This course is for you If you are being fascinated by the field of Machine Learning? This course is designed to cover one of the most interesting areas of machine learning called classification. I will take you step-by-step in this course and will first cover the basics of MATLAB. Following that we will look into the details of how to use different machine learning algorithms using MATLAB. Specifically, we will be looking at the MATLAB toolbox called statistic and machine learning toolbox.We will implement some of the most commonly used classification algorithms such as K-Nearest Neighbor, Naive Bayes, Discriminant Analysis, Decision Tress, Support Vector Machines, Error Correcting Ouput Codes and Ensembles. Following that we will be looking at how to cross validate these models and how to evaluate their performances.

Many data science issues have to be addressed through unbalanced datasets. Indeed, it may be quite affordable to gather data on the representatives of a given pathology in medicine, or positive operating scenarios of machines in the industry [1]. The related complementary occurrences are, by contrast, scarce and/or expensive to raise. The practice of One-Class Classification (OCC) has been developed within this consideration [1, 2]. One-class classifiers are trained on a single class sample, in the possible presence of a few counterexamples. The related issue consists of understanding and isolating a given class from the rest of the universe. The resulting model allows to predict target (or positive) patterns and to reject outlier (or negative) ones. One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) is a popular OCC method [3, 4]. Statistics-based techniques such as Gaussian models and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) [5] are also commonly considered as respectively parametric and nonparametric approaches to estimate a sample distribution.

In the era of "big data", it is becoming more of a challenge to not only build state-of-the-art predictive models, but also gain an understanding of what's really going on in the data. For example, it is often of interest to know which, if any, of the predictors in a fitted model are relatively influential on the predicted outcome. Some modern algorithms---like random forests and gradient boosted decision trees---have a natural way of quantifying the importance or relative influence of each feature. Other algorithms---like naive Bayes classifiers and support vector machines---are not capable of doing so and model-free approaches are generally used to measure each predictor's importance. In this paper, we propose a standardized, model-based approach to measuring predictor importance across the growing spectrum of supervised learning algorithms. Our proposed method is illustrated through both simulated and real data examples. The R code to reproduce all of the figures in this paper is available in the supplementary materials.

While the term "machine learning" generally relates to understanding structures or patterns in data, it can also refer to a very diverse set of activities and techniques. Most of us have experienced machine learning in our everyday lives with natural language processing (Alexa, Siri), image recognition (Facebook, Pinterest), purchase recommendations (Amazon) and search optimization (Google). These approaches generally use many different types of algorithms (e.g., neural networks, decision trees, clustering, support vector machines, etc.) Industrial operations, on the other hand, need more specialized approaches that can provide actionable insights to reduce downtime as well as improve throughput, operator safety, and product quality. Whether you call it Industry 4.0 or Industrial IoT or Digital Operations, the increased access to operational data, combined with the spread of computing, connectivity, and storage, has created the perfect environment for transforming industrial operations. The real opportunity is in unlocking the value of this data.

Region-based classification of PolSAR data can be effectively performed by seeking for the assignment that minimizes a distance between prototypes and segments. Silva et al (2013) used stochastic distances between complex multivariate Wishart models which, differently from other measures, are computationally tractable. In this work we assess the robustness of such approach with respect to errors in the training stage, and propose an extension that alleviates such problems. We introduce robustness in the process by incorporating a combination of radial basis kernel functions and stochastic distances with Support Vector Machines (SVM). We consider several stochastic distances between Wishart: Bhatacharyya, Kullback-Leibler, Chi-Square, R\'{e}nyi, and Hellinger. We perform two case studies with PolSAR images, both simulated and from actual sensors, and different classification scenarios to compare the performance of Minimum Distance and SVM classification frameworks. With this, we model the situation of imperfect training samples. We show that SVM with the proposed kernel functions achieves better performance with respect to Minimum Distance, at the expense of more computational resources and the need of parameter tuning. Code and data are provided for reproducibility.

