191 research outputs found

    Automatic Classification of Irregularly Sampled Time Series with Unequal Lengths: A Case Study on Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate

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    A patient's estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) can provide important information about disease progression and kidney function. Traditionally, an eGFR time series is interpreted by a human expert labelling it as stable or unstable. While this approach works for individual patients, the time consuming nature of it precludes the quick evaluation of risk in large numbers of patients. However, automating this process poses significant challenges as eGFR measurements are usually recorded at irregular intervals and the series of measurements differs in length between patients. Here we present a two-tier system to automatically classify an eGFR trend. First, we model the time series using Gaussian process regression (GPR) to fill in `gaps' by resampling a fixed size vector of fifty time-dependent observations. Second, we classify the resampled eGFR time series using a K-NN/SVM classifier, and evaluate its performance via 5-fold cross validation. Using this approach we achieved an F-score of 0.90, compared to 0.96 for 5 human experts when scored amongst themselves

    Avoiding overstating the strength of forensic evidence: Shrunk likelihood ratios/Bayes factors

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    When strength of forensic evidence is quantified using sample data and statistical models, a concern may be raised as to whether the output of a model overestimates the strength of evidence. This is particularly the case when the amount of sample data is small, and hence sampling variability is high. This concern is related to concern about precision. This paper describes, explores, and tests three procedures which shrink the value of the likelihood ratio or Bayes factor toward the neutral value of one. The procedures are: (1) a Bayesian procedure with uninformative priors, (2) use of empirical lower and upper bounds (ELUB), and (3) a novel form of regularized logistic regression. As a benchmark, they are compared with linear discriminant analysis, and in some instances with non-regularized logistic regression. The behaviours of the procedures are explored using Monte Carlo simulated data, and tested on real data from comparisons of voice recordings, face images, and glass fragments

    Multi-system Biometric Authentication: Optimal Fusion and User-Specific Information

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    Verifying a person's identity claim by combining multiple biometric systems (fusion) is a promising solution to identity theft and automatic access control. This thesis contributes to the state-of-the-art of multimodal biometric fusion by improving the understanding of fusion and by enhancing fusion performance using information specific to a user. One problem to deal with at the score level fusion is to combine system outputs of different types. Two statistically sound representations of scores are probability and log-likelihood ratio (LLR). While they are equivalent in theory, LLR is much more useful in practice because its distribution can be approximated by a Gaussian distribution, which makes it useful to analyze the problem of fusion. Furthermore, its score statistics (mean and covariance) conditioned on the claimed user identity can be better exploited. Our first contribution is to estimate the fusion performance given the class-conditional score statistics and given a particular fusion operator/classifier. Thanks to the score statistics, we can predict fusion performance with reasonable accuracy, identify conditions which favor a particular fusion operator, study the joint phenomenon of combining system outputs with different degrees of strength and correlation and possibly correct the adverse effect of bias (due to the score-level mismatch between training and test sets) on fusion. While in practice the class-conditional Gaussian assumption is not always true, the estimated performance is found to be acceptable. Our second contribution is to exploit the user-specific prior knowledge by limiting the class-conditional Gaussian assumption to each user. We exploit this hypothesis in two strategies. In the first strategy, we combine a user-specific fusion classifier with a user-independent fusion classifier by means of two LLR scores, which are then weighted to obtain a single output. We show that combining both user-specific and user-independent LLR outputs always results in improved performance than using the better of the two. In the second strategy, we propose a statistic called the user-specific F-ratio, which measures the discriminative power of a given user based on the Gaussian assumption. Although similar class separability measures exist, e.g., the Fisher-ratio for a two-class problem and the d-prime statistic, F-ratio is more suitable because it is related to Equal Error Rate in a closed form. F-ratio is used in the following applications: a user-specific score normalization procedure, a user-specific criterion to rank users and a user-specific fusion operator that selectively considers a subset of systems for fusion. The resultant fusion operator leads to a statistically significantly increased performance with respect to the state-of-the-art fusion approaches. Even though the applications are different, the proposed methods share the following common advantages. Firstly, they are robust to deviation from the Gaussian assumption. Secondly, they are robust to few training data samples thanks to Bayesian adaptation. Finally, they consider both the client and impostor information simultaneously

    Can DMD obtain a scene background in color?

