Visual learning and classification of human epithelial type 2 cell images through spontaneous activity patterns

Identifying the presence of anti-nuclear antibody (ANA) in human epithelial type 2 (HEp-2) cells via the indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) protocol is commonly used to diagnose various connective tissue diseases in clinical pathology tests. As it is a labour and time intensive diagnostic process, several computer aided diagnostic (CAD) systems have been proposed. However, the existing CAD systems suffer from numerous shortcomings due to the selection of features, which is commonly based on expert experience. Such a choice of features may not work well when the CAD systems are retasked to another dataset. To address this, in our previous work, we proposed a novel approach that learns a set of filters from HEp-2 cell images. It is inspired by the receptive fields in the mammalian's vision system, since the receptive fields can be thought as a set of filters for similar shapes. We obtain robust filters for HEp-2 cell classification by employing the independent component analysis (ICA) framework. Although, this approach may be held back due to one particular problem; ICA learning requires a sufficiently large volume of training data which is not always available. In this paper, we demonstrate a biologically inspired solution to address this issue via the use of spontaneous activity patterns (SAP). The spontaneous activity patterns, which are related to the spontaneous neural activities initialised by the chemical release in the brain, are found as the typical stimuli for the visual cell development of newborn animals. In the classification system for HEp-2 cells, we propose to model SAP as a set of small image patches containing randomly positioned Gaussian spots. The SAP image patches are generated and mixed with the training images in order to learn filters via the ICA framework. The obtained filters are adopted to extract the set of responses from a HEp-2 cell image. We then employ regions from this set of responses and stack them into “cubic regions”, and apply a classification based on the correlation information of the features. We show that applying the additional SAP leads to a better classification performance on HEp-2 cell images compared to using only the existing patterns for training ICA filters. The improvement on classification is particularly significant when there are not enough specimen images available in the training set, as SAP adds more variations to the existing data that makes the learned ICA model more robust. We show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms three recently proposed CAD systems on two publicly available datasets: ICPR HEp-2 contest and SNPHEp-2.     

ECOC-DRF: Discriminative random fields based on error correcting output codes

We present ECOC-DRF, a framework where potential functions for Discriminative Random Fields are formulated as an ensemble of classifiers. We introduce the label trick, a technique to express transitions in the pairwise potential as meta-classes. This allows to independently learn any possible transition between labels without assuming any pre-defined model. The Error Correcting Output Codes matrix is used as ensemble framework for the combination of margin classifiers. We apply ECOC-DRF to a large set of classification problems, covering synthetic, natural and medical images for binary and multi-class cases, outperforming state-of-the art in almost all the experiments.     

On the design of an ECOC-Compliant Genetic Algorithm

Genetic Algorithms (GA) have been previously applied to Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) in state-of-the-art works in order to find a suitable coding matrix. Nevertheless, none of the presented techniques directly take into account the properties of the ECOC matrix. As a result the considered search space is unnecessarily large. In this paper, a novel Genetic strategy to optimize the ECOC coding step is presented. This novel strategy redefines the usual crossover and mutation operators in order to take into account the theoretical properties of the ECOC framework. Thus, it reduces the search space and lets the algorithm to converge faster. In addition, a novel operator that is able to enlarge the code in a smart way is introduced. The novel methodology is tested on several UCI datasets and four challenging computer vision problems. Furthermore, the analysis of the results done in terms of performance, code length and number of Support Vectors shows that the optimization process is able to find very efficient codes, in terms of the trade-off between classification performance and the number of classifiers. Finally, classification performance per dichotomizer results shows that the novel proposal is able to obtain similar or even better results while defining a more compact number of dichotomies and SVs compared to state-of-the-art approaches.     

