35 research outputs found
Learning from Very Few Samples: A Survey
Few sample learning (FSL) is significant and challenging in the field of
machine learning. The capability of learning and generalizing from very few
samples successfully is a noticeable demarcation separating artificial
intelligence and human intelligence since humans can readily establish their
cognition to novelty from just a single or a handful of examples whereas
machine learning algorithms typically entail hundreds or thousands of
supervised samples to guarantee generalization ability. Despite the long
history dated back to the early 2000s and the widespread attention in recent
years with booming deep learning technologies, little surveys or reviews for
FSL are available until now. In this context, we extensively review 300+ papers
of FSL spanning from the 2000s to 2019 and provide a timely and comprehensive
survey for FSL. In this survey, we review the evolution history as well as the
current progress on FSL, categorize FSL approaches into the generative model
based and discriminative model based kinds in principle, and emphasize
particularly on the meta learning based FSL approaches. We also summarize
several recently emerging extensional topics of FSL and review the latest
advances on these topics. Furthermore, we highlight the important FSL
applications covering many research hotspots in computer vision, natural
language processing, audio and speech, reinforcement learning and robotic, data
analysis, etc. Finally, we conclude the survey with a discussion on promising
trends in the hope of providing guidance and insights to follow-up researches.Comment: 30 page
Cassava genome from a wild ancestor to cultivated varieties
Cassava is a major tropical food crop in the Euphorbiaceae family that has high carbohydrate production potential and adaptability to diverse environments. Here we present the draft genome sequences of a wild ancestor and a domesticated variety of cassava and comparative analyses with a partial inbred line. We identify 1,584 and 1,678 gene models specific to the wild and domesticated varieties, respectively, and discover high heterozygosity and millions of single-nucleotide variations. Our analyses reveal that genes involved in photosynthesis, starch accumulation and abiotic stresses have been positively selected, whereas those involved in cell wall biosynthesis and secondary metabolism, including cyanogenic glucoside formation, have been negatively selected in the cultivated varieties, reflecting the result of natural selection and domestication. Differences in microRNA genes and retrotransposon regulation could partly explain an increased carbon flux towards starch accumulation and reduced cyanogenic glucoside accumulation in domesticated cassava. These results may contribute to genetic improvement of cassava through better understanding of its biology
Robust Multi-Task Feature Learning
Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to improve the performance of multiple related tasks by exploiting the intrinsic relationships among them. Recently, multi-task feature learning algorithms have received increasing attention and they have been successfully applied to many applications involving high-dimensional data. However, they assume that all tasks share a common set of features, which is too restrictive and may not hold in real-world applications, since outlier tasks often exist. In this paper, we propose a Robust Multi-Task Feature Learning algorithm (rMTFL) which simultaneously captures a common set of features among relevant tasks and identifies outlier tasks. Specifically, we decompose the weight (model) matrix for all tasks into two components. We impose the well-known group Lasso penalty o
Hierarchical interactions model for predicting Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer's Disease (AD) conversion.
Identifying patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) who are likely to convert to dementia has recently attracted increasing attention in Alzheimer's disease (AD) research. An accurate prediction of conversion from MCI to AD can aid clinicians to initiate treatments at early stage and monitor their effectiveness. However, existing prediction systems based on the original biosignatures are not satisfactory. In this paper, we propose to fit the prediction models using pairwise biosignature interactions, thus capturing higher-order relationship among biosignatures. Specifically, we employ hierarchical constraints and sparsity regularization to prune the high-dimensional input features. Based on the significant biosignatures and underlying interactions identified, we build classifiers to predict the conversion probability based on the selected features. We further analyze the underlying interaction effects of different biosignatures based on the so-called stable expectation scores. We have used 293 MCI subjects from Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database that have MRI measurements at the baseline to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our proposed method achieves better classification performance than state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we discover several significant interactions predictive of MCI-to-AD conversion. These results shed light on improving the prediction performance using interaction features