Sharif Digital Repository

k-medoids algorithm is a partitional, centroid-based clustering algorithm which uses pairwise distances of data points and tries to directly decompose the dataset with n points into a set of k disjoint clusters. However, k-medoids itself requires all distances between data points that are not so easy to get in many applications. In this paper, we introduce a new method which requires only a small proportion of the whole set of distances and makes an effort to estimate an upperbound for unknown distances using the inquired ones. This algorithm makes use of the triangle inequality to calculate an upper-bound estimation of the unknown distances. Our method is built upon a recursive approach to... 

Recently, the problem of integrating side information about classes has emerged in the learning settings like zero-shot learning. Although using multiple sources of information about the input space has been investigated in the last decade and many multi-view and multi-modal learning methods have already been introduced, the attribute learning for classes (output space) is a new problem that has been attended in the last few years. In this paper, we propose an attribute learning method that can use different sources of descriptions for classes to find new attributes that are more proper to be used as class signatures. Experimental results show that the learned attributes by the proposed... 

Although GAN-based methods have received many achievements in the last few years, they have not been entirely successful in generating discrete data. The most crucial challenge of these methods is the difficulty of passing the gradient from the discriminator to the generator when the generator outputs are discrete. Despite the fact that several attempts have been made to alleviate this problem, none of the existing GAN-based methods have improved the performance of text generation compared with the maximum likelihood approach in terms of both the quality and the diversity. In this paper, we proposed a new framework for generating discrete data by an adversarial approach in which there is no... 

Background: We developed transformer-based deep learning models based on natural language processing for early risk assessment of Alzheimer’s disease from the picture description test. Methods: The lack of large datasets poses the most important limitation for using complex models that do not require feature engineering. Transformer-based pre-trained deep language models have recently made a large leap in NLP research and application. These models are pre-trained on available large datasets to understand natural language texts appropriately, and are shown to subsequently perform well on classification tasks with small training sets. The overall classification model is a simple classifier on... 

In many real-world applications, data contain heterogeneous input modalities (e.g., web pages include images, text, etc.). Moreover, data such as images are usually described using different views (i.e. different sets of features). Learning a distance metric or similarity measure that originates from all input modalities or views is essential for many tasks such as content-based retrieval ones. In these cases, similar and dissimilar pairs of data can be used to find a better representation of data in which similarity and dissimilarity constraints are better satisfied. In this paper, we incorporate supervision in the form of pairwise similarity and/or dissimilarity constraints into... 

One of the most studied problems in machine learning is finding reasonable constraints that guarantee the generalization of a learning algorithm. These constraints are usually expressed as some simplicity assumptions on the target. For instance, in the Vapnik–Chervonenkis (VC) theory the space of possible hypotheses is considered to have a limited VC dimension One way to formulate the simplicity assumption is via information theoretic concepts. In this paper, the constraint on the entropy H(X) of the input variable X is studied as a simplicity assumption. It is proven that the sample complexity to achieve an ∊-δ Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) hypothesis is bounded by [Formula... 

Morphological filtering is a useful technique for the processing and analysis of binary and gray scale images. The extension of morphological techniques to color images is not a straightforward task because this extension stems from the multivariate ordering problem. Since multivariate ordering is ambiguous, existing approaches have used known vector ordering schemes for the color ordering purpose. In the. last decade, many different color morphological operators have been introduced in the literature. Some of them have focused on noise suppression purposes. However, none has shown good performance, especially on edgy regions. In this paper, new color morphological operators, based on a... 

In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in distance function learning for semi-supervised clustering settings. In addition to the earlier methods that learn Mahalanobis metrics (or equivalently, linear transformations), some nonlinear metric learning methods have also been recently introduced. However, these methods either allow limited choice of distance metrics yielding limited flexibility or learn nonparametric kernel matrices and scale very poorly (prohibiting applicability to medium and large data sets). In this paper, we propose a novel method that learns low-rank kernel matrices from pairwise constraints and unlabeled data. We formulate the proposed method as a trace... 

