Education
Globally Optimal On-line Learning Rules
We present a method for determining the globally optimal online learning rule for a soft committee machine under a statistical mechanics framework. This work complements previous results on locally optimal rules, where only the rate of change in generalization the total reduction inerror was considered. We maximize the whole learning process and show howgeneralization error over the resulting rule can significantly outperform the locally optimal rule. 1 Introduction We consider a learning scenario in which a feed-forward neural network model (the an unknown mapping (the teacher), given a set of training examplesstudent) emulates The performance of the student network is typicallyproduced by the teacher. A common form of training is online learning, where training patterns are presented sequentially and independently to the network at each learning step. This form of training can be beneficial in terms of both storage and computation time, especially for large systems.
A Neural Network Based Head Tracking System
We have constructed an inexpensive video based motorized tracking system that learns to track a head. It uses real time graphical user inputs or an auxiliary infrared detector as supervisory signals to train a convolutional neural network. The inputs to the neural network consist of normalized luminance and chrominance images and motion information from frame differences. Subsampled images are also used to provide scale invariance. During the online training phases the neural network rapidly adjusts the input weights depending up on the reliability of the different channels in the surrounding environment. This quick adaptation allows the system to robustly track a head even when other objects are moving within a cluttered background.
The Error Coding and Substitution PaCTs
A new class of plug in classification techniques have recently been developed inthe statistics and machine learning literature. A plug in classification technique(PaCT) is a method that takes a standard classifier (such as LDA or TREES) and plugs it into an algorithm to produce a new classifier. The standard classifier is known as the Plug in Classifier (PiC).These methods often produce large improvements over using a single classifier. In this paper we investigate one of these methods and give some motivation for its success.
On-line Learning from Finite Training Sets in Nonlinear Networks
Online learning is one of the most common forms of neural network training.We present an analysis of online learning from finite training sets for nonlinear networks (namely, soft-committee machines), advancingthe theory to more realistic learning scenarios. Dynamical equations are derived for an appropriate set of order parameters; these are exact in the limiting case of either linear networks or infinite training sets. Preliminary comparisons with simulations suggest that the theory captures some effects of finite training sets, but may not yet account correctly for the presence of local minima.
Training Methods for Adaptive Boosting of Neural Networks
Schwenk, Holger, Bengio, Yoshua
"Boosting" is a general method for improving the performance of any learning algorithm that consistently generates classifiers which need to perform only slightly better than random guessing. A recently proposed and very promising boosting algorithm is AdaBoost [5]. It has been applied withgreat success to several benchmark machine learning problems using rather simple learning algorithms [4], and decision trees [1, 2, 6]. In this paper we use AdaBoost to improve the performances of neural networks. We compare training methods based on sampling the training set and weighting the cost function. Our system achieves about 1.4% error on a data base of online handwritten digits from more than 200 writers. Adaptive boosting of a multi-layer network achieved 1.5% error on the UCI Letters and 8.1 % error on the UCI satellite data set.
Unsupervised On-line Learning of Decision Trees for Hierarchical Data Analysis
Held, Marcus, Buhmann, Joachim M.
An adaptive online algorithm is proposed to estimate hierarchical data structures for non-stationary data sources. The approach is based on the principle of minimum cross entropy to derive a decision tree for data clustering and it employs a metalearning idea (learning to learn) to adapt to changes in data characteristics. Its efficiency is demonstrated by grouping non-stationary artifical data and by hierarchical segmentation of LANDSAT images. 1 Introduction Unsupervised learning addresses the problem to detect structure inherent in unlabeled andunclassified data. N. The encoding usually is represented by an assignment matrix M (Mia), where Mia 1 if and only if Xi belongs to cluster L: 1 MiaV (Xi, Ya) measures the quality of a data partition, Le., optimal assignments and prototypes (M,y)OPt argminM,y1i (M,Y) minimize the inhomogeneity of clusters w.r.t. a given distance measure V. For reasons of simplicity we restrict the presentation to the ' sum-of-squared-error criterion V(x, y) To facilitate this minimization a deterministic annealing approach was proposed in [5] which maps the discrete optimization problem, i.e. how to determine the data assignments, viathe Maximum Entropy Principle [2] to a continuous parameter es- Unsupervised Online Learning ofDecision Trees for Data Analysis 515 timation problem.