Unsupervised feature construction for improving data representation and semantics

Attribute-based format is the main data representation format used by machine learning algorithms. When the attributes do not properly describe the initial data, performance starts to degrade. Some algorithms address this problem by internally changing the representation space, but the newly constructed features rarely have any meaning. We seek to construct, in an unsupervised way, new attributes that are more appropriate for describing a given dataset and, at the same time, comprehensible for a human user. We propose two algorithms that construct the new attributes as conjunctions of the initial primitive attributes or their negations. The generated feature sets have reduced correlations between features and succeed in catching some of the hidden relations between individuals in a dataset. For example, a feature like sky \wedge \neg building \wedge panorama would be true for non-urban images and is more informative than simple features expressing the presence or the absence of an object. The notion of Pareto optimality is used to evaluate feature sets and to obtain a balance between total correlation and the complexity of the resulted feature set. Statistical hypothesis testing is employed in order to automatically determine the values of the parameters used for constructing a data-dependent feature set. We experimentally show that our approaches achieve the construction of informative feature sets for multiple datasets. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Semantic-enriched visual vocabulary construction in a weakly supervised context

© 2015 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved. One of the prevalent learning tasks involving images is content-based image classification. This is a difficult task especially because the low-level features used to digitally describe images usually capture little information about the semantics of the images. In this paper, we tackle this difficulty by enriching the semantic content of the image representation by using external knowledge. The underlying hypothesis of our work is that creating a more semantically rich representation for images would yield higher machine learning performances, without the need to modify the learning algorithms themselves. The external semantic information is presented under the form of non-positional image labels, therefore positioning our work in a weakly supervised context. Two approaches are proposed: the first one leverages the labels into the visual vocabulary construction algorithm, the result being dedicated visual vocabularies. The second approach adds a filtering phase as a pre-processing of the vocabulary construction. Known positive and known negative sets are constructed and features that are unlikely to be associated with the objects denoted by the labels are filtered. We apply our proposition to the task of content-based image classification and we show that semantically enriching the image representation yields higher classification performances than the baseline representation

Topic extraction for ontology learning

This chapter addresses the issue of topic extraction from text corpora for ontology learning. The first part provides an overview of some of the most significant solutions present today in the literature. These solutions deal mainly with the inferior layers of the Ontology Learning Layer Cake. They are related to the challenges of the Terms and Synonyms layers. The second part shows how these pieces can be bound together into an integrated system for extracting meaningful topics. While the extracted topics are not proper concepts as yet, they constitute a convincing approach towards concept building and therefore ontology learning. This chapter concludes by discussing the research undertaken for filling the gap between topics and concepts as well as perspectives that emerge today in the area of topic extraction. © 2011, IGI Global

ClusPath: a temporal-driven clustering to infer typical evolution paths

© 2015, The Author(s). We propose ClusPath, a novel algorithm for detecting general evolution tendencies in a population of entities. We show how abstract notions, such as the Swedish socio-economical model (in a political dataset) or the companies fiscal optimization (in an economical dataset) can be inferred from low-level descriptive features. Such high-level regularities in the evolution of entities are detected by combining spatial and temporal features into a spatio-temporal dissimilarity measure and using semi-supervised clustering techniques. The relations between the evolution phases are modeled using a graph structure, inferred simultaneously with the partition, by using a “slow changing world” assumption. The idea is to ensure a smooth passage for entities along their evolution paths, which catches the long-term trends in the dataset. Additionally, we also provide a method, based on an evolutionary algorithm, to tune the parameters of ClusPath to new, unseen datasets. This method assesses the fitness of a solution using four opposed quality measures and proposes a balanced compromise

Concept-based topic model improvement

We propose a system which employs conceptual knowledge to improve topic models by removing unrelated words from the simplified topic description. We use WordNet to detect which topical words are not conceptually similar to the others and then test our assumptions against human judgment. Results obtained on two different corpora in different test conditions show that the words detected as unrelated had a much greater probability than the others to be chosen by human evaluators as not being part of the topic at all. We prove that there is a strong correlation between the said probability and an automatically calculated topical fitness and we discuss the variation of the correlation depending on the method and data used. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Improving topic evaluation using conceptual knowledge

The growing number of statistical topic models led to the need to better evaluate their output. Traditional evaluation means estimate the model's fitness to unseen data. It has recently been proven than the output of human judgment can greatly differ from these measures. Thus the need for methods that better emulate human judgment is stringent. In this paper we present a system that computes the conceptual relevance of individual topics from a given model on the basis of information drawn from a given concept hierarchy, in this case WordNet. The notion of conceptual relevance is regarded as the ability to attribute a concept to each topic and separate words related to the topic from the unrelated ones based on that concept. In multiple experiments we prove the correlation between the automatic evaluation method and the answers received from human evaluators, for various corpora and difficulty levels. By changing the evaluation focus from a statistical one to a conceptual one we were able to detect which topics are conceptually meaningful and rank them accordingly

Automatic extraction of conceptual labels from topic models

This work outlines a novel system that automatically extracts conceptual labels for statistically obtained topics. By creating a projection of the topic, which is a distribution over all the vocabulary words, over the WordNet ontology we succeed in associating concepts to the said groups of words. The most important contributions of this paper are connected to the validation of the role of these concepts as topical labels and the determination of correlations that emerge between the utility of these labels and the strength of the relation between the concepts and the topics

Default Clustering from Sparse Data Sets

Abstract. Categorization with a very high missing data rate is seldom studied, especially from a non-probabilistic point of view. This paper proposes a new algorithm called default clustering that relies on default reasoning and uses the local search paradigm. Two kinds of experiments are considered: the first one presents the results obtained on artificial data sets, the second uses an original and real case where political stereotypes are extracted from newspaper articles at the end of the 19th century

How to use temporal-driven constrained clustering to detect typical evolutions

In this paper, we propose a new time-aware dissimilarity measure that takes into account the temporal dimension. Observations that are close in the description space, but distant in time are considered as dissimilar. We also propose a method to enforce the segmentation contiguity, by introducing, in the objective function, a penalty term inspired from the Normal Distribution Function. We combine the two propositions into a novel time-driven constrained clustering algorithm, called TDCK-Means, which creates a partition of coherent clusters, both in the multidimensional space and in the temporal space. This algorithm uses soft semi-supervised constraints, to encourage adjacent observations belonging to the same entity to be assigned to the same cluster. We apply our algorithm to a Political Studies dataset in order to detect typical evolution phases. We adapt the Shannon entropy in order to measure the entity contiguity, and we show that our proposition consistently improves temporal cohesion of clusters, without any significant loss in the multidimensional variance. © 2014 World Scientific Publishing Company

Structuring typical evolutions using temporal-driven constrained clustering

In this paper, we propose a new time-aware dissimilarity measure that takes into account the temporal dimension. Observations that are close in the description space, but distant in time are considered as dissimilar. We also propose a method to enforce the segmentation contiguity, by introducing, in the objective function, a penalty term inspired from the Normal Distribution Function. We combine the two propositions into a novel time-driven constrained clustering algorithm, called TDCK-Means, which creates a partition of coherent clusters, both in the multidimensional space and in the temporal space. This algorithm uses soft semi-supervised constraints, to encourage adjacent observations belonging to the same entity to be assigned to the same cluster. We apply our algorithm to a Political Studies dataset in order to detect typical evolution phases. We adapt the Shannon entropy in order to measure the entity contiguity, and we show that our proposition consistently improves temporal cohesion of clusters, without any significant loss in the multidimensional variance. © 2012 IEEE