4,372 research outputs found
Comparative Experiments on Disambiguating Word Senses: An Illustration of the Role of Bias in Machine Learning
This paper describes an experimental comparison of seven different learning
algorithms on the problem of learning to disambiguate the meaning of a word
from context. The algorithms tested include statistical, neural-network,
decision-tree, rule-based, and case-based classification techniques. The
specific problem tested involves disambiguating six senses of the word ``line''
using the words in the current and proceeding sentence as context. The
statistical and neural-network methods perform the best on this particular
problem and we discuss a potential reason for this observed difference. We also
discuss the role of bias in machine learning and its importance in explaining
performance differences observed on specific problems.Comment: 10 page
Are screening methods useful in feature selection? An empirical study
Filter or screening methods are often used as a preprocessing step for
reducing the number of variables used by a learning algorithm in obtaining a
classification or regression model. While there are many such filter methods,
there is a need for an objective evaluation of these methods. Such an
evaluation is needed to compare them with each other and also to answer whether
they are at all useful, or a learning algorithm could do a better job without
them. For this purpose, many popular screening methods are partnered in this
paper with three regression learners and five classification learners and
evaluated on ten real datasets to obtain accuracy criteria such as R-square and
area under the ROC curve (AUC). The obtained results are compared through curve
plots and comparison tables in order to find out whether screening methods help
improve the performance of learning algorithms and how they fare with each
other. Our findings revealed that the screening methods were useful in
improving the prediction of the best learner on two regression and two
classification datasets out of the ten datasets evaluated.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figures, 21 table
A Decision tree-based attribute weighting filter for naive Bayes
The naive Bayes classifier continues to be a popular learning algorithm for data mining applications due to its simplicity and linear run-time. Many enhancements to the basic algorithm have been proposed to help mitigate its primary weakness--the assumption that attributes are independent given the class. All of them improve the performance of naĆÆve Bayes at the expense (to a greater or lesser degree) of execution time and/or simplicity of the final model. In this paper we present a simple filter method for setting attribute weights for use with naive Bayes. Experimental results show that naive Bayes with attribute weights rarely degrades the quality of the model compared to standard naive Bayes and, in many cases, improves it dramatically. The main advantages of this method compared to other approaches for improving naive Bayes is its
run-time complexity and the fact that it maintains the simplicity of the final model
A systematic comparison of supervised classifiers
Pattern recognition techniques have been employed in a myriad of industrial,
medical, commercial and academic applications. To tackle such a diversity of
data, many techniques have been devised. However, despite the long tradition of
pattern recognition research, there is no technique that yields the best
classification in all scenarios. Therefore, the consideration of as many as
possible techniques presents itself as an fundamental practice in applications
aiming at high accuracy. Typical works comparing methods either emphasize the
performance of a given algorithm in validation tests or systematically compare
various algorithms, assuming that the practical use of these methods is done by
experts. In many occasions, however, researchers have to deal with their
practical classification tasks without an in-depth knowledge about the
underlying mechanisms behind parameters. Actually, the adequate choice of
classifiers and parameters alike in such practical circumstances constitutes a
long-standing problem and is the subject of the current paper. We carried out a
study on the performance of nine well-known classifiers implemented by the Weka
framework and compared the dependence of the accuracy with their configuration
parameter configurations. The analysis of performance with default parameters
revealed that the k-nearest neighbors method exceeds by a large margin the
other methods when high dimensional datasets are considered. When other
configuration of parameters were allowed, we found that it is possible to
improve the quality of SVM in more than 20% even if parameters are set
randomly. Taken together, the investigation conducted in this paper suggests
that, apart from the SVM implementation, Weka's default configuration of
parameters provides an performance close the one achieved with the optimal
configuration
- ā¦