Infinite Ensemble Learning with Support Vector Machines

Ensemble learning algorithms such as boosting can achieve better performance by averaging over the predictions of base learners. However, existing algorithms are limited to combining only a finite number of base learners, and the generated ensemble is usually sparse. It is not clear whether we should construct an ensemble classifier with a larger or even an infinite number of base learners. In addition, constructing an infinite ensemble itself is a challenging task. In this paper, we formulate an infinite ensemble learning framework based on SVM. The framework could output an infinite and nonsparse ensemble, and can be applied to construct new kernels for SVM as well as to interpret existing ones. We demonstrate the framework with a concrete application, the stump kernel, which embodies infinitely many decision stumps. The stump kernel is simple, yet powerful. Experimental results show that SVM with the stump kernel usually achieves better performance than boosting, even with noisy data.</p

Combining Search, Social Media, and Traditional Data Sources to Improve Influenza Surveillance

We present a machine learning-based methodology capable of providing real-time ("nowcast") and forecast estimates of influenza activity in the US by leveraging data from multiple data sources including: Google searches, Twitter microblogs, nearly real-time hospital visit records, and data from a participatory surveillance system. Our main contribution consists of combining multiple influenza-like illnesses (ILI) activity estimates, generated independently with each data source, into a single prediction of ILI utilizing machine learning ensemble approaches. Our methodology exploits the information in each data source and produces accurate weekly ILI predictions for up to four weeks ahead of the release of CDC's ILI reports. We evaluate the predictive ability of our ensemble approach during the 2013-2014 (retrospective) and 2014-2015 (live) flu seasons for each of the four weekly time horizons. Our ensemble approach demonstrates several advantages: (1) our ensemble method's predictions outperform every prediction using each data source independently, (2) our methodology can produce predictions one week ahead of GFT's real-time estimates with comparable accuracy, and (3) our two and three week forecast estimates have comparable accuracy to real-time predictions using an autoregressive model. Moreover, our results show that considerable insight is gained from incorporating disparate data streams, in the form of social media and crowd sourced data, into influenza predictions in all time horizon

Wearable Sensor Data Based Human Activity Recognition using Machine Learning: A new approach

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of human activity recognition (HAR) based on wearable sensor data. One can find many practical applications in this area, especially in the field of health care. Many machine learning algorithms such as Decision Trees, Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbor, and Multilayer Perceptron are successfully used in HAR. Although these methods are fast and easy for implementation, they still have some limitations due to poor performance in a number of situations. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on the ensemble learning to boost the performance of these machine learning methods for HAR

Cache Hierarchy Inspired Compression: a Novel Architecture for Data Streams

We present an architecture for data streams based on structures typically found in web cache hierarchies. The main idea is to build a meta level analyser from a number of levels constructed over time from a data stream. We present the general architecture for such a system and an application to classification. This architecture is an instance of the general wrapper idea allowing us to reuse standard batch learning algorithms in an inherently incremental learning environment. By artificially generating data sources we demonstrate that a hierarchy containing a mixture of models is able to adapt over time to the source of the data. In these experiments the hierarchies use an elementary performance based replacement policy and unweighted voting for making classification decisions