Is "Better Data" Better than "Better Data Miners"? (On the Benefits of Tuning SMOTE for Defect Prediction)

We report and fix an important systematic error in prior studies that ranked classifiers for software analytics. Those studies did not (a) assess classifiers on multiple criteria and they did not (b) study how variations in the data affect the results. Hence, this paper applies (a) multi-criteria tests while (b) fixing the weaker regions of the training data (using SMOTUNED, which is a self-tuning version of SMOTE). This approach leads to dramatically large increases in software defect predictions. When applied in a 5*5 cross-validation study for 3,681 JAVA classes (containing over a million lines of code) from open source systems, SMOTUNED increased AUC and recall by 60% and 20% respectively. These improvements are independent of the classifier used to predict for quality. Same kind of pattern (improvement) was observed when a comparative analysis of SMOTE and SMOTUNED was done against the most recent class imbalance technique. In conclusion, for software analytic tasks like defect prediction, (1) data pre-processing can be more important than classifier choice, (2) ranking studies are incomplete without such pre-processing, and (3) SMOTUNED is a promising candidate for pre-processing.Comment: 10 pages + 2 references. Accepted to International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE), 201

Is "Better Data" Better than "Better Data Miners"? (On the Benefits of Tuning SMOTE for Defect Prediction)

We report and fix an important systematic error in prior studies that ranked classifiers for software analytics. Those studies did not (a) assess classifiers on multiple criteria and they did not (b) study how variations in the data affect the results. Hence, this paper applies (a) multi-criteria tests while (b) fixing the weaker regions of the training data (using SMOTUNED, which is a self-tuning version of SMOTE). This approach leads to dramatically large increases in software defect predictions. When applied in a 5*5 cross-validation study for 3,681 JAVA classes (containing over a million lines of code) from open source systems, SMOTUNED increased AUC and recall by 60% and 20% respectively. These improvements are independent of the classifier used to predict for quality. Same kind of pattern (improvement) was observed when a comparative analysis of SMOTE and SMOTUNED was done against the most recent class imbalance technique. In conclusion, for software analytic tasks like defect prediction, (1) data pre-processing can be more important than classifier choice, (2) ranking studies are incomplete without such pre-processing, and (3) SMOTUNED is a promising candidate for pre-processing.Comment: 10 pages + 2 references. Accepted to International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE), 201

Spectral Band Selection for Ensemble Classification of Hyperspectral Images with Applications to Agriculture and Food Safety

In this dissertation, an ensemble non-uniform spectral feature selection and a kernel density decision fusion framework are proposed for the classification of hyperspectral data using a support vector machine classifier. Hyperspectral data has more number of bands and they are always highly correlated. To utilize the complete potential, a feature selection step is necessary. In an ensemble situation, there are mainly two challenges: (1) Creating diverse set of classifiers in order to achieve a higher classification accuracy when compared to a single classifier. This can either be achieved by having different classifiers or by having different subsets of features for each classifier in the ensemble. (2) Designing a robust decision fusion stage to fully utilize the decision produced by individual classifiers. This dissertation tests the efficacy of the proposed approach to classify hyperspectral data from different applications. Since these datasets have a small number of training samples with larger number of highly correlated features, conventional feature selection approaches such as random feature selection cannot utilize the variability in the correlation level between bands to achieve diverse subsets for classification. In contrast, the approach proposed in this dissertation utilizes the variability in the correlation between bands by dividing the spectrum into groups and selecting bands from each group according to its size. The intelligent decision fusion proposed in this approach uses the probability density of training classes to produce a final class label. The experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed framework that results in improvements in the overall, user, and producer accuracies compared to other state-of-the-art techniques. The experiments demonstrate the ability of the proposed approach to produce more diverse feature selection over conventional approaches

Using millions of emoji occurrences to learn any-domain representations for detecting sentiment, emotion and sarcasm

NLP tasks are often limited by scarcity of manually annotated data. In social media sentiment analysis and related tasks, researchers have therefore used binarized emoticons and specific hashtags as forms of distant supervision. Our paper shows that by extending the distant supervision to a more diverse set of noisy labels, the models can learn richer representations. Through emoji prediction on a dataset of 1246 million tweets containing one of 64 common emojis we obtain state-of-the-art performance on 8 benchmark datasets within sentiment, emotion and sarcasm detection using a single pretrained model. Our analyses confirm that the diversity of our emotional labels yield a performance improvement over previous distant supervision approaches.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2017. Please include EMNLP in any citations. Minor changes from the EMNLP camera-ready version. 9 pages + references and supplementary materia