Robust classification of high dimensional unbalanced single and multi-label datasets

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Single and multi-label classification are arguably two of the most important topics within the field of machine learning. Single-label classification refers to the case where each sample is assigned to one class, and multi-label classification is where instances are associated with multiple labels simultaneously. Nowadays, research to build robust single and multi-label classification models is still ongoing in the data analytics community because of the emerging complexities in the real-world data, and due to the increasingly research interest in use of data analytics techniques in many fields including biomedicine, finance, text mining, text categorization, and images. Real-world datasets contain complexities which degrade the performance of classifiers. These complexities or open challenges are: imbalanced data, low numbers of samples, high-dimensionality, highly correlated features, label correlations, and missing labels in multi-label space. Several research gaps are identified and motivate this thesis. Class imbalance occurs when the distribution of classes is not uniform among samples. Feature extraction is used to reduce the dimensionality of data. However, the presence of highly imbalanced data in single-label classification misleads existing unsupervised and supervised feature extraction techniques. It produces features biased towards classification of the class with the majority of samples, and results in poor classification performance especially for the minor class. Furthermore, imbalanced multi-labeled data is more ubiquitous than single-labeled data because of several issues including label correlation, incomplete multi-label matrices, and noisy and irrelevant features. High-dimensional highly correlated data exist in several domains such as genomics. Many feature selection techniques consider correlated features as redundant and therefore need to be removed. Several studies investigate the interpretation of the correlated features in domains such as genomics, but investigating the classification capabilities of the correlated feature groups in single-labeled data is a point of interest in several domains. Moreover, high-dimensional multi-labeled data is more challenging than single-labeled data. Only relatively few feature selection methods have been proposed to select the discriminative features among multiple labels due to issues including interdependent labels, different instances sharing different label correlations, correlated features, and missing and noisy labels. This thesis proposes a series of novel algorithms for machine learning to handle the negative effects of the above mentioned problems and improves the performance of the classifiers in single and multi-labeled data. There are seven contributions in this thesis. Contribution 1 proposes novel cost-sensitive principal component analysis (CSPCA) and cost-sensitive non-negative matrix factorization (CSNMF) methods for handling feature extraction of imbalanced single-labeled data. Contribution 2 extends a standard non-negative matrix factorization to a balanced supervised non-negative matrix factorization (BSNMF) to handle the class imbalance problem in supervised non-negative matrix factorization. Contribution 3 introduces an ABC-Sampling algorithm for balancing imbalanced datasets based on Artificial Bee Colony algorithm. Contribution 4 develops a novel supervised feature selection algorithm (SCANMF) by jointly integrating correlation network and structural analysis of the balanced supervised non-negative matrix factorization to handle high-dimensional, highly correlated single-labeled data. Contribution 5 proposes an ensemble feature ranking method using co-expression networks to select optimal features for classification. Contribution 6 proposes a Correlated- and Multi-label Feature Selection method (CMFS), based on NMF for simultaneously performing multi-label feature selection and addressing the following challenges: interdependent labels, different instances sharing different label correlations, correlated features, and missing and awed labels. Contribution 7 presents an integrated multi-label approach (ML-CIB) for simultaneously training the multi-label classification model and addressing the following challenges namely, class imbalance, label correlation, incomplete multi-label matrices, and noisy and irrelevant features. The performance of all novel algorithms in this thesis is evaluated in terms of single and multi-label classification accuracy. The proposed algorithms are evaluated in the context of a childhood leukaemia dataset from The Children Hospital at Westmead, and public datasets for different fields including genomics, finance, text mining, images, and others from online repositories. Moreover, all the results of the proposed algorithms in this thesis are compared to state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art methods. Further, several statistical tests including, t-test and Friedman test are applied to evaluate the results to demonstrate the statistical significance of the proposed methods in this thesis

