Quantifying appearance retention in carpets using geometrical local binary patterns

Quality assessment in carpet manufacturing is performed by humans who evaluate the appearance retention (AR) grade on carpet samples. To quantify the AR grades objectively, different research based on computer vision have been developed. Among them Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and its variations has shown promising results. Nevertheless, the requirements of quality assessment on a wide range of carpets have not been met yet. One of the difficulties is to distinguish between consecutive AR grades in carpets. For this, we adopt an extension of LBP called Geometrical Local Binary Patterns (GLBP) that we recently proposed. The basis of GLBP is to evaluate the grey scale differences between adjacent points defined on a path in a neighbourhood. Symmetries of the paths in the GLBPs are evaluated. The proposed technique is compared with an invariant rotational mirror based LBP technique. The results show that the GLBP technique performs better to distinguish consecutive AR grades in carpets

Surface reconstruction of wear in carpets by using a wavelet edge detector

Carpet manufacturers have wear labels assigned to their products by human experts who evaluate carpet samples subjected to accelerated wear in a test device. There is considerable industrial and academic interest in going from human to automated evaluation, which should be less cumbersome and more objective. In this paper, we present image analysis research on videos of carpet surfaces scanned with a 3D laser. The purpose is obtaining good depth Images for an automated system that should have a high percentage of correct assessments for a wide variety of carpets. The innovation is the use of a wavelet edge detector to obtain a more continuously defined surface shape. The evaluation is based on how well the algorithms allow a good linear ranking and a good discriminance of consecutive wear labels. The results show an improved linear ranking for most carpet types, for two carpet types the results are quite significant

A two-step learning approach for solving full and almost full cold start problems in dyadic prediction

Dyadic prediction methods operate on pairs of objects (dyads), aiming to infer labels for out-of-sample dyads. We consider the full and almost full cold start problem in dyadic prediction, a setting that occurs when both objects in an out-of-sample dyad have not been observed during training, or if one of them has been observed, but very few times. A popular approach for addressing this problem is to train a model that makes predictions based on a pairwise feature representation of the dyads, or, in case of kernel methods, based on a tensor product pairwise kernel. As an alternative to such a kernel approach, we introduce a novel two-step learning algorithm that borrows ideas from the fields of pairwise learning and spectral filtering. We show theoretically that the two-step method is very closely related to the tensor product kernel approach, and experimentally that it yields a slightly better predictive performance. Moreover, unlike existing tensor product kernel methods, the two-step method allows closed-form solutions for training and parameter selection via cross-validation estimates both in the full and almost full cold start settings, making the approach much more efficient and straightforward to implement

Multi-Target Prediction: A Unifying View on Problems and Methods

Multi-target prediction (MTP) is concerned with the simultaneous prediction of multiple target variables of diverse type. Due to its enormous application potential, it has developed into an active and rapidly expanding research field that combines several subfields of machine learning, including multivariate regression, multi-label classification, multi-task learning, dyadic prediction, zero-shot learning, network inference, and matrix completion. In this paper, we present a unifying view on MTP problems and methods. First, we formally discuss commonalities and differences between existing MTP problems. To this end, we introduce a general framework that covers the above subfields as special cases. As a second contribution, we provide a structured overview of MTP methods. This is accomplished by identifying a number of key properties, which distinguish such methods and determine their suitability for different types of problems. Finally, we also discuss a few challenges for future research

Algebraic shortcuts for leave-one-out cross-validation in supervised network inference

