63 research outputs found
Diffeomorphic Transformations for Time Series Analysis: An Efficient Approach to Nonlinear Warping
The proliferation and ubiquity of temporal data across many disciplines has
sparked interest for similarity, classification and clustering methods
specifically designed to handle time series data. A core issue when dealing
with time series is determining their pairwise similarity, i.e., the degree to
which a given time series resembles another. Traditional distance measures such
as the Euclidean are not well-suited due to the time-dependent nature of the
data. Elastic metrics such as dynamic time warping (DTW) offer a promising
approach, but are limited by their computational complexity,
non-differentiability and sensitivity to noise and outliers. This thesis
proposes novel elastic alignment methods that use parametric \& diffeomorphic
warping transformations as a means of overcoming the shortcomings of DTW-based
metrics. The proposed method is differentiable \& invertible, well-suited for
deep learning architectures, robust to noise and outliers, computationally
efficient, and is expressive and flexible enough to capture complex patterns.
Furthermore, a closed-form solution was developed for the gradient of these
diffeomorphic transformations, which allows an efficient search in the
parameter space, leading to better solutions at convergence. Leveraging the
benefits of these closed-form diffeomorphic transformations, this thesis
proposes a suite of advancements that include: (a) an enhanced temporal
transformer network for time series alignment and averaging, (b) a
deep-learning based time series classification model to simultaneously align
and classify signals with high accuracy, (c) an incremental time series
clustering algorithm that is warping-invariant, scalable and can operate under
limited computational and time resources, and finally, (d) a normalizing flow
model that enhances the flexibility of affine transformations in coupling and
autoregressive layers.Comment: PhD Thesis, defended at the University of Navarra on July 17, 2023.
277 pages, 8 chapters, 1 appendi
Multi-task Self-Supervised Learning for Human Activity Detection
Deep learning methods are successfully used in applications pertaining to
ubiquitous computing, health, and well-being. Specifically, the area of human
activity recognition (HAR) is primarily transformed by the convolutional and
recurrent neural networks, thanks to their ability to learn semantic
representations from raw input. However, to extract generalizable features,
massive amounts of well-curated data are required, which is a notoriously
challenging task; hindered by privacy issues, and annotation costs. Therefore,
unsupervised representation learning is of prime importance to leverage the
vast amount of unlabeled data produced by smart devices. In this work, we
propose a novel self-supervised technique for feature learning from sensory
data that does not require access to any form of semantic labels. We learn a
multi-task temporal convolutional network to recognize transformations applied
on an input signal. By exploiting these transformations, we demonstrate that
simple auxiliary tasks of the binary classification result in a strong
supervisory signal for extracting useful features for the downstream task. We
extensively evaluate the proposed approach on several publicly available
datasets for smartphone-based HAR in unsupervised, semi-supervised, and
transfer learning settings. Our method achieves performance levels superior to
or comparable with fully-supervised networks, and it performs significantly
better than autoencoders. Notably, for the semi-supervised case, the
self-supervised features substantially boost the detection rate by attaining a
kappa score between 0.7-0.8 with only 10 labeled examples per class. We get
similar impressive performance even if the features are transferred from a
different data source. While this paper focuses on HAR as the application
domain, the proposed technique is general and could be applied to a wide
variety of problems in other areas
Learning by stochastic serializations
Complex structures are typical in machine learning. Tailoring learning
algorithms for every structure requires an effort that may be saved by defining
a generic learning procedure adaptive to any complex structure. In this paper,
we propose to map any complex structure onto a generic form, called
serialization, over which we can apply any sequence-based density estimator. We
then show how to transfer the learned density back onto the space of original
structures. To expose the learning procedure to the structural particularities
of the original structures, we take care that the serializations reflect
accurately the structures' properties. Enumerating all serializations is
infeasible. We propose an effective way to sample representative serializations
from the complete set of serializations which preserves the statistics of the
complete set. Our method is competitive or better than state of the art
learning algorithms that have been specifically designed for given structures.
In addition, since the serialization involves sampling from a combinatorial
process it provides considerable protection from overfitting, which we clearly
demonstrate on a number of experiments.Comment: Submission to NeurIPS 201
Hurricane Forecasting: A Novel Multimodal Machine Learning Framework
This paper describes a machine learning (ML) framework for tropical cyclone
intensity and track forecasting, combining multiple distinct ML techniques and
utilizing diverse data sources. Our framework, which we refer to as Hurricast
(HURR), is built upon the combination of distinct data processing techniques
using gradient-boosted trees and novel encoder-decoder architectures, including
CNN, GRU and Transformers components. We propose a deep-feature extractor
methodology to mix spatial-temporal data with statistical data efficiently. Our
multimodal framework unleashes the potential of making forecasts based on a
wide range of data sources, including historical storm data, and visual data
such as reanalysis atmospheric images. We evaluate our models with current
operational forecasts in North Atlantic and Eastern Pacific basins on 2016-2019
for 24-hour lead time, and show our models consistently outperform
statistical-dynamical models and compete with the best dynamical models, while
computing forecasts in seconds. Furthermore, the inclusion of Hurricast into an
operational forecast consensus model leads to a significant improvement of 5% -
15% over NHC's official forecast, thus highlighting the complementary
properties with existing approaches. In summary, our work demonstrates that
combining different data sources and distinct machine learning methodologies
can lead to superior tropical cyclone forecasting. We hope that this work opens
the door for further use of machine learning in meteorological forecasting.Comment: Under revision by the AMS' Weather and Forecasting journa
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