结合半监督核的高斯过程分类

提出了一种半监督算法用于学习高斯过程分类器, 其通过结合非参数的半监督核向分类器提供未标记数据信息. 该算法主要包括以下几个方面: 1)通过图拉普拉斯的谱分解获得核矩阵, 其联合了标记数据和未标记数据信息; 2)采用凸最优化方法学习核矩阵特征向量的最优权值, 构建非参数的半监督核; 3)把半监督核整合到高斯过程模型中, 构建所提出的半监督学习算法. 该算法的主要特点是: 把基于整个数据集的非参数半监督核应用于高斯过程模型, 该模型有着明确的概率描述, 可以方便地对数据之间的不确定性进行建模, 并能够解决复杂的推论问题. 通过实验结果表明, 该算法与其他方法相比具有更高的可靠性.     

Regularizing multiple kernel learning using response surface methodology

In recent years, several methods have been proposed to combine multiple kernels using a weighted linear sum of kernels. These different kernels may be using information coming from multiple sources or may correspond to using different notions of similarity on the same source. We note that such methods, in addition to the usual ones of the canonical support vector machine formulation, introduce new regularization parameters that affect the solution quality and, in this work, we propose to optimize them using response surface methodology on cross-validation data. On several bioinformatics and digit recognition benchmark data sets, we compare multiple kernel learning and our proposed regularized variant in terms of accuracy, support vector count, and the number of kernels selected. We see that our proposed variant achieves statistically similar or higher accuracy results by using fewer kernel functions and/or support vectors through suitable regularization; it also allows better knowledge extraction because unnecessary kernels are pruned and the favored kernels reflect the properties of the problem at hand.     

Quadratic-radial-basis-function-kernel for classifying multi-class agricultural datasets with continuous attributes

Classification of agricultural data such as soil data and crop data is significant as it allows the stakeholders to make meaningful decisions for farming. Soil classification aids farmers in deciding the type of crop to be sown for a particular type of soil. Similarly, wheat variety classification assists in selecting the right type of wheat for a particular product. Current methods used for classifying agricultural data are mostly manual. These methods involve agriculture field visits and surveys and are labor-intensive, expensive, and prone to human error. Recently, data mining techniques such as decision trees, k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), support vector machine (SVM), and Naive Bayes (NB) have been used in classification of agricultural data such as soil, crops, and land cover. The resulting classification aid the decision making process of government organizations and agro-industries in the field of agriculture. SVM is a popular approach for data classification. A recent study on SVM highlighted the fact that using multiple kernels instead of a single kernel would lead to better performance because of the greater learning and generalization power. In this work, a hybrid kernel based support vector machine (H-SVM) is proposed for classifying multi-class agricultural datasets having continuous attributes. Genetic algorithm (GA) or gradient descent (GD) methods are utilized to select the SVM parameters C and γ. The proposed kernel is called the quadratic-radial-basis-function kernel (QRK) and it combines both quadratic and radial basis function (RBF) kernels. The proposed classifier has the ability to classify all kinds of multi-class agricultural datasets with continuous features. Rigorous experiments using the proposed method are performed on standard benchmark and real world agriculture datasets. The results reveal a significant performance improvement over state of the art methods such as NB, k-NN, and SVM in terms of performance metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and F-score.     

Composite kernels for semi-supervised clustering

A critical problem related to kernel-based methods is how to select optimal kernels. A kernel function must conform to the learning target in order to obtain meaningful results. While solutions to the problem of estimating optimal kernel functions and corresponding parameters have been proposed in a supervised setting, it remains a challenge when no labeled data are available, and all we have is a set of pairwise must-link and cannot-link constraints. In this paper, we address the problem of optimizing the kernel function using pairwise constraints for semi-supervised clustering. We propose a new optimization criterion for automatically estimating the optimal parameters of composite Gaussian kernels, directly from the data and given constraints. We combine our proposal with a semi-supervised kernel-based algorithm to demonstrate experimentally the effectiveness of our approach. The results show that our method is very effective for kernel-based semi-supervised clustering.     

