A tailored model of a system is the prerequisite for various analysis tasks, such as anomaly detection, fault identification, or quality assurance. This paper deals with the algorithmic learning of a system’s behavior model given a sample of observations. In particular, we consider real-world production plants where the learned model must capture timing behavior, dependencies between system variables, as well as mode switches—in short: hybrid system’s characteristics. Usually, such model formation tasks are solved by human engineers, entailing the well-known bunch of problems including knowledge acquisition, development cost, or lack of experience. Our contributions to the outlined field are as follows. (1) We present a taxonomy of learning problems related to model formation tasks. As a result, an important open learning problem for the domain of production system is identified: The learning of hybrid timed automata. (2) For this class of models, the learning algorithm HyBUTLA is presented. This algorithm is the first of its kind to solve the underlying model formation problem at scalable precision. (3) We present two case studies that illustrate the usability of this approach in realistic settings. (4) We give a proof for the learning and runtime properties of HyBUTLA.

The goal in Rule Ensemble Learning (REL) is simultaneous discovery of a small set of simple rules and their optimal weights that lead to good generalization. Rules are assumed to be conjunctions of basic propositions concerning the values taken by the input features. It has been shown that rule ensembles for classification can be learnt optimally and efficiently using hierarchical kernel learning approaches that explore the exponentially large space of conjunctions by exploiting its hierarchical structure. The regularizer employed penalizes large features and thereby selects a small set of short features. In this paper, we generalize the rule ensemble learning using hierarchical kernels (RELHKL) framework to multi class structured output spaces. We build on the StructSVM model for sequence prediction problems and employ a ρ-norm hierarchical regularizer for observation features and a conventional 2-norm regularizer for state transition features. The exponentially large feature space is searched using an active set algorithm and the exponentially large set of constraints are handled using a cutting plane algorithm. The approach can be easily extended to other structured output problems. We perform experiments on activity recognition datasets which are prone to noise, sparseness and skewness. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms other approaches.

Recently, besides the performance, the stability (robustness, i.e., the variation in feature selection results due to small changes in the data set) of feature selection is received more attention. Ensemble feature selection where multiple feature selection outputs are combined to yield more robust results without sacrificing the performance is an effective method for stable feature selection. In order to make further improvements of the performance (classification accuracy), the diversity regularized ensemble feature weighting framework is presented, in which the base feature selector is based on local learning with logistic loss for its robustness to huge irrelevant features and small samples. At the same time, the sample complexity of the proposed ensemble feature weighting algorithm is analyzed based on the VC-theory. The experiments on different kinds of data sets show that the proposed ensemble method can achieve higher accuracy than other ensemble ones and other stable feature selection strategy (such as sample weighting) without sacrificing stability

In many real applications, especially those involving data objects with complicated semantics, it is generally desirable to discover the relation between patterns in the input space and labels corresponding to different semantics in the output space. This task becomes feasible with MIML (Multi-Instance Multi-Label learning), a recently developed learning framework, where each data object is represented by multiple instances and is allowed to be associated with multiple labels simultaneously. In this paper, we propose KISAR , an MIML algorithm that is able to discover what instances trigger what labels. By considering the fact that highly relevant labels usually share some patterns, we develop a convex optimization formulation and provide an alternating optimization solution. Experiments show that KISAR is able to discover reasonable relations between input patterns and output labels, and achieves performances that are highly competitive with many state-of-the-art MIML algorithms.

Cross-domain text classification aims to automatically train a precise text classifier for a target domain by using labeled text data from a related source domain. To this end, the distribution gap between different domains has to be reduced. In previous works, a certain number of shared latent features (e.g., latent topics, principal components, etc.) are extracted to represent documents from different domains, and thus reduce the distribution gap. However, only relying the shared latent features as the domain bridge may limit the amount of knowledge transferred. This limitation is more serious when the distribution gap is so large that only a small number of latent features can be shared between domains. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Topic Correlation Analysis (TCA), which extracts both the shared and the domain-specific latent features to facilitate effective knowledge transfer. In TCA, all word features are first grouped into the shared and the domain-specific topics using a joint mixture model. Then the correlations between the two kinds of topics are inferred and used to induce a mapping between the domain-specific topics from different domains. Finally, both the shared and the mapped domain-specific topics are utilized to span a new shared feature space where the supervised knowledge can be effectively transferred. The experimental results on two real-world data sets justify the superiority of the proposed method over the stat-of-the-art baselines.

Humans have an uncanny ability to learn new concepts with very few examples. Cognitive theories have suggested that this is done by utilizing prior experience of related tasks. We propose to emulate this process in machines, by transforming new problems into old ones. These transformations are called metaphors. Obviously, the learner is not given a metaphor, but must acquire one through a learning process. We show that learning metaphors yield better results than existing transfer learning methods. Moreover, we argue that metaphors give a qualitative assessment of task relatedness.

In recent years, several systems have been proposed that learn the rules of a simple card or board game solely from visual demonstration. These systems were constructed for specific games and rely on substantial background knowledge. We introduce a general system for learning board game rules from videos and demonstrate it on several well-known games. The presented algorithm requires only a few demonstrations and minimal background knowledge, and, having learned the rules, automatically derives position evaluation functions and can play the learned games competitively. Our main technique is based on descriptive complexity, i.e. the logical means necessary to define a set of interest. We compute formulas defining allowed moves and final positions in a game in different logics and select the most adequate ones. We show that this method is well-suited for board games and there is strong theoretical evidence that it will generalize to other problems.

A large family of graph-based semi-supervised algorithms have been developed intuitively and pragmatically for the multi-label learning problem. These methods, however, only implicitly exploited the label correlation, as either part of graph weight or an additional constraint, to improve overall classification performance. Despite their seemingly quite different formulations, we show that all existing approaches can be uniformly referred to as a Label Propagation (LP) or Random Walk with Restart (RWR) on a Cartesian Product Graph (CPG). Inspired by this discovery, we introduce a new framework for multi-label classification task, employing the Tensor Product Graph (TPG) — the tensor product of the data graph with the class (label) graph — in which not only the intra-class but also the inter-class associations are explicitly represented as weighted edges among graph vertices. In stead of computing directly on TPG, we derive an iterative algorithm, which is guaranteed to converge and with the same computational complexity and the same amount of storage as the standard label propagation on the original data graph. Applications to four benchmark multi-label data sets illustrate that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches.

It is well known that exploiting label correlations is important for multi-label learning. Existing approaches typically exploit label correlations globally, by assuming that the label correlations are shared by all the instances. In real-world tasks, however, different instances may share different label correlations, and few correlations are globally applicable. In this paper, we propose the ML-LOC approach which allows label correlations to be exploited locally. To encode the local influence of label correlations, we derive a LOC code to enhance the feature representation of each instance. The global discrimination fitting and local correlation sensitivity are incorporated into a unified framework, and an alternating solution is developed for the optimization. Experimental results on a number of image, text and gene data sets validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Recently, training support vector machines with indefinite kernels has attracted great attention in the machine learning community. In this paper, we tackle this problem by formulating a joint optimization model over SVM classifications and kernel principal component analysis. We first reformulate the kernel principal component analysis as a general kernel transformation framework, and then incorporate it into the SVM classification to formulate a joint optimization model. The proposed model has the advantage of making consistent kernel transformations over training and test samples. It can be used for both binary classification and multi-class classification problems. Our experimental results on both synthetic data sets and real world data sets show the proposed model can significantly outperform related approaches.