15137899
Ensembles of cascading trees
We introduce a new method, called CS4, to construct committees of decision trees for classification. The method considers different top-ranked features as the root nodes of member trees. This idea is particularly suitable for dealing with high-dimensional bio-medical data as top-ranked features in this type of data usually possess similar merits for classification. To make a decision, the committee combines the power of individual trees in a weighted manner. Unlike Bagging or Boosting which uses bootstrapped training data, our method builds all the member trees of a committee using exactly the same set of training data. We have tested these ideas on UCI data sets as well as recent bio-medical data sets of gene expression or proteomic profiles that are usually described by more than 10,000 features. All the experimental results show that our method is efficient and that the classification performance are superior to C4.5 family algorithms.
9642703
Discovering typical structures of documents: a road map approach
The structure of a document refers to the role and hierarchy of subdocument references. Many online documents are similarly structured, though not identically structured. We study the problem of discovering “typical” structures of a collection of such documents, where the user specifies the minimum frequency of a typical structure. We will consider structural features of subdocument references such as labeling, nesting, ordering, cyclicity, and wild-card references, like those found on the Web and digital libraries. Typical structures can be used to serve the following purposes. (a) The “table-ofcontent” for gaining the general information of a source. (b) A road map for browsing and querying a source. (c) A basis for clustering documents. (d) Partial schemas for building structured layers to provide standard database access methods. (e) User/customer’s interests and browsing patterns. We present a solution to the discovery problem.
13995613
DNAFSMiner: a web-based software toolbox to recognize two types of functional sites in DNA sequences
UNLABELLED
DNAFSMiner (DNA Functional Sites Miner) is a web-based software toolbox to recognize functional sites in nucleic acid sequences. Currently in this toolbox, we provide two software: TIS Miner and Poly(A) Signal Miner. The TIS Miner can be used to predict translation initiation sites in vertebrate DNA/mRNA/cDNA sequences, and the Poly(A) Signal Miner can be used to predict polyadenylation [poly(A)] signals in human DNA sequences. The prediction results are better than those by literature methods on two benchmark applications. This good performance is mainly attributable to our unique learning method. DNAFSMiner is available free of charge for academic and non-profit organizations.


AVAILABILITY
http://research.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/DNAFSMiner/


CONTACT
huiqing@i2r.a-star.edu.sg.
15390292
Selection of patient samples and genes for outcome prediction
Gene expression profiles with clinical outcome data enable monitoring of disease progression and prediction of patient survival at the molecular level. We present a new computational method for outcome prediction. Our idea is to use an informative subset of original training samples. This subset consists of only short-term survivors who died within a short period and long-term survivors who were still alive after a long follow-up time. These extreme training samples yield a clear platform to identify genes whose expression is related to survival. To find relevant genes, we combine two feature selection methods - entropy measure and Wilcoxon rank sum test - so that a set of sharp discriminating features are identified. The selected training samples and genes are then integrated by a support vector machine to build a prediction model, by which each validation sample is assigned a survival/relapse risk score for drawing Kaplan-Meier survival curves. We apply this method to two data sets: diffuse large-B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) and primary lung adenocarcinoma. In both cases, patients in high and low risk groups stratified by our risk scores are clearly distinguishable. We also compare our risk scores to some clinical factors, such as International Prognostic Index score for DLBCL analysis and tumor stage information for lung adenocarcinoma. Our results indicate that gene expression profiles combined with carefully chosen learning algorithms can predict patient survival for certain diseases.
10722883
Use of extreme patient samples for outcome prediction from gene expression data
MOTIVATION
Patient outcome prediction using microarray technologies is an important application in bioinformatics. Based on patients' genotypic microarray data, predictions are made to estimate patients' survival time and their risk of tumor metastasis or recurrence. So, accurate prediction can potentially help to provide better treatment for patients.


