10016327
Identifying early buyers from purchase data
Market research has shown that consumers exhibit a variety of different purchasing behaviors; specifically, some tend to purchase products earlier than other consumers. Identifying such early buyers can help personalize marketing strategies, potentially improving their effectiveness. In this paper, we present a non-parametric approach to the problem of identifying early buyers from purchase data. Our formulation takes as inputs the detailed purchase information of each consumer, with which we construct a weighted directed graph whose nodes correspond to consumers and whose edges correspond to purchases consumers have in common; the edge weights indicate how frequently consumers purchase products earlier than other consumers.Identifying early buyers corresponds to the problem of finding a subset of nodes in the graph with maximum difference between the weights of the outgoing and incoming edges. This problem is a variation of the maximum cut problem in a directed graph. We provide an approximation algorithm based on semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations pioneered by Goemans and Williamson, and analyze its performance. We apply the algorithm to real purchase data from Amazon.com, providing new insights into consumer behaviors.
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.
1527832
Document clustering with cluster refinement and model selection capabilities
In this paper, we propose a document clustering method that strives to achieve: (1) a high accuracy of document clustering, and (2) the capability of estimating the number of clusters in the document corpus (i.e. the model selection capability). To accurately cluster the given document corpus, we employ a richer feature set to represent each document, and use the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) together with the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to conduct an initial document clustering. From this initial result, we identify a set of discriminative featuresfor each cluster, and refine the initially obtained document clusters by voting on the cluster label of each document using this discriminative feature set. This self-refinement process of discriminative feature identification and cluster label voting is iteratively applied until the convergence of document clusters. On the other hand, the model selection capability is achieved by introducing randomness in the cluster initialization stage, and then discovering a value C for the number of clusters N by which running the document clustering process for a fixed number of times yields sufficiently similar results. Performance evaluations exhibit clear superiority of the proposed method with its improved document clustering and model selection accuracies. The evaluations also demonstrate how each feature as well as the cluster refinement process contribute to the document clustering accuracy.
8864863
Integrating Features from Different Sources for Music Information Retrieval
Efficient and intelligent music information retrieval is a very important topic of the 21st century. With the ultimate goal of building personal music information retrieval systems, this paper studies the problem of identifying "similar" artists using both lyrics and acoustic data. In this paper, we present a clustering algorithm that integrates features from both sources to perform bimodal learning. The algorithm is tested on a data set consisting of 570 songs from 53 albums of 41 artists using artist similarity provided by All Music Guide. Experimental results show that the accuracy of artist similarity classifiers can be significantly improved and that artist similarity can be efficiently identified.
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.
9813108
CoFD : An Algorithm for Non-distance Based Clustering in High Dimensional Spaces
The clustering problem, which aims at identifying the distribution of patterns and intrinsic correlations in large data sets by partitioning the data points into similarity clusters, has been widely studied. Traditional clustering algorithms use distance functions to measure similarity and are not suitable for high dimensional spaces. In this paper, we propose CoFD algorithm, which is a non-distance based clustering algorithm for high dimensional spaces. Based on the maximum likelihood principle, CoFD is to optimize parameters to maximize the likelihood between data points and the model generated by the parameters. Experimental results on both synthetic data sets and a real data set show the efficiency and effectiveness of CoFD.
14160695
Analysis and synthesis of textured motion: particles and waves
Natural scenes contain a wide range of textured motion phenomena which are characterized by the movement of a large amount of particle and wave elements, such as falling snow, wavy water, and dancing grass. In this paper, we present a generative model for representing these motion patterns and study a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for inferring the generative representation from observed video sequences. Our generative model consists of three components. The first is a photometric model which represents an image as a linear superposition of image bases selected from a generic and overcomplete dictionary. The dictionary contains Gabor and LoG bases for point/particle elements and Fourier bases for wave elements. These bases compete to explain the input images and transfer them to a token (base) representation with an O(10/sup 2/)-fold dimension reduction. The second component is a geometric model which groups spatially adjacent tokens (bases) and their motion trajectories into a number of moving elements-called "motons". A moton is a deformable template in time-space representing a moving element, such as a falling snowflake or a flying bird. The third component is a dynamic model which characterizes the motion of particles, waves, and their interactions. For example, the motion of particle objects floating in a river, such as leaves and balls, should be coupled with the motion of waves. The trajectories of these moving elements are represented by coupled Markov chains. The dynamic model also includes probabilistic representations for the birth/death (source/sink) of the motons. We adopt a stochastic gradient algorithm for learning and inference. Given an input video sequence, the algorithm iterates two steps: 1) computing the motions and their trajectories by a number of reversible Markov chain jumps, and 2) learning the parameters that govern the geometric deformations and motion dynamics. Novel video sequences are synthesized from the learned models and, by editing the model parameters, we demonstrate the controllability of the generative model.
15408418
CatRelate: A New Hierarchical Document Category Integration Algorithm by Learning Category Relationships
We address the problem of integrating documents from a source catalog into a master catalog. Current technologies for solving the problem deem it as a flat category integration problem without considering the useful hierarchy information in the catalog, or deal with it hierarchically but without a rigorous model. In contrast, our method is based on correctly identifying relationships among categories, such as Match, Disjoint, SubConcept, SuperConcept, and Overlap, which come from the relations of sets in Set theory. Compared with traditional Match/NotMatch relationship in literature, our approach is more expressive in defining the relationship. The relationships among categories are first learned in a probabilistic way, and then refined by considering the hierarchy context. Our preliminary experiments show that it can help to correctly identify category relationships, and thus increase the accuracy of document integration.
38761790
Social Choice For Data Fusion
Social choice theory is the study of decision theory on how to aggregate separate preferences into group's rational preference. It has wide applications, especially on the design of voting rules, and brings far-reaching influence on the development of modern political science and welfare economics. With the advent of the information age, social choice theory finds its up-to-date application on designing effective Metasearch engines. Metasearch engines provide effective searching by combining the results of multiple source search engines that make use of diverse models and techniques. In this work, we analyze social choice algorithms in a graph-theoretic approach. In addition to classical social choice algorithms, such as Borda and Condorcet, we study one special type of social choice algorithms, elimination voting, to tackle Metasearch problem. Some new algorithms are proposed and examined in the fusion experiment on TREC data. It shows that these elimination voting algorithms achieve satisfied performance when compared with Borda algorithm.
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.