Classifiers With a Reject Option for Early Time-Series Classification

Early classification of time-series data in a dynamic environment is a challenging problem of great importance in signal processing. This paper proposes a classifier architecture with a reject option capable of online decision making without the need to wait for the entire time series signal to be present. The main idea is to classify an odor/gas signal with an acceptable accuracy as early as possible. Instead of using posterior probability of a classifier, the proposed method uses the "agreement" of an ensemble to decide whether to accept or reject the candidate label. The introduced algorithm is applied to the bio-chemistry problem of odor classification to build a novel Electronic-Nose called Forefront-Nose. Experimental results on wind tunnel test-bed facility confirms the robustness of the forefront-nose compared to the standard classifiers from both earliness and recognition perspectives

Induction of Subgoal Automata for Reinforcement Learning

In this work we present ISA, a novel approach for learning and exploiting subgoals in reinforcement learning (RL). Our method relies on inducing an automaton whose transitions are subgoals expressed as propositional formulas over a set of observable events. A state-of-the-art inductive logic programming system is used to learn the automaton from observation traces perceived by the RL agent. The reinforcement learning and automaton learning processes are interleaved: a new refined automaton is learned whenever the RL agent generates a trace not recognized by the current automaton. We evaluate ISA in several gridworld problems and show that it performs similarly to a method for which automata are given in advance. We also show that the learned automata can be exploited to speed up convergence through reward shaping and transfer learning across multiple tasks. Finally, we analyze the running time and the number of traces that ISA needs to learn an automata, and the impact that the number of observable events has on the learner's performance.Comment: Preprint accepted for publication to the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20

Minimal Learning Machine: Theoretical Results and Clustering-Based Reference Point Selection

The Minimal Learning Machine (MLM) is a nonlinear supervised approach based on learning a linear mapping between distance matrices computed in the input and output data spaces, where distances are calculated using a subset of points called reference points. Its simple formulation has attracted several recent works on extensions and applications. In this paper, we aim to address some open questions related to the MLM. First, we detail theoretical aspects that assure the interpolation and universal approximation capabilities of the MLM, which were previously only empirically verified. Second, we identify the task of selecting reference points as having major importance for the MLM's generalization capability. Several clustering-based methods for reference point selection in regression scenarios are then proposed and analyzed. Based on an extensive empirical evaluation, we conclude that the evaluated methods are both scalable and useful. Specifically, for a small number of reference points, the clustering-based methods outperformed the standard random selection of the original MLM formulation.Comment: 29 pages, Accepted to JML