37613840
Improving medical/biological data classification performance by wavelet preprocessing
Many real-world datasets contain noise which could degrade the performances of learning algorithms. Motivated from the success of wavelet denoising techniques in image data, we explore a general solution to alleviate the effect of noisy data by wavelet preprocessing for medical/biological data classification. Our experiments are divided into two categories: one is of different classification algorithms on a specific database, and the other is of a specific classification algorithm (decision tree) on different databases. The experiment results show that the wavelet denoising of noisy data is able to improve the accuracies of those classification methods, if the localities of the attributes are strong enough.
239739
A new distributed data mining model based on similarity
Distributed Data Mining (DDM) has been very active and enjoying a growing amount attention since its inception. Current DDM techniques regard the distributed data sets as a single virtual table and assume there exists a global model which could be generated if the data were combined/centralized. This paper proposes a similarity-based distributed data mining(SBDDM) framework which explicitly take the differences among distributed sources into consideration. A new similarity measure is introduced and its effectiveness is then evaluated and validated. This paper also illustrates the limitations of current DDM techniques through three concrete case studies. Finally distributed clustering within the SBDDM framework is also discussed.
1511154
Association-based similarity testing and its applications
This paper proposes a new similarity measure between basket datasets based on associations. The new measure is calculated from support counts using a formula inspired by information entropy. Experiments on both real and synthetic datasets show the effectiveness of the measure. This paper then investigates the applications of the similarity measure. It first studies the problem of finding a mapping between categorical database attribute sets using similarity measures. A generic approach for identifying such a mapping is proposed. The approach is implemented based on the similarity measure proposed in the paper and its performance has been evaluated and validated. Moreover, this paper also explores the applications of using the similarity measure to mine distributed datasets.
208933693
What are Textons?
Textons refer to fundamental micro-structures in natural images (and videos) and are considered as the atoms of pre-attentive human visual perception (Julesz, 1981). Unfortunately, the word "texton" remains a vague concept in the literature for lack of a good mathematical model. In this article, we first present a three-level generative image model for learning textons from texture images. In this model, an image is a superposition of a number of image bases selected from an over-complete dictionary including various Gabor and Laplacian of Gaussian functions at various locations, scales, and orientations. These image bases are, in turn, generated by a smaller number of texton elements, selected from a dictionary of textons. By analogy to the waveform-phoneme-word hierarchy in speech, the pixel-base-texton hierarchy presents an increasingly abstract visual description and leads to dimension reduction and variable decoupling. By fitting the generative model to observed images, we can learn the texton dictionary as parameters of the generative model. Then the paper proceeds to study the geometric, dynamic, and photometric structures of the texton representation by further extending the generative model to account for motion and illumination variations. (1) For the geometric structures, a texton consists of a number of image bases with deformable spatial configurations. The geometric structures are learned from static texture images. (2) For the dynamic structures, the motion of a texton is characterized by a Markov chain model in time which sometimes can switch geometric configurations during the movement. We call the moving textons as "motons". The dynamic models are learned using the trajectories of the textons inferred from video sequence. (3) For photometric structures, a texton represents the set of images of a 3D surface element under varying illuminations and is called a "lighton" in this paper. We adopt an illumination-cone representation where a lighton is a texton triplet. For a given light source, a lighton image is generated as a linear sum of the three texton bases. We present a sequence of experiments for learning the geometric, dynamic, and photometric structures from images and videos, and we also present some comparison studies with K-mean clustering, sparse coding, independent component analysis, and transformed component analysis. We shall discuss how general textons can be learned from generic natural images.
29701311
Stochastic Jump-Diffusion Process for Computing Medial Axes in Markov Random Fields
Proposes a statistical framework for computing medial axes of 2D shapes. In the paper, the computation of medial axes is posed as a statistical inference problem not as a mathematical transform. The paper contributes to three aspects in computing medial axes. 1) Prior knowledge is adopted for axes and junctions so that axes around junctions are regularized. 2) Multiple interpretations of axes are possible, each being assigned a probability. 3) A stochastic jump-diffusion process is proposed for estimating both axes and junctions in Markov random fields. We argue that the stochastic algorithm for computing medial axes is compatible with existing algorithms for image segmentation, such as region growing, snake, and region competition. Thus, our method provides a new direction for computing medial axes from texture images. Experiments are demonstrated on both synthetic and real 2D shapes.
