Time series classification (TSC) is a challenging task that attracted many researchers in the last few years. One main challenge in TSC is the diversity of domains where time series data come from. Thus, there is no "one model that fits all" in TSC. Some algorithms are very accurate in classifying a specific type of time series when the whole series is considered, while some only target the existence/non-existence of specific patterns/shapelets. Yet other techniques focus on the frequency of occurrences of discriminating patterns/features. This paper presents a new classification technique that addresses the inherent diversity problem in TSC using a nature-inspired method. The technique is stimulated by how flies look at the world through "compound eyes" that are made up of thousands of lenses, called ommatidia. Each ommatidium is an eye with its own lens, and thousands of them together create a broad field of vision. The developed technique similarly uses different lenses and representations to look at the time series, and then combines them for broader visibility. These lenses have been created through hyper-parameterisation of symbolic representations (Piecewise Aggregate and Fourier approximations). The algorithm builds a random forest for each lens, then performs soft dynamic voting for classifying new instances using the most confident eyes, i.e, forests. We evaluate the new technique, coined Co-eye, using the recently released extended version of UCR archive, containing more than 100 datasets across a wide range of domains. The results show the benefits of bringing together different perspectives reflecting on the accuracy and robustness of Co-eye in comparison to other state-of-the-art techniques.

When inspecting a classification model's performance, a confusion matrix tells you the distribution of the predictions and targets. For each combination, we can count how many times the model made that prediction for an observation with that target. This is often more useful than the various metrics, as it reveals any class imbalances and tells us which classes the model tend to confuse. An accuracy score of 90% may, for instance, seem very high. Without the context though, this is impossible to judge.

Network method of moments arXiv:1202.5101 is an important tool for nonparametric network inferences. However, there has been little investigation on accurate descriptions of the sampling distributions of network moment statistics. In this paper, we present the first higher-order accurate approximation to the sampling CDF of a studentized network moment by Edgeworth expansion. In sharp contrast to classical literature on noiseless U-statistics, we showed that the Edgeworth expansion of a network moment statistic as a noisy U-statistic can achieve higher-order accuracy without non-lattice or smoothness assumptions but just requiring weak regularity conditions. Behind this result is our surprising discovery that the two typically-hated factors in network analysis, namely, sparsity and edge-wise observational errors, jointly play a blessing role, contributing a crucial self-smoothing effect in the network moment statistic and making it analytically tractable. Our assumptions match the minimum requirements in related literature. For practitioners, our empirical Edgeworth expansion is highly accurate and computationally efficient. It is also easy to implement. These were demonstrated by comprehensive simulation studies. We showcase three applications of our results in network inference. We proved, to our knowledge, for the first time that some network bootstraps enjoy higher-order accuracy, and provided theoretical guidance for tuning network sub-sampling. We also derived a one-sample test and Cornish-Fisher confidence interval for any given moment, both with analytical formulation and explicit error rates.

Computer vision algorithms, e.g. for face recognition, favour groups of individuals that are better represented in the training data. This happens because of the generalization that classifiers have to make. It is simpler to fit the majority groups as this fit is more important to overall error. We propose to create a balanced training dataset, consisting of the original dataset plus new data points in which the group memberships are intervened, minorities become majorities and vice versa. We show that current generative adversarial networks are a powerful tool for learning these data points, called contrastive examples. We experiment with the equalized odds bias measure on tabular data as well as image data (CelebA and Diversity in Faces datasets). Contrastive examples allow us to expose correlations between group membership and other seemingly neutral features. Whenever a causal graph is available, we can put those contrastive examples in the perspective of counterfactuals.

Rapid damage assessment is one of the core tasks that response organizations perform at the onset of a disaster to understand the scale of damage to infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and buildings. This work analyzes the usefulness of social media imagery content to perform rapid damage assessment during a real-world disaster. An automatic image processing system, which was activated in collaboration with a volunteer response organization, processed ~280K images to understand the extent of damage caused by the disaster. The system achieved an accuracy of 76% computed based on the feedback received from the domain experts who analyzed ~29K system-processed images during the disaster. An extensive error analysis reveals several insights and challenges faced by the system, which are vital for the research community to advance this line of research.

