Sharif Digital Repository

In large databases, availability of labeled training data is mostly prohibitive in classification. Semi-supervised algorithms are employed to tackle the lack of labeled training data problem. Video databases are the epitome for such a scenario; that is why semi-supervised learning has found its niche in it. Graph-based methods are a promising platform for semi-supervised video classification. Based on the multiview characteristic of video data, different features have been proposed (such as SIFT, STIP and MFCC) which can be utilized to build a graph. In this paper, we have proposed a new classification method which fuses the results of manifold regularization over different graphs. Our... 

Graph based methods are among the most active and applicable approaches studied in semi-supervised learning. The problem of neighborhood graph construction for these methods is addressed in this paper. Neighborhood graph construction plays a key role in the quality of the classification in graph based methods. Several unsupervised graph construction methods have been proposed that have addressed issues such as data noise, geometrical properties of the underlying manifold and graph hyper-parameters selection. In contrast, in order to adapt the graph construction to the given classification task, many of the recent graph construction methods take advantage of the data labels. However, these... 

Increasing access to very large and non-stationary datasets in many real problems has made the classical data mining algorithms impractical and made it necessary to design new online classification algorithms. Online learning of data streams has some important features, such as sequential access to the data, limitation on time and space complexity and the occurrence of concept drift. The infinite nature of data streams makes it hard to label all observed instances. It seems that using the semi-supervised approaches have much more compatibility with the problem. So in this paper we present a new semi-supervised ensemble learning algorithm for data streams. This algorithm uses the majority... 

The key element of a spoken dialogue system is Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) part. HVS and EHVS are two most popular statistical methods employed to implement the SLU part which need lightly annotated data. Since annotation is a time consuming, we present a novel semi-supervised learning for EHVS to reduce the human labeling effort using two different statistical classifiers, SVM and KNN. Experiments are done on a Persian corpus, the University Information Kiosk corpus. The experimental results show improvements in performance of semi-supervised EHVS, trained by both labeled and unlabeled data, compared to EHVS trained by just initially labeled data. The performance of EHVS improves... 

Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) has become a topic of recent research that effectively addresses the problem of limited labeled data. Many SSL methods have been developed based on the manifold assumption, among them, the Local and Global Consistency (LGC) is a popular method. The problem with most of these algorithms, and in particular with LGC, is the fact that their naive implementations do not scale well to the size of data. Time and memory limitations are the major problems faced in large-scale problems. In this paper, we provide theoretical bounds on gradient descent, and to overcome the aforementioned problems, a new approximate Newton's method is proposed. Moreover, convergence... 

Semi-supervised learning based on manifolds has been the focus of extensive research in recent years. Convenient neighbourhood graph construction is a key component of a successful semi-supervised classification method. Previous graph construction methods fail when there are pairs of data points that have small Euclidean distance, but are far apart over the manifold. To overcome this problem, we start with an arbitrary neighbourhood graph and iteratively update the edge weights by using the estimates of the geodesic distances between points. Moreover, we provide theoretical bounds on the values of estimated geodesic distances. Experimental results on real-world data show significant... 

During recent years, active learning has evolved into a popular paradigm for utilizing user's feedback to improve accuracy of learning algorithms. Active learning works by selecting the most informative sample among unlabeled data and querying the label of that point from user. Many different methods such as uncertainty sampling and minimum risk sampling have been utilized to select the most informative sample in active learning. Although many active learning algorithms have been proposed so far, most of them work with binary or multi-class classification problems and therefore can not be applied to problems in which only samples from one class as well as a set of unlabeled data are... 

In this paper, we introduce a novel method for human activity recognition that benefits from the structure and sequential properties of the test data as well as the training data. In the training phase, we obtain a fraction of data labels at constant time intervals and use them in a semi-supervised graph-based method for recognizing the user's activities. We use label propagation on a k-nearest neighbor graph to calculate the probability of association of the unlabeled data to each class in this phase. Then we use these probabilities to train an HMM in a way that each of its hidden states corresponds to one class of activity. These probabilities are used to learn the transition probabilities... 

When the number of labeled data is not sufficient, Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods utilize unlabeled data to enhance classification. Recently, many SSL methods have been developed based on the manifold assumption in a batch mode. However, when data arrive sequentially and in large quantities, both computation and storage limitations become a bottleneck. In this paper, we present a new semi-supervised coarse graining (CG) algorithm to reduce the required number of data points for preserving the manifold structure. First, an equivalent formulation of Label Propagation (LP) is derived. Then a novel spectral view of the Harmonic Solution (HS) is proposed. Finally an algorithm to reduce... 

Image annotation approaches need an annotated dataset to learn a model for the relation between images and words. Unfortunately, preparing a labeled dataset is highly time consuming and expensive. In this work, we describe the development of an annotation system in semi-supervised learning framework which by incorporating unlabeled images into training phase reduces the system demand to labeled images. Our approach constructs a generative model for each semantic class in two main steps. First, based on Gamma distribution, a generative model is constructed for each semantic class using labeled images in that class. The second step incorporates the unlabeled images by using a modified EM... 

Almost all of the existing domain adaptation methods assume that all test data belong to a single stationary target distribution. However, in many real world applications, data arrive sequentially and the data distribution is continuously evolving. In this paper, we tackle the problem of adaptation to a continuously evolving target domain that has been recently introduced. We assume that the available data for the source domain are labeled but the examples of the target domain can be unlabeled and arrive sequentially. Moreover, the distribution of the target domain can evolve continuously over time. We propose the Evolving Domain Adaptation (EDA) method that first finds a new feature space... 

This study introduces a new identifier for nuclear power plants (NPPs) transients. The proposed identifier performs its function in two steps. First, the transient is identified by the previously developed supervised classifier combining ARIMA model and EBP algorithm. In the second step, the patterns of unknown transients are fed to the identifier based on the semi-supervised learning (SSL). The transductive support vector machine (TSVM) as a semi-supervised algorithm is trained by the labeled data of transients to predict some unlabeled data. The labeled and newly predicted data is then used to train the TSVM for another portion of unlabeled data. Training and prediction is continued until... 

Recent advances in storage and processing have provided the possibility of automatic gathering of information, which in turn leads to fast and continuous flows of data. The data which are produced and stored in this way are called data streams. Data streams are produced in large size, and much dynamism and have some unique properties which make them applicable to model many real data mining applications. The main challenge of streaming data is the occurrence of concept drift. In addition, regarding the costs of labeling of instances, it is often assumed that only a small fraction of instances are labeled. In this paper, we propose an ensemble algorithm to classify instances of non-stationary...