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503 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2007

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Machine Learning for Mass Production and Industrial Engineering

Pfingsten, T.

Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, February 2007 (phdthesis)

PDF [BibTex]

2007

Pfingsten, T. Machine Learning for Mass Production and Industrial Engineering Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, February 2007 (phdthesis)

PDF [BibTex]

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New Margin- and Evidence-Based Approaches for EEG Signal Classification

Hill, N., Farquhar, J.

Invited talk at the FaSor Jahressymposium, February 2007 (talk)

PDF [BibTex]

Hill, N., Farquhar, J. New Margin- and Evidence-Based Approaches for EEG Signal Classification Invited talk at the FaSor Jahressymposium, February 2007 (talk)

PDF [BibTex]

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On the Pre-Image Problem in Kernel Methods

BakIr, G., Schölkopf, B., Weston, J.

In Kernel Methods in Bioengineering, Signal and Image Processing, pages: 284-302, (Editors: G Camps-Valls and JL Rojo-Álvarez and M Martínez-Ramón), Idea Group Publishing, Hershey, PA, USA, January 2007 (inbook)

Abstract
In this chapter we are concerned with the problem of reconstructing patterns from their representation in feature space, known as the pre-image problem. We review existing algorithms and propose a learning based approach. All algorithms are discussed regarding their usability and complexity and evaluated on an image denoising application.

DOI [BibTex]

BakIr, G., Schölkopf, B., Weston, J. On the Pre-Image Problem in Kernel Methods In Kernel Methods in Bioengineering, Signal and Image Processing, pages: 284-302, (Editors: G Camps-Valls and JL Rojo-Álvarez and M Martínez-Ramón), Idea Group Publishing, Hershey, PA, USA, January 2007 (inbook)

DOI [BibTex]

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A Subspace Kernel for Nonlinear Feature Extraction

Wu, M., Farquhar, J.

In IJCAI-07, pages: 1125-1130, (Editors: Veloso, M. M.), AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, USA, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, January 2007 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Kernel based nonlinear Feature Extraction (KFE) or dimensionality reduction is a widely used pre-processing step in pattern classification and data mining tasks. Given a positive definite kernel function, it is well known that the input data are implicitly mapped to a feature space with usually very high dimensionality. The goal of KFE is to find a low dimensional subspace of this feature space, which retains most of the information needed for classification or data analysis. In this paper, we propose a subspace kernel based on which the feature extraction problem is transformed to a kernel parameter learning problem. The key observation is that when projecting data into a low dimensional subspace of the feature space, the parameters that are used for describing this subspace can be regarded as the parameters of the kernel function between the projected data. Therefore current kernel parameter learning methods can be adapted to optimize this parameterized kernel function. Experimental results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Wu, M., Farquhar, J. A Subspace Kernel for Nonlinear Feature Extraction In IJCAI-07, pages: 1125-1130, (Editors: Veloso, M. M.), AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, USA, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, January 2007 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

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Some observations on the pedestal effect

Henning, G., Wichmann, F.

Journal of Vision, 7(1:3):1-15, January 2007 (article)

Abstract
The pedestal or dipper effect is the large improvement in the detectability of a sinusoidal grating observed when it is added to a masking or pedestal grating of the same spatial frequency, orientation, and phase. We measured the pedestal effect in both broadband and notched noiseVnoise from which a 1.5-octave band centered on the signal frequency had been removed. Although the pedestal effect persists in broadband noise, it almost disappears in the notched noise. Furthermore, the pedestal effect is substantial when either high- or low-pass masking noise is used. We conclude that the pedestal effect in the absence of notched noise results principally from the use of information derived from channels with peak sensitivities at spatial frequencies different from that of the signal and the pedestal. We speculate that the spatial-frequency components of the notched noise above and below the spatial frequency of the signal and the pedestal prevent ‘‘off-frequency looking,’’ that is, prevent the use of information about changes in contrast carried in channels tuned to spatial frequencies that are very much different from that of the signal and the pedestal. Thus, the pedestal or dipper effect measured without notched noise appears not to be a characteristic of individual spatial-frequency-tuned channels.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Henning, G., Wichmann, F. Some observations on the pedestal effect Journal of Vision, 7(1:3):1-15, January 2007 (article)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

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Development of a Brain-Computer Interface Approach Based on Covert Attention to Tactile Stimuli

Raths, C.

University of Tübingen, Germany, University of Tübingen, Germany, January 2007 (diplomathesis)

[BibTex]

Raths, C. Development of a Brain-Computer Interface Approach Based on Covert Attention to Tactile Stimuli University of Tübingen, Germany, University of Tübingen, Germany, January 2007 (diplomathesis)

[BibTex]

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Cue Combination and the Effect of Horizontal Disparity and Perspective on Stereoacuity

Zalevski, AM., Henning, GB., Hill, NJ.

Spatial Vision, 20(1):107-138, January 2007 (article)

Abstract
Relative depth judgments of vertical lines based on horizontal disparity deteriorate enormously when the lines form part of closed configurations (Westheimer, 1979). In studies showing this effect, perspective was not manipulated and thus produced inconsistency between horizontal disparity and perspective. We show that stereoacuity improves dramatically when perspective and horizontal disparity are made consistent. Observers appear to use unhelpful perspective cues in judging the relative depth of the vertical sides of rectangles in a way not incompatible with a form of cue weighting. However, 95% confidence intervals for the weights derived for cues usually exceed the a-priori [0-1] range.

PDF PDF DOI [BibTex]

Zalevski, AM., Henning, GB., Hill, NJ. Cue Combination and the Effect of Horizontal Disparity and Perspective on Stereoacuity Spatial Vision, 20(1):107-138, January 2007 (article)

PDF PDF DOI [BibTex]

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A Machine Learning Approach for Estimating the Attenuation Map for a Combined PET/MR Scanner

Hofmann, M.

Biologische Kybernetik, Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, 2007 (diplomathesis)

[BibTex]

Hofmann, M. A Machine Learning Approach for Estimating the Attenuation Map for a Combined PET/MR Scanner Biologische Kybernetik, Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, 2007 (diplomathesis)

[BibTex]

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Mathematik der Wahrnehmung: Wendepunkte

Wichman, F., Ernst, MO.

