Statistical Learning
Human Activity Encoding and Recognition Using Low-level Visual Features
Wang, Zheshen (Arizona State University) | Li, Baoxin (Arizona State University)
Automatic recognition of human activities is among the key capabilities of many intelligent systems with vision/perception. Most existing approaches to this problem require sophisticated feature extraction before classification can be performed. This paper presents a novel approach for human action recognition using only simple low-level visual features: motion captured from direct frame differencing. A codebook of key poses is first created from the training data through unsupervised clustering. Videos of actions are then coded as sequences of super-frames, defined as the key poses augmented with discriminative attributes. A weighted-sequence distance is proposed for comparing two super-frame sequences, which is further wrapped as a kernel embedded in a SVM classifier for the final classification. Compared with conventional methods, our approach provides a flexible non-parametric sequential structure with a corresponding distance measure for human action representation and classification without requiring complex feature extraction. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated with the widely-used KTH human activity dataset, for which the proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art.
Generalized Clustergrams for Overlapping Biclusters
Badea, Liviu (National Institute for Research in Informatics)
Many real-life datasets, such as those produced by gene expression studies, exhibit complex substructures at various levels of granularity and thus do not have unique well-defined numbers of clusters. In such cases, it is important to be able to trace the evolution of the individual clusters as the number of dimensions of the clustering is varied. While the dendrograms produced by bottom-up clustering methods such as hierarchical clustering are very useful for this purpose, the approach is known to produce unreliable clusters due to its instability w.r.t. resampling. Moreover, hierarchical clustering does not apply to overlapping (bi)clusters, such as those obtained in gene expression studies. On the other hand, the instability w.r.t. the initialization of top-down methods, such as k-means, prevents the comparison between clusters obtained at different dimensionalities. In this paper, we present a method for constructing generalized dendrograms for overlapping biclusters, which depict the evolution of the biclusters as their number is varied. An essential ingredient is a stable biclustering method based on positive tensor factorization of a number of nonnegative matrix factorization runs. We apply our approach to a large colon cancer dataset, which shows several distinct subclasses whose dimensional evolution must be carefully analyzed to enable a more meaningful biological interpretation and sub-classification.
A Kernel Method for Market Clearing
The problem of market clearing in an economy is that of finding prices such that supply meets demand. In this work, we propose a kernel method to compute nonlinear clearing prices for instances where linear prices do not suffice. We first present a procedure that, given a sample of values and costs for a set of bundles, implicitly computes nonlinear clearing prices by solving an appropriately formulated quadratic program. We then use this as a subroutine in an elicitation procedure that queries demand and supply incrementally over rounds, only as much as needed to reach clearing prices. An empirical evaluation demonstrates that, with a proper choice of kernel function, the method is able to find sparse nonlinear clearing prices with much less than full revelation of values and costs. When the kernel function is not suitable to clear the market, the method can be tuned to achieve approximate clearing.
Knowledge Driven Dimension Reduction For Clustering
Davidson, Ian (University of California - Davis)
However, most dimension reduction approaches are driven by objective functions that may not or only We will provide more detail on our solution to this problem partially suit the end users requirements. In this later but it is important to note the problem of focus in this work, we show how to incorporate general-purpose paper is different to spectral clustering (dimension reduction) domain expertise encoded as a graph into dimension in two keys ways. Firstly, we are projecting the entire space reduction in way that lends itself to an elegant D occupies not just the points in G or D. Secondly, we do generalized eigenvalue problem. We call not formulate the problem as some form of min-cut and then our approach Graph-Driven Constrained Dimension solve a relaxed version of the problem. Reduction via Linear Projection (GCDR-LP) Our work aims to find a reduced dimension space based on and show that it has several desirable properties.
Local Learning Regularized Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
Gu, Quanquan (Tsinghua University) | Zhou, Jie (Tsinghua University)
Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has been widely used in machine learning and data mining. It aims to find two nonnegative matrices whose product can well approximate the nonnegative data matrix, which naturally lead to parts-based representation. In this paper, we present a local learning regularized nonnegative matrix factorization (LLNMF) for clustering. It imposes an additional constraint on NMF that the cluster label of each point can be predicted by the points in its neighborhood. This constraint encodes both the discriminative information and the geometric structure, and is good at clustering data on manifold. An iterative multiplicative updating algorithm is proposed to optimize the objective, and its convergence is guaranteed theoretically. Experiments on many benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms NMF as well as many state of the art clustering methods.
