Data sets that characterize human activity over time through collections of timestamped eventsor counts are of increasing interest in application areas as humancomputer interaction,video surveillance, and Web data analysis. We propose a nonparametric Bayesian framework for modeling collections of such data. In particular, we use a Dirichlet process framework for learning a set of intensity functions corresponding to different categories, which form a basis set for representing individualtime-periods (e.g., several days) depending on which categories the time-periods are assigned to. This allows the model to learn in a data-driven fashion what "factors" are generating the observations on a particular day, including (forexample) weekday versus weekend effects or day-specific effects corresponding tounique (single-day) occurrences of unusual behavior, sharing information where appropriate to obtain improved estimates of the behavior associated with each category. Applications to real-world data sets of count data involving both vehicles and people are used to illustrate the technique.

We describe an algorithmic framework for an abstract game which we term a convex repeatedgame. We show that various online learning and boosting algorithms can be all derived as special cases of our algorithmic framework. This unified view explains the properties of existing algorithms and also enables us to derive several new interesting algorithms. Our algorithmic framework stems from a connection that we build between the notions of regret in game theory and weak duality in convex optimization.

In this paper we are presenting a novel multivariate analysis method. Our scheme is based on a novel kernel orthonormalized partial least squares (PLS) variant for feature extraction, imposing sparsity constrains in the solution to improve scalability. Thealgorithm is tested on a benchmark of UCI data sets, and on the analysis of integrated short-time music features for genre prediction. The upshot is that the method has strong expressive power even with rather few features, is clearly outperforming the ordinary kernel PLS, and therefore is an appealing method for feature extraction of labelled data.

Active learning refers to algorithmic frameworks aimed at selecting training data points in order to reduce the number of required training data points and/or improve thegeneralization performance of a learning method. In this paper, we present an asymptotic analysis of active learning for generalized linear models. Our analysis holds under the common practical situation of model misspecification, andis based on realistic assumptions regarding the nature of the sampling distributions, which are usually neither independent nor identical. We derive unbiased estimatorsof generalization performance, as well as estimators of expected reduction in generalization error after adding a new training data point, that allow us to optimize its sampling distribution through a convex optimization problem. Our analysis naturally leads to an algorithm for sequential active learning which is applicable for all tasks supported by generalized linear models (e.g., binary classification, multi-classclassification, regression) and can be applied in nonlinear settings through the use of Mercer kernels.

The theoretical understanding of support vector machines (SVMs) and related kernel-based methods has been substantially improved in recent years.

We present a general model-independent approach to the analysis of data in cases when these data do not appear in the form of co-occurrence of two variables X,Y, but rather as a sample of values of an unknown (stochastic) function Z(X,Y). For example, in gene expression data, the expression level Z is a function of gene X and condition Y; or in movie ratings data the rating Z is a function of viewer X and movie Y . The approach represents a consistent extension of the Information Bottleneck method that has previously relied on the availability of co-occurrence statistics. By altering the relevance variable we eliminate the need in the sample of joint distribution of all input variables. This new formulation also enables simple MDL-like model complexity control and prediction of missing values of Z. The approach is analyzed and shown to be on a par with the best known clustering algorithms for a wide range of domains. For the prediction of missing values (collaborative filtering) it improves the currently best known results.

Many computer aided diagnosis (CAD) problems can be best modelled as a multiple-instance learning (MIL) problem with unbalanced data: i.e., the training data typically consists of a few positive bags, and a very large number of negative instances.Existing MIL algorithms are much too computationally expensive for these datasets. We describe CH, a framework for learning a Convex Hull representation of multiple instances that is significantly faster than existing MIL algorithms. Our CH framework applies to any standard hyperplane-based learning algorithm, and for some algorithms, is guaranteed to find the global optimal solution. Experimentalstudies on two different CAD applications further demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly improves diagnostic accuracy when compared toboth MIL and traditional classifiers. Although not designed for standard MIL problems (which have both positive and negative bags and relatively balanced datasets),comparisons against other MIL methods on benchmark problems also indicate that the proposed method is competitive with the state-of-the-art.

Propagation based methods are developed and rigorously assessed.

Starting with the work of Jaakkola and Haussler, a variety of approaches have been proposed for coupling domain-specific generative models with statistical learning methods. The link is established by a kernel function which provides a similarity measure based inherently on the underlying model. In computational biology, the full promise of this framework has rarely ever been exploited, as most kernels are derived from very generic models, such as sequence profiles or hidden Markov models. Here, we introduce the MTreeMix kernel, which is based on a generative model tailored to the underlying biological mechanism.

We describe an unsupervised method for learning a probabilistic grammar of an object from a set of training examples. Our approach is invariant to the scale and rotation of the objects. We illustrate our approach using thirteen objects from the Caltech 101 database. In addition, we learn the model of a hybrid object class where we do not know the specific object or its position, scale or pose. This is illustrated bylearning a hybrid class consisting of faces, motorbikes, and airplanes. The individual objects can be recovered as different aspects of the grammar for the object class.