Akademische Mitteilungen zw{\"o}lf: F{\"u}nf Sinne, pages: 32-37, 2007 (misc)

[BibTex]

Wichman, F., Ernst, MO. Mathematik der Wahrnehmung: Wendepunkte Akademische Mitteilungen zw{\"o}lf: F{\"u}nf Sinne, pages: 32-37, 2007 (misc)

[BibTex]

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Towards Machine Learning of Motor Skills

Peters, J., Schaal, S., Schölkopf, B.

In Proceedings of Autonome Mobile Systeme (AMS), pages: 138-144, (Editors: K Berns and T Luksch), 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

Abstract
Autonomous robots that can adapt to novel situations has been a long standing vision of robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive sciences. Early approaches to this goal during the heydays of artificial intelligence research in the late 1980s, however, made it clear that an approach purely based on reasoning or human insights would not be able to model all the perceptuomotor tasks that a robot should fulfill. Instead, new hope was put in the growing wake of machine learning that promised fully adaptive control algorithms which learn both by observation and trial-and-error. However, to date, learning techniques have yet to fulfill this promise as only few methods manage to scale into the high-dimensional domains of manipulator robotics, or even the new upcoming trend of humanoid robotics, and usually scaling was only achieved in precisely pre-structured domains. In this paper, we investigate the ingredients for a general approach to motor skill learning in order to get one step closer towards human-like performance. For doing so, we study two ma jor components for such an approach, i.e., firstly, a theoretically well-founded general approach to representing the required control structures for task representation and execution and, secondly, appropriate learning algorithms which can be applied in this setting.

PDF DOI [BibTex]

Peters, J., Schaal, S., Schölkopf, B. Towards Machine Learning of Motor Skills In Proceedings of Autonome Mobile Systeme (AMS), pages: 138-144, (Editors: K Berns and T Luksch), 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

PDF DOI [BibTex]

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Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Control of Arm Movements

Theodorou, E., Peters, J., Schaal, S.

In Abstracts of the 37st Meeting of the Society of Neuroscience., Neuroscience, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

Abstract
Every day motor behavior consists of a plethora of challenging motor skills from discrete movements such as reaching and throwing to rhythmic movements such as walking, drumming and running. How this plethora of motor skills can be learned remains an open question. In particular, is there any unifying computa-tional framework that could model the learning process of this variety of motor behaviors and at the same time be biologically plausible? In this work we aim to give an answer to these questions by providing a computational framework that unifies the learning mechanism of both rhythmic and discrete movements under optimization criteria, i.e., in a non-supervised trial-and-error fashion. Our suggested framework is based on Reinforcement Learning, which is mostly considered as too costly to be a plausible mechanism for learning com-plex limb movement. However, recent work on reinforcement learning with pol-icy gradients combined with parameterized movement primitives allows novel and more efficient algorithms. By using the representational power of such mo-tor primitives we show how rhythmic motor behaviors such as walking, squash-ing and drumming as well as discrete behaviors like reaching and grasping can be learned with biologically plausible algorithms. Using extensive simulations and by using different reward functions we provide results that support the hy-pothesis that Reinforcement Learning could be a viable candidate for motor learning of human motor behavior when other learning methods like supervised learning are not feasible.

[BibTex]

Theodorou, E., Peters, J., Schaal, S. Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Control of Arm Movements In Abstracts of the 37st Meeting of the Society of Neuroscience., Neuroscience, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

[BibTex]

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Reinforcement learning by reward-weighted regression for operational space control

Peters, J., Schaal, S.

In Proceedings of the 24th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 745-750, ICML, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

Abstract
Many robot control problems of practical importance, including operational space control, can be reformulated as immediate reward reinforcement learning problems. However, few of the known optimization or reinforcement learning algorithms can be used in online learning control for robots, as they are either prohibitively slow, do not scale to interesting domains of complex robots, or require trying out policies generated by random search, which are infeasible for a physical system. Using a generalization of the EM-base reinforcement learning framework suggested by Dayan & Hinton, we reduce the problem of learning with immediate rewards to a reward-weighted regression problem with an adaptive, integrated reward transformation for faster convergence. The resulting algorithm is efficient, learns smoothly without dangerous jumps in solution space, and works well in applications of complex high degree-of-freedom robots.

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Peters, J., Schaal, S. Reinforcement learning by reward-weighted regression for operational space control In Proceedings of the 24th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 745-750, ICML, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

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Policy gradient methods for machine learning

Peters, J., Theodorou, E., Schaal, S.

In Proceedings of the 14th INFORMS Conference of the Applied Probability Society, pages: 97-98, Eindhoven, Netherlands, July 9-11, 2007, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

Abstract
We present an in-depth survey of policy gradient methods as they are used in the machine learning community for optimizing parameterized, stochastic control policies in Markovian systems with respect to the expected reward. Despite having been developed separately in the reinforcement learning literature, policy gradient methods employ likelihood ratio gradient estimators as also suggested in the stochastic simulation optimization community. It is well-known that this approach to policy gradient estimation traditionally suffers from three drawbacks, i.e., large variance, a strong dependence on baseline functions and a inefficient gradient descent. In this talk, we will present a series of recent results which tackles each of these problems. The variance of the gradient estimation can be reduced significantly through recently introduced techniques such as optimal baselines, compatible function approximations and all-action gradients. However, as even the analytically obtainable policy gradients perform unnaturally slow, it required the step from ÔvanillaÕ policy gradient methods towards natural policy gradients in order to overcome the inefficiency of the gradient descent. This development resulted into the Natural Actor-Critic architecture which can be shown to be very efficient in application to motor primitive learning for robotics.

[BibTex]

Peters, J., Theodorou, E., Schaal, S. Policy gradient methods for machine learning In Proceedings of the 14th INFORMS Conference of the Applied Probability Society, pages: 97-98, Eindhoven, Netherlands, July 9-11, 2007, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

[BibTex]

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Policy Learning for Motor Skills

Peters, J., Schaal, S.

In Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP), pages: 233-242, (Editors: Ishikawa, M. , K. Doya, H. Miyamoto, T. Yamakawa), 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

Abstract
Policy learning which allows autonomous robots to adapt to novel situations has been a long standing vision of robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive sciences. However, to date, learning techniques have yet to fulfill this promise as only few methods manage to scale into the high-dimensional domains of manipulator robotics, or even the new upcoming trend of humanoid robotics, and usually scaling was only achieved in precisely pre-structured domains. In this paper, we investigate the ingredients for a general approach policy learning with the goal of an application to motor skill refinement in order to get one step closer towards human-like performance. For doing so, we study two major components for such an approach, i.e., firstly, we study policy learning algorithms which can be applied in the general setting of motor skill learning, and, secondly, we study a theoretically well-founded general approach to representing the required control structures for task representation and execution.

