Similarity search and data mining techniques for advanced database systems.

Modern automated methods for measurement, collection, and analysis of data in industry and science are providing more and more data with drastically increasing structure complexity. On the one hand, this growing complexity is justified by the need for a richer and more precise description of real-world objects, on the other hand it is justified by the rapid progress in measurement and analysis techniques that allow the user a versatile exploration of objects. In order to manage the huge volume of such complex data, advanced database systems are employed. In contrast to conventional database systems that support exact match queries, the user of these advanced database systems focuses on applying similarity search and data mining techniques. Based on an analysis of typical advanced database systems — such as biometrical, biological, multimedia, moving, and CAD-object database systems — the following three challenging characteristics of complexity are detected: uncertainty (probabilistic feature vectors), multiple instances (a set of homogeneous feature vectors), and multiple representations (a set of heterogeneous feature vectors). Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to develop similarity search and data mining techniques that are capable of handling uncertain, multi-instance, and multi-represented objects. The first part of this thesis deals with similarity search techniques. Object identification is a similarity search technique that is typically used for the recognition of objects from image, video, or audio data. Thus, we develop a novel probabilistic model for object identification. Based on it, two novel types of identification queries are defined. In order to process the novel query types efficiently, we introduce an index structure called Gauss-tree. In addition, we specify further probabilistic models and query types for uncertain multi-instance objects and uncertain spatial objects. Based on the index structure, we develop algorithms for an efficient processing of these query types. Practical benefits of using probabilistic feature vectors are demonstrated on a real-world application for video similarity search. Furthermore, a similarity search technique is presented that is based on aggregated multi-instance objects, and that is suitable for video similarity search. This technique takes multiple representations into account in order to achieve better effectiveness. The second part of this thesis deals with two major data mining techniques: clustering and classification. Since privacy preservation is a very important demand of distributed advanced applications, we propose using uncertainty for data obfuscation in order to provide privacy preservation during clustering. Furthermore, a model-based and a density-based clustering method for multi-instance objects are developed. Afterwards, original extensions and enhancements of the density-based clustering algorithms DBSCAN and OPTICS for handling multi-represented objects are introduced. Since several advanced database systems like biological or multimedia database systems handle predefined, very large class systems, two novel classification techniques for large class sets that benefit from using multiple representations are defined. The first classification method is based on the idea of a k-nearest-neighbor classifier. It employs a novel density-based technique to reduce training instances and exploits the entropy impurity of the local neighborhood in order to weight a given representation. The second technique addresses hierarchically-organized class systems. It uses a novel hierarchical, supervised method for the reduction of large multi-instance objects, e.g. audio or video, and applies support vector machines for efficient hierarchical classification of multi-represented objects. User benefits of this technique are demonstrated by a prototype that performs a classification of large music collections. The effectiveness and efficiency of all proposed techniques are discussed and verified by comparison with conventional approaches in versatile experimental evaluations on real-world datasets

Tensor-based regression models and applications

Tableau d’honneur de la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales, 2017-2018Avec l’avancement des technologies modernes, les tenseurs d’ordre élevé sont assez répandus et abondent dans un large éventail d’applications telles que la neuroscience informatique, la vision par ordinateur, le traitement du signal et ainsi de suite. La principale raison pour laquelle les méthodes de régression classiques ne parviennent pas à traiter de façon appropriée des tenseurs d’ordre élevé est due au fait que ces données contiennent des informations structurelles multi-voies qui ne peuvent pas être capturées directement par les modèles conventionnels de régression vectorielle ou matricielle. En outre, la très grande dimensionnalité de l’entrée tensorielle produit une énorme quantité de paramètres, ce qui rompt les garanties théoriques des approches de régression classique. De plus, les modèles classiques de régression se sont avérés limités en termes de difficulté d’interprétation, de sensibilité au bruit et d’absence d’unicité. Pour faire face à ces défis, nous étudions une nouvelle classe de modèles de régression, appelés modèles de régression tensor-variable, où les prédicteurs indépendants et (ou) les réponses dépendantes prennent la forme de représentations tensorielles d’ordre élevé. Nous les appliquons également dans de nombreuses applications du monde réel pour vérifier leur efficacité et leur efficacité.With the advancement of modern technologies, high-order tensors are quite widespread and abound in a broad range of applications such as computational neuroscience, computer vision, signal processing and so on. The primary reason that classical regression methods fail to appropriately handle high-order tensors is due to the fact that those data contain multiway structural information which cannot be directly captured by the conventional vector-based or matrix-based regression models, causing substantial information loss during the regression. Furthermore, the ultrahigh dimensionality of tensorial input produces huge amount of parameters, which breaks the theoretical guarantees of classical regression approaches. Additionally, the classical regression models have also been shown to be limited in terms of difficulty of interpretation, sensitivity to noise and absence of uniqueness. To deal with these challenges, we investigate a novel class of regression models, called tensorvariate regression models, where the independent predictors and (or) dependent responses take the form of high-order tensorial representations. We also apply them in numerous real-world applications to verify their efficiency and effectiveness. Concretely, we first introduce hierarchical Tucker tensor regression, a generalized linear tensor regression model that is able to handle potentially much higher order tensor input. Then, we work on online local Gaussian process for tensor-variate regression, an efficient nonlinear GPbased approach that can process large data sets at constant time in a sequential way. Next, we present a computationally efficient online tensor regression algorithm with general tensorial input and output, called incremental higher-order partial least squares, for the setting of infinite time-dependent tensor streams. Thereafter, we propose a super-fast sequential tensor regression framework for general tensor sequences, namely recursive higher-order partial least squares, which addresses issues of limited storage space and fast processing time allowed by dynamic environments. Finally, we introduce kernel-based multiblock tensor partial least squares, a new generalized nonlinear framework that is capable of predicting a set of tensor blocks by merging a set of tensor blocks from different sources with a boosted predictive power