Online Unsupervised Multi-view Feature Selection

In the era of big data, it is becoming common to have data with multiple modalities or coming from multiple sources, known as "multi-view data". Multi-view data are usually unlabeled and come from high-dimensional spaces (such as language vocabularies), unsupervised multi-view feature selection is crucial to many applications. However, it is nontrivial due to the following challenges. First, there are too many instances or the feature dimensionality is too large. Thus, the data may not fit in memory. How to select useful features with limited memory space? Second, how to select features from streaming data and handles the concept drift? Third, how to leverage the consistent and complementary information from different views to improve the feature selection in the situation when the data are too big or come in as streams? To the best of our knowledge, none of the previous works can solve all the challenges simultaneously. In this paper, we propose an Online unsupervised Multi-View Feature Selection, OMVFS, which deals with large-scale/streaming multi-view data in an online fashion. OMVFS embeds unsupervised feature selection into a clustering algorithm via NMF with sparse learning. It further incorporates the graph regularization to preserve the local structure information and help select discriminative features. Instead of storing all the historical data, OMVFS processes the multi-view data chunk by chunk and aggregates all the necessary information into several small matrices. By using the buffering technique, the proposed OMVFS can reduce the computational and storage cost while taking advantage of the structure information. Furthermore, OMVFS can capture the concept drifts in the data streams. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed OMVFS method. More importantly, OMVFS is about 100 times faster than the off-line methods

Machine Learning and Integrative Analysis of Biomedical Big Data.

Recent developments in high-throughput technologies have accelerated the accumulation of massive amounts of omics data from multiple sources: genome, epigenome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, etc. Traditionally, data from each source (e.g., genome) is analyzed in isolation using statistical and machine learning (ML) methods. Integrative analysis of multi-omics and clinical data is key to new biomedical discoveries and advancements in precision medicine. However, data integration poses new computational challenges as well as exacerbates the ones associated with single-omics studies. Specialized computational approaches are required to effectively and efficiently perform integrative analysis of biomedical data acquired from diverse modalities. In this review, we discuss state-of-the-art ML-based approaches for tackling five specific computational challenges associated with integrative analysis: curse of dimensionality, data heterogeneity, missing data, class imbalance and scalability issues

Counterfactual Risk Minimization: Learning from Logged Bandit Feedback

We develop a learning principle and an efficient algorithm for batch learning from logged bandit feedback. This learning setting is ubiquitous in online systems (e.g., ad placement, web search, recommendation), where an algorithm makes a prediction (e.g., ad ranking) for a given input (e.g., query) and observes bandit feedback (e.g., user clicks on presented ads). We first address the counterfactual nature of the learning problem through propensity scoring. Next, we prove generalization error bounds that account for the variance of the propensity-weighted empirical risk estimator. These constructive bounds give rise to the Counterfactual Risk Minimization (CRM) principle. We show how CRM can be used to derive a new learning method -- called Policy Optimizer for Exponential Models (POEM) -- for learning stochastic linear rules for structured output prediction. We present a decomposition of the POEM objective that enables efficient stochastic gradient optimization. POEM is evaluated on several multi-label classification problems showing substantially improved robustness and generalization performance compared to the state-of-the-art.Comment: 10 page

ActiveRemediation: The Search for Lead Pipes in Flint, Michigan

We detail our ongoing work in Flint, Michigan to detect pipes made of lead and other hazardous metals. After elevated levels of lead were detected in residents' drinking water, followed by an increase in blood lead levels in area children, the state and federal governments directed over $125 million to replace water service lines, the pipes connecting each home to the water system. In the absence of accurate records, and with the high cost of determining buried pipe materials, we put forth a number of predictive and procedural tools to aid in the search and removal of lead infrastructure. Alongside these statistical and machine learning approaches, we describe our interactions with government officials in recommending homes for both inspection and replacement, with a focus on the statistical model that adapts to incoming information. Finally, in light of discussions about increased spending on infrastructure development by the federal government, we explore how our approach generalizes beyond Flint to other municipalities nationwide.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, To appear in KDD 2018, For associated promotional video, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbIn_axYu9

Learning From Labeled And Unlabeled Data: An Empirical Study Across Techniques And Domains

There has been increased interest in devising learning techniques that combine unlabeled data with labeled data ? i.e. semi-supervised learning. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has been performed across various techniques and different types and amounts of labeled and unlabeled data. Moreover, most of the published work on semi-supervised learning techniques assumes that the labeled and unlabeled data come from the same distribution. It is possible for the labeling process to be associated with a selection bias such that the distributions of data points in the labeled and unlabeled sets are different. Not correcting for such bias can result in biased function approximation with potentially poor performance. In this paper, we present an empirical study of various semi-supervised learning techniques on a variety of datasets. We attempt to answer various questions such as the effect of independence or relevance amongst features, the effect of the size of the labeled and unlabeled sets and the effect of noise. We also investigate the impact of sample-selection bias on the semi-supervised learning techniques under study and implement a bivariate probit technique particularly designed to correct for such bias