PDF DOI [BibTex]

Peters, J., Schaal, S. Policy Learning for Motor Skills In Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP), pages: 233-242, (Editors: Ishikawa, M. , K. Doya, H. Miyamoto, T. Yamakawa), 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

PDF DOI [BibTex]

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Reinforcement learning for operational space control

Peters, J., Schaal, S.

In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages: 2111-2116, IEEE Computer Society, ICRA, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

Abstract
While operational space control is of essential importance for robotics and well-understood from an analytical point of view, it can be prohibitively hard to achieve accurate control in face of modeling errors, which are inevitable in complex robots, e.g., humanoid robots. In such cases, learning control methods can offer an interesting alternative to analytical control algorithms. However, the resulting supervised learning problem is ill-defined as it requires to learn an inverse mapping of a usually redundant system, which is well known to suffer from the property of non-convexity of the solution space, i.e., the learning system could generate motor commands that try to steer the robot into physically impossible configurations. The important insight that many operational space control algorithms can be reformulated as optimal control problems, however, allows addressing this inverse learning problem in the framework of reinforcement learning. However, few of the known optimization or reinforcement learning algorithms can be used in online learning control for robots, as they are either prohibitively slow, do not scale to interesting domains of complex robots, or require trying out policies generated by random search, which are infeasible for a physical system. Using a generalization of the EM-based reinforcement learning framework suggested by Dayan & Hinton, we reduce the problem of learning with immediate rewards to a reward-weighted regression problem with an adaptive, integrated reward transformation for faster convergence. The resulting algorithm is efficient, learns smoothly without dangerous jumps in solution space, and works well in applications of complex high degree-of-freedom robots.

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Peters, J., Schaal, S. Reinforcement learning for operational space control In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages: 2111-2116, IEEE Computer Society, ICRA, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

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Relative Entropy Policy Search

Peters, J.

CLMC Technical Report: TR-CLMC-2007-2, Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab, Los Angeles, CA, 2007, clmc (techreport)

Abstract
This technical report describes a cute idea of how to create new policy search approaches. It directly relates to the Natural Actor-Critic methods but allows the derivation of one shot solutions. Future work may include the application to interesting problems.

PDF link (url) [BibTex]

Peters, J. Relative Entropy Policy Search CLMC Technical Report: TR-CLMC-2007-2, Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab, Los Angeles, CA, 2007, clmc (techreport)

PDF link (url) [BibTex]

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Using reward-weighted regression for reinforcement learning of task space control

Peters, J., Schaal, S.

In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Approximate Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning, pages: 262-267, Honolulu, Hawaii, April 1-5, 2007, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper, we evaluate different versions from the three main kinds of model-free policy gradient methods, i.e., finite difference gradients, `vanilla' policy gradients and natural policy gradients. Each of these methods is first presented in its simple form and subsequently refined and optimized. By carrying out numerous experiments on the cart pole regulator benchmark we aim to provide a useful baseline for future research on parameterized policy search algorithms. Portable C++ code is provided for both plant and algorithms; thus, the results in this paper can be reevaluated, reused and new algorithms can be inserted with ease.

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Peters, J., Schaal, S. Using reward-weighted regression for reinforcement learning of task space control In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Approximate Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning, pages: 262-267, Honolulu, Hawaii, April 1-5, 2007, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

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Evaluation of Policy Gradient Methods and Variants on the Cart-Pole Benchmark

Riedmiller, M., Peters, J., Schaal, S.

In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Approximate Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning, pages: 254-261, ADPRL, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper, we evaluate different versions from the three main kinds of model-free policy gradient methods, i.e., finite difference gradients, `vanilla' policy gradients and natural policy gradients. Each of these methods is first presented in its simple form and subsequently refined and optimized. By carrying out numerous experiments on the cart pole regulator benchmark we aim to provide a useful baseline for future research on parameterized policy search algorithms. Portable C++ code is provided for both plant and algorithms; thus, the results in this paper can be reevaluated, reused and new algorithms can be inserted with ease.

PDF [BibTex]

Riedmiller, M., Peters, J., Schaal, S. Evaluation of Policy Gradient Methods and Variants on the Cart-Pole Benchmark In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Approximate Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning, pages: 254-261, ADPRL, 2007, clmc (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]

2006

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Conformal Multi-Instance Kernels

Blaschko, M., Hofmann, T.

In NIPS 2006 Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, pages: 1-6, NIPS Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, December 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In the multiple instance learning setting, each observation is a bag of feature vectors of which one or more vectors indicates membership in a class. The primary task is to identify if any vectors in the bag indicate class membership while ignoring vectors that do not. We describe here a kernel-based technique that defines a parametric family of kernels via conformal transformations and jointly learns a discriminant function over bags together with the optimal parameter settings of the kernel. Learning a conformal transformation effectively amounts to weighting regions in the feature space according to their contribution to classification accuracy; regions that are discriminative will be weighted higher than regions that are not. This allows the classifier to focus on regions contributing to classification accuracy while ignoring regions that correspond to vectors found both in positive and in negative bags. We show how parameters of this transformation can be learned for support vector machines by posing the problem as a multiple kernel learning problem. The resulting multiple instance classifier gives competitive accuracy for several multi-instance benchmark datasets from different domains.

PDF Web [BibTex]

2006

Blaschko, M., Hofmann, T. Conformal Multi-Instance Kernels In NIPS 2006 Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, pages: 1-6, NIPS Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, December 2006 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

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Some observations on the pedestal effect or dipper function

Henning, B., Wichmann, F.

Journal of Vision, 6(13):50, 2006 Fall Vision Meeting of the Optical Society of America, December 2006 (poster)

Abstract
The pedestal effect is the large improvement in the detectabilty of a sinusoidal “signal” grating observed when the signal is added to a masking or “pedestal” grating of the same spatial frequency, orientation, and phase. We measured the pedestal effect in both broadband and notched noise - noise from which a 1.5-octave band centred on the signal frequency had been removed. Although the pedestal effect persists in broadband noise, it almost disappears in the notched noise. Furthermore, the pedestal effect is substantial when either high- or low-pass masking noise is used. We conclude that the pedestal effect in the absence of notched noise results principally from the use of information derived from channels with peak sensitivities at spatial frequencies different from that of the signal and pedestal. The spatial-frequency components of the notched noise above and below the spatial frequency of the signal and pedestal prevent the use of information about changes in contrast carried in channels tuned to spatial frequencies that are very much different from that of the signal and pedestal. Thus the pedestal or dipper effect measured without notched noise is not a characteristic of individual spatial-frequency tuned channels.

