A comparative study of different machine learning methods for landslide susceptibility assessment: A case study of Uttarakhand area (India)

Landslide susceptibility assessment of Uttarakhand area of India has been done by applying five machine learning methods namely Support Vector Machines (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), Fisher's Linear Discriminant Analysis (FLDA), Bayesian Network (BN), and Naïve Bayes (NB). Performance of these methods has been evaluated using the ROC curve and statistical index based methods. Analysis and comparison of the results show that all five landslide models performed well for landslide susceptibility assessment (AUC = 0.910–0.950). However, it has been observed that the SVM model (AUC = 0.950) has the best performance in comparison to other landslide models, followed by the LR model (AUC = 0.922), the FLDA model (AUC = 0.921), the BN model (AUC = 0.915), and the NB model (AUC = 0.910), respectively.     

A comparison of machine learning techniques for customer churn prediction

We present a comparative study on the most popular machine learning methods applied to the challenging problem of customer churning prediction in the telecommunications industry. In the first phase of our experiments, all models were applied and evaluated using cross-validation on a popular, public domain dataset. In the second phase, the performance improvement offered by boosting was studied. In order to determine the most efficient parameter combinations we performed a series of Monte Carlo simulations for each method and for a wide range of parameters. Our results demonstrate clear superiority of the boosted versions of the models against the plain (non-boosted) versions. The best overall classifier was the SVM-POLY using AdaBoost with accuracy of almost 97% and F-measure over 84%.     

Evaluation of machine learning-based information extraction algorithms: criticisms and recommendations

We survey the evaluation methodology adopted in information extraction (IE), as defined in a few different efforts applying machine learning (ML) to IE. We identify a number of critical issues that hamper comparison of the results obtained by different researchers. Some of these issues are common to other NLP-related tasks: e.g., the difficulty of exactly identifying the effects on performance of the data (sample selection and sample size), of the domain theory (features selected), and of algorithm parameter settings. Some issues are specific to IE: how leniently to assess inexact identification of filler boundaries, the possibility of multiple fillers for a slot, and how the counting is performed. We argue that, when specifying an IE task, these issues should be explicitly addressed, and a number of methodological characteristics should be clearly defined. To empirically verify the practical impact of the issues mentioned above, we perform a survey of the results of different algorithms when applied to a few standard datasets. The survey shows a serious lack of consensus on these issues, which makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions on a comparative evaluation of the algorithms. Our aim is to elaborate a clear and detailed experimental methodology and propose it to the IE community. Widespread agreement on this proposal should lead to future IE comparative evaluations that are fair and reliable. To demonstrate the way the methodology is to be applied we have organized and run a comparative evaluation of ML-based IE systems (the Pascal Challenge on ML-based IE) where the principles described in this article are put into practice. In this article we describe the proposed methodology and its motivations. The Pascal evaluation is then described and its results presented.

A systematic review of machine learning techniques for software fault prediction

BackgroundSoftware fault prediction is the process of developing models that can be used by the software practitioners in the early phases of software development life cycle for detecting faulty constructs such as modules or classes. There are various machine learning techniques used in the past for predicting faults.MethodIn this study we perform a systematic review of studies from January 1991 to October 2013 in the literature that use the machine learning techniques for software fault prediction. We assess the performance capability of the machine learning techniques in existing research for software fault prediction. We also compare the performance of the machine learning techniques with the statistical techniques and other machine learning techniques. Further the strengths and weaknesses of machine learning techniques are summarized.ResultsIn this paper we have identified 64 primary studies and seven categories of the machine learning techniques. The results prove the prediction capability of the machine learning techniques for classifying module/class as fault prone or not fault prone. The models using the machine learning techniques for estimating software fault proneness outperform the traditional statistical models.ConclusionBased on the results obtained from the systematic review, we conclude that the machine learning techniques have the ability for predicting software fault proneness and can be used by software practitioners and researchers. However, the application of the machine learning techniques in software fault prediction is still limited and more number of studies should be carried out in order to obtain well formed and generalizable results. We provide future guidelines to practitioners and researchers based on the results obtained in this work.     

