15,928 research outputs found
Analysis of the potentials of multi criteria decision analysis methods to conduct sustainability assessment
Sustainability assessments require the management of a wide variety of information types, parameters and uncertainties. Multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) has been regarded as a suitable set of methods to perform sustainability evaluations as a result of its flexibility and the possibility of facilitating the dialogue between stakeholders, analysts and scientists. However, it has been reported that researchers do not usually properly define the reasons for choosing a certain MCDA method instead of another. Familiarity and affinity with a certain approach seem to be the drivers for the choice of a certain procedure. This review paper presents the performance of five MCDA methods (i.e. MAUT, AHP, PROMETHEE, ELECTRE and DRSA) in respect to ten crucial criteria that sustainability assessments tools should satisfy, among which are a life cycle perspective, thresholds and uncertainty management, software support and ease of use. The review shows that MAUT and AHP are fairly simple to understand and have good software support, but they are cognitively demanding for the decision makers, and can only embrace a weak sustainability perspective as trade-offs are the norm. Mixed information and uncertainty can be managed by all the methods, while robust results can only be obtained with MAUT. ELECTRE, PROMETHEE and DRSA are non-compensatory approaches which consent to use a strong sustainability concept, accept a variety of thresholds, but suffer from rank reversal. DRSA is less demanding in terms of preference elicitation, is very easy to understand and provides a straightforward set of decision rules expressed in the form of elementary âif ⊠then âŠâ conditions. Dedicated software is available for all the approaches with a medium to wide range of results capability representation. DRSA emerges as the easiest method, followed by AHP, PROMETHEE and MAUT, while ELECTRE is regarded as fairly difficult. Overall, the analysis has shown that most of the requirements are satisfied by the MCDA methods (although to different extents) with the exclusion of management of mixed data types and adoption of life cycle perspective which are covered by all the considered approaches
Learning Interpretable Rules for Multi-label Classification
Multi-label classification (MLC) is a supervised learning problem in which,
contrary to standard multiclass classification, an instance can be associated
with several class labels simultaneously. In this chapter, we advocate a
rule-based approach to multi-label classification. Rule learning algorithms are
often employed when one is not only interested in accurate predictions, but
also requires an interpretable theory that can be understood, analyzed, and
qualitatively evaluated by domain experts. Ideally, by revealing patterns and
regularities contained in the data, a rule-based theory yields new insights in
the application domain. Recently, several authors have started to investigate
how rule-based models can be used for modeling multi-label data. Discussing
this task in detail, we highlight some of the problems that make rule learning
considerably more challenging for MLC than for conventional classification.
While mainly focusing on our own previous work, we also provide a short
overview of related work in this area.Comment: Preprint version. To appear in: Explainable and Interpretable Models
in Computer Vision and Machine Learning. The Springer Series on Challenges in
Machine Learning. Springer (2018). See
http://www.ke.tu-darmstadt.de/bibtex/publications/show/3077 for further
informatio
Multi-Source Spatial Entity Linkage
Besides the traditional cartographic data sources, spatial information can
also be derived from location-based sources. However, even though different
location-based sources refer to the same physical world, each one has only
partial coverage of the spatial entities, describe them with different
attributes, and sometimes provide contradicting information. Hence, we
introduce the spatial entity linkage problem, which finds which pairs of
spatial entities belong to the same physical spatial entity. Our proposed
solution (QuadSky) starts with a time-efficient spatial blocking technique
(QuadFlex), compares pairwise the spatial entities in the same block, ranks the
pairs using Pareto optimality with the SkyRank algorithm, and finally,
classifies the pairs with our novel SkyEx-* family of algorithms that yield
0.85 precision and 0.85 recall for a manually labeled dataset of 1,500 pairs
and 0.87 precision and 0.6 recall for a semi-manually labeled dataset of
777,452 pairs. Moreover, we provide a theoretical guarantee and formalize the
SkyEx-FES algorithm that explores only 27% of the skylines without any loss in
F-measure. Furthermore, our fully unsupervised algorithm SkyEx-D approximates
the optimal result with an F-measure loss of just 0.01. Finally, QuadSky
provides the best trade-off between precision and recall, and the best
F-measure compared to the existing baselines and clustering techniques, and
approximates the results of supervised learning solutions
DeepPermNet: Visual Permutation Learning
We present a principled approach to uncover the structure of visual data by
solving a novel deep learning task coined visual permutation learning. The goal
of this task is to find the permutation that recovers the structure of data
from shuffled versions of it. In the case of natural images, this task boils
down to recovering the original image from patches shuffled by an unknown
permutation matrix. Unfortunately, permutation matrices are discrete, thereby
posing difficulties for gradient-based methods. To this end, we resort to a
continuous approximation of these matrices using doubly-stochastic matrices
which we generate from standard CNN predictions using Sinkhorn iterations.
Unrolling these iterations in a Sinkhorn network layer, we propose DeepPermNet,
an end-to-end CNN model for this task. The utility of DeepPermNet is
demonstrated on two challenging computer vision problems, namely, (i) relative
attributes learning and (ii) self-supervised representation learning. Our
results show state-of-the-art performance on the Public Figures and OSR
benchmarks for (i) and on the classification and segmentation tasks on the
PASCAL VOC dataset for (ii).Comment: Accepted in IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition CVPR 201
In the attraction, compromise, and similarity effects, alternatives are repeatedly compared in pairs on single dimensions
In multi-alternative choice, the attraction, compromise, and similarity effects demonstrate that the value of an alternative is not independent of the other alternatives in the choice-set. Rather, these effects suggest that a choice is reached through the comparison of alternatives. We investigated exactly how alternatives are compared against each other using eye-movement data. The results indicate that a series of comparisons is made in each choice, with a pair of alternatives compared on a single attribute dimension in each comparison. We conclude that psychological models of choice should be based on these single-attribute pairwise comparisons
Multiple Imputation Ensembles (MIE) for dealing with missing data
Missing data is a significant issue in many real-world datasets, yet there are no robust methods for dealing with it appropriately. In this paper, we propose a robust approach to dealing with missing data in classification problems: Multiple Imputation Ensembles (MIE). Our method integrates two approaches: multiple imputation and ensemble methods and compares two types of ensembles: bagging and stacking. We also propose a robust experimental set-up using 20 benchmark datasets from the UCI machine learning repository. For each dataset, we introduce increasing amounts of data Missing Completely at Random. Firstly, we use a number of single/multiple imputation methods to recover the missing values and then ensemble a number of different classifiers built on the imputed data. We assess the quality of the imputation by using dissimilarity measures. We also evaluate the MIE performance by comparing classification accuracy on the complete and imputed data. Furthermore, we use the accuracy of simple imputation as a benchmark for comparison. We find that our proposed approach combining multiple imputation with ensemble techniques outperform others, particularly as missing data increases
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