Web DOI [BibTex]

Henning, B., Wichmann, F. Some observations on the pedestal effect or dipper function Journal of Vision, 6(13):50, 2006 Fall Vision Meeting of the Optical Society of America, December 2006 (poster)

Web DOI [BibTex]

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A Kernel Method for the Two-Sample-Problem

Gretton, A., Borgwardt, K., Rasch, M., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A.

20th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), December 2006 (talk)

Abstract
We propose two statistical tests to determine if two samples are from different distributions. Our test statistic is in both cases the distance between the means of the two samples mapped into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The first test is based on a large deviation bound for the test statistic, while the second is based on the asymptotic distribution of this statistic. We show that the test statistic can be computed in $O(m^2)$ time. We apply our approach to a variety of problems, including attribute matching for databases using the Hungarian marriage method, where our test performs strongly. We also demonstrate excellent performance when comparing distributions over graphs, for which no alternative tests currently exist.

PDF [BibTex]

Gretton, A., Borgwardt, K., Rasch, M., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A. A Kernel Method for the Two-Sample-Problem 20th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), December 2006 (talk)

PDF [BibTex]

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Ab-initio gene finding using machine learning

Schweikert, G., Zeller, G., Zien, A., Ong, C., de Bona, F., Sonnenburg, S., Phillips, P., Rätsch, G.

NIPS Workshop on New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology, December 2006 (talk)

Web [BibTex]

Schweikert, G., Zeller, G., Zien, A., Ong, C., de Bona, F., Sonnenburg, S., Phillips, P., Rätsch, G. Ab-initio gene finding using machine learning NIPS Workshop on New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology, December 2006 (talk)

Web [BibTex]

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Graph boosting for molecular QSAR analysis

Saigo, H., Kadowaki, T., Kudo, T., Tsuda, K.

NIPS Workshop on New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology, December 2006 (talk)

Abstract
We propose a new boosting method that systematically combines graph mining and mathematical programming-based machine learning. Informative and interpretable subgraph features are greedily found by a series of graph mining calls. Due to our mathematical programming formulation, subgraph features and pre-calculated real-valued features are seemlessly integrated. We tested our algorithm on a quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) problem, which is basically a regression problem when given a set of chemical compounds. In benchmark experiments, the prediction accuracy of our method favorably compared with the best results reported on each dataset.

Web [BibTex]

Saigo, H., Kadowaki, T., Kudo, T., Tsuda, K. Graph boosting for molecular QSAR analysis NIPS Workshop on New Problems and Methods in Computational Biology, December 2006 (talk)

Web [BibTex]

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Inferring Causal Directions by Evaluating the Complexity of Conditional Distributions

Sun, X., Janzing, D., Schölkopf, B.

NIPS Workshop on Causality and Feature Selection, December 2006 (talk)

Abstract
We propose a new approach to infer the causal structure that has generated the observed statistical dependences among n random variables. The idea is that the factorization of the joint measure of cause and effect into P(cause)P(effect|cause) leads typically to simpler conditionals than non-causal factorizations. To evaluate the complexity of the conditionals we have tried two methods. First, we have compared them to those which maximize the conditional entropy subject to the observed first and second moments since we consider the latter as the simplest conditionals. Second, we have fitted the data with conditional probability measures being exponents of functions in an RKHS space and defined the complexity by a Hilbert-space semi-norm. Such a complexity measure has several properties that are useful for our purpose. We describe some encouraging results with both methods applied to real-world data. Moreover, we have combined constraint-based approaches to causal discovery (i.e., methods using only information on conditional statistical dependences) with our method in order to distinguish between causal hypotheses which are equivalent with respect to the imposed independences. Furthermore, we compare the performance to Bayesian approaches to causal inference.

Web [BibTex]

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Structure validation of the Josephin domain of ataxin-3: Conclusive evidence for an open conformation

Nicastro, G., Habeck, M., Masino, L., Svergun, DI., Pastore, A.

Journal of Biomolecular NMR, 36(4):267-277, December 2006 (article)

Abstract
The availability of new and fast tools in structure determination has led to a more than exponential growth of the number of structures solved per year. It is therefore increasingly essential to assess the accuracy of the new structures by reliable approaches able to assist validation. Here, we discuss a specific example in which the use of different complementary techniques, which include Bayesian methods and small angle scattering, resulted essential for validating the two currently available structures of the Josephin domain of ataxin-3, a protein involved in the ubiquitin/proteasome pathway and responsible for neurodegenerative spinocerebellar ataxia of type 3. Taken together, our results demonstrate that only one of the two structures is compatible with the experimental information. Based on the high precision of our refined structure, we show that Josephin contains an open cleft which could be directly implicated in the interaction with polyubiquitin chains and other partners.

Web DOI [BibTex]

Nicastro, G., Habeck, M., Masino, L., Svergun, DI., Pastore, A. Structure validation of the Josephin domain of ataxin-3: Conclusive evidence for an open conformation Journal of Biomolecular NMR, 36(4):267-277, December 2006 (article)

Web DOI [BibTex]

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A Unifying View of Wiener and Volterra Theory and Polynomial Kernel Regression

Franz, M., Schölkopf, B.

Neural Computation, 18(12):3097-3118, December 2006 (article)

Abstract
Volterra and Wiener series are perhaps the best understood nonlinear system representations in signal processing. Although both approaches have enjoyed a certain popularity in the past, their application has been limited to rather low-dimensional and weakly nonlinear systems due to the exponential growth of the number of terms that have to be estimated. We show that Volterra and Wiener series can be represented implicitly as elements of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space by utilizing polynomial kernels. The estimation complexity of the implicit representation is linear in the input dimensionality and independent of the degree of nonlinearity. Experiments show performance advantages in terms of convergence, interpretability, and system sizes that can be handled.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Franz, M., Schölkopf, B. A Unifying View of Wiener and Volterra Theory and Polynomial Kernel Regression Neural Computation, 18(12):3097-3118, December 2006 (article)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

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Minimal Logical Constraint Covering Sets

Sinz, F., Schölkopf, B.