Neural networks in many varieties are touted as very powerful machine learning tools because of their ability to distill large amounts of information from different forms of data, extracting complex features and enabling powerful classification abilities. In this study, we use neural networks to extract features from both images and numeric data and use these extracted features as inputs for other machine learning models, namely support vector machines (SVMs) and k-nearest neighbor classifiers (KNNs), in order to see if neural-network-extracted features enhance the capabilities of these models. We tested 7 different neural network architectures in this manner, 4 for images and 3 for numeric data, training each for varying lengths of time and then comparing the results of the neural network independently to those of an SVM and KNN on the data, and finally comparing these results to models of SVM and KNN trained using features extracted via the neural network architecture. This process was repeated on 3 different image datasets and 2 different numeric datasets. The results show that, in many cases, the features extracted using the neural network significantly improve the capabilities of SVMs and KNNs compared to running these algorithms on the raw features, and in some cases also surpass the performance of the neural network alone. This in turn suggests that it may be a reasonable practice to use neural networks as a means to extract features for classification by other machine learning models for some datasets.

Mosquitoes are vectors of many human diseases. In particular, Aedes \ae gypti (Linnaeus) is the main vector for Chikungunya, Dengue, and Zika viruses in Latin America and it represents a global threat. Public health policies that aim at combating this vector require dependable and timely information, which is usually expensive to obtain with field campaigns. For this reason, several efforts have been done to use remote sensing due to its reduced cost. The present work includes the temporal modeling of the oviposition activity (measured weekly on 50 ovitraps in a north Argentinean city) of Aedes \ae gypti (Linnaeus), based on time series of data extracted from operational earth observation satellite images. We use are NDVI, NDWI, LST night, LST day and TRMM-GPM rain from 2012 to 2016 as predictive variables. In contrast to previous works which use linear models, we employ Machine Learning techniques using completely accessible open source toolkits. These models have the advantages of being non-parametric and capable of describing nonlinear relationships between variables. Specifically, in addition to two linear approaches, we assess a Support Vector Machine, an Artificial Neural Networks, a K-nearest neighbors and a Decision Tree Regressor. Considerations are made on parameter tuning and the validation and training approach. The results are compared to linear models used in previous works with similar data sets for generating temporal predictive models. These new tools perform better than linear approaches, in particular Nearest Neighbor Regression (KNNR) performs the best. These results provide better alternatives to be implemented operatively on the Argentine geospatial Risk system that is running since 2012.

This study assesses the influence of the forecast horizon on the forecasting performance of several machine learning techniques. We compare the fo recast accuracy of Support Vector Regression (SVR) to Neural Network (NN) models, using a linear model as a benchmark. We focus on international tourism demand to all seventeen regions of Spain. The SVR with a Gaussian radial basis function kernel outperforms the rest of the models for the longest forecast horizons. We also find that machine learning methods improve their forecasting accuracy with respect to linear models as forecast horizons increase. This result shows the suitability of SVR for medium and long term forecasting.

The continuous dimensional emotion modelled by arousal and valence can depict complex changes of emotions. In this paper, we present our works on arousal and valence predictions for One-Minute-Gradual (OMG) Emotion Challenge. Multimodal representations are first extracted from videos using a variety of acoustic, video and textual models and support vector machine (SVM) is then used for fusion of multimodal signals to make final predictions. Our solution achieves Concordant Correlation Coefficient (CCC) scores of 0.397 and 0.520 on arousal and valence respectively for the validation dataset, which outperforms the baseline systems with the best CCC scores of 0.15 and 0.23 on arousal and valence by a large margin.

We develop a new approach to solving classification problems, in which the labeled training data is viewed as random samples from populations with unknown distributions and we base our analysis on the theory of coherent measures of risk and risk sharing. The proposed approach aims at designing a risk-averse classifier. We stipulate that misclassification in different classes is associated with different risk. Therefore, we employ non-linear (in probability) risk functionals specific to each class. We analyze the structure of the new classifier design problem and establish its theoretical relation to the risk-neutral design problem. In particular, we show that the risk-sharing classification problem is equivalent to an implicitly defined optimization problem with unequal, implicitly defined but unknown weights for each data point. We implement our methodology in a binary classification scenario on several different data sets and carry out numerical comparison with classifiers which are obtained using the Huber loss function and other popular loss functions. In these applications, we use linear support vector machines in order to demonstrate the viability of our method.