Concept drift refers to changes in the distribution of underlying data and is an inherent property of evolving data streams. Ensemble learning, with dynamic classifiers, has proved to be an efficient method of handling concept drift. However, the best way to create and maintain ensemble diversity with evolving streams is still a challenging problem. In contrast to estimating diversity via inputs, outputs, or classifier parameters, we propose a diversity measurement based on whether the ensemble members agree on the probability of a regional distribution change. In our method, estimations over regional distribution changes are used as instance weights. Constructing different region sets through different schemes will lead to different drift estimation results, thereby creating diversity. The classifiers that disagree the most are selected to maximize diversity. Accordingly, an instance-based ensemble learning algorithm, called the diverse instance weighting ensemble (DiwE), is developed to address concept drift for data stream classification problems. Evaluations of various synthetic and real-world data stream benchmarks show the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed algorithm.

Analyzing the ever-increasing volume of posts on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter requires improved information processing methods for profiling authorship. Document classification is central to this task, but the performance of traditional supervised classifiers has degraded as the volume of social media has increased. This paper addresses this problem in the context of gender detection through ensemble classification that employs multi-model deep learning architectures to generate specialized understanding from different feature spaces.

Local learning methods are a popular class of machine learning algorithms. The basic idea for the entire cadre is to choose some non-local model family, to train many of them on small sections of neighboring data, and then to `stitch' the resulting models together in some way. Due to the limits of constraining a training dataset to a small neighborhood, research on locally-learned models has largely been restricted to simple model families. Also, since simple model families have no complex structure by design, this has limited use of the individual local models to predictive tasks. We hypothesize that, using a sufficiently complex local model family, various properties of the individual local models, such as their learned parameters, can be used as features for further learning. This dissertation improves upon the current state of research and works toward establishing this hypothesis by investigating algorithms for localization of more complex model families and by studying their applications beyond predictions as a feature extraction mechanism. We summarize this generic technique of using local models as a feature extraction step with the term ``local model feature transformations.'' In this document, we extend the local modeling paradigm to Gaussian processes, orthogonal quadric models and word embedding models, and extend the existing theory for localized linear classifiers. We then demonstrate applications of local model feature transformations to epileptic event classification from EEG readings, activity monitoring via chest accelerometry, 3D surface reconstruction, 3D point cloud segmentation, handwritten digit classification and event detection from Twitter feeds.

The task of detecting anomalous data patterns is as important in practical applications as challenging. In the context of spatial data, recognition of unexpected trajectories brings additional difficulties, such as high dimensionality and varying pattern lengths. We aim to tackle such a problem from a probability density estimation point of view, since it provides an unsupervised procedure to identify out of distribution samples. More specifically, we pursue an approach based on normalizing flows, a recent framework that enables complex density estimation from data with neural networks. Our proposal computes exact model likelihood values, an important feature of normalizing flows, for each segment of the trajectory. Then, we aggregate the segments' likelihoods into a single coherent trajectory anomaly score. Such a strategy enables handling possibly large sequences with different lengths. We evaluate our methodology, named aggregated anomaly detection with normalizing flows (GRADINGS), using real world trajectory data and compare it with more traditional anomaly detection techniques. The promising results obtained in the performed computational experiments indicate the feasibility of the GRADINGS, specially the variant that considers autoregressive normalizing flows.

Concept drift describes unforeseeable changes in the underlying distribution of streaming data over time. Concept drift research involves the development of methodologies and techniques for drift detection, understanding and adaptation. Data analysis has revealed that machine learning in a concept drift environment will result in poor learning results if the drift is not addressed. To help researchers identify which research topics are significant and how to apply related techniques in data analysis tasks, it is necessary that a high quality, instructive review of current research developments and trends in the concept drift field is conducted. In addition, due to the rapid development of concept drift in recent years, the methodologies of learning under concept drift have become noticeably systematic, unveiling a framework which has not been mentioned in literature. This paper reviews over 130 high quality publications in concept drift related research areas, analyzes up-to-date developments in methodologies and techniques, and establishes a framework of learning under concept drift including three main components: concept drift detection, concept drift understanding, and concept drift adaptation. This paper lists and discusses 10 popular synthetic datasets and 14 publicly available benchmark datasets used for evaluating the performance of learning algorithms aiming at handling concept drift. Also, concept drift related research directions are covered and discussed. By providing state-of-the-art knowledge, this survey will directly support researchers in their understanding of research developments in the field of learning under concept drift.