(155), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, December 2006 (techreport)

Abstract
We propose a general framework for computing minimal set covers under class of certain logical constraints. The underlying idea is to transform the problem into a mathematical programm under linear constraints. In this sense it can be seen as a natural extension of the vector quantization algorithm proposed by Tipping and Schoelkopf. We show which class of logical constraints can be cast and relaxed into linear constraints and give an algorithm for the transformation.

PDF [BibTex]

Sinz, F., Schölkopf, B. Minimal Logical Constraint Covering Sets (155), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, December 2006 (techreport)

PDF [BibTex]

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Learning Optimal EEG Features Across Time, Frequency and Space

Farquhar, J., Hill, J., Schölkopf, B.

NIPS Workshop on Current Trends in Brain-Computer Interfacing, December 2006 (talk)

PDF Web [BibTex]

Farquhar, J., Hill, J., Schölkopf, B. Learning Optimal EEG Features Across Time, Frequency and Space NIPS Workshop on Current Trends in Brain-Computer Interfacing, December 2006 (talk)

PDF Web [BibTex]

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Semi-Supervised Learning

Zien, A.

Advanced Methods in Sequence Analysis Lectures, November 2006 (talk)

Web [BibTex]

Zien, A. Semi-Supervised Learning Advanced Methods in Sequence Analysis Lectures, November 2006 (talk)

Web [BibTex]

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Prediction of Protein Function from Networks

Shin, H., Tsuda, K.

In Semi-Supervised Learning, pages: 361-376, Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning, (Editors: Chapelle, O. , B. Schölkopf, A. Zien), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, November 2006 (inbook)

Abstract
In computational biology, it is common to represent domain knowledge using graphs. Frequently there exist multiple graphs for the same set of nodes, representing information from different sources, and no single graph is sufficient to predict class labels of unlabelled nodes reliably. One way to enhance reliability is to integrate multiple graphs, since individual graphs are partly independent and partly complementary to each other for prediction. In this chapter, we describe an algorithm to assign weights to multiple graphs within graph-based semi-supervised learning. Both predicting class labels and searching for weights for combining multiple graphs are formulated into one convex optimization problem. The graph-combining method is applied to functional class prediction of yeast proteins.When compared with individual graphs, the combined graph with optimized weights performs significantly better than any single graph.When compared with the semidefinite programming-based support vector machine (SDP/SVM), it shows comparable accuracy in a remarkably short time. Compared with a combined graph with equal-valued weights, our method could select important graphs without loss of accuracy, which implies the desirable property of integration with selectivity.

Web [BibTex]

Shin, H., Tsuda, K. Prediction of Protein Function from Networks In Semi-Supervised Learning, pages: 361-376, Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning, (Editors: Chapelle, O. , B. Schölkopf, A. Zien), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, November 2006 (inbook)

Web [BibTex]

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Adapting Spatial Filter Methods for Nonstationary BCIs

Tomioka, R., Hill, J., Blankertz, B., Aihara, K.

In IBIS 2006, pages: 65-70, 2006 Workshop on Information-Based Induction Sciences, November 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
A major challenge in applying machine learning methods to Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) is to overcome the possible nonstationarity in the data from the datablock the method is trained on and that the method is applied to. Assuming the joint distributions of the whitened signal and the class label to be identical in two blocks, where the whitening is done in each block independently, we propose a simple adaptation formula that is applicable to a broad class of spatial filtering methods including ICA, CSP, and logistic regression classifiers. We characterize the class of linear transformations for which the above assumption holds. Experimental results on 60 BCI datasets show improved classification accuracy compared to (a) fixed spatial filter approach (no adaptation) and (b) fixed spatial pattern approach (proposed by Hill et al., 2006 [1]).

PDF [BibTex]

Tomioka, R., Hill, J., Blankertz, B., Aihara, K. Adapting Spatial Filter Methods for Nonstationary BCIs In IBIS 2006, pages: 65-70, 2006 Workshop on Information-Based Induction Sciences, November 2006 (inproceedings)

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Discrete Regularization

Zhou, D., Schölkopf, B.

In Semi-supervised Learning, pages: 237-250, Adaptive computation and machine learning, (Editors: O Chapelle and B Schölkopf and A Zien), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, November 2006 (inbook)

Abstract
Many real-world machine learning problems are situated on finite discrete sets, including dimensionality reduction, clustering, and transductive inference. A variety of approaches for learning from finite sets has been proposed from different motivations and for different problems. In most of those approaches, a finite set is modeled as a graph, in which the edges encode pairwise relationships among the objects in the set. Consequently many concepts and methods from graph theory are adopted. In particular, the graph Laplacian is widely used. In this chapter we present a systemic framework for learning from a finite set represented as a graph. We develop discrete analogues of a number of differential operators, and then construct a discrete analogue of classical regularization theory based on those discrete differential operators. The graph Laplacian based approaches are special cases of this general discrete regularization framework. An important thing implied in this framework is that we have a wide choices of regularization on graph in addition to the widely-used graph Laplacian based one.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Zhou, D., Schölkopf, B. Discrete Regularization In Semi-supervised Learning, pages: 237-250, Adaptive computation and machine learning, (Editors: O Chapelle and B Schölkopf and A Zien), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, November 2006 (inbook)

PDF Web [BibTex]

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New Methods for the P300 Visual Speller

Biessmann, F.

(1), (Editors: Hill, J. ), Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, November 2006 (techreport)

PDF [BibTex]

Biessmann, F. New Methods for the P300 Visual Speller (1), (Editors: Hill, J. ), Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, November 2006 (techreport)

PDF [BibTex]

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Statistical Analysis of Slow Crack Growth Experiments

Pfingsten, T., Glien, K.

Journal of the European Ceramic Society, 26(15):3061-3065, November 2006 (article)

Abstract
A common approach for the determination of Slow Crack Growth (SCG) parameters are the static and dynamic loading method. Since materials with small Weibull module show a large variability in strength, a correct statistical analysis of the data is indispensable. In this work we propose the use of the Maximum Likelihood method and a Baysian analysis, which, in contrast to the standard procedures, take into account that failure strengths are Weibull distributed. The analysis provides estimates for the SCG parameters, the Weibull module, and the corresponding confidence intervals and overcomes the necessity of manual differentiation between inert and fatigue strength data. We compare the methods to a Least Squares approach, which can be considered the standard procedure. The results for dynamic loading data from the glass sealing of MEMS devices show that the assumptions inherent to the standard approach lead to significantly different estimates.

