Fusing Data with Correlations

Many applications rely on Web data and extraction systems to accomplish knowledge-driven tasks. Web information is not curated, so many sources provide inaccurate, or conflicting information. Moreover, extraction systems introduce additional noise to the data. We wish to automatically distinguish correct data and erroneous data for creating a cleaner set of integrated data. Previous work has shown that a na\"ive voting strategy that trusts data provided by the majority or at least a certain number of sources may not work well in the presence of copying between the sources. However, correlation between sources can be much broader than copying: sources may provide data from complementary domains (\emph{negative correlation}), extractors may focus on different types of information (\emph{negative correlation}), and extractors may apply common rules in extraction (\emph{positive correlation, without copying}). In this paper we present novel techniques modeling correlations between sources and applying it in truth finding.Comment: Sigmod'201

Minimum information loss fusion in distributed sensor networks

A key assumption of distributed data fusion is that individual nodes have no knowledge of the global network topology and use only information which is available locally. This paper considers the weighted exponential product (WEP) rule as a methodology for conservatively fusing estimates with an unknown degree of correlation between them. We provide a preliminary investigation into how the methodology for selecting the mixing parameter can be used to minimize the information loss in the fused covariance as opposed to reducing the Shannon entropy, and hence maximize the information of the fused covariance. Our results suggest that selecting a mixing parameter which minimizes the information loss ensures that information which is exclusive to the estimates from one source is not lost during the fusion process. These results indicate that minimizing the information loss provides a robust technique for selecting the mixing parameter in WEP fusion

Medical Image Segmentation Based on Multi-Modal Convolutional Neural Network: Study on Image Fusion Schemes

Image analysis using more than one modality (i.e. multi-modal) has been increasingly applied in the field of biomedical imaging. One of the challenges in performing the multimodal analysis is that there exist multiple schemes for fusing the information from different modalities, where such schemes are application-dependent and lack a unified framework to guide their designs. In this work we firstly propose a conceptual architecture for the image fusion schemes in supervised biomedical image analysis: fusing at the feature level, fusing at the classifier level, and fusing at the decision-making level. Further, motivated by the recent success in applying deep learning for natural image analysis, we implement the three image fusion schemes above based on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with varied structures, and combined into a single framework. The proposed image segmentation framework is capable of analyzing the multi-modality images using different fusing schemes simultaneously. The framework is applied to detect the presence of soft tissue sarcoma from the combination of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computed Tomography (CT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) images. It is found from the results that while all the fusion schemes outperform the single-modality schemes, fusing at the feature level can generally achieve the best performance in terms of both accuracy and computational cost, but also suffers from the decreased robustness in the presence of large errors in any image modalities.Comment: Zhe Guo and Xiang Li contribute equally to this wor

Low-Dimensional Topology of Information Fusion

We provide an axiomatic characterization of information fusion, on the basis of which we define an information fusion network. Our construction is reminiscent of tangle diagrams in low dimensional topology. Information fusion networks come equipped with a natural notion of equivalence. Equivalent networks `contain the same information', but differ locally. When fusing streams of information, an information fusion network may adaptively optimize itself inside its equivalence class. This provides a fault tolerance mechanism for such networks.Comment: 8 pages. Conference proceedings version. Will be superceded by a journal versio