以LDA为例的大规模分布式机器学习系统分析

针对构建大规模机器学习系统在可扩展性、算法收敛性能、运行效率等方面面临的问题,分析了大规模样本、模型和网络通信给机器学习系统带来的挑战和现有系统的应对方案。以隐含狄利克雷分布（LDA）模型为例,通过对比三款开源分布式LDA系统——Spark LDA、PLDA+和LightLDA,在系统资源消耗、算法收敛性能和可扩展性等方面的表现,分析各系统在设计、实现和性能上的差异。实验结果表明：面对小规模的样本集和模型,LightLDA与PLDA+的内存使用量约为Spark LDA的一半,系统收敛速度为Spark LDA的4至5倍;面对较大规模的样本集和模型,LightLDA的网络通信总量与系统收敛时间远小于PLDA+与SparkLDA,展现出良好的可扩展性。“数据并行+模型并行”的体系结构能有效应对大规模样本和模型的挑战;参数弱同步策略（SSP）、模型本地缓存机制和参数稀疏存储能有效降低网络开销,提升系统运行效率。     

An empirical study of machine learning techniques for affect recognition in human–robot interaction

Given the importance of implicit communication in human interactions, it would be valuable to have this capability in robotic systems wherein a robot can detect the motivations and emotions of the person it is working with. Recognizing affective states from physiological cues is an effective way of implementing implicit human–robot interaction. Several machine learning techniques have been successfully employed in affect-recognition to predict the affective state of an individual given a set of physiological features. However, a systematic comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of these methods has not yet been done. In this paper, we present a comparative study of four machine learning methods—K-Nearest Neighbor, Regression Tree (RT), Bayesian Network and Support Vector Machine (SVM) as applied to the domain of affect recognition using physiological signals. The results showed that SVM gave the best classification accuracy even though all the methods performed competitively. RT gave the next best classification accuracy and was the most space and time efficient.     

A methodology for the classification of quality of requirements using machine learning techniques

ContextOne of the most important factors in the development of a software project is the quality of their requirements. Erroneous requirements, if not detected early, may cause many serious problems, such as substantial additional costs, failure to meet the expected objectives and delays in delivery dates. For these reasons, great effort must be devoted in requirements engineering to ensure that the project’s requirements results are of high quality. One of the aims of this discipline is the automatic processing of requirements for assessing their quality; this aim, however, results in a complex task because the quality of requirements depends mostly on the interpretation of experts and the necessities and demands of the project at hand.ObjectiveThe objective of this paper is to assess the quality of requirements automatically, emulating the assessment that a quality expert of a project would assess.MethodThe proposed methodology is based on the idea of learning based on standard metrics that represent the characteristics that an expert takes into consideration when deciding on the good or bad quality of requirements. Using machine learning techniques, a classifier is trained with requirements earlier classified by the expert, which then is used for classifying newly provided requirements.ResultsWe present two approaches to represent the methodology with two situations of the problem in function of the requirement corpus learning balancing, obtaining different results in the accuracy and the efficiency in order to evaluate both representations. The paper demonstrates the reliability of the methodology by presenting a case study with requirements provided by the Requirements Working Group of the INCOSE organization.ConclusionsA methodology that evaluates the quality of requirements written in natural language is presented in order to emulate the quality that the expert would provide for new requirements, with 86.1 of average in the accuracy.     

A comprehensive survey on regularization strategies in machine learning

In machine learning, the model is not as complicated as possible. Good generalization ability means that the model not only performs well on the training data set, but also can make good prediction on new data. Regularization imposes a penalty on model’s complexity or smoothness, allowing for good generalization to unseen data even when training on a finite training set or with an inadequate iteration. Deep learning has developed rapidly in recent years. Then the regularization has a broader definition: regularization is a technology aimed at improving the generalization ability of a model. This paper gave a comprehensive study and a state-of-the-art review of the regularization strategies in machine learning. Then the characteristics and comparisons of regularizations were presented. In addition, it discussed how to choose a regularization for the specific task. For specific tasks, it is necessary for regularization technology to have good mathematical characteristics. Meanwhile, new regularization techniques can be constructed by extending and combining existing regularization techniques. Finally, it concluded current opportunities and challenges of regularization technologies, as well as many open concerns and research trends.     