PDF PDF DOI [BibTex]

Pfingsten, T., Glien, K. Statistical Analysis of Slow Crack Growth Experiments Journal of the European Ceramic Society, 26(15):3061-3065, November 2006 (article)

PDF PDF DOI [BibTex]

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Optimizing Spatial Filters for BCI: Margin- and Evidence-Maximization Approaches

Farquhar, J., Hill, N., Schölkopf, B.

Challenging Brain-Computer Interfaces: MAIA Workshop 2006, pages: 1, November 2006 (poster)

Abstract
We present easy-to-use alternatives to the often-used two-stage Common Spatial Pattern + classifier approach for spatial filtering and classification of Event-Related Desychnronization signals in BCI. We report two algorithms that aim to optimize the spatial filters according to a criterion more directly related to the ability of the algorithms to generalize to unseen data. Both are based upon the idea of treating the spatial filter coefficients as hyperparameters of a kernel or covariance function. We then optimize these hyper-parameters directly along side the normal classifier parameters with respect to our chosen learning objective function. The two objectives considered are margin maximization as used in Support-Vector Machines and the evidence maximization framework used in Gaussian Processes. Our experiments assessed generalization error as a function of the number of training points used, on 9 BCI competition data sets and 5 offline motor imagery data sets measured in Tubingen. Both our approaches sho w consistent improvements relative to the commonly used CSP+linear classifier combination. Strikingly, the improvement is most significant in the higher noise cases, when either few trails are used for training, or with the most poorly performing subjects. This a reversal of the usual "rich get richer" effect in the development of CSP extensions, which tend to perform best when the signal is strong enough to accurately find their additional parameters. This makes our approach particularly suitable for clinical application where high levels of noise are to be expected.

PDF PDF [BibTex]

Farquhar, J., Hill, N., Schölkopf, B. Optimizing Spatial Filters for BCI: Margin- and Evidence-Maximization Approaches Challenging Brain-Computer Interfaces: MAIA Workshop 2006, pages: 1, November 2006 (poster)

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A Machine Learning Approach for Determining the PET Attenuation Map from Magnetic Resonance Images

Hofmann, M., Steinke, F., Judenhofer, M., Claussen, C., Schölkopf, B., Pichler, B.

IEEE Medical Imaging Conference, November 2006 (talk)

Abstract
A promising new combination in multimodality imaging is MR-PET, where the high soft tissue contrast of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and the functional information of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) are combined. Although many technical problems have recently been solved, it is still an open problem to determine the attenuation map from the available MR scan, as the MR intensities are not directly related to the attenuation values. One standard approach is an atlas registration where the atlas MR image is aligned with the patient MR thus also yielding an attenuation image for the patient. We also propose another approach, which to our knowledge has not been tried before: Using Support Vector Machines we predict the attenuation value directly from the local image information. We train this well-established machine learning algorithm using small image patches. Although both approaches sometimes yielded acceptable results, they also showed their specific shortcomings: The registration often fails with large deformations whereas the prediction approach is problematic when the local image structure is not characteristic enough. However, the failures often do not coincide and integration of both information sources is promising. We therefore developed a combination method extending Support Vector Machines to use not only local image structure but also atlas registered coordinates. We demonstrate the strength of this combination approach on a number of examples.

[BibTex]

Hofmann, M., Steinke, F., Judenhofer, M., Claussen, C., Schölkopf, B., Pichler, B. A Machine Learning Approach for Determining the PET Attenuation Map from Magnetic Resonance Images IEEE Medical Imaging Conference, November 2006 (talk)

[BibTex]

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Mining frequent stem patterns from unaligned RNA sequences

Hamada, M., Tsuda, K., Kudo, T., Kin, T., Asai, K.

Bioinformatics, 22(20):2480-2487, October 2006 (article)

Abstract
Motivation: In detection of non-coding RNAs, it is often necessary to identify the secondary structure motifs from a set of putative RNA sequences. Most of the existing algorithms aim to provide the best motif or few good motifs, but biologists often need to inspect all the possible motifs thoroughly. Results: Our method RNAmine employs a graph theoretic representation of RNA sequences, and detects all the possible motifs exhaustively using a graph mining algorithm. The motif detection problem boils down to finding frequently appearing patterns in a set of directed and labeled graphs. In the tasks of common secondary structure prediction and local motif detection from long sequences, our method performed favorably both in accuracy and in efficiency with the state-of-the-art methods such as CMFinder.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Hamada, M., Tsuda, K., Kudo, T., Kin, T., Asai, K. Mining frequent stem patterns from unaligned RNA sequences Bioinformatics, 22(20):2480-2487, October 2006 (article)

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Geometric Analysis of Hilbert Schmidt Independence criterion based ICA contrast function

Shen, H., Jegelka, S., Gretton, A.

(PA006080), National ICT Australia, Canberra, Australia, October 2006 (techreport)

Web [BibTex]

Shen, H., Jegelka, S., Gretton, A. Geometric Analysis of Hilbert Schmidt Independence criterion based ICA contrast function (PA006080), National ICT Australia, Canberra, Australia, October 2006 (techreport)

Web [BibTex]

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Large-Scale Gene Expression Profiling Reveals Major Pathogenetic Pathways of Cartilage Degeneration in Osteoarthritis

Aigner, T., Fundel, K., Saas, J., Gebhard, P., Haag, J., Weiss, T., Zien, A., Obermayr, F., Zimmer, R., Bartnik, E.

Arthritis and Rheumatism, 54(11):3533-3544, October 2006 (article)

Abstract
Objective. Despite many research efforts in recent decades, the major pathogenetic mechanisms of osteo- arthritis (OA), including gene alterations occurring during OA cartilage degeneration, are poorly under- stood, and there is no disease-modifying treatment approach. The present study was therefore initiated in order to identify differentially expressed disease-related genes and potential therapeutic targets. Methods. This investigation consisted of a large gene expression profiling study performed based on 78 normal and disease samples, using a custom-made complementar y DNA array covering >4,000 genes. Results. Many differentially expressed genes were identified, including the expected up-regulation of ana- bolic and catabolic matrix genes. In particular, the down-regulation of important oxidative defense genes, i.e., the genes for superoxide dismutases 2 and 3 and glutathione peroxidase 3, was prominent. This indicates that continuous oxidative stress to the cells and the matrix is one major underlying pathogenetic mecha- nism in OA. Also, genes that are involved in the phenot ypic stabilit y of cells, a feature that is greatly reduced in OA cartilage, appeared to be suppressed. Conclusion. Our findings provide a reference data set on gene alterations in OA cartilage and, importantly, indicate major mechanisms underlying central cell bio- logic alterations that occur during the OA disease process. These results identify molecular targets that can be further investigated in the search for therapeutic interventions.