Sentiment visualization and classification via semi-supervised nonlinear dimensionality reduction

Sentiment analysis, which detects the subjectivity or polarity of documents, is one of the fundamental tasks in text data analytics. Recently, the number of documents available online and offline is increasing dramatically, and preprocessed text data have more features. This development makes analysis more complex to be analyzed effectively. This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised Laplacian eigenmap (SS-LE). The SS-LE removes redundant features effectively by decreasing detection errors of sentiments. Moreover, it enables visualization of documents in perceptible low dimensional embedded space to provide a useful tool for text analytics. The proposed method is evaluated using multi-domain review data set in sentiment visualization and classification by comparing other dimensionality reduction methods. SS-LE provides a better similarity measure in the visualization result by separating positive and negative documents properly. Sentiment classification models trained over reduced data by SS-LE show higher accuracy. Overall, experimental results suggest that SS-LE has the potential to be used to visualize documents for the ease of analysis and to train a predictive model in sentiment analysis. SS-LE can also be applied to any other partially annotated text data sets.     

k-NN classification of handwritten characters via accelerated GAT correlation

This paper addresses the problem of reinforcing the ability of the k-NN classification of handwritten characters via distortion-tolerant template matching techniques with a limited quantity of data. We compare three kinds of matching techniques: the conventional simple correlation, the tangent distance, and the global affine transformation (GAT) correlation. Although the k-NN classification method is straightforward and powerful, it consumes a lot of time. Therefore, to reduce the computational cost of matching in k-NN classification, we propose accelerating the GAT correlation method by reformulating its computational model and adopting efficient lookup tables. Recognition experiments performed on the IPTP CDROM1B handwritten numerical database show that the matching techniques of the simple correlation, the tangent distance, and the accelerated GAT correlation achieved recognition rates of 97.07%, 97.50%, and 98.70%, respectively. The computation time ratios of the tangent distance and the accelerated GAT correlation to the simple correlation are 26.3 and 36.5 to 1.0, respectively.     

Using ontology-based text classification to assist Job Hazard Analysis

The dangers of the construction industry due to the risk of fatal hazards, such as falling from extreme heights, being struck by heavy equipment or materials, and the possibility of electrocution, are well known. The concept of Job Hazard Analysis is commonly used to mitigate and control these occupational hazards. This technique analyzes the major tasks in a construction activity, identifies all potential task-related hazards, and suggests safe approaches to reduce or avoid each of these hazards. In this paper, the authors explore the possibility of leveraging existing construction safety resources to assist JHA, aiming to reduce the level of human effort required. Specifically, the authors apply ontology-based text classification (TC) to match safe approaches identified in existing resources with unsafe scenarios. These safe approaches can serve as initial references and enrich the solution space when performing JHA. Various document modification strategies are applied to existing resources in order to achieve superior TC effectiveness. The end result of this research is a construction safety domain ontology and its underlying knowledge base. A user scenario is also discussed to demonstrate how the ontology supports JHA in practice.     

基于特征融合的核量化图像分类方法

局部特征和全局特征是图像的两种重要的特征描述,在图像分类时起着至关重要的作用。据此提出一种通过融合全局与局部特征核量化图像分类方法。首先,分析全局特征及局部特征各自优缺点,并对图像进行特征提取;其次,通过核方法将特征映射到适当的高维空间中,来进行码书的获取与量化,并进行特征的融合以更好地对图像进行描述;最后,采用基于直方图交叉核的支持向量机对获取的量化特征进行分类。通过实验证明了所提出的方法的可行性。     

面向增量同生主题的维吾尔文爬虫的研究

针对传统的主题爬虫对网页信息缺乏在知识层面上的处理和理解的问题进行了研究,提出了一种面向增量同生主题的维吾尔文爬虫,通过建立一个增量主题词库优化传统的主题模型,来描述维吾尔文关键词的应用语境及场景,提高了计算网页相关度的准确率。用改进的IC主题敏感算法来预测子页面优先级,过滤无关的网页地址。依据上述方法编写爬虫系统,用构建的维吾尔文语料库进行实验,表明了基于此模型的爬虫具有更好的稳定性和准确度。     

文本分类中训练集相关数量指标的影响研究

针对训练集对分类性能的影响,从训练集的文本数、类别数以及特征项数这三项数量指标出发进行研究。使用多因素方差分析方法及多种语料库定量探讨该三项数量指标对分类性能的影响规律。结果发现特征项数对分类性能的影响在不同的文本数和类别数时是不同的,分类性能受训练集的这三项指标的交互影响,通过对训练集的这三项指标进行优化,提出了从分类算法、特征项选择法以外提高分类性能的途径。在真实数据上的实验结果表明,该方法可有效提高分类性能。