Learning to Play Othello with N-Tuple Systems

This paper investigates the use of n-tuple systems as position value functions for the game of Othello. The architecture is described, and then evaluated for use with temporal difference learning. Performance is compared with previously de-veloped weighted piece counters and multi-layer perceptrons. The n-tuple system is able to defeat the best performing of these after just five hundred games of self-play learning. The conclusion is that n-tuple networks learn faster and better than the other more conventional approaches

Sign Spotting using Hierarchical Sequential Patterns with Temporal Intervals

This paper tackles the problem of spotting a set of signs occuring in videos with sequences of signs. To achieve this, we propose to model the spatio-temporal signatures of a sign using an extension of sequential patterns that contain temporal intervals called Sequential Interval Patterns (SIP). We then propose a novel multi-class classifier that organises different sequential interval patterns in a hierarchical tree structure called a Hierarchical SIP Tree (HSP-Tree). This allows one to exploit any subsequence sharing that exists between different SIPs of different classes. Multiple trees are then combined together into a forest of HSP-Trees resulting in a strong classifier that can be used to spot signs. We then show how the HSP-Forest can be used to spot sequences of signs that occur in an input video. We have evaluated the method on both concatenated sequences of isolated signs and continuous sign sequences. We also show that the proposed method is superior in robustness and accuracy to a state of the art sign recogniser when applied to spotting a sequence of signs.This work was funded by the UK government

Online and Offline Character Recognition Using Alignment to Prototypes

Nearest neighbor classifiers are simple to implement, yet they can model complex non-parametric distributions, and provide state-of-the-art recognition accuracy in OCR databases. At the same time, they may be too slow for practical character recognition, especially when they rely on similarity measures that require computationally expensive pairwise alignments between characters. This paper proposes an efficient method for computing an approximate similarity score between two characters based on their exact alignment to a small number of prototypes. The proposed method is applied to both online and offline character recognition, where similarity is based on widely used and computationally expensive alignment methods, i.e., Dynamic Time Warping and the Hungarian method respectively. In both cases significant recognition speedup is obtained at the expense of only a minor increase in recognition error.Office of Naval Research (N00014-03-1-0108); National Science Foundation (IIS-0308213, EIA-0202067

Distributed context discovering for predictive modeling

Click prediction has applications in various areas such as advertising, search and online sales. Usually user-intent information such as query terms and previous click history is used in click prediction. However, this information is not always available. For example, there are no queries from users on the webpages of content publishers, such as personal blogs. The available information for click prediction in this scenario are implicitly derived from users, such as visiting time and IP address. Thus, the existing approaches utilizing user-intent information may be inapplicable in this scenario; and the click prediction problem in this scenario remains unexplored to our knowledge. In addition, the challenges in handling skewed data streams also exist in prediction, since there is often a heavy traffic on webpages and few visitors click on them. In this thesis, we propose to use the pattern-based classification approach to tackle the click prediction problem. Attributes in webpage visits are combined by a pattern mining algorithm to enhance their power in prediction. To make the pattern-based classification handle skewed data streams, we adopt a sliding window to capture recent data, and an undersampling technique to handle the skewness. As a side problem raised by the pattern-based approach, mining patterns from large datasets is addressed by a distributed pattern sampling algorithm proposed by us. This algorithm shows its scalability in experiments. We validate our pattern-based approach in click prediction on a real-world dataset from a Dutch portal website. The experiments show our pattern-based approach can achieve an average AUC of 0.675 over a period of 36 days with a 5-day sized sliding window, which surpasses the baseline, a statically trained classification model without patterns by 0.002. Besides, the average weighted F-measure of our approach is 0.009 higher than the baseline. Therefore, our proposed approach can slightly improve classification performance; yet whether this improvement worth deployment in real scenarios remains a question. Click prediction has applications in various areas such as advertising, search and online sales. Usually user-intent information such as query terms and previous click history is used in click prediction. However, this information is not always available. For example, there are no queries from users on the webpages of content publishers, such as personal blogs. The available information for click prediction in this scenario are implicitly derived from users, such as visiting time and IP address. Thus, the existing approaches utilizing user-intent information may be inapplicable in this scenario; and the click prediction problem in this scenario remains unexplored to our knowledge. In addition, the challenges in handling skewed data streams also exist in prediction, since there is often a heavy traffic on webpages and few visitors click on them. In this thesis, we propose to use the pattern-based classification approach to tackle the click prediction problem. Attributes in webpage visits are combined by a pattern mining algorithm to enhance their power in prediction. To make the pattern-based classification handle skewed data streams, we adopt a sliding window to capture recent data, and an undersampling technique to handle the skewness. As a side problem raised by the pattern-based approach, mining patterns from large datasets is addressed by a distributed pattern sampling algorithm proposed by us. This algorithm shows its scalability in experiments. We validate our pattern-based approach in click prediction on a real-world dataset from a Dutch portal website. The experiments show our pattern-based approach can achieve an average AUC of 0.675 over a period of 36 days with a 5-day sized sliding window, which surpasses the baseline, a statically trained classification model without patterns by 0.002. Besides, the average weighted F-measure of our approach is 0.009 higher than the baseline. Therefore, our proposed approach can slightly improve classification performance; yet whether this improvement worth deployment in real scenarios remains a question