BagStack Classification for Data Imbalance Problems with Application to Defect Detection and Labeling in Semiconductor Units

abstract: Despite the fact that machine learning supports the development of computer vision applications by shortening the development cycle, finding a general learning algorithm that solves a wide range of applications is still bounded by the ”no free lunch theorem”. The search for the right algorithm to solve a specific problem is driven by the problem itself, the data availability and many other requirements. Automated visual inspection (AVI) systems represent a major part of these challenging computer vision applications. They are gaining growing interest in the manufacturing industry to detect defective products and keep these from reaching customers. The process of defect detection and classification in semiconductor units is challenging due to different acceptable variations that the manufacturing process introduces. Other variations are also typically introduced when using optical inspection systems due to changes in lighting conditions and misalignment of the imaged units, which makes the defect detection process more challenging. In this thesis, a BagStack classification framework is proposed, which makes use of stacking and bagging concepts to handle both variance and bias errors. The classifier is designed to handle the data imbalance and overfitting problems by adaptively transforming the multi-class classification problem into multiple binary classification problems, applying a bagging approach to train a set of base learners for each specific problem, adaptively specifying the number of base learners assigned to each problem, adaptively specifying the number of samples to use from each class, applying a novel data-imbalance aware cross-validation technique to generate the meta-data while taking into account the data imbalance problem at the meta-data level and, finally, using a multi-response random forest regression classifier as a meta-classifier. The BagStack classifier makes use of multiple features to solve the defect classification problem. In order to detect defects, a locally adaptive statistical background modeling is proposed. The proposed BagStack classifier outperforms state-of-the-art image classification techniques on our dataset in terms of overall classification accuracy and average per-class classification accuracy. The proposed detection method achieves high performance on the considered dataset in terms of recall and precision.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Engineering 201

Financial predictions using cost sensitive neural networks for multi-class learning

The interest in the localisation of wireless sensor networks has grown in recent years. A variety of machine-learning methods have been proposed in recent years to improve the optimisation of the complex behaviour of wireless networks. Network administrators have found that traditional classification algorithms may be limited with imbalanced datasets. In fact, the problem of imbalanced data learning has received particular interest. The purpose of this study was to examine design modifications to neural networks in order to address the problem of cost optimisation decisions and financial predictions. The goal was to compare four learning-based techniques using cost-sensitive neural network ensemble for multiclass imbalance data learning. The problem is formulated as a combinatorial cost optimisation in terms of minimising the cost using meta-learning classification rules for Naïve Bayes, J48, Multilayer Perceptions, and Radial Basis Function models. With these models, optimisation faults and cost evaluations for network training are considered