Hierarchical linear support vector machine

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Pattern Recognition. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Pattern Recognition, Vol. 45, Iss. 12, (2012) DOI: 10.1016/j.patcog.2012.06.002The increasing size and dimensionality of real-world datasets make it necessary to design efficient algorithms not only in the training process but also in the prediction phase. In applications such as credit card fraud detection, the classifier needs to predict an event in 10 ms at most. In these environments the speed of the prediction constraints heavily outweighs the training costs. We propose a new classification method, called a Hierarchical Linear Support Vector Machine (H-LSVM), based on the construction of an oblique decision tree in which the node split is obtained as a Linear Support Vector Machine. Although other methods have been proposed to break the data space down in subregions to speed up Support Vector Machines, the H-LSVM algorithm represents a very simple and efficient model in training but mainly in prediction for large-scale datasets. Only a few hyperplanes need to be evaluated in the prediction step, no kernel computation is required and the tree structure makes parallelization possible. In experiments with medium and large datasets, the H-LSVM reduces the prediction cost considerably while achieving classification results closer to the non-linear SVM than that of the linear case.The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments that help improve the manuscript. I.R.-L. is supported by an FPU Grant from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and partially supported by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid-IIC Chair and TIN2010-21575-C02-01. R.H. acknowledges partial support by ONRN00014-07-1-0741, USARIEM-W81XWH-10-C-0040 (ELINTRIX) and JPL-2012-1455933

A practical view of large-scale classification: feature selection and real-time classification

Tesis doctoral inédita, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela Politécnica Superior, mayo de 201

A Hybrid Brain-Computer Interface for Closed- Loop Position Control of a Robot Arm

Brain-Computer Interfacing has currently added a new dimension in assistive robotics. Existing brain-computer interfaces designed for position control applications suffer from two fundamental limitations. First, most of the existing schemes employ open-loop control, and thus are unable to track the positional errors, resulting in failures in taking necessary online corrective actions. There are traces of one or fewer works dealing with closed-loop EEG-based position control. The existing closed-loop brain-induced position control schemes employ a fixed order link selection rule, which often creates a bottleneck for time-efficient control. Second, the existing brain-induced position controllers are designed to generate the position response like a traditional first-order system, resulting in a large steady-state error. This paper overcomes the above two limitations by keeping provisions for (Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential induced) link-selection in an arbitrary order as required for efficient control and also to generate a second-order response of the position-control system with gradually diminishing overshoots/undershoots to reduce steady-state errors. Besides the above, the third novelty is to utilize motor imagery and P300 signals to design the hybrid brain-computer interfacing system for the said application with gradually diminishing error-margin by speed reversal at the zero-crossings of positional errors. Experiments undertaken reveal that the steady-state error is reduced to 0.2%. The paper also provides a thorough analysis of stability of the closed-loop system performance using Root Locus technique

Statistical Classification Based Modelling and Estimation of Analog Circuits Failure Probability

At nanoscales, variations in transistor parameters cause variations and unpredictability in the circuit output, and may ultimately cause a violation of the desired specifications, leading to circuit failure. The parametric variations in transistors occur due to limitations in the manufacturing process and are commonly known as process variations. Circuit simulation is a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) technique for verifying the behavior of analog circuits but exhibits incompleteness under the effects of process variations. Hence, statistical circuit simulation is showing increasing importance for circuit design to address this incompleteness problem. However, existing statistical circuit simulation approaches either fail to analyze the rare failure events accurately and efficiently or are impractical to use. Moreover, none of the existing approaches is able to successfully analyze analog circuits in the presence of multiple performance specifications in timely and accurate manner. Therefore, we propose a new statistical circuit simulation based methodology for modelling and estimation of failure probability of analog circuits in the presence of multiple performance metrics. Our methodology is based on an iterative way of estimating failure probability, employing a statistical classifier to reduce the number of simulations while still maintaining high estimation accuracy. Furthermore, a more practical classifier model is proposed for analog circuit failure probability estimation. Our methodology estimates an accurate failure probability even when the failures resulting from each performance metric occur simultaneously. The proposed methodology can deliver many orders of speedup compared to traditional Monte Carlo methods. Moreover, experimental results show that the methodology generates accurate results for problems with multiple specifications, while other approaches fail totally

Solución rápida y automática de parámetros hipocentrales para eventos sísmicos, mediante el empleo de técnicas de aprendizaje de máquina

La generación de alertas tempranas para sismos es de gran utilidad, en particular para la ciudad de Bogotá-Colombia, dada su importancia social y económica para el país. Con base en la información de la estación sismológica de El Rosal, la cual es una estación de banda ancha y tres componentes, localizada muy cerca de la ciudad, perteneciente al Servicio Geológico Colombiano (SGC) se desarrolló un modelo de regresión basado en máquinas de vectores de soporte (SVM), con un kernel polinomial normalizado, usando como datos de entrada algunas características de la porción inicial de la onda P empleadas en trabajos anteriores tales como la amplitud máxima, los coeficientes de regresión lineal de los mismos, los parámetros de ajuste logarítmico de la envolvente y los valores propios de la relación de las tres componentes del sismograma. El modelo fue entrenado y evaluado aplicando correlación cruzada, permitiendo llevar a cabo el cálculo de la magnitud y la localización de un evento sísmico con una longitud de señal de tan solo cinco segundos. Con el modelo propuesto se logró la determinación de la magnitud local con una precisión de 0.19 unidades de magnitud, la distancia epicentral con una precisión de alrededor de 11 kilómetros, la profundidad hipocentral con una precisión de aproximadamente 40 kilómetros y el azimut de llegada con una precisión de 45°. Las precisiones obtenidas en magnitud y distancia epicentral son mejores que las encontradas en trabajos anteriores, donde se emplean gran número de eventos para la determinación del modelo y en los demás parámetros hipocentrales son del mismo orden. Este trabajo de investigación realiza un aporte considerable en la generación de alertas tempranas para sismos, no solamente para el país sino para cualquier otro lugar donde se deseen implementar los modelos aquí propuestos y es un excelente punto de partida para investigaciones futuras.Abstract. Earthquake early warning alerts generation is very useful, especially for the city of Bogotá-Colombia, given the social and economic importance of this city for the country. Based on the information from the seismological station “El Rosal”, which is a broadband and three components station, located very near the city that belongs to the Servicio Geológico Colombiano (SGC) a Support Vector Machine Regression (SVMR) model was developed, using a Normalized Polynomial Kernel, using as input some characteristics of the initial portion of the P wave used in earlier works such as the maximum amplitude, the linear regression coefficients of such amplitudes, the logarithmic adjustment parameters of the envelope of the waveform and the eigenvalues of the relationship between the three seismogram components of each band. The model was trained and evaluated by applying a cross-correlation strategy, allowing to calculate the magnitude and location of a seismic event with only five seconds of signal. With the proposed model it was possible to estimate local magnitude with an accuracy of 0.19 units of magnitude, epicentral distance with an accuracy of about 11 km, the hipocentral depth with a precision of approximately 40 km and the arrival back-azimut with a precision of 45°. Accuracies obtained in magnitude and epicentral distance are better that those found in earlier works, where a large number of events were used for model determination, and the other hipocentral parameters precisions obtained here are of the same order. This research work makes a considerable contribution in the generation of seismic early warning alerts, not only for the country but for any other place where proposed models here can be applied and is a very good starting point for future research.Doctorad