Learning state machine-based string edit kernels

During the past few years, several works have been done to derive string kernels from probability distributions. For instance, the Fisher kernel uses a generative model M (e.g. a hidden Markov model) and compares two strings according to how they are generated by M. On the other hand, the marginalized kernels allow the computation of the joint similarity between two instances by summing conditional probabilities. In this paper, we adapt this approach to edit distance-based conditional distributions and we present a way to learn a new string edit kernel. We show that the practical computation of such a kernel between two strings x and x^′ built from an alphabet Σ requires (i) to learn edit probabilities in the form of the parameters of a stochastic state machine and (ii) to calculate an infinite sum over Σ^* by resorting to the intersection of probabilistic automata as done for rational kernels. We show on a handwritten character recognition task that our new kernel outperforms not only the state of the art string kernels and string edit kernels but also the standard edit distance used by a neighborhood-based classifier.     

Multiple kernel clustering based on centered kernel alignment

Multiple kernel clustering (MKC), which performs kernel-based data fusion for data clustering, is an emerging topic. It aims at solving clustering problems with multiple cues. Most MKC methods usually extend existing clustering methods with a multiple kernel learning (MKL) setting. In this paper, we propose a novel MKC method that is different from those popular approaches. Centered kernel alignment—an effective kernel evaluation measure—is employed in order to unify the two tasks of clustering and MKL into a single optimization framework. To solve the formulated optimization problem, an efficient two-step iterative algorithm is developed. Experiments on several UCI datasets and face image datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our MKC algorithm.     

Piecewise affine kernel tracking for non-planar targets

Since the multiple kernel representation opened in tracking the possibility of representing several features of the target in the same model, tracking multiple features using kernel-based methods has received a great attention. In spite of these efforts, the formulation has been reduced to tracking planar targets or targets rotating inside a plane parallel to the image plane. The aim of this paper is to extend the multi-kernel tracking to cope with situations different to those. To this end, we consider the triangular mesh described by the centers of the kernels and we develop the estimation of a set of affine transforms, one at each mesh triangle, subject to the constraints that each affine transform of a triangle must be compatible with the affine transforms coming from contiguous triangles. The method is applied to sequences including face and car tracking. Results show an outperformance respect to previous kernel tracking methods, which generally work with a too restricted set of movements.     

Local normalized linear summation kernel for fast and robust recognition

Kernel-based methods are effective for object detection and recognition. However, the computational cost when using kernel functions is high, except when using linear kernels. To realize fast and robust recognition, we apply normalized linear kernels to local regions of a recognition target, and the kernel outputs are integrated by summation. This kernel is referred to as a local normalized linear summation kernel. Here, we show that kernel-based methods that employ local normalized linear summation kernels can be computed by a linear kernel of local normalized features. Thus, the computational cost of the kernel is nearly the same as that of a linear kernel and much lower than that of radial basis function (RBF) and polynomial kernels. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated in face detection and recognition problems, and we confirm that our kernel provides higher accuracy with lower computational cost than RBF and polynomial kernels. In addition, our kernel is also robust to partial occlusion and shadows on faces since it is based on the summation of local kernels.     

用于文本分类的多核SVM算法研究

根据文本分类通常包含多异类数据源的特点，提出了多核SVM学习算法。该算法将分类核矩阵的二次组合重新表述成半无限规划，并说明其可以通过重复利用SVM来实现有效求解。实验结果表明，提出的算法可以用于数百个核的结合或者是数十万个样本的结合，对于多异类数据源的文本分类具有较高的查全率和查准率。     

A new approach to qualitative learning in time series

In this paper the k-nearest-neighbours (KNN) based method is presented for the classification of time series which use qualitative learning to identify similarities using kernels. To this end, time series are transformed into symbol strings by means of several discretization methods and a distance based on a kernel between symbols in ordinal scale is used to calculate the similarity between time series. Hence, the idea proposed is the consideration of the simultaneous use of symbolic representation together with a kernel based approach for classification of time series. The methodology has been tested and compared with quantitative learning from a television-viewing shared data set and has yielded a high success identification ratio.