Evaluating Go Game Records for Prediction of Player Attributes

We propose a way of extracting and aggregating per-move evaluations from sets of Go game records. The evaluations capture different aspects of the games such as played patterns or statistic of sente/gote sequences. Using machine learning algorithms, the evaluations can be utilized to predict different relevant target variables. We apply this methodology to predict the strength and playing style of the player (e.g. territoriality or aggressivity) with good accuracy. We propose a number of possible applications including aiding in Go study, seeding real-work ranks of internet players or tuning of Go-playing programs

Information-Theoretic Active Learning for Content-Based Image Retrieval

We propose Information-Theoretic Active Learning (ITAL), a novel batch-mode active learning method for binary classification, and apply it for acquiring meaningful user feedback in the context of content-based image retrieval. Instead of combining different heuristics such as uncertainty, diversity, or density, our method is based on maximizing the mutual information between the predicted relevance of the images and the expected user feedback regarding the selected batch. We propose suitable approximations to this computationally demanding problem and also integrate an explicit model of user behavior that accounts for possible incorrect labels and unnameable instances. Furthermore, our approach does not only take the structure of the data but also the expected model output change caused by the user feedback into account. In contrast to other methods, ITAL turns out to be highly flexible and provides state-of-the-art performance across various datasets, such as MIRFLICKR and ImageNet.Comment: GCPR 2018 paper (14 pages text + 2 pages references + 6 pages appendix

Oversampling for Imbalanced Learning Based on K-Means and SMOTE

Learning from class-imbalanced data continues to be a common and challenging problem in supervised learning as standard classification algorithms are designed to handle balanced class distributions. While different strategies exist to tackle this problem, methods which generate artificial data to achieve a balanced class distribution are more versatile than modifications to the classification algorithm. Such techniques, called oversamplers, modify the training data, allowing any classifier to be used with class-imbalanced datasets. Many algorithms have been proposed for this task, but most are complex and tend to generate unnecessary noise. This work presents a simple and effective oversampling method based on k-means clustering and SMOTE oversampling, which avoids the generation of noise and effectively overcomes imbalances between and within classes. Empirical results of extensive experiments with 71 datasets show that training data oversampled with the proposed method improves classification results. Moreover, k-means SMOTE consistently outperforms other popular oversampling methods. An implementation is made available in the python programming language.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure

Object Proposals for Text Extraction in the Wild

Object Proposals is a recent computer vision technique receiving increasing interest from the research community. Its main objective is to generate a relatively small set of bounding box proposals that are most likely to contain objects of interest. The use of Object Proposals techniques in the scene text understanding field is innovative. Motivated by the success of powerful while expensive techniques to recognize words in a holistic way, Object Proposals techniques emerge as an alternative to the traditional text detectors. In this paper we study to what extent the existing generic Object Proposals methods may be useful for scene text understanding. Also, we propose a new Object Proposals algorithm that is specifically designed for text and compare it with other generic methods in the state of the art. Experiments show that our proposal is superior in its ability of producing good quality word proposals in an efficient way. The source code of our method is made publicly available.Comment: 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2015