Totally Corrective Multiclass Boosting with Binary Weak Learners

In this work, we propose a new optimization framework for multiclass boosting learning. In the literature, AdaBoost.MO and AdaBoost.ECC are the two successful multiclass boosting algorithms, which can use binary weak learners. We explicitly derive these two algorithms' Lagrange dual problems based on their regularized loss functions. We show that the Lagrange dual formulations enable us to design totally-corrective multiclass algorithms by using the primal-dual optimization technique. Experiments on benchmark data sets suggest that our multiclass boosting can achieve a comparable generalization capability with state-of-the-art, but the convergence speed is much faster than stage-wise gradient descent boosting. In other words, the new totally corrective algorithms can maximize the margin more aggressively.Comment: 11 page

Solving for multi-class using orthogonal coding matrices

A common method of generalizing binary to multi-class classification is the error correcting code (ECC). ECCs may be optimized in a number of ways, for instance by making them orthogonal. Here we test two types of orthogonal ECCs on seven different datasets using three types of binary classifier and compare them with three other multi-class methods: 1 vs. 1, one-versus-the-rest and random ECCs. The first type of orthogonal ECC, in which the codes contain no zeros, admits a fast and simple method of solving for the probabilities. Orthogonal ECCs are always more accurate than random ECCs as predicted by recent literature. Improvments in uncertainty coefficient (U.C.) range between 0.4--17.5% (0.004--0.139, absolute), while improvements in Brier score between 0.7--10.7%. Unfortunately, orthogonal ECCs are rarely more accurate than 1 vs. 1. Disparities are worst when the methods are paired with logistic regression, with orthogonal ECCs never beating 1 vs. 1. When the methods are paired with SVM, the losses are less significant, peaking at 1.5%, relative, 0.011 absolute in uncertainty coefficient and 6.5% in Brier scores. Orthogonal ECCs are always the fastest of the five multi-class methods when paired with linear classifiers. When paired with a piecewise linear classifier, whose classification speed does not depend on the number of training samples, classifications using orthogonal ECCs were always more accurate than the the remaining three methods and also faster than 1 vs. 1. Losses against 1 vs. 1 here were higher, peaking at 1.9% (0.017, absolute), in U.C. and 39% in Brier score. Gains in speed ranged between 1.1% and over 100%. Whether the speed increase is worth the penalty in accuracy will depend on the application

Maximum Margin Multiclass Nearest Neighbors

We develop a general framework for margin-based multicategory classification in metric spaces. The basic work-horse is a margin-regularized version of the nearest-neighbor classifier. We prove generalization bounds that match the state of the art in sample size $n$ and significantly improve the dependence on the number of classes $k$. Our point of departure is a nearly Bayes-optimal finite-sample risk bound independent of $k$. Although $k$-free, this bound is unregularized and non-adaptive, which motivates our main result: Rademacher and scale-sensitive margin bounds with a logarithmic dependence on $k$. As the best previous risk estimates in this setting were of order $\sqrt k$, our bound is exponentially sharper. From the algorithmic standpoint, in doubling metric spaces our classifier may be trained on $n$ examples in $O(n^2\log n)$ time and evaluated on new points in $O(\log n)$ time

TwiSE at SemEval-2016 Task 4: Twitter Sentiment Classification

This paper describes the participation of the team "TwiSE" in the SemEval 2016 challenge. Specifically, we participated in Task 4, namely "Sentiment Analysis in Twitter" for which we implemented sentiment classification systems for subtasks A, B, C and D. Our approach consists of two steps. In the first step, we generate and validate diverse feature sets for twitter sentiment evaluation, inspired by the work of participants of previous editions of such challenges. In the second step, we focus on the optimization of the evaluation measures of the different subtasks. To this end, we examine different learning strategies by validating them on the data provided by the task organisers. For our final submissions we used an ensemble learning approach (stacked generalization) for Subtask A and single linear models for the rest of the subtasks. In the official leaderboard we were ranked 9/35, 8/19, 1/11 and 2/14 for subtasks A, B, C and D respectively.\footnote{We make the code available for research purposes at \url{https://github.com/balikasg/SemEval2016-Twitter\_Sentiment\_Evaluation}.

Benchmark of structured machine learning methods for microbial identification from mass-spectrometry data

Microbial identification is a central issue in microbiology, in particular in the fields of infectious diseases diagnosis and industrial quality control. The concept of species is tightly linked to the concept of biological and clinical classification where the proximity between species is generally measured in terms of evolutionary distances and/or clinical phenotypes. Surprisingly, the information provided by this well-known hierarchical structure is rarely used by machine learning-based automatic microbial identification systems. Structured machine learning methods were recently proposed for taking into account the structure embedded in a hierarchy and using it as additional a priori information, and could therefore allow to improve microbial identification systems. We test and compare several state-of-the-art machine learning methods for microbial identification on a new Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization Time-of-Flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) dataset. We include in the benchmark standard and structured methods, that leverage the knowledge of the underlying hierarchical structure in the learning process. Our results show that although some methods perform better than others, structured methods do not consistently perform better than their "flat" counterparts. We postulate that this is partly due to the fact that standard methods already reach a high level of accuracy in this context, and that they mainly confuse species close to each other in the tree, a case where using the known hierarchy is not helpful