Discovering user communities on the Internet using unsupervised machine learning techniques

Interest in the analysis of user behaviour on the Internet has been increasing rapidly, especially since the advent of electronic commerce. In this context, we argue here for the usefulness of constructing communities of users with common behaviour, making use of machine learning techniques. In particular, we assume that the users of any service on the Internet constitute a large community and we aim to construct smaller communities of users with common characteristics. The paper presents the results of three case studies for three different types of Internet service: a digital library, an information broker and a Web site. Particular attention is paid on the different types of information access involved in the three case studies: query-based information retrieval, profile-based information filtering and Web-site navigation. Each type of access imposes different constraints on the representation of the learning task. Two different unsupervised learning methods are evaluated: conceptual clustering and cluster mining. One of our main concerns is the construction of meaningful communities that can be used for improving information access on the Internet. Analysis of the results in the three case studies brings to surface some of the important properties of the task, suggesting the feasibility of a common methodology for the three different types of information access on the Internet.     

Comparison of machine learning methods for classifying aphasic and non-aphasic speakers

The performance of eight machine learning classifiers were compared with three aphasia related classification problems. The first problem contained naming data of aphasic and non-aphasic speakers tested with the Philadelphia Naming Test. The second problem included the naming data of Alzheimer and vascular disease patients tested with Finnish version of the Boston Naming Test. The third problem included aphasia test data of patients suffering from four different aphasic syndromes tested with the Aachen Aphasia Test. The first two data sets were small. Therefore, the data used in the tests were artificially generated from the original confrontation naming data of 23 and 22 subjects, respectively. The third set contained aphasia test data of 146 aphasic speakers and was used as such in the experiments. With the first and the third data set the classifiers could successfully be used for the task, while the results with the second data set were less encouraging. However, based on the results, no single classifier performed exceptionally well with all data sets, suggesting that the selection of the classifier used for classification of aphasic data should be based on the experiments performed with the data set at hand.     

Intelligent compilation of patent summaries using machine learning and natural language processing techniques

Patents are a type of intellectual property with ownership and monopolistic rights that are publicly accessible published documents, often with illustrations, registered by governments and international organizations. The registration allows people familiar with the domain to understand how to re-create the new and useful invention but restricts the manufacturing unless the owner licenses or enters into a legal agreement to sell ownership of the patent. Patents reward the costly research and development efforts of inventors while spreading new knowledge and accelerating innovation. This research uses artificial intelligence natural language processing, deep learning techniques and machine learning algorithms to extract the essential knowledge of patent documents within a given domain as a means to evaluate their worth and technical advantage. Manual patent abstraction is a time consuming, labor intensive, and subjective process which becomes cost and outcome ineffective as the size of the patent knowledge domain increases. This research develops an intelligent patent summarization methodology using artificial intelligence machine learning approaches to allow patent domains of extremely large sizes to be effectively and objectively summarized, especially for cases where the cost and time requirements of manual summarization is infeasible. The system learns to automatically summarize patent documents with natural language texts for any given technical domain. The machine learning solution identifies technical key terminologies (words, phrases, and sentences) in the context of the semantic relationships among training patents and corresponding summaries as the core of the summarization system. To ensure the high performance of the proposed methodology, ROUGE metrics are used to evaluate precision, recall, accuracy, and consistency of knowledge generated by the summarization system. The Smart machinery technologies domain, under the sub-domains of control intelligence, sensor intelligence and intelligent decision-making provide the case studies for the patent summarization system training. The cases use 1708 training pairs of patents and summaries while testing uses 30 randomly selected patents. The case implementation and verification have shown the summary reports achieve 90% and 84% average precision and recall ratios respectively.     