Web DOI [BibTex]

Aigner, T., Fundel, K., Saas, J., Gebhard, P., Haag, J., Weiss, T., Zien, A., Obermayr, F., Zimmer, R., Bartnik, E. Large-Scale Gene Expression Profiling Reveals Major Pathogenetic Pathways of Cartilage Degeneration in Osteoarthritis Arthritis and Rheumatism, 54(11):3533-3544, October 2006 (article)

Web DOI [BibTex]

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Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machines and Application to Spam Filtering

Zien, A.

ECML Discovery Challenge Workshop, September 2006 (talk)

Abstract
After introducing the semi-supervised support vector machine (aka TSVM for "transductive SVM"), a few popular training strategies are briefly presented. Then the assumptions underlying semi-supervised learning are reviewed. Finally, two modern TSVM optimization techniques are applied to the spam filtering data sets of the workshop; it is shown that they can achieve excellent results, if the problem of the data being non-iid can be handled properly.

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A Linear Programming Approach for Molecular QSAR analysis

Saigo, H., Kadowaki, T., Tsuda, K.

In MLG 2006, pages: 85-96, (Editors: Gärtner, T. , G. C. Garriga, T. Meinl), International Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs, September 2006, Best Paper Award (inproceedings)

Abstract
Small molecules in chemistry can be represented as graphs. In a quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis, the central task is to find a regression function that predicts the activity of the molecule in high accuracy. Setting a QSAR as a primal target, we propose a new linear programming approach to the graph-based regression problem. Our method extends the graph classification algorithm by Kudo et al. (NIPS 2004), which is a combination of boosting and graph mining. Instead of sequential multiplicative updates, we employ the linear programming boosting (LP) for regression. The LP approach allows to include inequality constraints for the parameter vector, which turns out to be particularly useful in QSAR tasks where activity values are sometimes unavailable. Furthermore, the efficiency is improved significantly by employing multiple pricing.

PDF PDF [BibTex]

Saigo, H., Kadowaki, T., Tsuda, K. A Linear Programming Approach for Molecular QSAR analysis In MLG 2006, pages: 85-96, (Editors: Gärtner, T. , G. C. Garriga, T. Meinl), International Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs, September 2006, Best Paper Award (inproceedings)

PDF PDF [BibTex]

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Incremental Aspect Models for Mining Document Streams

Surendran, A., Sra, S.

In PKDD 2006, pages: 633-640, (Editors: Fürnkranz, J. , T. Scheffer, M. Spiliopoulou), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 10th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper we introduce a novel approach for incrementally building aspect models, and use it to dynamically discover underlying themes from document streams. Using the new approach we present an application which we call “query-line tracking” i.e., we automatically discover and summarize different themes or stories that appear over time, and that relate to a particular query. We present evaluation on news corpora to demonstrate the strength of our method for both query-line tracking, online indexing and clustering.

Web DOI [BibTex]

Surendran, A., Sra, S. Incremental Aspect Models for Mining Document Streams In PKDD 2006, pages: 633-640, (Editors: Fürnkranz, J. , T. Scheffer, M. Spiliopoulou), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 10th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Web DOI [BibTex]

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Learning Eye Movements

Kienzle, W., Wichmann, F., Schölkopf, B., Franz, M.

Sensory Coding And The Natural Environment, 2006, pages: 1, September 2006 (poster)

Abstract
The human visual system samples images through saccadic eye movements which rapidly change the point of fixation. Although the selection of eye movement targets depends on numerous top-down mechanisms, a number of recent studies have shown that low-level image features such as local contrast or edges play an important role. These studies typically used predefined image features which were afterwards experimentally verified. Here, we follow a complementary approach: instead of testing a set of candidate image features, we infer these hypotheses from the data, using methods from statistical learning. To this end, we train a non-linear classifier on fixated vs. randomly selected image patches without making any physiological assumptions. The resulting classifier can be essentially characterized by a nonlinear combination of two center-surround receptive fields. We find that the prediction performance of this simple model on our eye movement data is indistinguishable from the physiologically motivated model of Itti & Koch (2000) which is far more complex. In particular, we obtain a comparable performance without using any multi-scale representations, long-range interactions or oriented image features.

Web [BibTex]

Kienzle, W., Wichmann, F., Schölkopf, B., Franz, M. Learning Eye Movements Sensory Coding And The Natural Environment, 2006, pages: 1, September 2006 (poster)

Web [BibTex]

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Implicit Surface Modelling with a Globally Regularised Basis of Compact Support

Walder, C., Schölkopf, B., Chapelle, O.

Computer Graphics Forum, 25(3):635-644, September 2006 (article)

Abstract
We consider the problem of constructing a globally smooth analytic function that represents a surface implicitly by way of its zero set, given sample points with surface normal vectors. The contributions of the paper include a novel means of regularising multi-scale compactly supported basis functions that leads to the desirable interpolation properties previously only associated with fully supported bases. We also provide a regularisation framework for simpler and more direct treatment of surface normals, along with a corresponding generalisation of the representer theorem lying at the core of kernel-based machine learning methods. We demonstrate the techniques on 3D problems of up to 14 million data points, as well as 4D time series data and four-dimensional interpolation between three-dimensional shapes.

PDF GZIP DOI [BibTex]

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PALMA: Perfect Alignments using Large Margin Algorithms

Rätsch, G., Hepp, B., Schulze, U., Ong, C.

