Advance Artificial Neural Network Classification Techniques Using EHG for Detecting Preterm Births

Worldwide the rate of preterm birth is increasing, which presents significant health, developmental and economic problems. Current methods for predicting preterm births at an early stage are inadequate. Yet, there has been increasing evidence that the analysis of uterine electrical signals, from the abdominal surface, could provide an independent and easy way to diagnose true labour and predict preterm delivery. This analysis provides a heavy focus on the use of advanced machine learning techniques and Electrohysterography (EHG) signal processing. Most EHG studies have focused on true labour detection, in the window of around seven days before labour. However, this paper focuses on using such EHG signals to detect preterm births. In achieving this, the study uses an open dataset containing 262 records for women who delivered at term and 38 who delivered prematurely. The synthetic minority oversampling technique is utilized to overcome the issue with imbalanced datasets to produce a dataset containing 262 term records and 262 preterm records. Six different artificial neural networks were used to detect term and preterm records. The results show that the best performing classifier was the LMNC with 96% sensitivity, 92% specificity, 95% AUC and 6% mean error

Deep learning for time series classification: a review

Time Series Classification (TSC) is an important and challenging problem in data mining. With the increase of time series data availability, hundreds of TSC algorithms have been proposed. Among these methods, only a few have considered Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to perform this task. This is surprising as deep learning has seen very successful applications in the last years. DNNs have indeed revolutionized the field of computer vision especially with the advent of novel deeper architectures such as Residual and Convolutional Neural Networks. Apart from images, sequential data such as text and audio can also be processed with DNNs to reach state-of-the-art performance for document classification and speech recognition. In this article, we study the current state-of-the-art performance of deep learning algorithms for TSC by presenting an empirical study of the most recent DNN architectures for TSC. We give an overview of the most successful deep learning applications in various time series domains under a unified taxonomy of DNNs for TSC. We also provide an open source deep learning framework to the TSC community where we implemented each of the compared approaches and evaluated them on a univariate TSC benchmark (the UCR/UEA archive) and 12 multivariate time series datasets. By training 8,730 deep learning models on 97 time series datasets, we propose the most exhaustive study of DNNs for TSC to date.Comment: Accepted at Data Mining and Knowledge Discover

Learning with Scalability and Compactness

Artificial Intelligence has been thriving for decades since its birth. Traditional AI features heuristic search and planning, providing good strategy for tasks that are inherently search-based problems, such as games and GPS searching. In the meantime, machine learning, arguably the hottest subfield of AI, embraces data-driven methodology with great success in a wide range of applications such as computer vision and speech recognition. As a new trend, the applications of both learning and search have shifted toward mobile and embedded devices which entails not only scalability but also compactness of the models. Under this general paradigm, we propose a series of work to address the issues of scalability and compactness within machine learning and its applications on heuristic search. We first focus on the scalability issue of memory-based heuristic search which is recently ameliorated by Maximum Variance Unfolding (MVU), a manifold learning algorithm capable of learning state embeddings as effective heuristics to speed up $A^*$ search. Though achieving unprecedented online search performance with constraints on memory footprint, MVU is notoriously slow on offline training. To address this problem, we introduce Maximum Variance Correction (MVC), which finds large-scale feasible solutions to MVU by post-processing embeddings from any manifold learning algorithm. It increases the scale of MVU embeddings by several orders of magnitude and is naturally parallel. We further propose Goal-oriented Euclidean Heuristic (GOEH), a variant to MVU embeddings, which preferably optimizes the heuristics associated with goals in the embedding while maintaining their admissibility. We demonstrate unmatched reductions in search time across several non-trivial $A^*$ benchmark search problems. Through these work, we bridge the gap between the manifold learning literature and heuristic search which have been regarded as fundamentally different, leading to cross-fertilization for both fields. Deep learning has made a big splash in the machine learning community with its superior accuracy performance. However, it comes at a price of huge model size that might involves billions of parameters, which poses great challenges for its use on mobile and embedded devices. To achieve the compactness, we propose HashedNets, a general approach to compressing neural network models leveraging feature hashing. At its core, HashedNets randomly group parameters using a low-cost hash function, and share parameter value within the group. According to our empirical results, a neural network could be 32x smaller with little drop in accuracy performance. We further introduce Frequency-Sensitive Hashed Nets (FreshNets) to extend this hashing technique to convolutional neural network by compressing parameters in the frequency domain. Compared with many AI applications, neural networks seem not graining as much popularity as it should be in traditional data mining tasks. For these tasks, categorical features need to be first converted to numerical representation in advance in order for neural networks to process them. We show that a na\ {i}ve use of the classic one-hot encoding may result in gigantic weight matrices and therefore lead to prohibitively expensive memory cost in neural networks. Inspired by word embedding, we advocate a compellingly simple, yet effective neural network architecture with category embedding. It is capable of directly handling both numerical and categorical features as well as providing visual insights on feature similarities. At the end, we conduct comprehensive empirical evaluation which showcases the efficacy and practicality of our approach, and provides surprisingly good visualization and clustering for categorical features

Wasserstein Introspective Neural Networks

We present Wasserstein introspective neural networks (WINN) that are both a generator and a discriminator within a single model. WINN provides a significant improvement over the recent introspective neural networks (INN) method by enhancing INN's generative modeling capability. WINN has three interesting properties: (1) A mathematical connection between the formulation of the INN algorithm and that of Wasserstein generative adversarial networks (WGAN) is made. (2) The explicit adoption of the Wasserstein distance into INN results in a large enhancement to INN, achieving compelling results even with a single classifier --- e.g., providing nearly a 20 times reduction in model size over INN for unsupervised generative modeling. (3) When applied to supervised classification, WINN also gives rise to improved robustness against adversarial examples in terms of the error reduction. In the experiments, we report encouraging results on unsupervised learning problems including texture, face, and object modeling, as well as a supervised classification task against adversarial attacks.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2018 (Oral

Reservoir computing approaches for representation and classification of multivariate time series

Classification of multivariate time series (MTS) has been tackled with a large variety of methodologies and applied to a wide range of scenarios. Reservoir Computing (RC) provides efficient tools to generate a vectorial, fixed-size representation of the MTS that can be further processed by standard classifiers. Despite their unrivaled training speed, MTS classifiers based on a standard RC architecture fail to achieve the same accuracy of fully trainable neural networks. In this paper we introduce the reservoir model space, an unsupervised approach based on RC to learn vectorial representations of MTS. Each MTS is encoded within the parameters of a linear model trained to predict a low-dimensional embedding of the reservoir dynamics. Compared to other RC methods, our model space yields better representations and attains comparable computational performance, thanks to an intermediate dimensionality reduction procedure. As a second contribution we propose a modular RC framework for MTS classification, with an associated open-source Python library. The framework provides different modules to seamlessly implement advanced RC architectures. The architectures are compared to other MTS classifiers, including deep learning models and time series kernels. Results obtained on benchmark and real-world MTS datasets show that RC classifiers are dramatically faster and, when implemented using our proposed representation, also achieve superior classification accuracy