Real-time robust automatic speech recognition using compact support vector machines

In the last years, support vector machines (SVMs) have shown excellent performance in many applications, especially in the presence of noise. In particular, SVMs offer several advantages over artificial neural networks (ANNs) that have attracted the attention of the speech processing community. Nevertheless, their high computational requirements prevent them from being used in practice in automatic speech recognition (ASR), where ANNs have proven to be successful. The high complexity of SVMs in this context arises from the use of huge speech training databases with millions of samples and highly overlapped classes. This paper suggests the use of a weighted least squares (WLS) training procedure that facilitates the possibility of imposing a compact semiparametric model on the SVM, which results in a dramatic complexity reduction. Such a complexity reduction with respect to conventional SVMs, which is between two and three orders of magnitude, allows the proposed hybrid WLS-SVC/HMM system to perform real-time speech decoding on a connected-digit recognition task (SpeechDat Spanish database). The experimental evaluation of the proposed system shows encouraging performance levels in clean and noisy conditions, although further improvements are required to reach the maturity level of current context-dependent HMM based recognizers.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation TEC 2008-06382 and TEC 2008-02473 and Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid-UC3M CCG10-UC3M/TIC-5304.Publicad

Iteratively-Reweighted Least-Squares Fitting of Support Vector Machines: A Majorization--Minimization Algorithm Approach

Support vector machines (SVMs) are an important tool in modern data analysis. Traditionally, support vector machines have been fitted via quadratic programming, either using purpose-built or off-the-shelf algorithms. We present an alternative approach to SVM fitting via the majorization--minimization (MM) paradigm. Algorithms that are derived via MM algorithm constructions can be shown to monotonically decrease their objectives at each iteration, as well as be globally convergent to stationary points. We demonstrate the construction of iteratively-reweighted least-squares (IRLS) algorithms, via the MM paradigm, for SVM risk minimization problems involving the hinge, least-square, squared-hinge, and logistic losses, and 1-norm, 2-norm, and elastic net penalizations. Successful implementations of our algorithms are presented via some numerical examples

SVMs for Automatic Speech Recognition: a Survey

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are, undoubtedly, the most employed core technique for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Nevertheless, we are still far from achieving high-performance ASR systems. Some alternative approaches, most of them based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), were proposed during the late eighties and early nineties. Some of them tackled the ASR problem using predictive ANNs, while others proposed hybrid HMM/ANN systems. However, despite some achievements, nowadays, the preponderance of Markov Models is a fact. During the last decade, however, a new tool appeared in the field of machine learning that has proved to be able to cope with hard classification problems in several fields of application: the Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The SVMs are effective discriminative classifiers with several outstanding characteristics, namely: their solution is that with maximum margin; they are capable to deal with samples of a very higher dimensionality; and their convergence to the minimum of the associated cost function is guaranteed. These characteristics have made SVMs very popular and successful. In this chapter we discuss their strengths and weakness in the ASR context and make a review of the current state-of-the-art techniques. We organize the contributions in two parts: isolated-word recognition and continuous speech recognition. Within the first part we review several techniques to produce the fixed-dimension vectors needed for original SVMs. Afterwards we explore more sophisticated techniques based on the use of kernels capable to deal with sequences of different length. Among them is the DTAK kernel, simple and effective, which rescues an old technique of speech recognition: Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). Within the second part, we describe some recent approaches to tackle more complex tasks like connected digit recognition or continuous speech recognition using SVMs. Finally we draw some conclusions and outline several ongoing lines of research

Evolving fuzzy and neuro-fuzzy approaches in clustering, regression, identification, and classification: A Survey

Major assumptions in computational intelligence and machine learning consist of the availability of a historical dataset for model development, and that the resulting model will, to some extent, handle similar instances during its online operation. However, in many real world applications, these assumptions may not hold as the amount of previously available data may be insufficient to represent the underlying system, and the environment and the system may change over time. As the amount of data increases, it is no longer feasible to process data efficiently using iterative algorithms, which typically require multiple passes over the same portions of data. Evolving modeling from data streams has emerged as a framework to address these issues properly by self-adaptation, single-pass learning steps and evolution as well as contraction of model components on demand and on the fly. This survey focuses on evolving fuzzy rule-based models and neuro-fuzzy networks for clustering, classification and regression and system identification in online, real-time environments where learning and model development should be performed incrementally. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier Inc.Igor Škrjanc, Jose Antonio Iglesias and Araceli Sanchis would like to thank to the Chair of Excellence of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and the Bank of Santander Program for their support. Igor Škrjanc is grateful to Slovenian Research Agency with the research program P2-0219, Modeling, simulation and control. Daniel Leite acknowledges the Minas Gerais Foundation for Research and Development (FAPEMIG), process APQ-03384-18. Igor Škrjanc and Edwin Lughofer acknowledges the support by the ”LCM — K2 Center for Symbiotic Mechatronics” within the framework of the Austrian COMET-K2 program. Fernando Gomide is grateful to the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) for grant 305906/2014-3

