The performance of EEGbased Brain-Computer-Interfaces (BCIs) critically depends on the extraction of features from the EEG carrying information relevant for the classification of different mental states. For BCIs employing imaginary movements of different limbs, the method of Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) has been shown to achieve excellent classification results. The CSP-algorithm however suffers from a lack of robustness, requiring training data without artifacts for good performance. To overcome this lack of robustness, we propose an adaptive spatial filter that replaces the training data in the CSP approach by a-priori information. More specifically, we design an adaptive spatial filter that maximizes the ratio of the variance of the electric field originating in a predefined region of interest (ROI) and the overall variance of the measured EEG. Since it is known that the component of the EEG used for discriminating imaginary movements originates in the motor cortex, we design two adaptive spatial filters with the ROIs centered in the hand areas of the left and right motor cortex. We then use these to classify EEG data recorded during imaginary movements of the right and left hand of three subjects, and show that the adaptive spatial filters outperform the CSP-algorithm, enabling classification rates of up to 94.7 % without artifact rejection.

We propose two statistical tests to determine if two samples are from different distributions. Our test statistic is in both cases the distance between the means of the two samples mapped into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The first test is based on a large deviation bound for the test statistic, while the second is based on the asymptotic distribution of this statistic.

Pyramid intersection is an efficient method for computing an approximate partial matching between two sets of feature vectors. We introduce a novel pyramid embedding based on a hierarchy of non-uniformly shaped bins that takes advantage of the underlying structure of the feature space and remains accurate even for sets with high-dimensional feature vectors. The matching similarity is computed in linear time and forms a Mercer kernel. Whereas previous matching approximation algorithms suffer from distortion factors that increase linearly with the feature dimension, we demonstrate that our approach can maintain constant accuracy even as the feature dimension increases. When used as a kernel in a discriminative classifier, our approach achieves improved object recognition results over a state-of-the-art set kernel.

By adopting Gaussian process priors a fully Bayesian solution to the problem of integrating possibly heterogeneous data sets within a classification setting is presented. Approximate inference schemes employing Variational & Expectation Propagation based methods are developed and rigorously assessed. We demonstrate our approach to integrating multiple data sets on a large scale protein fold prediction problem where we infer the optimal combinations of covariance functions and achieve state-of-the-art performance without resorting to any ad hoc parameter tuning and classifier combination.

Many computer aided diagnosis (CAD) problems can be best modelled as a multiple-instance learning (MIL) problem with unbalanced data: i.e., the training data typically consists of a few positive bags, and a very large number of negative instances. Existing MIL algorithms are much too computationally expensive for these datasets. We describe CH, a framework for learning a Convex Hull representation of multiple instances that is significantly faster than existing MIL algorithms. Our CH framework applies to any standard hyperplane-based learning algorithm, and for some algorithms, is guaranteed to find the global optimal solution. Experimental studies on two different CAD applications further demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly improves diagnostic accuracy when compared to both MIL and traditional classifiers. Although not designed for standard MIL problems (which have both positive and negative bags and relatively balanced datasets), comparisons against other MIL methods on benchmark problems also indicate that the proposed method is competitive with the state-of-the-art.

In this paper we introduce and experiment with a framework for learning local perceptual distance functions for visual recognition. We learn a distance function for each training image as a combination of elementary distances between patch-based visual features. We apply these combined local distance functions to the tasks of image retrieval and classification of novel images. On the Caltech 101 object recognition benchmark, we achieve 60.3% mean recognition across classes using 15 training images per class, which is better than the best published performance by Zhang, et al.

This paper proposes a new approach to model-based clustering under prior knowledge. The proposed formulation can be interpreted from two different angles: as penalized logistic regression, where the class labels are only indirectly observed (via the probability density of each class); as finite mixture learning under a grouping prior. To estimate the parameters of the proposed model, we derive a (generalized) EM algorithm with a closed-form E-step, in contrast with other recent approaches to semi-supervised probabilistic clustering which require Gibbs sampling or suboptimal shortcuts. We show that our approach is ideally suited for image segmentation: it avoids the combinatorial nature Markov random field priors, and opens the door to more sophisticated spatial priors (e.g., wavelet-based) in a simple and computationally efficient way. Finally, we extend our formulation to work in unsupervised, semi-supervised, or discriminative modes.

The standard Support Vector Machine formulation does not provide its user with the ability to explicitly control the number of support vectors used to define the generated classifier. We present a modified version of SVM that allows the user to set a budget parameter B and focuses on minimizing the loss attained by the B worst-classified examples while ignoring the remaining examples. This idea can be used to derive sparse versions of both L1-SVM and L2-SVM. Technically, we obtain these new SVM variants by replacing the 1-norm in the standard SVM formulation with various interpolation-norms. We also adapt the SMO optimization algorithm to our setting and report on some preliminary experimental results.

Gaussian data is pervasive and many learning algorithms (e.g., k-means) model their inputs as a single sample drawn from a multivariate Gaussian. However, in many real-life settings, each input object is best described by multiple samples drawn from a multivariate Gaussian. Such data can arise, for example, in a movie review database where each movie is rated by several users, or in time-series domains such as sensor networks. Here, each input can be naturally described by both a mean vector and covariance matrix which parameterize the Gaussian distribution. In this paper, we consider the problem of clustering such input objects, each represented as a multivariate Gaussian. We formulate the problem using an information theoretic approach and draw several interesting theoretical connections to Bregman divergences and also Bregman matrix divergences. We evaluate our method across several domains, including synthetic data, sensor network data, and a statistical debugging application.

We consider the problem of learning accurate models from multiple sources of "nearby" data. Given distinct samples from multiple data sources and estimates of the dissimilarities between these sources, we provide a general theory of which samples should be used to learn models for each source. This theory is applicable in a broad decision-theoretic learning framework, and yields results for classification and regression generally, and for density estimation within the exponential family. A key component of our approach is the development of approximate triangle inequalities for expected loss, which may be of independent interest.