Learning to Predict Combinatorial Structures

The major challenge in designing a discriminative learning algorithm for predicting structured data is to address the computational issues arising from the exponential size of the output space. Existing algorithms make different assumptions to ensure efficient, polynomial time estimation of model parameters. For several combinatorial structures, including cycles, partially ordered sets, permutations and other graph classes, these assumptions do not hold. In this thesis, we address the problem of designing learning algorithms for predicting combinatorial structures by introducing two new assumptions: (i) The first assumption is that a particular counting problem can be solved efficiently. The consequence is a generalisation of the classical ridge regression for structured prediction. (ii) The second assumption is that a particular sampling problem can be solved efficiently. The consequence is a new technique for designing and analysing probabilistic structured prediction models. These results can be applied to solve several complex learning problems including but not limited to multi-label classification, multi-category hierarchical classification, and label ranking.Comment: PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Bonn (submitted, December 2009

Learning Label Structures with Neural Networks for Multi-label Classification

Multi-label classification (MLC) is the task of predicting a set of labels for a given input instance. A key challenge in MLC is how to capture underlying structures in label spaces. Due to the computational cost of learning from all possible label combinations, it is crucial to take into account scalability as well as predictive performance when we deal with large scale MLC problems. Another problem that arises when building MLC systems is which evaluation measures need to be used for performance comparison. Unlike traditional multi-class classification, several evaluation measures are often used together in MLC because each measure prefers a different MLC system. In other words, we need to understand the properties of MLC evaluation measures and build a system which performs well in terms of those evaluation measures in which we are particularly interested. In this thesis, we develop neural network architectures that efficiently and effectively utilize underlying label structures in large-scale MLC problems. In the literature, neural networks (NNs) that learn from pairwise relationships between labels have been used, but they do not scale well on large-scale label spaces. Thus, we propose a comparably simple NN architecture that uses a loss function which ignores label dependencies. We demonstrate that simpler NNs using cross-entropy per label works better than more complex NNs, particularly in terms of rank loss, an evaluation measure that takes into account the number of incorrectly ranked label pairs. Another commonly considered evaluation measure is subset 0/1 loss. Classifier chains (CCs) have shown state-of-the-art performance in terms of that measure because the joint probability of labels is optimized explicitly. CCs essentially convert the problem of learning the joint probability into a sequential prediction problem. Then, the task is to predict a sequence of binary values for labels. Contrary to the aforementioned NN architecture which ignores label structures, we study recurrent neural networks (RNNs) so as to make use of sequential structures on label chains. The proposed RNNs are advantageous over CC approaches when dealing with a large number of labels due to parameter sharing effects in RNNs and their abilities to learn from long sequences. Our experimental results also confirm that their superior performance on very large label spaces. In addition to NNs that learn from label sequences, we present two novel NN-based methods that learn a joint space of instances and labels efficiently while exploiting label structures. The proposed joint space learning methods project both instances and labels into a lower dimensional space in a way that minimizes the distance between an instance and its relevant labels in that space. While the goal of both joint space learning methods is same, they use different additional information on label spaces during training: One approach makes use of hierarchical structures of labels and can be useful when such label structures are given by human experts. The other uses latent label spaces learned from textual label descriptions so that we can apply it to more general MLC problems where no explicit label structures are available. Notwithstanding the difference between the two approaches, both approaches allow us to make predictions with respect to labels that have not been seen during training

Structured learning for information retrieval

Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with the process of searching, recovering and interpreting information from large amounts of data. In this Thesis we show that many of the problems in information retrieval consist of structured learning, where the goal is to learn predictors of complex output structures, consisting of many inter-dependent variables. We then attack these problems using principled machine learning methods that are specifically suited for such scenarios. In the process of doing so, we develop new models, new model extensions and new algorithms that, when integrated with existing methodology, comprise a new set of tools for solving a variety of information retrieval problems. Firstly, we cover the multi-label classification problem, where we seek to predict a set of labels associated with a given object; the output in this case is structured, as the output variables are interdependent. Secondly, we focus on document ranking, where given a query and a set of documents associated with it we want to rank them according to their relevance with respect to the query; here, again, we have a structured output - a ranking of documents. Thirdly, we address topic models, where we are given a set of documents and attempt to find a compact representation of them, by learning latent topics and associating a topic distribution to each document; the output is again structured, consisting of word and topic distributions. For all the above problems, we obtain state-of-the-art solutions as attested by empirical performance in publicly available real-world datasets

Deep Active Learning Explored Across Diverse Label Spaces

abstract: Deep learning architectures have been widely explored in computer vision and have depicted commendable performance in a variety of applications. A fundamental challenge in training deep networks is the requirement of large amounts of labeled training data. While gathering large quantities of unlabeled data is cheap and easy, annotating the data is an expensive process in terms of time, labor and human expertise. Thus, developing algorithms that minimize the human effort in training deep models is of immense practical importance. Active learning algorithms automatically identify salient and exemplar samples from large amounts of unlabeled data and can augment maximal information to supervised learning models, thereby reducing the human annotation effort in training machine learning models. The goal of this dissertation is to fuse ideas from deep learning and active learning and design novel deep active learning algorithms. The proposed learning methodologies explore diverse label spaces to solve different computer vision applications. Three major contributions have emerged from this work; (i) a deep active framework for multi-class image classication, (ii) a deep active model with and without label correlation for multi-label image classi- cation and (iii) a deep active paradigm for regression. Extensive empirical studies on a variety of multi-class, multi-label and regression vision datasets corroborate the potential of the proposed methods for real-world applications. Additional contributions include: (i) a multimodal emotion database consisting of recordings of facial expressions, body gestures, vocal expressions and physiological signals of actors enacting various emotions, (ii) four multimodal deep belief network models and (iii) an in-depth analysis of the effect of transfer of multimodal emotion features between source and target networks on classification accuracy and training time. These related contributions help comprehend the challenges involved in training deep learning models and motivate the main goal of this dissertation.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

Metadata-driven computational (meta)genomics. A practical machine learning approach

Rumming M. Metadata-driven computational (meta)genomics. A practical machine learning approach. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2018.A vast amount of bacterial and archaeal genomic sequences have been generated in the past decade through single cell sequencing and in particular binning of metagenomic sequences, but a detailed characterization of the functional features and observable phenotypes of such novel genomes is mostly unknown and thus missing. Machine learning models are trained on previously annotated organisms in relation to the mentioned traits and can be used for the characterization of so far undiscovered novel microbial organisms. The metadata is also used to enrich microbial community profiles with this kind of information, and a client-side webtool has been developed for comparative visualizations of these profiles