Supervised machine learning techniques have traditionally been very successful at reconstructing biological networks, such as protein-ligand interaction, protein-protein interaction and gene regulatory networks. Many supervised techniques for network prediction use linear models on a possibly nonlinear pairwise feature representation of edges. Recently, much emphasis has been placed on the correct evaluation of such supervised models. It is vital to distinguish between using a model to either predict new interactions in a given network or to predict interactions for a new vertex not present in the original network. This distinction matters because (i) the performance might dramatically differ between the prediction settings and (ii) tuning the model hyperparameters to obtain the best possible model depends on the setting of interest. Specific cross-validation schemes need to be used to assess the performance in such different prediction settings.In this work we discuss a state-of-the-art kernel-based network inference technique called two-step kernel ridge regression. We show that this regression model can be trained efficiently, with a time complexity scaling with the number of vertices rather than the number of edges. Furthermore, this framework leads to a series of cross-validation shortcuts that allow one to rapidly estimate the model performance for any relevant network prediction setting. This allows computational biologists to fully assess the capabilities of their models. The machine learning techniques with the algebraic shortcuts are implemented in the RLScore software package: https://github.com/aatapa/RLScore

A Kernel-Based Framework for Learning Graded Relations From Data

Driven by a large number of potential applications in areas, such as bioinformatics, information retrieval, and social network analysis, the problem setting of inferring relations between pairs of data objects has recently been investigated intensively in the machine learning community. To this end, current approaches typically consider datasets containing crisp relations so that standard classification methods can be adopted. However, relations between objects like similarities and preferences are often expressed in a graded manner in real-world applications. A general kernel-based framework for learning relations from data is introduced here. It extends existing approaches because both crisp and graded relations are considered, and it unifies existing approaches because different types of graded relations can be modeled, including symmetric and reciprocal relations. This framework establishes important links between recent developments in fuzzy set theory and machine learning. Its usefulness is demonstrated through various experiments on synthetic and real-world data. The results indicate that incorporating domain knowledge about relations improves the predictive performance

Learning Interpretable Rules for Multi-label Classification

Multi-label classification (MLC) is a supervised learning problem in which, contrary to standard multiclass classification, an instance can be associated with several class labels simultaneously. In this chapter, we advocate a rule-based approach to multi-label classification. Rule learning algorithms are often employed when one is not only interested in accurate predictions, but also requires an interpretable theory that can be understood, analyzed, and qualitatively evaluated by domain experts. Ideally, by revealing patterns and regularities contained in the data, a rule-based theory yields new insights in the application domain. Recently, several authors have started to investigate how rule-based models can be used for modeling multi-label data. Discussing this task in detail, we highlight some of the problems that make rule learning considerably more challenging for MLC than for conventional classification. While mainly focusing on our own previous work, we also provide a short overview of related work in this area.Comment: Preprint version. To appear in: Explainable and Interpretable Models in Computer Vision and Machine Learning. The Springer Series on Challenges in Machine Learning. Springer (2018). See http://www.ke.tu-darmstadt.de/bibtex/publications/show/3077 for further informatio

Seasonal prediction of Horn of Africa long rains using machine learning: the pitfalls of preselecting correlated predictors

The Horn of Africa is highly vulnerable to droughts and floods, and reliable long-term forecasting is a key part of building resilience. However, the prediction of the “long rains” season (March–May) is particularly challenging for dynamical climate prediction models. Meanwhile, the potential for machine learning to improve seasonal precipitation forecasts in the region has yet to be uncovered. Here, we implement and evaluate four data-driven models for prediction of long rains rainfall: ridge and lasso linear regressions, random forests and a single-layer neural network. Predictors are based on SSTs, zonal winds, land state, and climate indices, and the target variables are precipitation totals for each separate month (March, April, and May) in the Horn of Africa drylands, with separate predictions made for lead-times of 1–3 months. Results reveal a tendency for overfitting when predictors are preselected based on correlations to the target variable over the entire historical period, a frequent practice in machine learning-based seasonal forecasting. Using this conventional approach, the data-driven methods—and particularly the lasso and ridge regressions—often outperform dynamical seasonal hindcasts. However, when the selection of predictors is done independently of both the train and test data, by performing this predictor selection within the cross-validation loop, the performance of all four data-driven models is poorer than that of the dynamical hindcasts. These findings should not discourage future applications of machine learning for rainfall forecasting in the region. Yet, they should be seen as a note of caution to prevent optimistically biased results that are not indicative of the true power in operational forecast systems