Modelling perceptions on the evaluation of video summarization

Hours of video are uploaded to streaming platforms every minute, with recommender systems suggesting popular and relevant videos that can help users save time in the searching process. Recommender systems regularly require video summarization as an expert system to automatically identify suitable video entities and events. Since there is no well-established methodology to evaluate the relevance of summarized videos, some studies have made use of user annotations to gather evidence about the effectiveness of summarization methods. Aimed at modelling the user’s perceptions, which ultimately form the basis for testing video summarization systems, this paper seeks to propose: (i) A guideline to collect unrestricted user annotations, (ii) a novel metric called compression level of user annotation (CLUSA) to gauge the performance of video summarization methods, and (iii) a study on the quality of annotated video summaries collected from different assessment scales. These contributions lead to benchmarking video summarization methods with no constraints, even if user annotations are collected from different assessment scales for each method. Our experiments showed that CLUSA is less susceptible to unbalanced compression data sets in comparison to other metrics, hence achieving higher reliability estimates. CLUSA also allows to compare results from different video summarizing approaches

Similarity search and data mining techniques for advanced database systems.

Modern automated methods for measurement, collection, and analysis of data in industry and science are providing more and more data with drastically increasing structure complexity. On the one hand, this growing complexity is justified by the need for a richer and more precise description of real-world objects, on the other hand it is justified by the rapid progress in measurement and analysis techniques that allow the user a versatile exploration of objects. In order to manage the huge volume of such complex data, advanced database systems are employed. In contrast to conventional database systems that support exact match queries, the user of these advanced database systems focuses on applying similarity search and data mining techniques. Based on an analysis of typical advanced database systems — such as biometrical, biological, multimedia, moving, and CAD-object database systems — the following three challenging characteristics of complexity are detected: uncertainty (probabilistic feature vectors), multiple instances (a set of homogeneous feature vectors), and multiple representations (a set of heterogeneous feature vectors). Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to develop similarity search and data mining techniques that are capable of handling uncertain, multi-instance, and multi-represented objects. The first part of this thesis deals with similarity search techniques. Object identification is a similarity search technique that is typically used for the recognition of objects from image, video, or audio data. Thus, we develop a novel probabilistic model for object identification. Based on it, two novel types of identification queries are defined. In order to process the novel query types efficiently, we introduce an index structure called Gauss-tree. In addition, we specify further probabilistic models and query types for uncertain multi-instance objects and uncertain spatial objects. Based on the index structure, we develop algorithms for an efficient processing of these query types. Practical benefits of using probabilistic feature vectors are demonstrated on a real-world application for video similarity search. Furthermore, a similarity search technique is presented that is based on aggregated multi-instance objects, and that is suitable for video similarity search. This technique takes multiple representations into account in order to achieve better effectiveness. The second part of this thesis deals with two major data mining techniques: clustering and classification. Since privacy preservation is a very important demand of distributed advanced applications, we propose using uncertainty for data obfuscation in order to provide privacy preservation during clustering. Furthermore, a model-based and a density-based clustering method for multi-instance objects are developed. Afterwards, original extensions and enhancements of the density-based clustering algorithms DBSCAN and OPTICS for handling multi-represented objects are introduced. Since several advanced database systems like biological or multimedia database systems handle predefined, very large class systems, two novel classification techniques for large class sets that benefit from using multiple representations are defined. The first classification method is based on the idea of a k-nearest-neighbor classifier. It employs a novel density-based technique to reduce training instances and exploits the entropy impurity of the local neighborhood in order to weight a given representation. The second technique addresses hierarchically-organized class systems. It uses a novel hierarchical, supervised method for the reduction of large multi-instance objects, e.g. audio or video, and applies support vector machines for efficient hierarchical classification of multi-represented objects. User benefits of this technique are demonstrated by a prototype that performs a classification of large music collections. The effectiveness and efficiency of all proposed techniques are discussed and verified by comparison with conventional approaches in versatile experimental evaluations on real-world datasets