field. Although ordinal regression can be faced using standard nominal classification techniques, there are several algorithms which can specifically benefit from the ordering information. Therefore, this paper is aimed at reviewing the state of the art on these techniques and proposing a taxonomy based on how the models are constructed to take the order into account. Furthermore, a thorough experimental study is proposed to check if the use of the order information improves the performance of the models obtained, considering some of the approaches within the taxonomy. The results confirm that ordering information benefits ordinal models improving their accuracy and the closeness of the predictions to actual targets in the ordinal scal

Visual Scene Understanding by Deep Fisher Discriminant Learning

Modern deep learning has recently revolutionized several fields of classic machine learning and computer vision, such as, scene understanding, natural language processing and machine translation. The substitution of feature hand-crafting with automatic feature learning, provides an excellent opportunity for gaining an in-depth understanding of large-scale data statistics. Deep neural networks generally train models with huge numbers of parameters, facilitating efficient search for optimal and sub-optimal spaces of highly non-convex objective functions. On the other hand, Fisher discriminant analysis has been widely employed to impose class discrepancy, for the sake of segmentation, classification, and recognition tasks. This thesis bridges between contemporary deep learning and classic discriminant analysis, to accommodate some important challenges in visual scene understanding, i.e. semantic segmentation, texture classification, and object recognition. The aim is to accomplish specific tasks in some new high-dimensional spaces, covered by the statistical information of the datasets under study. Inspired by a new formulation of Fisher discriminant analysis, this thesis introduces some novel arrangements of well-known deep learning architectures, to achieve better performances on the targeted missions. The theoretical justifications are based upon a large body of experimental work, and consolidate the contribution of the proposed idea; Deep Fisher Discriminant Learning, to several challenges in visual scene understanding

TeKET: a Tree-Based Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction Technique

Automatic keyphrase extraction techniques aim to extract quality keyphrases for higher level summarization of a document. Majority of the existing techniques are mainly domain-specific, which require application domain knowledge and employ higher order statistical methods, and computationally expensive and require large train data, which is rare for many applications. Overcoming these issues, this paper proposes a new unsupervised keyphrase extraction technique. The proposed unsupervised keyphrase extraction technique, named TeKET or Tree-based Keyphrase Extraction Technique, is a domain-independent technique that employs limited statistical knowledge and requires no train data. This technique also introduces a new variant of a binary tree, called KeyPhrase Extraction (KePhEx) tree, to extract final keyphrases from candidate keyphrases. In addition, a measure, called Cohesiveness Index or CI, is derived which denotes a given node’s degree of cohesiveness with respect to the root. The CI is used in flexibly extracting final keyphrases from the KePhEx tree and is co-utilized in the ranking process. The effectiveness of the proposed technique and its domain and language independence are experimentally evaluated using available benchmark corpora, namely SemEval-2010 (a scientific articles dataset), Theses100 (a thesis dataset), and a German Research Article dataset, respectively. The acquired results are compared with other relevant unsupervised techniques belonging to both statistical and graph-based techniques. The obtained results demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed technique over other compared techniques in terms of precision, recall, and F1 scores

Méthodes d'apprentissage statistique pour le ranking : théorie, algorithmes et applications

Multipartite ranking is a statistical learning problem that consists in ordering observations that belong to a high dimensional feature space in the same order as the labels, so that the observations with the highest label appear at the top of the list. This work aims to understand the probabilistic nature of the multipartite ranking problem in order to obtain theoretical guarantees for ranking algorithms. In this context, the output of a ranking algorithm takes the form of a scoring function, a function that maps the space of the observation to the real line which order is induced using the values on the real line. The contributions of this manuscript are the following : First, we focus on the characterization of optimal solutions to multipartite ranking. The second research theme is the design of algorithms to produce scoring functions. We offer two methods, the first using an aggregation procedure, the second an approximation scheme. Finally, we return to the binary ranking problem to establish adaptive minimax rate of convergence.Le ranking multipartite est un problème d'apprentissage statistique qui consiste à ordonner les observations qui appartiennent à un espace de grande dimension dans le même ordre que les labels, de sorte que les observations avec le label le plus élevé apparaissent en haut de la liste. Cette thèse vise à comprendre la nature probabiliste du problème de ranking multipartite afin d'obtenir des garanties théoriques pour les algorithmes de ranking. Dans ce cadre, la sortie d'un algorithme de ranking prend la forme d'une fonction de scoring, une fonction qui envoie l'espace des observations sur la droite réelle et l'ordre finale est construit en utilisant l'ordre induit par la droite réelle. Les contributions de ce manuscrit sont les suivantes : d'abord, nous nous concentrons sur la caractérisation des solutions optimales de ranking multipartite. Le deuxième thème de recherche est la conception d'algorithmes pour produire des fonctions de scoring. Nous proposons deux méthodes, la première utilisant une procédure d'agrégation, la deuxième un schema d'approximation. Enfin, nous revenons au problème de ranking binaire afin d'établir des vitesse minimax adaptives de convergences

Label Ranking with Probabilistic Models

Diese Arbeit konzentriert sich auf eine spezielle Prognoseform, das sogenannte Label Ranking. Auf den Punkt gebracht, kann Label Ranking als eine Erweiterung des herkömmlichen Klassifizierungproblems betrachtet werden. Bei einer Anfrage (z. B. durch einen Kunden) und einem vordefinierten Set von Kandidaten Labels (zB AUDI, BMW, VW), wird ein einzelnes Label (zB BMW) zur Vorhersage in der Klassifizierung benötigt, während ein komplettes Ranking aller Label (zB BMW> VW> Audi) für das Label Ranking erforderlich ist. Da Vorhersagen dieser Art, bei vielen Problemen der realen Welt nützlich sind, können Label Ranking-Methoden in mehreren Anwendungen, darunter Information Retrieval, Kundenwunsch Lernen und E-Commerce eingesetzt werden. Die vorliegende Arbeit stellt eine Auswahl an Methoden für Label-Ranking vor, die Maschinelles Lernen mit statistischen Bewertungsmodellen kombiniert. Wir konzentrieren wir uns auf zwei statistische Ranking-Modelle, das Mallows- und das Plackett-Luce-Modell und zwei Techniken des maschinellen Lernens, das Beispielbasierte Lernen und das Verallgemeinernde Lineare Modell

Drug Target Interaction Prediction Using Machine Learning Techniques – A Review

Drug discovery is a key process, given the rising and ubiquitous demand for medication to stay in good shape right through the course of one’s life. Drugs are small molecules that inhibit or activate the function of a protein, offering patients a host of therapeutic benefits. Drug design is the inventive process of finding new medication, based on targets or proteins. Identifying new drugs is a process that involves time and money. This is where computer-aided drug design helps cut time and costs. Drug design needs drug targets that are a protein and a drug compound, with which the interaction between a drug and a target is established. Interaction, in this context, refers to the process of discovering protein binding sites, which are protein pockets that bind with drugs. Pockets are regions on a protein macromolecule that bind to drug molecules. Researchers have been at work trying to determine new Drug Target Interactions (DTI) that predict whether or not a given drug molecule will bind to a target. Machine learning (ML) techniques help establish the interaction between drugs and their targets, using computer-aided drug design. This paper aims to explore ML techniques better for DTI prediction and boost future research. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of ML techniques show that several have been applied to predict DTIs, employing a range of classifiers. Though DTI prediction improves with negative drug target pairs (DTP), the lack of true negative DTPs has led to the use a particular dataset of drugs and targets. Using dynamic DTPs improves DTI prediction. Little attention has so far been paid to developing a new classifier for DTI classification, and there is, unquestionably, a need for better ones