One-Class-at-a-Time Removal Sequence Planning Method for Multiclass Classification Problems

Using dynamic programming, this work develops a one-class-at-a-time removal sequence planning method to decompose a multiclass classification problem into a series of two-class problems. Compared with previous decomposition methods, the approach has the following distinct features. First, under the one-class-at-a-time framework, the approach guarantees the optimality of the decomposition. Second, for a K-class problem, the number of binary classifiers required by the method is only K-1. Third, to achieve higher classification accuracy, the approach can easily be adapted to form a committee machine. A drawback of the approach is that its computational burden increases rapidly with the number of classes. To resolve this difficulty, a partial decomposition technique is introduced that reduces the computational cost by generating a suboptimal solution. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms two conventional decomposition methods

Optimized complex power quality classifier using one vs. rest support vector machine

Nowadays, power quality issues are becoming a significant research topic because of the increasing inclusion of very sensitive devices and considerable renewable energy sources. In general, most of the previous power quality classification techniques focused on single power quality events and did not include an optimal feature selection process. This paper presents a classification system that employs Wavelet Transform and the RMS profile to extract the main features of the measured waveforms containing either single or complex disturbances. A data mining process is designed to select the optimal set of features that better describes each disturbance present in the waveform. Support Vector Machine binary classifiers organized in a ?One Vs Rest? architecture are individually optimized to classify single and complex disturbances. The parameters that rule the performance of each binary classifier are also individually adjusted using a grid search algorithm that helps them achieve optimal performance. This specialized process significantly improves the total classification accuracy. Several single and complex disturbances were simulated in order to train and test the algorithm. The results show that the classifier is capable of identifying >99% of single disturbances and >97% of complex disturbances.Fil: de Yong, David Marcelo. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ingeniería. Departamento de Electricidad y Electrónica; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba; ArgentinaFil: Bhowmik, Sudipto. Nexant Inc; Estados UnidosFil: Magnago, Fernando. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ingeniería. Departamento de Electricidad y Electrónica; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba; Argentin

Convex Optimization for Binary Classifier Aggregation in Multiclass Problems

Multiclass problems are often decomposed into multiple binary problems that are solved by individual binary classifiers whose results are integrated into a final answer. Various methods, including all-pairs (APs), one-versus-all (OVA), and error correcting output code (ECOC), have been studied, to decompose multiclass problems into binary problems. However, little study has been made to optimally aggregate binary problems to determine a final answer to the multiclass problem. In this paper we present a convex optimization method for an optimal aggregation of binary classifiers to estimate class membership probabilities in multiclass problems. We model the class membership probability as a softmax function which takes a conic combination of discrepancies induced by individual binary classifiers, as an input. With this model, we formulate the regularized maximum likelihood estimation as a convex optimization problem, which is solved by the primal-dual interior point method. Connections of our method to large margin classifiers are presented, showing that the large margin formulation can be considered as a limiting case of our convex formulation. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing aggregation methods as well as direct methods, in terms of the classification accuracy and the quality of class membership probability estimates.Comment: Appeared in Proceedings of the 2014 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2014

Combination Strategies for Semantic Role Labeling

This paper introduces and analyzes a battery of inference models for the problem of semantic role labeling: one based on constraint satisfaction, and several strategies that model the inference as a meta-learning problem using discriminative classifiers. These classifiers are developed with a rich set of novel features that encode proposition and sentence-level information. To our knowledge, this is the first work that: (a) performs a thorough analysis of learning-based inference models for semantic role labeling, and (b) compares several inference strategies in this context. We evaluate the proposed inference strategies in the framework of the CoNLL-2005 shared task using only automatically-generated syntactic information. The extensive experimental evaluation and analysis indicates that all the proposed inference strategies are successful -they all outperform the current best results reported in the CoNLL-2005 evaluation exercise- but each of the proposed approaches has its advantages and disadvantages. Several important traits of a state-of-the-art SRL combination strategy emerge from this analysis: (i) individual models should be combined at the granularity of candidate arguments rather than at the granularity of complete solutions; (ii) the best combination strategy uses an inference model based in learning; and (iii) the learning-based inference benefits from max-margin classifiers and global feedback