Scalable Text Mining with Sparse Generative Models

The information age has brought a deluge of data. Much of this is in text form, insurmountable in scope for humans and incomprehensible in structure for computers. Text mining is an expanding field of research that seeks to utilize the information contained in vast document collections. General data mining methods based on machine learning face challenges with the scale of text data, posing a need for scalable text mining methods. This thesis proposes a solution to scalable text mining: generative models combined with sparse computation. A unifying formalization for generative text models is defined, bringing together research traditions that have used formally equivalent models, but ignored parallel developments. This framework allows the use of methods developed in different processing tasks such as retrieval and classification, yielding effective solutions across different text mining tasks. Sparse computation using inverted indices is proposed for inference on probabilistic models. This reduces the computational complexity of the common text mining operations according to sparsity, yielding probabilistic models with the scalability of modern search engines. The proposed combination provides sparse generative models: a solution for text mining that is general, effective, and scalable. Extensive experimentation on text classification and ranked retrieval datasets are conducted, showing that the proposed solution matches or outperforms the leading task-specific methods in effectiveness, with a order of magnitude decrease in classification times for Wikipedia article categorization with a million classes. The developed methods were further applied in two 2014 Kaggle data mining prize competitions with over a hundred competing teams, earning first and second places

WEC: weighted ensemble of text classifiers.

Text classification is one of the most important tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing. There are many approaches that focus on two main aspects: generating an effective representation; and selecting and refining algorithms to build the classification model. Traditional machine learning methods represent documents in vector space using features such as term frequencies, which have limitations in handling the order and semantics of words. Meanwhile, although achieving many successes, deep learning classifiers require substantial resources in terms of labelled data and computational complexity. In this work, a weighted ensemble of classifiers (WEC) is introduced to address the text classification problem. Instead of using majority vote as the combining method, we propose to associate each classifier’s prediction with a different weight when combining classifiers. The optimal weights are obtained by minimising a loss function on the training data with the Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm. We conducted experiments on 5 popular datasets and report classification performance of algorithms with classification accuracy and macro F1 score. WEC was run with several different combinations of traditional machine learning and deep learning classifiers to show its flexibility and robustness. Experimental results confirm the advantage of WEC, especially on smaller datasets

Constrained domain maximum likelihood estimation and the loss function in statistical pattern recognition

In this thesis we present a new estimation algorithm for statistical models which does not incurs in the over-trainning problems. This new estimation techinque, the so-called, constrained domain maximum likelihood estimation (CDMLE) holds all the theoretical properties of the maximum likelihood estimation and furthermore it does not provides overtrained parameter sets. On the other hand, the impliations of the the 0-1 loss function assumption are analysed in the pattern recognition tasks. Specifically, more versatile functions are designed without increasing the optimal classification rule costs. This approach is applied to the statistical machine translation problem.Andrés Ferrer, J. (2008). Constrained domain maximum likelihood estimation and the loss function in statistical pattern recognition. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/13638Archivo delegad

Polychotomiser for case-based reasoning beyond the traditional Bayesian classification approach