3246603
Statistical Modeling and Conceptualization of Visual Patterns
Natural images contain an overwhelming number of visual patterns generated by diverse stochastic processes. Defining and modeling these patterns is of fundamental importance for generic vision tasks, such as perceptual organization, segmentation, and recognition. The objective of this epistemological paper is to summarize various threads of research in the literature and to pursue a unified framework for conceptualization, modeling, learning, and computing visual patterns. This paper starts with reviewing four research streams: 1) the study of image statistics, 2) the analysis of image components, 3) the grouping of image elements, and 4) the modeling of visual patterns. The models from these research streams are then divided into four categories according to their semantic structures: 1) descriptive models, i.e., Markov random fields (MRF) or Gibbs, 2) variants of descriptive models (causal MRF and "pseudodescriptive" models), 3) generative models, and 4) discriminative models. The objectives, principles, theories, and typical models are reviewed in each category and the relationships between the four types of models are studied. Two central themes emerge from the relationship studies. 1) In representation, the integration of descriptive and generative models is the future direction for statistical modeling and should lead to richer and more advanced classes of vision models. 2) To make visual models computationally tractable, discriminative models are used as computational heuristics for inferring generative models. Thus, the roles of four types of models are clarified.
6739132
Improving MHC binding peptide prediction by incorporating binding data of auxiliary MHC molecules
MOTIVATION
Various computational methods have been proposed to tackle the problem of predicting the peptide binding ability for a specific MHC molecule. These methods are based on known binding peptide sequences. However, current available peptide databases do not have very abundant amounts of examples and are highly redundant. Existing studies show that MHC molecules can be classified into supertypes in terms of peptide-binding specificities. Therefore, we first give a method for reducing the redundancy in a given dataset based on information entropy, then present a novel approach for prediction by learning a predictive model from a dataset of binders for not only the molecule of interest but also for other MHC molecules.


RESULTS
We experimented on the HLA-A family with the binding nonamers of A1 supertype (HLA-A*0101, A*2601, A*2902, A*3002), A2 supertype (A*0201, A*0202, A*0203, A*0206, A*6802), A3 supertype (A*0301, A*1101, A*3101, A*3301, A*6801) and A24 supertype (A*2301 and A*2402), whose data were collected from six publicly available peptide databases and two private sources. The results show that our approach significantly improves the prediction accuracy of peptides that bind a specific HLA molecule when we combine binding data of HLA molecules in the same supertype. Our approach can thus be used to help find new binders for MHC molecules.
11835209
Statistical Edge Detection: Learning and Evaluating Edge Cues
We formulate edge detection as statistical inference. This statistical edge detection is data driven, unlike standard methods for edge detection which are model based. For any set of edge detection filters (implementing local edge cues), we use presegmented images to learn the probability distributions of filter responses conditioned on whether they are evaluated on or off an edge. Edge detection is formulated as a discrimination task specified by a likelihood ratio test on the filter responses. This approach emphasizes the necessity of modeling the image background (the off-edges). We represent the conditional probability distributions nonparametrically and illustrate them on two different data sets of 100 (Sowerby) and 50 (South Florida) images. Multiple edges cues, including chrominance and multiple-scale, are combined by using their joint distributions. Hence, this cue combination is optimal in the statistical sense. We evaluate the effectiveness of different visual cues using the Chernoff information and Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) curves. This shows that our approach gives quantitatively better results than the Canny edge detector when the image background contains significant clutter. In addition, it enables us to determine the effectiveness of different edge cues and gives quantitative measures for the advantages of multilevel processing, for the use of chrominance, and for the relative effectiveness of different detectors. Furthermore, we show that we can learn these conditional distributions on one data set and adapt them to the other with only slight degradation of performance without knowing the ground truth on the second data set. This shows that our results are not purely domain specific. We apply the same approach to the spatial grouping of edge cues and obtain analogies to nonmaximal suppression and hysteresis.