In GCB 2006, pages: 104-113, (Editors: Huson, D. , O. Kohlbacher, A. Lupas, K. Nieselt, A. Zell), Gesellschaft für Informatik, Bonn, Germany, German Conference on Bioinformatics, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Despite many years of research on how to properly align sequences in the presence of sequencing errors, alternative splicing and micro-exons, the correct alignment of mRNA sequences to genomic DNA is still a challenging task. We present a novel approach based on large margin learning that combines kernel based splice site predictions with common sequence alignment techniques. By solving a convex optimization problem, our algorithm -- called PALMA -- tunes the parameters of the model such that the true alignment scores higher than all other alignments. In an experimental study on the alignments of mRNAs containing artificially generated micro-exons, we show that our algorithm drastically outperforms all other methods: It perfectly aligns all 4358 sequences on an hold-out set, while the best other method misaligns at least 90 of them. Moreover, our algorithm is very robust against noise in the query sequence: when deleting, inserting, or mutating up to 50% of the query sequence, it still aligns 95% of all sequences correctly, while other methods achieve less than 36% accuracy. For datasets, additional results and a stand-alone alignment tool see http://www.fml.mpg.de/raetsch/projects/palma.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Rätsch, G., Hepp, B., Schulze, U., Ong, C. PALMA: Perfect Alignments using Large Margin Algorithms In GCB 2006, pages: 104-113, (Editors: Huson, D. , O. Kohlbacher, A. Lupas, K. Nieselt, A. Zell), Gesellschaft für Informatik, Bonn, Germany, German Conference on Bioinformatics, September 2006 (inproceedings)

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Graph Based Semi-Supervised Learning with Sharper Edges

Shin, H., Hill, N., Rätsch, G.

In ECML 2006, pages: 401-412, (Editors: Fürnkranz, J. , T. Scheffer, M. Spiliopoulou), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 17th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML), September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In many graph-based semi-supervised learning algorithms, edge weights are assumed to be fixed and determined by the data points‘ (often symmetric)relationships in input space, without considering directionality. However, relationships may be more informative in one direction (e.g. from labelled to unlabelled) than in the reverse direction, and some relationships (e.g. strong weights between oppositely labelled points) are unhelpful in either direction. Undesirable edges may reduce the amount of influence an informative point can propagate to its neighbours -- the point and its outgoing edges have been ``blunted.‘‘ We present an approach to ``sharpening‘‘ in which weights are adjusted to meet an optimization criterion wherever they are directed towards labelled points. This principle can be applied to a wide variety of algorithms. In the current paper, we present one ad hoc solution satisfying the principle, in order to show that it can improve performance on a number of publicly available benchmark data sets.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Shin, H., Hill, N., Rätsch, G. Graph Based Semi-Supervised Learning with Sharper Edges In ECML 2006, pages: 401-412, (Editors: Fürnkranz, J. , T. Scheffer, M. Spiliopoulou), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 17th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML), September 2006 (inproceedings)

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Semi-Supervised Learning

Chapelle, O., Schölkopf, B., Zien, A.

pages: 508, Adaptive computation and machine learning, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, September 2006 (book)

Abstract
In the field of machine learning, semi-supervised learning (SSL) occupies the middle ground, between supervised learning (in which all training examples are labeled) and unsupervised learning (in which no label data are given). Interest in SSL has increased in recent years, particularly because of application domains in which unlabeled data are plentiful, such as images, text, and bioinformatics. This first comprehensive overview of SSL presents state-of-the-art algorithms, a taxonomy of the field, selected applications, benchmark experiments, and perspectives on ongoing and future research. Semi-Supervised Learning first presents the key assumptions and ideas underlying the field: smoothness, cluster or low-density separation, manifold structure, and transduction. The core of the book is the presentation of SSL methods, organized according to algorithmic strategies. After an examination of generative models, the book describes algorithms that implement the low-density separation assumption, graph-based methods, and algorithms that perform two-step learning. The book then discusses SSL applications and offers guidelines for SSL practitioners by analyzing the results of extensive benchmark experiments. Finally, the book looks at interesting directions for SSL research. The book closes with a discussion of the relationship between semi-supervised learning and transduction.

Web [BibTex]

Chapelle, O., Schölkopf, B., Zien, A. Semi-Supervised Learning pages: 508, Adaptive computation and machine learning, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, September 2006 (book)

Web [BibTex]

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Finite-Horizon Optimal State-Feedback Control of Nonlinear Stochastic Systems Based on a Minimum Principle

Deisenroth, MP., Ohtsuka, T., Weissel, F., Brunn, D., Hanebeck, UD.

In MFI 2006, pages: 371-376, (Editors: Hanebeck, U. D.), IEEE Service Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 6th IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper, an approach to the finite-horizon optimal state-feedback control problem of nonlinear, stochastic, discrete-time systems is presented. Starting from the dynamic programming equation, the value function will be approximated by means of Taylor series expansion up to second-order derivatives. Moreover, the problem will be reformulated, such that a minimum principle can be applied to the stochastic problem. Employing this minimum principle, the optimal control problem can be rewritten as a two-point boundary-value problem to be solved at each time step of a shrinking horizon. To avoid numerical problems, the two-point boundary-value problem will be solved by means of a continuation method. Thus, the curse of dimensionality of dynamic programming is avoided, and good candidates for the optimal state-feedback controls are obtained. The proposed approach will be evaluated by means of a scalar example system.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Deisenroth, MP., Ohtsuka, T., Weissel, F., Brunn, D., Hanebeck, UD. Finite-Horizon Optimal State-Feedback Control of Nonlinear Stochastic Systems Based on a Minimum Principle In MFI 2006, pages: 371-376, (Editors: Hanebeck, U. D.), IEEE Service Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 6th IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration, September 2006 (inproceedings)

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Uniform Convergence of Adaptive Graph-Based Regularization

Hein, M.

In COLT 2006, pages: 50-64, (Editors: Lugosi, G. , H.-U. Simon), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 19th Annual Conference on Learning Theory, September 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The regularization functional induced by the graph Laplacian of a random neighborhood graph based on the data is adaptive in two ways. First it adapts to an underlying manifold structure and second to the density of the data-generating probability measure. We identify in this paper the limit of the regularizer and show uniform convergence over the space of Hoelder functions. As an intermediate step we derive upper bounds on the covering numbers of Hoelder functions on compact Riemannian manifolds, which are of independent interest for the theoretical analysis of manifold-based learning methods.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Hein, M. Uniform Convergence of Adaptive Graph-Based Regularization In COLT 2006, pages: 50-64, (Editors: Lugosi, G. , H.-U. Simon), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 19th Annual Conference on Learning Theory, September 2006 (inproceedings)

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