This work implements an enhanced Bayesian classifier with better performance as compared to the ordinary naïve Bayes classifier when used with domains and datasets of varying characteristics. Text classification is an active and on-going research field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Text classification is defined as the task of learning methods for categorising collections of electronic text documents into their annotated classes, based on its contents. An increasing number of statistical approaches have been developed for text classification, including k-nearest neighbor classification, naïve Bayes classification, decision tree, rules induction, and the algorithm implementing the structural risk minimisation theory called the support vector machine. Among the approaches used in these applications, naïve Bayes classifiers have been widely used because of its simplicity. However this generative method has been reported to be less accurate than the discriminative methods such as SVM. Some researches have proven that the naïve Bayes classifier performs surprisingly well in many other domains with certain specialised characteristics. The main aim of this work is to quantify the weakness of traditional naïve Bayes classification and introduce an enhance Bayesian classification approach with additional innovative techniques to perform better than the traditional naïve Bayes classifier. Our research goal is to develop an enhanced Bayesian probabilistic classifier by introducing different tournament structures ranking algorithms along with a high relevance keywords extraction facility and an accurately calculated weighting factors facility. These were done to improve the performance of the classification tasks for specific datasets with different characteristics. Other researches have used general datasets, such as Reuters-21578 and 20_newsgroups to validate the performance of their classifiers. Our approach is easily adapted to datasets with different characteristics in terms of the degree of similarity between classes, multi-categorised documents, and different dataset organisations. As previously mentioned we introduce several techniques such as tournament structures ranking algorithms, higher relevance keyword extraction, and automatically computed document dependent (ACDD) weighting factors. Each technique has unique response while been implemented in datasets with different characteristics but has shown to give outstanding performance in most cases. We have successfully optimised our techniques for individual datasets with different characteristics based on our experimental results

Modern considerations for the use of naive Bayes in the supervised classification of genetic sequence data

2021 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Genetic sequence classification is the task of assigning a known genetic label to an unknown genetic sequence. Often, this is the first step in genetic sequence analysis and is critical to understanding data produced by molecular techniques like high throughput sequencing. Here, we explore an algorithm called naive Bayes that was historically successful in classifying 16S ribosomal gene sequences for microbiome analysis. We extend the naive Bayes classifier to perform the task of general sequence classification by leveraging advancements in computational parallelism and the statistical distributions that underlie naive Bayes. In Chapter 2, we show that our implementation of naive Bayes, called WarpNL, performs within a margin of error of modern classifiers like Kraken2 and local alignment. We discuss five crucial aspects of genetic sequence classification and show how these areas affect classifier performance: the query data, the reference sequence database, the feature encoding method, the classification algorithm, and access to computational resources. In Chapter 3, we cover the critical computational advancements introduced in WarpNL that make it efficient in a modern computing framework. This includes efficient feature encoding, introduction of a log-odds ratio for comparison of naive Bayes posterior estimates, description of schema for parallel and distributed naive Bayes architectures, and use of machine learning classifiers to perform outgroup sequence classification. Finally in Chapter 4, we explore a variant of the Dirichlet multinomial distribution that underlies the naive Bayes likelihood, called the beta-Liouville multinomial. We show that the beta-Liouville multinomial can be used to enhance classifier performance, and we provide mathematical proofs regarding its convergence during maximum likelihood estimation. Overall, this work explores the naive Bayes algorithm in a modern context and shows that it is competitive for genetic sequence classification

Machine learning on Web documents

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 111-115).The Web is a tremendous source of information: so tremendous that it becomes difficult for human beings to select meaningful information without support. We discuss tools that help people deal with web information, by, for example, blocking advertisements, recommending interesting news, and automatically sorting and compiling documents. We adapt and create machine learning algorithms for use with the Web's distinctive structures: large-scale, noisy, varied data with potentially rich, human-oriented features. We adapt two standard classification algorithms, the slow but powerful support vector machine and the fast but inaccurate Naive Bayes, to make them more effective for the Web. The support vector machine, which cannot currently handle the large amount of Web data potentially available, is sped up by "bundling" the classifier inputs to reduce the input size. The Naive Bayes classifier is improved through a series of three techniques aimed at fixing some of the severe, inaccurate assumptions Naive Bayes makes. Classification can also be improved by exploiting the Web's rich, human-oriented structure, including the visual layout of links on a page and the URL of a document. These "tree-shaped features" are placed in a Bayesian mutation model and learning is accomplished with a fast, online learning algorithm for the model. These new methods are applied to a personalized news recommendation tool, "the Daily You." The results of a 176 person user-study of news preferences indicate that the new Web-centric techniques out-perform classifiers that use traditional text algorithms and features. We also show that our methods produce an automated ad-blocker that performs as well as a hand-coded commercial ad-blocker.by Lawrence Kai Shih.Ph.D