26 research outputs found
Quickly Boosting Decision Trees - Pruning Underachieving Features Early
Boosted decision trees are one of the most popular and successful learning techniques used today. While exhibiting fast speeds at test time, relatively slow training makes them impractical for applications with real-time learning requirements. We propose a principled approach to overcome this drawback. We prove a bound on the error of a decision stump given its preliminary error on a subset of the training data; the bound may be used to prune unpromising features early on in the training process. We propose a fast training algorithm that exploits this bound, yielding speedups of an order of magnitude at no cost in the final performance of the classifier. Our method is not a new variant of Boosting; rather, it may be used in conjunction with existing Boosting algorithms and other sampling heuristics to achieve even greater speedups
Exploring Human Vision Driven Features for Pedestrian Detection
Motivated by the center-surround mechanism in the human visual attention
system, we propose to use average contrast maps for the challenge of pedestrian
detection in street scenes due to the observation that pedestrians indeed
exhibit discriminative contrast texture. Our main contributions are first to
design a local, statistical multi-channel descriptorin order to incorporate
both color and gradient information. Second, we introduce a multi-direction and
multi-scale contrast scheme based on grid-cells in order to integrate
expressive local variations. Contributing to the issue of selecting most
discriminative features for assessing and classification, we perform extensive
comparisons w.r.t. statistical descriptors, contrast measurements, and scale
structures. This way, we obtain reasonable results under various
configurations. Empirical findings from applying our optimized detector on the
INRIA and Caltech pedestrian datasets show that our features yield
state-of-the-art performance in pedestrian detection.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems
for Video Technology (TCSVT
Structured Learning of Tree Potentials in CRF for Image Segmentation
We propose a new approach to image segmentation, which exploits the
advantages of both conditional random fields (CRFs) and decision trees. In the
literature, the potential functions of CRFs are mostly defined as a linear
combination of some pre-defined parametric models, and then methods like
structured support vector machines (SSVMs) are applied to learn those linear
coefficients. We instead formulate the unary and pairwise potentials as
nonparametric forests---ensembles of decision trees, and learn the ensemble
parameters and the trees in a unified optimization problem within the
large-margin framework. In this fashion, we easily achieve nonlinear learning
of potential functions on both unary and pairwise terms in CRFs. Moreover, we
learn class-wise decision trees for each object that appears in the image. Due
to the rich structure and flexibility of decision trees, our approach is
powerful in modelling complex data likelihoods and label relationships. The
resulting optimization problem is very challenging because it can have
exponentially many variables and constraints. We show that this challenging
optimization can be efficiently solved by combining a modified column
generation and cutting-planes techniques. Experimental results on both binary
(Graz-02, Weizmann horse, Oxford flower) and multi-class (MSRC-21, PASCAL VOC
2012) segmentation datasets demonstrate the power of the learned nonlinear
nonparametric potentials.Comment: 10 pages. Appearing in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and
Learning System
Analysed potential of big data and supervised machine learning techniques in effectively forecasting travel times from fused data
Travel time forecasting is an interesting topic for many ITS services. Increased availability of data collection sensors increases the availability of the predictor variables but also highlights the high processing issues related to this big data availability. In this paper we aimed to analyse the potential of big data and supervised machine learning techniques in effectively forecasting travel times. For this purpose we used fused data from three data sources (Global Positioning System vehicles tracks, road network infrastructure data and meteorological data) and four machine learning techniques (k-nearest neighbours, support vector machines, boosting trees and random forest). To evaluate the forecasting results we compared them in-between different road classes in the context of absolute values, measured in minutes, and the mean squared percentage error. For the road classes with the high average speed and long road segments, machine learning techniques forecasted travel times with small relative error, while for the road classes with the small average speeds and segment lengths this was a more demanding task. All three data sources were proven itself to have a high impact on the travel time forecast accuracy and the best results (taking into account all road classes) were achieved for the k-nearest neighbours and random forest techniques.</p
Faster Boosting with Smaller Memory
State-of-the-art implementations of boosting, such as XGBoost and LightGBM,
can process large training sets extremely fast. However, this performance
requires that the memory size is sufficient to hold a 2-3 multiple of the
training set size. This paper presents an alternative approach to implementing
the boosted trees, which achieves a significant speedup over XGBoost and
LightGBM, especially when the memory size is small. This is achieved using a
combination of three techniques: early stopping, effective sample size, and
stratified sampling. Our experiments demonstrate a 10-100 speedup over XGBoost
when the training data is too large to fit in memory.Comment: NeurIPS 201