Incremental construction of classifier and discriminant ensembles

We discuss approaches to incrementally construct an ensemble. The first constructs an ensemble of classifiers choosing a subset from a larger set, and the second constructs an ensemble of discriminants, where a classifier is used for some classes only. We investigate criteria including accuracy, significant improvement, diversity, correlation, and the role of search direction. For discriminant ensembles, we test subset selection and trees. Fusion is by voting or by a linear model. Using 14 classifiers on 38 data sets. incremental search finds small, accurate ensembles in polynomial time. The discriminant ensemble uses a subset of discriminants and is simpler, interpretable, and accurate. We see that an incremental ensemble has higher accuracy than bagging and random subspace method; and it has a comparable accuracy to AdaBoost. but fewer classifiers.We would like to thank the three anonymous referees and the editor for their constructive comments, pointers to related literature, and pertinent questions which allowed us to better situate our work as well as organize the ms and improve the presentation. This work has been supported by the Turkish Academy of Sciences in the framework of the Young Scientist Award Program (EA-TUBA-GEBIP/2001-1-1), Bogazici University Scientific Research Project 05HA101 and Turkish Scientific Technical Research Council TUBITAK EEEAG 104EO79Publisher's VersionAuthor Pre-Prin

An analysis of ensemble pruning techniques based on ordered aggregation

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. G. Martínez-Muñoz, D. Hernández-Lobato and A. Suárez, "An analysis of ensemble pruning techniques based on ordered aggregation", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 245-249, February 2009Several pruning strategies that can be used to reduce the size and increase the accuracy of bagging ensembles are analyzed. These heuristics select subsets of complementary classifiers that, when combined, can perform better than the whole ensemble. The pruning methods investigated are based on modifying the order of aggregation of classifiers in the ensemble. In the original bagging algorithm, the order of aggregation is left unspecified. When this order is random, the generalization error typically decreases as the number of classifiers in the ensemble increases. If an appropriate ordering for the aggregation process is devised, the generalization error reaches a minimum at intermediate numbers of classifiers. This minimum lies below the asymptotic error of bagging. Pruned ensembles are obtained by retaining a fraction of the classifiers in the ordered ensemble. The performance of these pruned ensembles is evaluated in several benchmark classification tasks under different training conditions. The results of this empirical investigation show that ordered aggregation can be used for the efficient generation of pruned ensembles that are competitive, in terms of performance and robustness of classification, with computationally more costly methods that directly select optimal or near-optimal subensembles.The authors acknowledge support form the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia under Project TIN2007-66862-C02-0

A Self-Organizing Neural System for Learning to Recognize Textured Scenes

A self-organizing ARTEX model is developed to categorize and classify textured image regions. ARTEX specializes the FACADE model of how the visual cortex sees, and the ART model of how temporal and prefrontal cortices interact with the hippocampal system to learn visual recognition categories and their names. FACADE processing generates a vector of boundary and surface properties, notably texture and brightness properties, by utilizing multi-scale filtering, competition, and diffusive filling-in. Its context-sensitive local measures of textured scenes can be used to recognize scenic properties that gradually change across space, as well a.s abrupt texture boundaries. ART incrementally learns recognition categories that classify FACADE output vectors, class names of these categories, and their probabilities. Top-down expectations within ART encode learned prototypes that pay attention to expected visual features. When novel visual information creates a poor match with the best existing category prototype, a memory search selects a new category with which classify the novel data. ARTEX is compared with psychophysical data, and is benchmarked on classification of natural textures and synthetic aperture radar images. It outperforms state-of-the-art systems that use rule-based, backpropagation, and K-nearest neighbor classifiers.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-95-1-0657

Wild Patterns: Ten Years After the Rise of Adversarial Machine Learning

Learning-based pattern classifiers, including deep networks, have shown impressive performance in several application domains, ranging from computer vision to cybersecurity. However, it has also been shown that adversarial input perturbations carefully crafted either at training or at test time can easily subvert their predictions. The vulnerability of machine learning to such wild patterns (also referred to as adversarial examples), along with the design of suitable countermeasures, have been investigated in the research field of adversarial machine learning. In this work, we provide a thorough overview of the evolution of this research area over the last ten years and beyond, starting from pioneering, earlier work on the security of non-deep learning algorithms up to more recent work aimed to understand the security properties of deep learning algorithms, in the context of computer vision and cybersecurity tasks. We report interesting connections between these apparently-different lines of work, highlighting common misconceptions related to the security evaluation of machine-learning algorithms. We review the main threat models and attacks defined to this end, and discuss the main limitations of current work, along with the corresponding future challenges towards the design of more secure learning algorithms.Comment: Accepted for publication on Pattern Recognition, 201

Predictive Framework for Imbalance Dataset

The purpose of this research is to seek and propose a new predictive maintenance framework which can be used to generate a prediction model for deterioration of process materials. Real yield data which was obtained from Fuji Electric Malaysia has been used in this research. The existing data pre-processing and classification methodologies have been adapted in this research. Properties of the proposed framework include; developing an approach to correlate materials defects, developing an approach to represent data attributes features, analyzing various ratio and types of data re-sampling, analyzing the impact of data dimension reduction for various data size, and partitioning data size and algorithmic schemes against the prediction performance. Experimental results suggested that the class probability distribution function of a prediction model has to be closer to a training dataset; less skewed environment enable learning schemes to discover better function F in a bigger Fall space within a higher dimensional feature space, data sampling and partition size is appear to proportionally improve the precision and recall if class distribution ratios are balanced. A comparative study was also conducted and showed that the proposed approaches have performed better. This research was conducted based on limited number of datasets, test sets and variables. Thus, the obtained results are applicable only to the study domain with selected datasets. This research has introduced a new predictive maintenance framework which can be used in manufacturing industries to generate a prediction model based on the deterioration of process materials. Consequently, this may allow manufactures to conduct predictive maintenance not only for equipments but also process materials. The major contribution of this research is a step by step guideline which consists of methods/approaches in generating a prediction for process materials

Using Feature Selection Methods to Discover Common Users’ Preferences for Online Recommender Systems

Recommender systems have taken over user’s choice to choose the items/services they want from online markets, where lots of merchandise is traded. Collaborative filtering-based recommender systems uses user opinions and preferences. Determination of commonly used attributes that influence preferences used for prediction and subsequent recommendation of unknown or new items to users is a significant objective while developing recommender engines.  In conventional systems, study of user behavior to know their dis/like over items would be carried-out. In this paper, presents feature selection methods to mine such preferences through selection of high influencing attributes of the items. In machine learning, feature selection is used as a data pre-processing method but extended its use on this work to achieve two objectives; removal of redundant, uninformative features and for selecting formative, relevant features based on the response variable. The latter objective, was suggested to identify and determine the frequent and shared features that would be preferred mostly by marketplace online users as they express their preferences. The dataset used for experimentation and determination was synthetic dataset.  The Jupyter Notebook™ using python was used to run the experiments. Results showed that given a number of formative features, there were those selected, with high influence to the response variable. Evidence showed that different feature selection methods resulted with different feature scores, and intrinsic method had the best overall results with 85% model accuracy. Selected features were used as frequently preferred attributes that influence users’ preferences