The problem of clustering with side information has received much recent attention and metric learning has been considered as a powerful approach to this problem. Until now, various metric learning methods have been proposed for semi-supervised clustering. Although some of the existing methods can use both positive (must-link) and negative (cannot-link) constraints, they are usually limited to learning a linear transformation (i.e., finding a global Mahalanobis metric). In this paper, we propose a framework for learning linear and non-linear transformations efficiently. We use both positive and negative constraints and also the intrinsic topological structure of data. We formulate our metric... 

Recently, distance metric learning has been received an increasing attention and found as a powerful approach for semi-supervised learning tasks. In the last few years, several methods have been proposed for metric learning when must-link and/or cannot-link constraints as supervisory information are available. Although many of these methods learn global Mahalanobis metrics, some recently introduced methods have tried to learn more flexible distance metrics using a kernel-based approach. In this paper, we consider the problem of kernel learning from both pairwise constraints and unlabeled data. We propose a method that adapts a flexible distance metric via learning a nonparametric kernel... 

Distance metric plays an important role in many machine learning algorithms. Recently, there has been growing interest in distance metric learning for semi-supervised setting. In the last few years, many methods have been proposed for metric learning when pairwise similarity (must-link) and/or dissimilarity (cannot-link) constraints are available along with unlabeled data. Most of these methods learn a global Mahalanobis metric (or equivalently, a linear transformation). Although some recently introduced methods have devised nonlinear extensions of linear metric learning methods, they usually allow only limited forms of distance metrics and also can use only similarity constraints. In this... 

Distance metric has an important role in many machine learning algorithms. Recently, metric learning for semi-supervised algorithms has received much attention. For semi-supervised clustering, usually a set of pairwise similarity and dissimilarity constraints is provided as supervisory information. Until now, various metric learning methods utilizing pairwise constraints have been proposed. The existing methods that can consider both positive (must-link) and negative (cannot-link) constraints find linear transformations or equivalently global Mahalanobis metrics. Additionally, they find metrics only according to the data points appearing in constraints (without considering other data... 

Metric learning is a powerful approach for semi-supervised clustering. In this paper, a metric learning method considering both pairwise constraints and the geometrical structure of data is introduced for semi-supervised clustering. At first, a smooth metric is found (based on an optimization problem) using positive constraints as supervisory information. Then, an extension of this method employing both positive and negative constraints is introduced. As opposed to the existing methods, the extended method has the capability of considering both positive and negative constraints while considering the topological structure of data. The proposed metric learning method can improve performance of... 

One of the most famous approaches for the segmentation of color images is finding clusters in the color space. Shapes of these clusters are often complex and the time complexity of the existing algorithms for finding clusters of different shapes is usually high. In this paper, a novel clustering algorithm is proposed and used for the image segmentation purpose. This algorithm distinguishes clusters of different shapes using a two-stage clustering approach in a reasonable time. In the first stage, the mean-shift clustering algorithm is used and the data points are grouped into some sub-clusters. In the second stage, connections between sub-clusters are established according to a dissimilarity... 

Recently, several algorithms have been introduced for enhancing clustering quality by using supervision in the form of constraints. These algorithms typically utilize the pair wise constraints to either modify the clustering objective function or to learn the clustering distance measure. Very few of these algorithms show the ability of discovering clusters of different shapes along with satisfying the provided constraints. In this paper, a novel semi-supervised clustering algorithm is introduced that uses the side information and finds clusters of arbitrary shapes. This algorithm uses a two-stage clustering approach satisfying the pair wise constraints. In the first stage, the data points... 

Until now, many algorithms have been introduced for finding arbitrary shaped clusters, but none of these algorithms is able to identify all sorts of cluster shapes and structures that are encountered in practice. Furthermore, the time complexity of the existing algorithms is usually high and applying them on large dataseis is time-consuming. In this paper, a novel fast clustering algorithm is proposed. This algorithm distinguishes clusters of different shapes using a twostage clustering approach. In the first stage, the data points are grouped into a relatively large number of fuzzy ellipsoidal sub-clusters. Then, connections between sub-clusters are established according to the Bhatiacharya...