Cascade detectors have been shown to operate extremely rapidly, with high accuracy, and have important applications such as face detection. Driven by this success, cascade earning has been an area of active research in recent years. Nevertheless, there are still challenging technical problems during the training process of cascade detectors. In particular, determining the optimal target detection rate for each stage of the cascade remains an unsolved issue. In this paper, we propose the multiple instance pruning (MIP) algorithm for soft cascades. This algorithm computes a set of thresholds which aggressively terminate computation with no reduction in detection rate or increase in false positive rate on the training dataset. The algorithm is based on two key insights: i) examples that are destined to be rejected by the complete classifier can be safely pruned early; ii) face detection is a multiple instance learning problem. The MIP process is fully automatic and requires no assumptions of probability distributions, statistical independence, or ad hoc intermediate rejection targets. Experimental results on the MIT+CMU dataset demonstrate significant performance advantages.

We propose a Bayesian undirected graphical model for co-training, or more generally for semi-supervised multi-view learning. This makes explicit the previously unstated assumptions of a large class of co-training type algorithms, and also clarifies the circumstances under which these assumptions fail. Building upon new insights from this model, we propose an improved method for co-training, which is a novel co-training kernel for Gaussian process classifiers. The resulting approach is convex and avoids local-maxima problems, unlike some previous multi-view learning methods. Furthermore, it can automatically estimate how much each view should be trusted, and thus accommodate noisy or unreliable views. Experiments on toy data and real world data sets illustrate the benefits of this approach.

The classical hypothesis, that bottom-up saliency is a center-surround process, is combined with a more recent hypothesis that all saliency decisions are optimal in a decision-theoretic sense. The combined hypothesis is denoted as discriminant center-surround saliency, and the corresponding optimal saliency architecture is derived. This architecture equates the saliency of each image location to the discriminant power of a set of features with respect to the classification problem that opposes stimuli at center and surround, at that location. It is shown that the resulting saliency detector makes accurate quantitative predictions for various aspects of the psychophysics of human saliency, including non-linear properties beyond the reach of previous saliency models. Furthermore, it is shown that discriminant center-surround saliency can be easily generalized to various stimulus modalities (such as color, orientation and motion), and provides optimal solutions for many other saliency problems of interest for computer vision. Optimal solutions, under this hypothesis, are derived for a number of the former (including static natural images, dense motion fields, and even dynamic textures), and applied to a number of the latter (the prediction of human eye fixations, motion-based saliency in the presence of ego-motion, and motion-based saliency in the presence of highly dynamic backgrounds). In result, discriminant saliency is shown to predict eye fixations better than previous models, and produce background subtraction algorithms that outperform the state-of-the-art in computer vision.

Current object recognition systems can only recognize a limited number of object categories; scaling up to many categories is the next challenge. We seek to build a system to recognize and localize many different object categories in complex scenes. We achieve this through a simple approach: by matching the input image, inan appropriate representation, to images in a large training set of labeled images. Due to regularities in object identities across similar scenes, the retrieved matches provide hypotheses for object identities and locations. We build a probabilistic modelto transfer the labels from the retrieval set to the input image. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach and study algorithm component contributions using held-out test sets from the LabelMe database.

Traditional analysis methods for single-trial classification of electro-encephalography (EEG) focus on two types of paradigms: phase locked methods, in which the amplitude of the signal is used as the feature for classification, i.e. event related potentials; and second order methods, in which the feature of interest is the power of the signal, i.e event related (de)synchronization. The process of deciding which paradigm to use is ad hoc and is driven by knowledge of neurological findings. Here we propose a unified method in which the algorithm learns the best first and second order spatial and temporal features for classification of EEG based on a bilinear model. The efficiency of the method is demonstrated in simulated and real EEG from a benchmark data set for Brain Computer Interface.

This paper studies boosting algorithms that make a single pass over a set of base classifiers. Wefirst analyze a one-pass algorithm in the setting of boosting with diverse base classifiers. Our guarantee is the same as the best proved for any boosting algorithm, butour one-pass algorithm is much faster than previous approaches. We next exhibit a random source of examples for which a "picky" variant of AdaBoost thatskips poor base classifiers can outperform the standard AdaBoost algorithm, whichuses every base classifier, by an exponential factor. Experiments with Reuters and synthetic data show that one-pass boosting can substantially improveon the accuracy of Naive Bayes, and that picky boosting can sometimes lead to a further improvement in accuracy.

We present a new analysis for the combination of binary classifiers. We propose a theoretical framework based on the Neyman-Pearson lemma to analyze combinations of classifiers. In particular, we give a method for finding the optimal decision rule for a combination of classifiers and prove that it has the optimal ROC curve. We also show how our method generalizes and improves on previous work on combining classifiers and generating ROC curves.

Motivation: Profile hidden Markov Models (pHMMs) are a popular and very useful tool in the detection of the remote homologue protein families. Unfortunately, their performance is not always satisfactory when proteins are in the 'twilight zone'. We present HMMER-STRUCT, a model construction algorithm and tool that tries to improve pHMM performance by using structural information while training pHMMs. As a first step, HMMER-STRUCT constructs a set of pHMMs. Each pHMM is constructed by weighting each residue in an aligned protein according to a specific structural property of the residue. Properties used were primary, secondary and tertiary structures, accessibility and packing. HMMER-STRUCT then prioritizes the results by voting. Results: We used the SCOP database to perform our experiments. Throughout, we apply leave-one-family-out cross-validation over protein superfamilies. First, we used the MAMMOTH-mult structural aligner to align the training set proteins. Then, we performed two sets of experiments. In a first experiment, we compared structure weighted models against standard pHMMs and against each other. In a second experiment, we compared the voting model against individual pHMMs. We compare method performance through ROC curves and through Precision/Recall curves, and assess significance through the paired two tailed t-test. Our results show significant performance improvements of all structurally weighted models over default HMMER, and a significant improvement in sensitivity of the combined models over both the original model and the structurally weighted models.

This paper proposes a novel solution to spam detection inspired by a model of the adaptive immune system known as the crossregulation model. We report on the testing of a preliminary algorithm on six e-mail corpora. We also compare our results statically and dynamically with those obtained by the Naive Bayes classifier and another binary classification method we developed previously for biomedical text-mining applications. We show that the cross-regulation model is competitive against those and thus promising as a bio-inspired algorithm for spam detection in particular, and binary classification in general.

Many complex disease syndromes such as asthma consist of a large number of highly related, rather than independent, clinical phenotypes, raising a new technical challenge in identifying genetic variations associated simultaneously with correlated traits. In this study, we propose a new statistical framework called graph-guided fused lasso (GFlasso) to address this issue in a principled way. Our approach explicitly represents the dependency structure among the quantitative traits as a network, and leverages this trait network to encode structured regularizations in a multivariate regression model over the genotypes and traits, so that the genetic markers that jointly influence subgroups of highly correlated traits can be detected with high sensitivity and specificity. While most of the traditional methods examined each phenotype independently and combined the results afterwards, our approach analyzes all of the traits jointly in a single statistical method, and borrow information across correlated phenotypes to discover the genetic markers that perturbe a subset of correlated triats jointly rather than a single trait. Using simulated datasets based on the HapMap consortium data and an asthma dataset, we compare the performance of our method with the single-marker analysis, and other sparse regression methods such as the ridge regression and the lasso that do not use any structural information in the traits. Our results show that there is a significant advantage in detecting the true causal SNPs when we incorporate the correlation pattern in traits using our proposed methods.