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    A background model describes a scene without any foreground objects and has a number of applications, ranging from video surveillance to computational photography. Recent studies have introduced the method of Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) for robustly separating video frames into a background model and foreground components. While the method introduced operates by converting color images to grayscale, we in this study propose a technique to obtain the background model in the color domain. The effectiveness of our technique is demonstrated using a publicly available Scene Background Initialisation (SBI) dataset. Our results both qualitatively and quantitatively show that DMD can successfully obtain a colored background model

    An Investigation of F-ratio Client-Dependent Normalisation on Biometric Authentication Tasks

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    This study investigates a new \emph{client-dependent normalisation} to improve biometric authentication systems. There exists many client-de-pendent score normalisation techniques applied to speaker authentication, such as Z-Norm, D-Norm and T-Norm. Such normalisation is intended to adjust the variation across different client models. We propose ``F-ratio'' normalisation, or F-Norm, applied to face and speaker authentication systems. This normalisation requires only that \emph{as few as} two client-dependent accesses are available (the more the better). Different from previous normalisation techniques, F-Norm considers the client and impostor distributions \emph{simultaneously}. We show that F-ratio is a natural choice because it is directly associated to Equal Error Rate. It has the effect of centering the client and impostor distributions such that a global threshold can be easily found. Another difference is that F-Norm actually ``interpolates'' between client-independent and client-dependent information by introducing a mixture parameter. This parameter \emph{can be optimised} to maximise the class dispersion (the degree of separability between client and impostor distributions) while the aforementioned normalisation techniques cannot. unimodal experiments XM2VTS multimodal database show that such normalisation is advantageous over Z-Norm, client-dependent threshold normalisation or no normalisation

    Noise-Robust Multi-Stream Fusion for Text-Independent Speaker Authentication

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    Multi-stream approaches have proven to be very successful in speech recognition tasks and to a certain extent in speaker authentication tasks. In this study we propose a noise-robust multi-stream text-independent speaker authentication system. This system has two steps: first train the stream experts under clean conditions and then train the combination mechanism to merge the scores of the stream experts under both clean and noisy conditions. The idea here is to take advantage of the rather predictable reliability and diversity of streams under different conditions. Hence, noise-robustness is mainly due to the combination mechanism. This two-step approach offers several practical advantages: the stream experts can be trained in parallel (e.g., by using several machines); heterogeneous types of features can be used and the resultant system can be robust to different noise types (wide bands or narrow bands) as compared to sub-streams. An important finding is that a trade-off is often necessary between the overall good performance under all conditions (clean and noisy) and good performance under clean conditions. To reconcile this trade-off, we propose to give more emphasis or prior to clean conditions, thus, resulting in a combination mechanism that does not deteriorate under clean conditions (as compared to the best stream) yet is robust to noisy conditions

    Estimating the Confidence Interval of Expected Performance Curve in Biometric Authentication Using Joint Bootstrap

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    Evaluating biometric authentication performance is a complex task because the performance depends on the user set size, composition and the choice of samples. We propose to reduce the performance dependency of these three factors by deriving appropriate confidence intervals. In this study, we focus on deriving a confidence region based on the recently proposed Expected Performance Curve (EPC). An EPC is different from the conventional DET or ROC curve because an EPC assumes that the test class-conditional (client and impostor) score distributions are unknown and this includes the choice of the decision threshold for various operating points. Instead, an EPC selects thresholds based on the training set and applies them on the test set. The proposed technique is useful, for example, to quote realistic upper and lower bounds of the decision cost function used in the NIST annual speaker evaluation. Our findings, based on the 24 systems submitted to the NIST2005 evaluation, show that the confidence region obtained from our proposed algorithm can correctly predict the performance of an unseen database with two times more users with an average coverage of 95\% (over all the 24 systems). A coverage is the proportion of the unseen EPC covered by the derived confidence interval
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