Two developments of nonlinear latent variable models based on radial basis functions are discussed: in the first, the use of priors or constraints on allowable models is considered as a means of preserving data structure in low-dimensional representations for visualisation purposes. Also, a resampling approach is introduced which makes more effective use of the latent samples in evaluating the likelihood.

In supervised learning, we have a set of explicative variables x from which we wish to predict a response variable y.

AR-NNs are a natural generalization of the classic linear autoregressive AR(p) process (2) See, e.g., Brockwell & Davis (1987) for a comprehensive introduction into AR and ARMA (autoregressive moving average) models. F. Leisch, A. Trapletti and K. Hornik 268 One of the most central questions in linear time series theory is the stationarity of the model, i.e., whether the probabilistic structure of the series is constant over time or at least asymptotically constant (when not started in equilibrium). Surprisingly, this question has not gained much interest in the NN literature, especially there are-up to our knowledge-no results giving conditions for the stationarity of AR NN models. There are results on the stationarity of Hopfield nets (Wang & Sheng, 1996), but these nets cannot be used to estimate conditional expectations for time series prediction. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In Section 2 we recall some results from time series analysis and Markov chain theory defining the relationship between a time series and its associated Markov chain. In Section 3 we use these results to establish that standard AR-NN models without shortcut connections are stationary. We also give conditions for AR-NN models with shortcut connections to be stationary. Section 4 examines the NN modeling of an important class of non-stationary to the appendix.time

Following recent results [9, 8] showing the importance of the fatshattering dimensionin explaining the beneficial effect of a large margin on generalization performance, the current paper investigates theimplications of these results for the case of imbalanced datasets and develops two approaches to setting the threshold. The approaches are incorporated into ThetaBoost, a boosting algorithm fordealing with unequal loss functions. The performance of ThetaBoost and the two approaches are tested experimentally.

On the other hand, in 804 P.J Phillips face recognition, there are many individuals (classes), and only a few images (samples) per person, and algorithms must recognize faces by extrapolating from the training samples. In numerous applications there can be only one training sample (image) of each person. Support vector machines (SVMs) are formulated to solve a classical two class pattern recognition problem. We adapt SVM to face recognition by modifying the interpretation of the output of a SVM classifier and devising a representation of facial images that is concordant with a two class problem. Traditional SVM returns a binary value, the class of the object.

We present a stochastic clustering algorithm based on pairwise similarity ofdatapoints. Our method extends existing deterministic methods, including agglomerative algorithms, min-cut graph algorithms, andconnected components. Thus it provides a common framework for all these methods. Our graph-based method differs from existing stochastic methods which are based on analogy to physical systems. The stochastic nature of our method makes it more robust against noise, including accidental edges and small spurious clusters. We demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm using an example with 3 spiraling bands and a lot of noise. 1 Introduction Clustering algorithms can be divided into two categories: those that require a vectorial representationof the data, and those which use only pairwise representation. In the former case, every data item must be represented as a vector in a real normed space, while in the second case only pairwise relations of similarity or dissimilarity areused.

In supervised learning, we have a set of explicative variables x from which we wish to predict aresponse variable y.

Two developments of nonlinear latent variable models based on radial basis functions are discussed: in the first, the use of priors or constraints on allowable models is considered as a means of preserving data structure in low-dimensional representations for visualisation purposes. Also, a resampling approach is introduced which makes more effective use of the latent samples in evaluating the likelihood.

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is an iterative procedure formaximum likelihood parameter estimation from data sets with missing or hidden variables [2]. It has been applied to system identification in linear stochastic state-space models, where the state variables are hidden from the observer and both the state and the parameters of the model have to be estimated simultaneously [9].We present a generalization of the EM algorithm for parameter estimation in nonlinear dynamical systems. The "expectation" stepmakes use of Extended Kalman Smoothing to estimate the state, while the "maximization" step re-estimates the parameters usingthese uncertain state estimates. In general, the nonlinear maximization step is difficult because it requires integrating out the uncertainty in the states. However, if Gaussian radial basis function (RBF)approximators are used to model the nonlinearities, the integrals become tractable and the maximization step can be solved via systems of linear equations.

We propose a new in-sample cross validation based method (randomized GACV) for choosing smoothing or bandwidth parameters that govern the bias-variance or fit-complexity tradeoff in'soft' classification. Soft classification refersto a learning procedure which estimates the probability that an example with a given attribute vector is in class 1 vs class O. The target for optimizing the the tradeoff is the Kullback-Liebler distance between the estimated probability distribution and the'true' probability distribution,representing knowledge of an infinite population. The method uses a randomized estimate of the trace of a Hessian and mimics cross validation at the cost of a single relearning with perturbed outcome data.