Prediction of the hemoglobin level in hemodialysis patients using machine learning techniques

Patients who suffer from chronic renal failure (CRF) tend to suffer from an associated anemia as well. Therefore, it is essential to know the hemoglobin (Hb) levels in these patients. The aim of this paper is to predict the hemoglobin (Hb) value using a database of European hemodialysis patients provided by Fresenius Medical Care (FMC) for improving the treatment of this kind of patients. For the prediction of Hb, both analytical measurements and medication dosage of patients suffering from chronic renal failure (CRF) are used. Two kinds of models were trained, global and local models. In the case of local models, clustering techniques based on hierarchical approaches and the adaptive resonance theory (ART) were used as a first step, and then, a different predictor was used for each obtained cluster. Different global models have been applied to the dataset such as Linear Models, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Regression Trees among others. Also a relevance analysis has been carried out for each predictor model, thus finding those features that are most relevant for the given prediction.     

Dropout prediction in e-learning courses through the combination of machine learning techniques

In this paper, a dropout prediction method for e-learning courses, based on three popular machine learning techniques and detailed student data, is proposed. The machine learning techniques used are feed-forward neural networks, support vector machines and probabilistic ensemble simplified fuzzy ARTMAP. Since a single technique may fail to accurately classify some e-learning students, whereas another may succeed, three decision schemes, which combine in different ways the results of the three machine learning techniques, were also tested. The method was examined in terms of overall accuracy, sensitivity and precision and its results were found to be significantly better than those reported in relevant literature.     

A taxonomy and survey of attacks against machine learning

The majority of machine learning methodologies operate with the assumption that their environment is benign. However, this assumption does not always hold, as it is often advantageous to adversaries to maliciously modify the training (poisoning attacks) or test data (evasion attacks). Such attacks can be catastrophic given the growth and the penetration of machine learning applications in society. Therefore, there is a need to secure machine learning enabling the safe adoption of it in adversarial cases, such as spam filtering, malware detection, and biometric recognition. This paper presents a taxonomy and survey of attacks against systems that use machine learning. It organizes the body of knowledge in adversarial machine learning so as to identify the aspects where researchers from different fields can contribute to. The taxonomy identifies attacks which share key characteristics and as such can potentially be addressed by the same defence approaches. Thus, the proposed taxonomy makes it easier to understand the existing attack landscape towards developing defence mechanisms, which are not investigated in this survey. The taxonomy is also leveraged to identify open problems that can lead to new research areas within the field of adversarial machine learning.     

Recognizing yield patterns through hybrid applications of machine learning techniques

Yield management in semiconductor manufacturing companies requires accurate yield prediction and continual control. However, because many factors are complexly involved in the production of semiconductors, manufacturers or engineers have a hard time managing the yield precisely. Intelligent tools need to analyze the multiple process variables concerned and to predict the production yield effectively. This paper devises a hybrid method of incorporating machine learning techniques together to detect high and low yields in semiconductor manufacturing. The hybrid method has strong applicative advantages in manufacturing situations, where the control of a variety of process variables is interrelated. In real applications, the hybrid method provides a more accurate yield prediction than other methods that have been used. With this method, the company can achieve a higher yield rate by preventing low-yield lots in advance.     

A computational experiment on deducing phase diagrams from spatial thermodynamic data using machine learning techniques

Derivation and discovery of physical dynamics inherent in big data is one of the most major purposes of machine learning (ML) in the field of modern natural science. In the materials science, phase diagrams are often called as “road maps” to perfectly understand the conditions for phase formation and/or transformation in any material system caused by the associated thermodynamics. In this paper, we report a numerical experiment investigating whether the underlying thermodynamics can be derived from the big data constructed of local spatial composition and phase distribution data along with the help of ML. The artificial data analysed have been created assuming a steel composition based on the calculation phase diagram (CALPHAD) thermodynamics combined with the order-statistics-based sampling model. The hypothetical procedures of data acquisition assumed in this numerical experiment are as follows; (i) obtaining local analysis data on the composition and phase distribution in the same observation area using instruments such as electron probe micro analyser (EPMA) and electron backscattering diffraction (EBSD), and (ii) training the classification model based on a ML algorithm with compositional data as input and the phase data as output. The accuracies of the reconstructed phase diagrams have been estimated for three ML algorithms, i.e. support vector machine (SVM), random forest, and multilayer perceptron (MLP). The phase diagrams predicted using SVM and MLP are found to be adequately consistent with those of the CALPHAD method. We have also investigated the regression performance of the continuous data involved in the CALPHAD thermodynamics, such as the phase fractions of body-centred cubic, face-centred cubic, and cementite phases. Compared with the ML algorithms, the CALPHAD method is found to show superior predictive performance since it is based on the sophisticated physical model.     