Fast characterization of input-output behavior of non-charge-based logic devices by machine learning

Non-charge-based logic devices are promising candidates for the replacement of conventional complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) devices. These devices utilize magnetic properties to store or process information making them power efficient. Traditionally, to fully characterize the input-output behavior of these devices a large number of micromagnetic simulations are required, which makes the process computationally expensive. Machine learning techniques have been shown to dramatically decrease the computational requirements of many complex problems. We use state-of-the-art data-efficient machine learning techniques to expedite the characterization of their behavior. Several intelligent sampling strategies are combined with machine learning (binary and multi-class) classification models. These techniques are applied to a magnetic logic device that utilizes direct exchange interaction between two distinct regions containing a bistable canted magnetization configuration. Three classifiers were developed with various adaptive sampling techniques in order to capture the input-output behavior of this device. By adopting an adaptive sampling strategy, it is shown that prediction accuracy can approach that of full grid sampling while using only a small training set of micromagnetic simulations. Comparing model predictions to a grid-based approach on two separate cases, the best performing machine learning model accurately predicts 99.92% of the dense test grid while utilizing only 2.36% of the training data respectively

Benchmarking least squares support vector machine classifiers.

In Support Vector Machines (SVMs), the solution of the classification problem is characterized by a ( convex) quadratic programming (QP) problem. In a modified version of SVMs, called Least Squares SVM classifiers (LS-SVMs), a least squares cost function is proposed so as to obtain a linear set of equations in the dual space. While the SVM classifier has a large margin interpretation, the LS-SVM formulation is related in this paper to a ridge regression approach for classification with binary targets and to Fisher's linear discriminant analysis in the feature space. Multiclass categorization problems are represented by a set of binary classifiers using different output coding schemes. While regularization is used to control the effective number of parameters of the LS-SVM classifier, the sparseness property of SVMs is lost due to the choice of the 2-norm. Sparseness can be imposed in a second stage by gradually pruning the support value spectrum and optimizing the hyperparameters during the sparse approximation procedure. In this paper, twenty public domain benchmark datasets are used to evaluate the test set performance of LS-SVM classifiers with linear, polynomial and radial basis function (RBF) kernels. Both the SVM and LS-SVM classifier with RBF kernel in combination with standard cross-validation procedures for hyperparameter selection achieve comparable test set performances. These SVM and LS-SVM performances are consistently very good when compared to a variety of methods described in the literature including decision tree based algorithms, statistical algorithms and instance based learning methods. We show on ten UCI datasets that the LS-SVM sparse approximation procedure can be successfully applied.least squares support vector machines; multiclass support vector machines; sparse approximation; discriminant-analysis; sparse approximation; learning algorithms; classification; framework; kernels; time; SISTA;

Wide and Deep Neural Networks in Remote Sensing: A Review

Wide and deep neural networks in multispectral and hyperspectral image classification are discussed. Wide versus deep networks have always been a topic of intense interest. Deep networks mean large number of layers in the depth direction. Wide networks can be defined as networks growing in the vertical direction. Then, wide and deep networks are networks which have growth in both vertical and horizontal directions. In this report, several directions in order to achieve such networks are described. We first review a methodology called Parallel, Self-Organizing, Hierarchical Neural Networks (PSHNN’s) which have stages growing in the vertical direction, and each stage can be a deep network as well. In turn, each layer of a deep network can be a PSHNN. The second methodology involves making each layer of a deep network wide, and this has been discussed especially with deep residual networks. The third methodology is wide and deep residual neural networks which grow both in horizontal and vertical directions, and include residual learning principles for improving learning. The fourth methodology is wide and deep neural networks in parallel. Here wide and deep networks are two parallel branches, the wide network specializing in memorization while the deep network specializing in generalization. In leading to these methods, we also review various types of PSHNN’s, deep neural networks including convolutional neural networks, autoencoders, and residual learning. Partially due to moderate sizes of current multispectral and hyperspectral image sets, design and implementation of wide and deep neural networks hold the potential to yield most effective solutions. These conclusions are expected to be valid in other areas with similar data structures as well