68,589 research outputs found
Unsupervised Learning for Understanding Student Achievement in a Distance Learning Setting
Many factors could affect the achievement of students in distance learning settings. Internal factors such as age, gender, previous education level and engagement in online learning activities can play an important role in obtaining successful learning outcomes, as well as external factors such as regions where they come from and the learning environment that they can access. Identifying the relationships between student characteristics and distance learning outcomes is a central issue in learning analytics. This paper presents a study that applies unsupervised learning for identifying how demographic characteristics of students and their engagement in online learning activities can affect their learning achievement. We utilise the K-Prototypes clustering method to identify groups of students based on demographic characteristics and interactions with online learning environments, and also investigate the learning achievement of each group. Knowing these groups of students who have successful or poor learning outcomes can aid faculty for designing online courses that adapt to different students' needs. It can also assist students in selecting online courses that are appropriate to them
Extending Gated Linear Networks for Continual Learning
To incrementally learn multiple tasks from an indefinitely long stream of data
is a real challenge for traditional machine learning models. If not carefully
controlled, the learning of new knowledge strongly impacts on a model’s learned
abilities, making it to forget how to solve past tasks.
Continual learning faces this problem, called catastrophic forgetting, developing
models able to continually learn new tasks and adapt to changes in the
data distribution.
In this dissertation, we consider the recently proposed family of continual
learning models, called Gated Linear Networks (GLNs), and study two crucial
aspects impacting on the amount of catastrophic forgetting affecting gated linear
networks, namely, data standardization and gating mechanism.
Data standardization is particularly challenging in the online/continual learning
setting because data from future tasks is not available beforehand. The
results obtained using an online standardization method show a considerably
higher amount of forgetting compared to an offline –static– standardization.
Interestingly, with the latter standardization, we observe that GLNs show almost
no forgetting on the considered benchmark datasets.
Secondly, for an effective GLNs, it is essential to tailor the hyperparameters
of the gating mechanism to the data distribution. In this dissertation, we propose
a gating strategy based on a set of prototypes and the resulting Voronoi
tessellation. The experimental assessment shows that, in an ideal setting where
the data distribution is known, the proposed approach is more robust to different
data standardizations compared to the original one, based on a halfspace
gating mechanism, and shows improved predictive performance.
Finally, we propose an adaptive mechanism for the choice of prototypes,
which expands and shrinks the set of prototypes in an online fashion, making the
model suitable for practical continual learning applications. The experimental
results show that the adaptive model performances are close to the ideal scenario
where prototypes are directly sampled from the data distribution.To incrementally learn multiple tasks from an indefinitely long stream of data
is a real challenge for traditional machine learning models. If not carefully
controlled, the learning of new knowledge strongly impacts on a model’s learned
abilities, making it to forget how to solve past tasks.
Continual learning faces this problem, called catastrophic forgetting, developing
models able to continually learn new tasks and adapt to changes in the
data distribution.
In this dissertation, we consider the recently proposed family of continual
learning models, called Gated Linear Networks (GLNs), and study two crucial
aspects impacting on the amount of catastrophic forgetting affecting gated linear
networks, namely, data standardization and gating mechanism.
Data standardization is particularly challenging in the online/continual learning
setting because data from future tasks is not available beforehand. The
results obtained using an online standardization method show a considerably
higher amount of forgetting compared to an offline –static– standardization.
Interestingly, with the latter standardization, we observe that GLNs show almost
no forgetting on the considered benchmark datasets.
Secondly, for an effective GLNs, it is essential to tailor the hyperparameters
of the gating mechanism to the data distribution. In this dissertation, we propose
a gating strategy based on a set of prototypes and the resulting Voronoi
tessellation. The experimental assessment shows that, in an ideal setting where
the data distribution is known, the proposed approach is more robust to different
data standardizations compared to the original one, based on a halfspace
gating mechanism, and shows improved predictive performance.
