5,409 research outputs found
A nonparametric Bayesian approach toward robot learning by demonstration
In the past years, many authors have considered application of machine learning methodologies to effect robot learning by demonstration. Gaussian mixture regression (GMR) is one of the most successful methodologies used for this purpose. A major limitation of GMR models concerns automatic selection of the proper number of model states, i.e., the number of model component densities. Existing methods, including likelihood- or entropy-based criteria, usually tend to yield noisy model size estimates while imposing heavy computational requirements. Recently, Dirichlet process (infinite) mixture models have emerged in the cornerstone of nonparametric Bayesian statistics as promising candidates for clustering applications where the number of clusters is unknown a priori. Under this motivation, to resolve the aforementioned issues of GMR-based methods for robot learning by demonstration, in this paper we introduce a nonparametric Bayesian formulation for the GMR model, the Dirichlet process GMR model. We derive an efficient variational Bayesian inference algorithm for the proposed model, and we experimentally investigate its efficacy as a robot learning by demonstration methodology, considering a number of demanding robot learning by demonstration scenarios
Memory-Efficient Global Refinement of Decision-Tree Ensembles and its Application to Face Alignment
Ren et al. recently introduced a method for aggregating multiple decision
trees into a strong predictor by interpreting a path taken by a sample down
each tree as a binary vector and performing linear regression on top of these
vectors stacked together. They provided experimental evidence that the method
offers advantages over the usual approaches for combining decision trees
(random forests and boosting). The method truly shines when the regression
target is a large vector with correlated dimensions, such as a 2D face shape
represented with the positions of several facial landmarks. However, we argue
that their basic method is not applicable in many practical scenarios due to
large memory requirements. This paper shows how this issue can be solved
through the use of quantization and architectural changes of the predictor that
maps decision tree-derived encodings to the desired output.Comment: BMVC Newcastle 201
Nonparametrically consistent depth-based classifiers
We introduce a class of depth-based classification procedures that are of a
nearest-neighbor nature. Depth, after symmetrization, indeed provides the
center-outward ordering that is necessary and sufficient to define nearest
neighbors. Like all their depth-based competitors, the resulting classifiers
are affine-invariant, hence in particular are insensitive to unit changes.
Unlike the former, however, the latter achieve Bayes consistency under
virtually any absolutely continuous distributions - a concept we call
nonparametric consistency, to stress the difference with the stronger universal
consistency of the standard NN classifiers. We investigate the finite-sample
performances of the proposed classifiers through simulations and show that they
outperform affine-invariant nearest-neighbor classifiers obtained through an
obvious standardization construction. We illustrate the practical value of our
classifiers on two real data examples. Finally, we shortly discuss the possible
uses of our depth-based neighbors in other inference problems.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/13-BEJ561 in the Bernoulli
(http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical
Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm
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