Berkeley Lab 'minimalist machine learning' algorithms analyze images from very little data

Mathematicians at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a new approach to machine learning aimed at experimental imaging data. Rather than relying on the tens or hundreds of thousands of images used by typical machine learning methods, this new approach "learns" much more quickly and requires far fewer images. Daniël Pelt and James Sethian of Berkeley Lab's Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA) turned the usual machine learning perspective on its head by developing what they call a "Mixed-Scale Dense Convolution Neural Network (MS-D)" that requires far fewer parameters than traditional methods, converges quickly, and has the ability to "learn" from a remarkably small training set. Their approach is already being used to extract biological structure from cell images, and is poised to provide a major new computational tool to analyze data across a wide range of research areas. As experimental facilities generate higher resolution images at higher speeds, scientists can struggle to manage and analyze the resulting data, which is often done painstakingly by hand.