Unsupervised learning of clutter-resistant visual representations from natural videos

Populations of neurons in inferotemporal cortex (IT) maintain an explicit code for object identity that also tolerates transformations of object appearance e.g., position, scale, viewing angle [1, 2, 3]. Though the learning rules are not known, recent results [4, 5, 6] suggest the operation of an unsupervised temporal-association-based method e.g., Foldiak's trace rule [7]. Such methods exploit the temporal continuity of the visual world by assuming that visual experience over short timescales will tend to have invariant identity content. Thus, by associating representations of frames from nearby times, a representation that tolerates whatever transformations occurred in the video may be achieved. Many previous studies verified that such rules can work in simple situations without background clutter, but the presence of visual clutter has remained problematic for this approach. Here we show that temporal association based on large class-specific filters (templates) avoids the problem of clutter. Our system learns in an unsupervised way from natural videos gathered from the internet, and is able to perform a difficult unconstrained face recognition task on natural images: Labeled Faces in the Wild [8]

SCAN: Learning Hierarchical Compositional Visual Concepts

The seemingly infinite diversity of the natural world arises from a relatively small set of coherent rules, such as the laws of physics or chemistry. We conjecture that these rules give rise to regularities that can be discovered through primarily unsupervised experiences and represented as abstract concepts. If such representations are compositional and hierarchical, they can be recombined into an exponentially large set of new concepts. This paper describes SCAN (Symbol-Concept Association Network), a new framework for learning such abstractions in the visual domain. SCAN learns concepts through fast symbol association, grounding them in disentangled visual primitives that are discovered in an unsupervised manner. Unlike state of the art multimodal generative model baselines, our approach requires very few pairings between symbols and images and makes no assumptions about the form of symbol representations. Once trained, SCAN is capable of multimodal bi-directional inference, generating a diverse set of image samples from symbolic descriptions and vice versa. It also allows for traversal and manipulation of the implicit hierarchy of visual concepts through symbolic instructions and learnt logical recombination operations. Such manipulations enable SCAN to break away from its training data distribution and imagine novel visual concepts through symbolically instructed recombination of previously learnt concepts

Contribution to the Association Rules Visualization for Decision Support: A Combined Use Between Boolean Modeling and the Colored 2D Matrix

In the present paper we aim to study the visual decision support based on Cellular machine CASI (Cellular Automata for Symbolic Induction). The purpose is to improve the visualization of large sets of association rules, in order to perform Clinical decision support system and decrease doctors’ cognitive charge. One of the major problems in processing association rules is the exponential growth of generated rules volume which impacts doctor’s adaptation. In order to clarify it, many approaches meant to represent this set of association rules under visual context have been suggested. In this article we suggest to use jointly the CASI cellular machine and the colored 2D matrices to improve the visualization of association rules. Our approach has been divided into four important phases: (1) Data preparation, (2) Extracting association rules, (3) Boolean modeling of the rules base (4) 2D visualization colored by Boolean inferences

Visual grouping of association rules by clustering conditional probabilities for categorical data

We demonstrate the use of a visual data-mining tool for non-technical domain experts within organizations to facilitate the extraction of meaningful information and knowledge from in-house databases. The tool is mainly based on the basic notion of grouping association rules. Association rules are useful in discovering items that are frequently found together. However in many applications, rules with lower frequencies are often interesting for the user. Grouping of association rules is one way to overcome the rare item problem. However some groups of association rules are too large for ease of understanding. In this chapter we propose a method for clustering categorical data based on the conditional probabilities of association rules for data sets with large numbers of attributes. We argue that the proposed method provides non-technical users with a better understanding of discovered patterns in the data set

Utilisation d'outils de Visual Data Mining pour l'exploration d'un ensemble de règles d'association

International audienceData Mining aims at extracting maximum of knowledge from huge databases. It is realized by an automatic process or by data visual exploration with interactive tools. Automatic data mining extracts all the patterns which match a set of metrics. The limit of such algorithms is the amount of extracted data which can be larger than the initial data volume. In this article, we focus on association rules extraction with Apriori algorithm. After the description of a characterization model of a set of association rules, we propose to explore the results of a Data Mining algorithm with an interactive visual tool. There are two advantages. First it will visualize the results of the algorithms from different points of view (metrics, rules attributes). Then it allows us to select easily inside large set of rules the most relevant ones

Interactive visual exploration of association rules with rule-focusing methodology

International audienceOn account of the enormous amounts of rules that can be produced by data mining algorithms, knowledge post-processing is a difficult stage in an association rule discovery process. In order to find relevant knowledge for decision making, the user (a decision maker specialized in the data studied) needs to rummage through the rules. To assist him/her in this task, we here propose the rule-focusing methodology, an interactive methodology for the visual post-processing of association rules. It allows the user to explore large sets of rules freely by focusing his/her attention on limited subsets. This new approach relies on rule interestingness measures, on a visual representation, and on interactive navigation among the rules. We have implemented the rule-focusing methodology in a prototype system called ARVis. It exploits the user's focus to guide the generation of the rules by means of a specific constraint-based rule-mining algorithm

