Weighted Heuristic Ensemble of Filters

Feature selection has become increasingly important in data mining in recent years due to the rapid increase in the dimensionality of big data. However, the reliability and consistency of feature selection methods (filters) vary considerably on different data and no single filter performs consistently well under various conditions. Therefore, feature selection ensemble has been investigated recently to provide more reliable and effective results than any individual one but all the existing feature selection ensemble treat the feature selection methods equally regardless of their performance. In this paper, we present a novel framework which applies weighted feature selection ensemble through proposing a systemic way of adding different weights to the feature selection methods-filters. Also, we investigate how to determine the appropriate weight for each filter in an ensemble. Experiments based on ten benchmark datasets show that theoretically and intuitively adding more weight to ‘good filters’ should lead to better results but in reality it is very uncertain. This assumption was found to be correct for some examples in our experiment. However, for other situations, filters which had been assumed to perform well showed bad performance leading to even worse results. Therefore adding weight to filters might not achieve much in accuracy terms, in addition to increasing complexity, time consumption and clearly decreasing the stability

Sketch-a-Net that Beats Humans

We propose a multi-scale multi-channel deep neural network framework that, for the first time, yields sketch recognition performance surpassing that of humans. Our superior performance is a result of explicitly embedding the unique characteristics of sketches in our model: (i) a network architecture designed for sketch rather than natural photo statistics, (ii) a multi-channel generalisation that encodes sequential ordering in the sketching process, and (iii) a multi-scale network ensemble with joint Bayesian fusion that accounts for the different levels of abstraction exhibited in free-hand sketches. We show that state-of-the-art deep networks specifically engineered for photos of natural objects fail to perform well on sketch recognition, regardless whether they are trained using photo or sketch. Our network on the other hand not only delivers the best performance on the largest human sketch dataset to date, but also is small in size making efficient training possible using just CPUs.Comment: Accepted to BMVC 2015 (oral

A Multiple-Expert Binarization Framework for Multispectral Images

In this work, a multiple-expert binarization framework for multispectral images is proposed. The framework is based on a constrained subspace selection limited to the spectral bands combined with state-of-the-art gray-level binarization methods. The framework uses a binarization wrapper to enhance the performance of the gray-level binarization. Nonlinear preprocessing of the individual spectral bands is used to enhance the textual information. An evolutionary optimizer is considered to obtain the optimal and some suboptimal 3-band subspaces from which an ensemble of experts is then formed. The framework is applied to a ground truth multispectral dataset with promising results. In addition, a generalization to the cross-validation approach is developed that not only evaluates generalizability of the framework, it also provides a practical instance of the selected experts that could be then applied to unseen inputs despite the small size of the given ground truth dataset.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 6 tables. Presented at ICDAR'1

Direct-to-Patient Survey for Diagnosis of Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo

Given the high incidence of dizziness and its frequent misdiagnosis, we aim to create a clinical support system to classify the presence or absence of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo with high accuracy and specificity. This paper describes a three-phase study currently underway for classification of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, which includes diagnosis by a specialist in a clinical setting. Patient background information is collected by a survey on an Android tablet and machine learning techniques are applied for classification. Decision trees and wrappers are employed for their ability to provide information about the question set. One goal of the study is to attain an optimal question set. Each phase of the study presents a unique set and style of questions. Results achieved in the first two phases of the survey indicate that our approach using decision trees with filters or wrappers does a good job of identifying benign paroxysmal positional vertigo

Optimal Time-Series Selection of Quasars

We present a novel method for the optimal selection of quasars using time-series observations in a single photometric bandpass. Utilizing the damped random walk model of Kelly et al. (2009), we parameterize the ensemble quasar structure function in Sloan Stripe 82 as a function of observed brightness. The ensemble model fit can then be evaluated rigorously for and calibrated with individual light curves with no parameter fitting. This yields a classification in two statistics --- one describing the fit confidence and one describing the probability of a false alarm --- which can be tuned, a priori, to achieve high quasar detection fractions (99% completeness with default cuts), given an acceptable rate of false alarms. We establish the typical rate of false alarms due to known variable stars as <3% (high purity). Applying the classification, we increase the sample of potential quasars relative to those known in Stripe 82 by as much as 29%, and by nearly a factor of two in the redshift range 2.5<z<3, where selection by color is extremeley inefficient. This represents 1875 new quasars in a 290 deg^2 field. The observed rates of both quasars and stars agree well with the model predictions, with >99% of quasars exhibiting the expected variability profile. We discus the utility of the method at high-redshift and in the regime of noisy and sparse data. Our time series selection complements well independent selection based on quasar colors and has strong potential for identifying high redshift quasars for BAO and other cosmology studies in the LSST era.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables; Accepted to A