Finally, we propose an adaptive mechanism for the choice of prototypes,
which expands and shrinks the set of prototypes in an online fashion, making the
model suitable for practical continual learning applications. The experimental
results show that the adaptive model performances are close to the ideal scenario
where prototypes are directly sampled from the data distribution
Building, Testing and Assessing a Learning Management System
This paper summarizes the experiences of our research group in managing the full process of building, testing and assessing a Learning Management System for a educational institution. We will show how we moved across the “make or buy” dilemma that normally educational institutions have to face when deciding to implement a support for online and distance learning activities. We will deal with this theme by referring to systems and prototypes developed by our research group. Specifically, we will describe our experiences in realizing systems for making didactic material available on Internet, such as in the Learning Management Systems - LMS. This experience is based on what has been developed, tested, and put to use in some faculties of the University of Trento, where non-traditional learning environments in which students require more than the traditional face-to-face lessons are becoming ever more important. The prototypes produced are based on platform-independent technologies, and they make it possible to broaden one’s horizons, even for those students, such as lifelong learners, who want freedom from time constraints and also freedom from some technological constraints that are imposed by some forms of distance education currently available on the market. Some extensions to mobile tools like PDA, tablet PC, cellular phones etc. are presented, with regards to the impact of their introduction on the LMS and in general on the information system of the institution
Further results on dissimilarity spaces for hyperspectral images RF-CBIR
Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems are powerful search tools in
image databases that have been little applied to hyperspectral images.
Relevance feedback (RF) is an iterative process that uses machine learning
techniques and user's feedback to improve the CBIR systems performance. We
pursued to expand previous research in hyperspectral CBIR systems built on
dissimilarity functions defined either on spectral and spatial features
extracted by spectral unmixing techniques, or on dictionaries extracted by
dictionary-based compressors. These dissimilarity functions were not suitable
for direct application in common machine learning techniques. We propose to use
a RF general approach based on dissimilarity spaces which is more appropriate
for the application of machine learning algorithms to the hyperspectral
RF-CBIR. We validate the proposed RF method for hyperspectral CBIR systems over
a real hyperspectral dataset.Comment: In Pattern Recognition Letters (2013
How Many Dissimilarity/Kernel Self Organizing Map Variants Do We Need?
In numerous applicative contexts, data are too rich and too complex to be
represented by numerical vectors. A general approach to extend machine learning
and data mining techniques to such data is to really on a dissimilarity or on a
kernel that measures how different or similar two objects are. This approach
has been used to define several variants of the Self Organizing Map (SOM). This
paper reviews those variants in using a common set of notations in order to
outline differences and similarities between them. It discusses the advantages
and drawbacks of the variants, as well as the actual relevance of the
dissimilarity/kernel SOM for practical applications
Batch and median neural gas
Neural Gas (NG) constitutes a very robust clustering algorithm given
euclidian data which does not suffer from the problem of local minima like
simple vector quantization, or topological restrictions like the
self-organizing map. Based on the cost function of NG, we introduce a batch
variant of NG which shows much faster convergence and which can be interpreted
as an optimization of the cost function by the Newton method. This formulation
has the additional benefit that, based on the notion of the generalized median
in analogy to Median SOM, a variant for non-vectorial proximity data can be
introduced. We prove convergence of batch and median versions of NG, SOM, and
k-means in a unified formulation, and we investigate the behavior of the
algorithms in several experiments.Comment: In Special Issue after WSOM 05 Conference, 5-8 september, 2005, Pari
Representation Learning via Consistent Assignment of Views over Random Partitions
We present Consistent Assignment of Views over Random Partitions (CARP), a
self-supervised clustering method for representation learning of visual
features. CARP learns prototypes in an end-to-end online fashion using gradient
descent without additional non-differentiable modules to solve the cluster
assignment problem. CARP optimizes a new pretext task based on random
partitions of prototypes that regularizes the model and enforces consistency
between views' assignments. Additionally, our method improves training
stability and prevents collapsed solutions in joint-embedding training. Through
an extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that CARP's representations are
suitable for learning downstream tasks. We evaluate CARP's representations
capabilities in 17 datasets across many standard protocols, including linear
evaluation, few-shot classification, k-NN, k-means, image retrieval, and copy
detection. We compare CARP performance to 11 existing self-supervised methods.
We extensively ablate our method and demonstrate that our proposed random
partition pretext task improves the quality of the learned representations by
devising multiple random classification tasks. In transfer learning tasks, CARP
achieves the best performance on average against many SSL methods trained for a
longer time.Comment: To appear in NeurIPS 2023. Code available at
https://github.com/sthalles/car
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