A study on effectiveness of extreme learning machine

Extreme learning machine (ELM), proposed by Huang et al., has been shown a promising learning algorithm for single-hidden layer feedforward neural networks (SLFNs). Nevertheless, because of the random choice of input weights and biases, the ELM algorithm sometimes makes the hidden layer output matrix H of SLFN not full column rank, which lowers the effectiveness of ELM. This paper discusses the effectiveness of ELM and proposes an improved algorithm called EELM that makes a proper selection of the input weights and bias before calculating the output weights, which ensures the full column rank of H in theory. This improves to some extend the learning rate (testing accuracy, prediction accuracy, learning time) and the robustness property of the networks. The experimental results based on both the benchmark function approximation and real-world problems including classification and regression applications show the good performances of EELM.     

Mapping land-cover modifications over large areas: A comparison of machine learning algorithms

Large area land-cover monitoring scenarios, involving large volumes of data, are becoming more prevalent in remote sensing applications. Thus, there is a pressing need for increased automation in the change mapping process. The objective of this research is to compare the performance of three machine learning algorithms (MLAs); two classification tree software routines (S-plus and C4.5) and an artificial neural network (ARTMAP), in the context of mapping land-cover modifications in northern and southern California study sites between 1990/91 and 1996. Comparisons were based on several criteria: overall accuracy, sensitivity to data set size and variation, and noise. ARTMAP produced the most accurate maps overall ( 84%), for two study areas — in southern and northern California, and was most resistant to training data deficiencies. The change map generated using ARTMAP has similar accuracies to a human-interpreted map produced by the U.S. Forest Service in the southern study area. ARTMAP appears to be robust and accurate for automated, large area change monitoring as it performed equally well across the diverse study areas with minimal human intervention in the classification process.     

Uncensoring censored data for machine learning: A likelihood-based approach

Various machine learning techniques have been applied to different problems in survival analysis in the last decade. They were usually adapted to learning from censored survival data by using the information on observation time. This includes learning from parts of the data or interventions to the learning algorithms. Efficient models were established in various fields of clinical medicine and bioinformatics. In this paper, we propose a pre-processing method for adapting the censored survival data to be used with ordinary machine learning algorithms. This is done by pre-assigning censored instances a positive or negative outcome according to their features and observation time. The proposed procedure calculates the goodness of fit of each censored instance to both the distribution of positives and the spoiled distribution of negatives in the entire dataset and relabels that instance accordingly. We performed a thorough empirical testing of our method in a simulation study and on two real-world medical datasets, using the naive Bayes classifier and decision trees. When compared to one of the popular ML methods dealing with survival, our method provided good results, especially when applied to heavily censored data.     

Applications of machine learning to BIM: A systematic literature review

As Building Information Modeling (BIM) workflows are becoming very relevant for the different stages of the project’s lifecycle, more data is produced and managed across it. The information and data accumulated in BIM-based projects present an opportunity for analysis and extraction of project knowledge from the inception to the operation phase. In other industries, Machine Learning (ML) has been demonstrated to be an effective approach to automate processes and extract useful insights from different types and sources of data. The rapid development of ML applications, the growing generation of BIM-related data in projects, and the different needs for use of this data present serious challenges to adopt and effectively apply ML techniques to BIM-based projects in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations (AECO) industry. While research on the use of BIM data through ML has increased in the past decade, it is still in a nascent stage. In order to asses where the industry stands today, this paper carries out a systematic literature review (SLR) identifying and summarizing common emerging areas of application and utilization of ML within the context of BIM-generated data. Moreover, the paper identifies research gaps and trends. Based on the observed limitations, prominent future research directions are suggested, focusing on information architecture and data, applications scalability, and human information interactions.