8,442 research outputs found
A Discriminative Model of Stochastic Edit Distance in the form of a Conditional Transducer
pages 240-252International audienceMany real-world applications such as spell-checking or DNA analysis use the Levenshtein edit-distance to compute similarities between strings. In practice, the costs of the primitive edit operations (insertion, deletion and substitution of symbols) are generally hand-tuned. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to learn these costs. The underlying model is a probabilitic transducer, computed by using grammatical inference techniques, that allows us to learn both the structure and the probabilities of the model. Beyond the fact that the learned transducers are neither deterministic nor stochastic in the standard terminology, they are conditional, thus independant from the distributions of the input strings. Finally, we show through experiments that our method allows us to design cost functions that depend on the string context where the edit operations are used. In other words, we get kinds of \textit{context-sensitive} edit distances
Learning loopy graphical models with latent variables: Efficient methods and guarantees
The problem of structure estimation in graphical models with latent variables
is considered. We characterize conditions for tractable graph estimation and
develop efficient methods with provable guarantees. We consider models where
the underlying Markov graph is locally tree-like, and the model is in the
regime of correlation decay. For the special case of the Ising model, the
number of samples required for structural consistency of our method scales
as , where p is the
number of variables, is the minimum edge potential, is
the depth (i.e., distance from a hidden node to the nearest observed nodes),
and is a parameter which depends on the bounds on node and edge
potentials in the Ising model. Necessary conditions for structural consistency
under any algorithm are derived and our method nearly matches the lower bound
on sample requirements. Further, the proposed method is practical to implement
and provides flexibility to control the number of latent variables and the
cycle lengths in the output graph.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOS1070 the Annals of
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Statistical interaction modeling of bovine herd behaviors
While there has been interest in modeling the group behavior of herds or flocks, much of this work has focused on simulating their collective spatial motion patterns which have not accounted for individuality in the herd and instead assume a homogenized role for all members or sub-groups of the herd. Animal behavior experts have noted that domestic animals exhibit behaviors that are indicative of social hierarchy: leader/follower type behaviors are present as well as dominance and subordination, aggression and rank order, and specific social affiliations may also exist. Both wild and domestic cattle are social species, and group behaviors are likely to be influenced by the expression of specific social interactions. In this paper, Global Positioning System coordinate fixes gathered from a herd of beef cows tracked in open fields over several days at a time are utilized to learn a model that focuses on the interactions within the herd as well as its overall movement. Using these data in this way explores the validity of existing group behavior models against actual herding behaviors. Domain knowledge, location geography and human observations, are utilized to explain the causes of these deviations from this idealized behavior
A Survey on Metric Learning for Feature Vectors and Structured Data
The need for appropriate ways to measure the distance or similarity between
data is ubiquitous in machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining,
but handcrafting such good metrics for specific problems is generally
difficult. This has led to the emergence of metric learning, which aims at
automatically learning a metric from data and has attracted a lot of interest
in machine learning and related fields for the past ten years. This survey
paper proposes a systematic review of the metric learning literature,
highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. We pay particular attention to
Mahalanobis distance metric learning, a well-studied and successful framework,
but additionally present a wide range of methods that have recently emerged as
powerful alternatives, including nonlinear metric learning, similarity learning
and local metric learning. Recent trends and extensions, such as
semi-supervised metric learning, metric learning for histogram data and the
derivation of generalization guarantees, are also covered. Finally, this survey
addresses metric learning for structured data, in particular edit distance
learning, and attempts to give an overview of the remaining challenges in
metric learning for the years to come.Comment: Technical report, 59 pages. Changes in v2: fixed typos and improved
presentation. Changes in v3: fixed typos. Changes in v4: fixed typos and new
method
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