RESULTS
We present a new computational method for patient outcome prediction. In the training phase of this method, we make use of two types of extreme patient samples: short-term survivors who got an unfavorable outcome within a short period and long-term survivors who were maintaining a favorable outcome after a long follow-up time. These extreme training samples yield a clear platform for us to identify relevant genes whose expression is closely related to the outcome. The selected extreme samples and the relevant genes are then integrated by a support vector machine to build a prediction model, by which each validation sample is assigned a risk score that falls into one of the special pre-defined risk groups. We apply this method to several public datasets. In most cases, patients in high and low risk groups stratified by our method have clearly distinguishable outcome status as seen in their Kaplan-Meier curves. We also show that the idea of selecting only extreme patient samples for training is effective for improving the prediction accuracy when different gene selection methods are used.
29257622
Use of Built-in Features in the Interpretation of High-dimensional Cancer Diagnosis Data
Cancer diagnosis data, for example microarray gene expression profiling data and proteomic profiling data, are often described by thousands of features. To computationally make a diagnosis for new samples, these data are usually input to a learning algorithm, the algorithm then induces a classifier, the classifier then predicts a class label for any test sample. As the data is so high-dimensional, most of the resulting classifiers are very complicated particularly those based on kernel-functions such as support vector machines---the interpretation of the decision results must need all the features to be involved. In this paper, we discuss built-in features and use them to concisely characterize the data and to easily interpret the decisions. Built-in features are features that are used only in the classifiers, and that are only a small subset of the original features, e.g., the features in a decision tree. So, the notion of built-in features is different from input features and also from original features. As there is a significant reduction from the huge size of original features to a small number of relevant features, the complexity of the interpretation can be much eased. The use of built-in features also provides much potential for elucidating the translation between raw data and clinically useful knowledge. In this paper, we also report that the performance of classifiers using built-in features tends to remain stable even input feature space changes, but other types of classifiers fluctuate their performance. So, once again, we promote the use of classifiers that use built-in features since the algorithms can avoid the existing hard problem of selecting best number of features for learning.
34878858
Dimensionality reduction of unsupervised data
Dimensionality reduction is an important problem for efficient handling of large databases. Many feature selection methods exist for supervised data having class information. Little work has been done for dimensionality reduction of unsupervised data in which class information is not available. Principal component analysis (PCA) is often used. However, PCA creates new features. It is difficult to obtain intuitive understanding of the data using the new features only. We are concerned with the problem of determining and choosing the important original features for unsupervised data. Our method is based on the observation that removing an irrelevant feature from the feature set may not change the underlying concept of the data, but not so otherwise. We propose an entropy measure for ranking features, and conduct extensive experiments to show that our method is able to find the important features. Also it compares well with a similar feature ranking method (Relief) that requires class information unlike our method.
10420056
Class-Specific Ensembles for Active Learning
40070319
A Distributed Hierarchical Clustering System for Web Mining
This paper proposes a novel method of distributed hierarchical clustering for Web mining. The method is closely related to our early work of Self-Generated Neural Networks (SGNN), which is in turn based on both self-organizing neural network and concept formation. The complexity of the algorithm is at most O(MNlogN). With the distributed implementation the method can be easily scaled up. The method is independent of the order the web documents presented. The method produces a natural conceptual hierarchy but not a binary tree. The method can include multimedia information into the same cluster hierarchy. A visualization mechanism has been developed for the clustering method and it shows the cluster hierarchy generated by the method has very high quality. The clustering process is fully automatic, and no human intervention is required. A clustering system has been built based on the proposed method, which can be used to automatically generate multimedia search engines, web directories, decision-making assistance systems, knowledge management systems, and personalized knowledge portals.
9665104
What would they think?: a computational model of attitudes
A key to improving at any task is frequent feedback from people whose opinions we care about: our family, friends, mentors, and the experts. However, such input is not usually available from the right people at the time it is needed most, and attaining a deep understanding of someone else's perspective requires immense effort. This paper introduces a technological solution.We present a novel method for automatically modeling a person's attitudes and opinions, and a proactive interface called "What Would They Think?" which offers the just-in-time perspectives of people whose opinions we care about, based on whatever the user happens to be reading or writing. In the application, each person is represented by a "digital persona," generated from an automated analysis of personal texts (e.g. weblogs and papers written by the person being modeled) using natural language processing and commonsense-based textual-affect sensing.In user studies, participants using our application were able to grasp the personalities and opinions of a panel of strangers more quickly and deeply than with either of two baseline methods. We discuss the theoretical and pragmatic implications of this research to intelligent user interfaces.
15545886
Dimensionality reduction via discretization
The existence of numeric data and large numbers of records in a database present a challenging task in terms of explicit concepts extraction from the raw data. The paper introduces a method that reduces data vertically and horizontally, keeps the discriminating power of the original data, and paves the way for extracting concepts. The method is based on discretization (vertical reduction) and feature selection (horizontal reduction). The experimental results show that (a) the data can be effectively reduced by the proposed method; (b) the predictive accuracy of a classifier (C4.5) can be improved after data and dimensionality reduction; and (c) the classification rules learned are simpler.