Toward Unsupervised Activity Discovery Using Multi Dimensional Motif Detection in Time Series
Vahdatpour, Alireza (University of California, Los Angeles) | Amini, Navid (University of California, Los Angeles) | Sarrafzadeh, Majid (University of California, Los Angeles)
This paper addresses the problem of activity and event discovery in multi dimensional time series data by proposing a novel method for locating multi dimensional motifs in time series. While recent work has been done in finding single dimensional and multi dimensional motifs in time series, we address motifs in general case, where the elements of multi dimensional motifs have temporal, length, and frequency variations. The proposed method is validated by synthetic data, and empirical evaluation has been done on several wearable systems that are used by real subjects.
Domain Adaptation via Transfer Component Analysis
Pan, Sinno Jialin (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) | Tsang, Ivor W. (Nanyang Technological University) | Kwok, James T. (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) | Yang, Qiang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Domain adaptation solves a learning problem in a target domain by utilizing the training data in a different but related source domain. Intuitively, discovering a good feature representation across domains is crucial. In this paper, we propose to find such a representation through a new learning method, transfer component analysis ( TCA ), for domain adaptation. TCA tries to learn some transfer components across domains in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) using Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). In the subspace spanned by these transfer components , data distributions in different domains are close to each other. As a result, with the new representations in this subspace, we can apply standard machine learning methods to train classifiers or regression models in the source domain for use in the target domain. The main contribution of our work is that we propose a novel feature representation in which to perform domain adaptation via a new parametric kernel using feature extraction methods, which can dramatically minimize the distance between domain distributions by projecting data onto the learned transfer components . Furthermore, our approach can handle large datsets and naturally lead to out-of-sample generalization. The effectiveness and efficiency of our approach in are verified by experiments on two real-world applications: cross-domain indoor WiFi localization and cross-domain text classification.
Drosophila Gene Expression Pattern Annotation through Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning
Li, Ying-Xin (Nanjing University) | Ji, Shuiwang (Arizona State University) | Kumar, Sudhir (Arizona State University) | Ye, Jieping (Arizona State University) | Zhou, Zhi-Hua (Nanjing University)
The Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project (BDGP) has produced a large number of gene expression patterns, many of which have been annotated textually with anatomical and developmental terms. These terms spatially correspond to local regions of the images; however, they are attached collectively to groups of images, such that it is unknown which term is assigned to which region of which image in the group. This poses a challenge to the development of the computational method to automate the textual description of expression patterns contained in each image. In this paper, we show that the underlying nature of this task matches well with Figure 1: Samples of images and associated annotation terms a new machine learning framework, Multi-Instance of the gene Actn in the stage ranges 11-12 and 13-16 in the Multi-Label learning (MIML). We propose a new BDGP database. The darkly stained region highlights the MIML support vector machine to solve the problems place where the gene is expressed. The darker the region, that beset the annotation task.
Latent Variable Perceptron Algorithm for Structured Classification
Sun, Xu (University of Tokyo) | Matsuzaki, Takuya (University of Tokyo) | Okanohara, Daisuke (University of Tokyo) | Tsujii, Jun' (University of Tokyo) | ichi
We propose a perceptron-style algorithm for fast discriminative training of structured latent variable model. This method extends the perceptron algorithm for the learning with latent dependencies, as an alternative to existing probabilistic latent variable models. It relies on Viterbi decoding over latent variables, combined with simple additive updates. Its training cost is significantly lower than that of probabilistic latent variable models, while it gives comparable or even superior classification accuracy on our tasks. Experiments on natural language processing problems demonstrate that its results are among those good reports on corresponding data sets.
Learning Optimal Subsets with Implicit User Preferences
Guo, Yunsong (Cornell University) | Gomes, Carla (Cornell University)
We study the problem of learning an optimal subset from a larger ground set of items, where the optimality criterion is defined by an unknown preference function. We model the problem as a discriminative structural learning problem and solve it using a Structural Support Vector Machine (SSVM) that optimizes a set accuracy performance measure representing set similarities. Our approach departs from previous approaches since we do not explicitly learn a pre-defined preference function. Experimental results on both a synthetic problem domain and a real-world face image subset selection problem show that our method significantly outperforms previous learning approaches for such problems.