Sparse multinomial kernel discriminant analysis (sMKDA)

Dimensionality reduction via canonical variate analysis (CVA) is important for pattern recognition and has been extended variously to permit more flexibility, e.g. by "kernelizing" the formulation. This can lead to over-fitting, usually ameliorated by regularization. Here, a method for sparse, multinomial kernel discriminant analysis (sMKDA) is proposed, using a sparse basis to control complexity. It is based on the connection between CVA and least-squares, and uses forward selection via orthogonal least-squares to approximate a basis, generalizing a similar approach for binomial problems. Classification can be performed directly via minimum Mahalanobis distance in the canonical variates. sMKDA achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and sparseness on 11 benchmark datasets

Pairwise local Fisher and naive Bayes: Improving two standard discriminants

Under embargo until: 2022-02-01The Fisher discriminant is probably the best known likelihood discriminant for continuous data. Another benchmark discriminant is the naive Bayes, which is based on marginals only. In this paper we extend both discriminants by modeling dependence between pairs of variables. In the continuous case this is done by local Gaussian versions of the Fisher discriminant. In the discrete case the naive Bayes is extended by taking geometric averages of pairwise joint probabilities. We also indicate how the two approaches can be combined for mixed continuous and discrete data. The new discriminants show promising results in a number of simulation experiments and real data illustrations.acceptedVersio

Ideal tau tagging with the multivariate data-analysis toolkit TMVA

Peer reviewe

SVMs for Automatic Speech Recognition: a Survey

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are, undoubtedly, the most employed core technique for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Nevertheless, we are still far from achieving high-performance ASR systems. Some alternative approaches, most of them based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), were proposed during the late eighties and early nineties. Some of them tackled the ASR problem using predictive ANNs, while others proposed hybrid HMM/ANN systems. However, despite some achievements, nowadays, the preponderance of Markov Models is a fact. During the last decade, however, a new tool appeared in the field of machine learning that has proved to be able to cope with hard classification problems in several fields of application: the Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The SVMs are effective discriminative classifiers with several outstanding characteristics, namely: their solution is that with maximum margin; they are capable to deal with samples of a very higher dimensionality; and their convergence to the minimum of the associated cost function is guaranteed. These characteristics have made SVMs very popular and successful. In this chapter we discuss their strengths and weakness in the ASR context and make a review of the current state-of-the-art techniques. We organize the contributions in two parts: isolated-word recognition and continuous speech recognition. Within the first part we review several techniques to produce the fixed-dimension vectors needed for original SVMs. Afterwards we explore more sophisticated techniques based on the use of kernels capable to deal with sequences of different length. Among them is the DTAK kernel, simple and effective, which rescues an old technique of speech recognition: Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). Within the second part, we describe some recent approaches to tackle more complex tasks like connected digit recognition or continuous speech recognition using SVMs. Finally we draw some conclusions and outline several ongoing lines of research

A Subspace Projection Methodology for Nonlinear Manifold Based Face Recognition

A novel feature extraction method that utilizes nonlinear mapping from the original data space to the feature space is presented in this dissertation. Feature extraction methods aim to find compact representations of data that are easy to classify. Measurements with similar values are grouped to same category, while those with differing values are deemed to be of separate categories. For most practical systems, the meaningful features of a pattern class lie in a low dimensional nonlinear constraint region (manifold) within the high dimensional data space. A learning algorithm to model this nonlinear region and to project patterns to this feature space is developed. Least squares estimation approach that utilizes interdependency between points in training patterns is used to form the nonlinear region. The proposed feature extraction strategy is employed to improve face recognition accuracy under varying illumination conditions and facial expressions. Though the face features show variations under these conditions, the features of one individual tend to cluster together and can be considered as a neighborhood. Low dimensional representations of face patterns in the feature space may lie in a nonlinear constraint region, which when modeled leads to efficient pattern classification. A feature space encompassing multiple pattern classes can be trained by modeling a separate constraint region for each pattern class and obtaining a mean constraint region by averaging all the individual regions. Unlike most other nonlinear techniques, the proposed method provides an easy intuitive way to place new points onto a nonlinear region in the feature space. The proposed feature extraction and classification method results in improved accuracy when compared to the classical linear representations. Face recognition accuracy is further improved by introducing the concepts of modularity, discriminant analysis and phase congruency into the proposed method. In the modular approach, feature components are extracted from different sub-modules of the images and concatenated to make a single vector to represent a face region. By doing this we are able to extract features that are more representative of the local features of the face. When projected onto an arbitrary line, samples from well formed clusters could produce a confused mixture of samples from all the classes leading to poor recognition. Discriminant analysis aims to find an optimal line orientation for which the data classes are well separated. Experiments performed on various databases to evaluate the performance of the proposed face recognition technique have shown improvement in recognition accuracy, especially under varying illumination conditions and facial expressions. This shows that the integration of multiple subspaces, each representing a part of a higher order nonlinear function, could represent a pattern with variability. Research work is progressing to investigate the effectiveness of subspace projection methodology for building manifolds with other nonlinear functions and to identify the optimum nonlinear function from an object classification perspective

Stabilizing Training of Generative Adversarial Networks through Regularization

Deep generative models based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated impressive sample quality but in order to work they require a careful choice of architecture, parameter initialization, and selection of hyper-parameters. This fragility is in part due to a dimensional mismatch or non-overlapping support between the model distribution and the data distribution, causing their density ratio and the associated f-divergence to be undefined. We overcome this fundamental limitation and propose a new regularization approach with low computational cost that yields a stable GAN training procedure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this regularizer across several architectures trained on common benchmark image generation tasks. Our regularization turns GAN models into reliable building blocks for deep learning