5 research outputs found
Incremental Sparse Bayesian Ordinal Regression
Ordinal Regression (OR) aims to model the ordering information between
different data categories, which is a crucial topic in multi-label learning. An
important class of approaches to OR models the problem as a linear combination
of basis functions that map features to a high dimensional non-linear space.
However, most of the basis function-based algorithms are time consuming. We
propose an incremental sparse Bayesian approach to OR tasks and introduce an
algorithm to sequentially learn the relevant basis functions in the ordinal
scenario. Our method, called Incremental Sparse Bayesian Ordinal Regression
(ISBOR), automatically optimizes the hyper-parameters via the type-II maximum
likelihood method. By exploiting fast marginal likelihood optimization, ISBOR
can avoid big matrix inverses, which is the main bottleneck in applying basis
function-based algorithms to OR tasks on large-scale datasets. We show that
ISBOR can make accurate predictions with parsimonious basis functions while
offering automatic estimates of the prediction uncertainty. Extensive
experiments on synthetic and real word datasets demonstrate the efficiency and
effectiveness of ISBOR compared to other basis function-based OR approaches
Ordinal regression methods: survey and experimental study
Abstract—Ordinal regression problems are those machine learning problems where the objective is to classify patterns using a
categorical scale which shows a natural order between the labels. Many real-world applications present this labelling structure and
that has increased the number of methods and algorithms developed over the last years in this field. Although ordinal regression can
be faced using standard nominal classification techniques, there are several algorithms which can specifically benefit from the ordering
information. Therefore, this paper is aimed at reviewing the state of the art on these techniques and proposing a taxonomy based on
how the models are constructed to take the order into account. Furthermore, a thorough experimental study is proposed to check if
the use of the order information improves the performance of the models obtained, considering some of the approaches within the
taxonomy. The results confirm that ordering information benefits ordinal models improving their accuracy and the closeness of the
predictions to actual targets in the ordinal scal
An Ordinal Approach to Affective Computing
Both depression prediction and emotion recognition systems are often based on ordinal ground truth due to subjectively annotated datasets. Yet, both have so far been posed as classification or regression problems. These naive approaches have fundamental issues because they are not focused on ordering, unlike ordinal regression, which is the most appropriate for truly ordinal ground truth. Ordinal regression to date offers comparatively fewer, more limited methods when compared with other branches in machine learning, and its usage has been limited to specific research domains. Accordingly, this thesis presents investigations into ordinal approaches for affective computing by describing a consistent framework to understand all ordinal system designs, proposing ordinal systems for large datasets, and introducing tools and principles to select suitable system designs and evaluation methods.
First, three learning approaches are compared using the support vector framework to establish the empirical advantages of ordinal regression, which is lacking from the current literature. Results on depression and emotion corpora indicate that ordinal regression with proper tuning can improve existing depression and emotion systems. Ordinal logistic regression (OLR), which is an extension of logistic regression for ordinal scales, contributes to a number of model structures, from which the best structure must be chosen. Exploiting the newly proposed computationally efficient greedy algorithm for model structure selection (GREP), OLR outperformed or was comparable with state-of-the-art depression systems on two benchmark depression speech datasets.
Deep learning has dominated many affective computing fields, and hence ordinal deep learning is an attractive prospect. However, it is under-studied even in the machine learning literature, which motivates an in-depth analysis of appropriate network architectures and loss functions. One of the significant outcomes of this analysis is the introduction of RankCNet, a novel ordinal network which utilises a surrogate loss function of rank correlation.
Not only the modelling algorithm but the choice of evaluation measure depends on the nature of the ground truth. Rank correlation measures, which are sensitive to ordering, are more apt for ordinal problems than common classification or regression measures that ignore ordering information. Although rank-based evaluation for ordinal problems is not new, so far in affective computing, ordinality of the ground truth has been widely ignored during evaluation. Hence, a systematic analysis in the affective computing context is presented, to provide clarity and encourage careful choice of evaluation measures. Another contribution is a neural network framework with a novel multi-term loss function to assess the ordinality of ordinally-annotated datasets, which can guide the selection of suitable learning and evaluation methods. Experiments on multiple synthetic and affective speech datasets reveal that the proposed system can offer reliable and meaningful predictions about the ordinality of a given dataset.
Overall, the novel contributions and findings presented in this thesis not only improve prediction accuracy but also encourage future research towards ordinal affective computing: a different paradigm, but often the most appropriate