Unconfused Ultraconservative Multiclass Algorithms

We tackle the problem of learning linear classifiers from noisy datasets in a multiclass setting. The two-class version of this problem was studied a few years ago by, e.g. Bylander (1994) and Blum et al. (1996): in these contributions, the proposed approaches to fight the noise revolve around a Perceptron learning scheme fed with peculiar examples computed through a weighted average of points from the noisy training set. We propose to build upon these approaches and we introduce a new algorithm called UMA (for Unconfused Multiclass additive Algorithm) which may be seen as a generalization to the multiclass setting of the previous approaches. In order to characterize the noise we use the confusion matrix as a multiclass extension of the classification noise studied in the aforementioned literature. Theoretically well-founded, UMA furthermore displays very good empirical noise robustness, as evidenced by numerical simulations conducted on both synthetic and real data. Keywords: Multiclass classification, Perceptron, Noisy labels, Confusion MatrixComment: ACML, Australia (2013

From Cutting Planes Algorithms to Compression Schemes and Active Learning

Cutting-plane methods are well-studied localization(and optimization) algorithms. We show that they provide a natural framework to perform machinelearning ---and not just to solve optimization problems posed by machinelearning--- in addition to their intended optimization use. In particular, theyallow one to learn sparse classifiers and provide good compression schemes.Moreover, we show that very little effort is required to turn them intoeffective active learning methods. This last property provides a generic way todesign a whole family of active learning algorithms from existing passivemethods. We present numerical simulations testifying of the relevance ofcutting-plane methods for passive and active learning tasks.Comment: IJCNN 2015, Jul 2015, Killarney, Ireland. 2015, \<http://www.ijcnn.org/\&g

Du bruit de confusion à l’apprentissage actif : jouer sur la disponibilité des étiquettes dans les problèmes de classification linéaire

Les travaux présentés dans cette thèse relèvent de l'étude des méthodes de classification linéaires, c'est à dire l'étude de méthodes ayant pour but la catégorisation de données en différents groupes à partir d'un jeu d'exemples, préalablement étiquetés, disponible en amont et appelés ensemble d'apprentissage. En pratique, l'acquisition d'un tel ensemble d'apprentissage peut être difficile et/ou couteux, la catégorisation d'un exemple étant de fait plus ardu que l'obtention de dudit exemple. Cette disparité entre la disponibilité des données et notre capacité à constituer un ensemble d'apprentissage étiqueté a été un des problèmes centraux de l'apprentissage automatique et ce manuscrit s’intéresse à deux solutions usuellement considérées pour contourner ce problème : l'apprentissage en présence de données bruitées et l'apprentissage actif.The works presented in this thesis fall within the general framework of linear classification, that is the problem of categorizing data into two or more classes based on on a training set of labelled data. In practice though acquiring labeled examples might prove challenging and/or costly as data are inherently easier to obtain than to label. Dealing with label scarceness have been a motivational goal in the machine learning literature and this work discuss two settings related to this problem: learning in the presence of noise and active learning