Mining aeronautical data by using visualized driven rules extraction approach

International audienceData Mining aims at researching relevant information from a huge volume of data. It can be automatic thanks to algorithms, or manual, for instance by using visual exploration tools. An algorithm finds an exhaustive set of patterns matching specific measures. But, depending on measures thresholds, the volume of extracted information can be greater than the volume of initial data. The second approach is Visual Data Mining which helps the specialist to focus on specific areas of data that may describe interesting patterns. However it is generally limited by the difficulty to tackle a great number of multi dimensional data. In this paper, we propose both methods, by combining the use of algorithms with manual visual data mining. From a scatter plot visualization, an algorithm generates association rules, depending on the visual variables assignments. Thus they have a direct effect on the construction of the found rules. Then we characterize the visualization with the extracted association rules in order to show the involvement of the data in the rules, and then which data can be used for predictions. We illustrate our method on two databases. The first describes one month French air traffic and the second stems from a FAA database about delays and cancellations causes

Learning and disrupting invariance in visual recognition

Learning by temporal association rules such as Foldiak's trace rule is an attractive hypothesis that explains the development of invariance in visual recognition. Consistent with these rules, several recent experiments have shown that invariance can be broken by appropriately altering the visual environment but found puzzling differences in the effects at the psychophysical versus single cell level. We show a) that associative learning provides appropriate invariance in models of object recognition inspired by Hubel and Wiesel b) that we can replicate the "invariance disruption" experiments using these models with a temporal association learning rule to develop and maintain invariance, and c) that we can thereby explain the apparent discrepancies between psychophysics and singe cells effects. We argue that these models account for the stability of perceptual invariance despite the underlying plasticity of the system, the variability of the visual world and expected noise in the biological mechanisms

Enhancing predictive crime mapping model using association rule mining for geographical and demographic structure

This research project is to enhanced predictive crime mapping model with data mining technique to predict the possible rate of crime occurrence. Few specific objectives are stated in order to achieve the aim of this research project. This project proposed a data mining technique called Association Rule Mining. Basically Association Rule Mining is to investigate the rules according to the predefined parameter. This technique considered useful if it can satisfy both minimum confidence and support. Apriori is a popular algorithm in finding frequent set of items in data and association rule. Dataset of Communities and Crime from UCI Machine Learning Repository is used in order to setup the experiment. 60% of the dataset is used for training to generate association rules by using WEKA. The association rules generated shows the prediction of the rate of crime occurrence. The other 40% of the dataset is used to test generated rules. A simple program of C++ is implemented using Microsoft Visual Studio to test generated rules until accuracy of performance is obtained. At the end of the project, generated rules tested and come out with difference accuracy according to predefined minimum support

ProteoLens: a visual analytic tool for multi-scale database-driven biological network data mining

Background New systems biology studies require researchers to understand how interplay among myriads of biomolecular entities is orchestrated in order to achieve high-level cellular and physiological functions. Many software tools have been developed in the past decade to help researchers visually navigate large networks of biomolecular interactions with built-in template-based query capabilities. To further advance researchers' ability to interrogate global physiological states of cells through multi-scale visual network explorations, new visualization software tools still need to be developed to empower the analysis. A robust visual data analysis platform driven by database management systems to perform bi-directional data processing-to-visualizations with declarative querying capabilities is needed. Results We developed ProteoLens as a JAVA-based visual analytic software tool for creating, annotating and exploring multi-scale biological networks. It supports direct database connectivity to either Oracle or PostgreSQL database tables/views, on which SQL statements using both Data Definition Languages (DDL) and Data Manipulation languages (DML) may be specified. The robust query languages embedded directly within the visualization software help users to bring their network data into a visualization context for annotation and exploration. ProteoLens supports graph/network represented data in standard Graph Modeling Language (GML) formats, and this enables interoperation with a wide range of other visual layout tools. The architectural design of ProteoLens enables the de-coupling of complex network data visualization tasks into two distinct phases: 1) creating network data association rules, which are mapping rules between network node IDs or edge IDs and data attributes such as functional annotations, expression levels, scores, synonyms, descriptions etc; 2) applying network data association rules to build the network and perform the visual annotation of graph nodes and edges according to associated data values. We demonstrated the advantages of these new capabilities through three biological network visualization case studies: human disease association network, drug-target interaction network and protein-peptide mapping network. Conclusion The architectural design of ProteoLens makes it suitable for bioinformatics expert data analysts who are experienced with relational database management to perform large-scale integrated network visual explorations. ProteoLens is a promising visual analytic platform that will facilitate knowledge discoveries in future network and systems biology studies