Gunnar Rätsch

Research Scientist

Alumni

Empirical Inference

Publications

58 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2012

Multitask Learning in Computational Biology

Widmer, C., Rätsch, G.

JMLR W\&CP. ICML 2011 Unsupervised and Transfer Learning Workshop, 27, pages: 207-216, 2012 (article)

Abstract

Computational Biology provides a wide range of applications for Multitask Learning (MTL) methods. As the generation of labels often is very costly in the biomedical domain, combining data from diﬀerent related problems or tasks is a promising strategy to reduce label cost. In this paper, we present two problems from sequence biology, where MTL was successfully applied. For this, we use regularization-based MTL methods, with a special focus on the case of a hierarchical relationship between tasks. Furthermore, we propose strategies to reﬁne the measure of task relatedness, which is of central importance in MTL and ﬁnally give some practical guidelines, when MTL strategies are likely to pay oﬀ.

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2012

Widmer, C., Rätsch, G. Multitask Learning in Computational Biology JMLR W\&CP. ICML 2011 Unsupervised and Transfer Learning Workshop, 27, pages: 207-216, 2012 (article)

PDF [BibTex]

Efficient Training of Graph-Regularized Multitask SVMs

Widmer, C., Kloft, M., Görnitz, N., Rätsch, G.

In Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML/PKDD 2012, LNCS Vol. 7523, pages: 633-647, (Editors: PA Flach and T De Bie and N Cristianini), Springer, Berlin, Germany, ECML, 2012 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

Widmer, C., Kloft, M., Görnitz, N., Rätsch, G. Efficient Training of Graph-Regularized Multitask SVMs In Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML/PKDD 2012, LNCS Vol. 7523, pages: 633-647, (Editors: PA Flach and T De Bie and N Cristianini), Springer, Berlin, Germany, ECML, 2012 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

2011

Multiple reference genomes and transcriptomes for Arabidopsis thaliana

Nature, 477(7365):419–423, September 2011 (article)

Abstract

Genetic differences between Arabidopsis thaliana accessions underlie the plant’s extensive phenotypic variation, and until now these have been interpreted largely in the context of the annotated reference accession Col-0. Here we report the sequencing, assembly and annotation of the genomes of 18 natural A. thaliana accessions, and their transcriptomes. When assessed on the basis of the reference annotation, one-third of protein-coding genes are predicted to be disrupted in at least one accession. However, re-annotation of each genome revealed that alternative gene models often restore coding potential. Gene expression in seedlings differed for nearly half of expressed genes and was frequently associated with cis variants within 5 kilobases, as were intron retention alternative splicing events. Sequence and expression variation is most pronounced in genes that respond to the biotic environment. Our data further promote evolutionary and functional studies in A. thaliana, especially the MAGIC genetic reference population descended from these accessions.

Web DOI [BibTex]

2011

Gan, X., Stegle, O., Behr, J., Steffen, J., Drewe, P., Hildebrand, K., Lyngsoe, R., Schultheiss, S., Osborne, E., Sreedharan, V., Kahles, A., Bohnert, R., Jean, G., Derwent, P., Kersey, P., Belfield, E., Harberd, N., Kemen, E., Toomajian, C., Kover, P., Clark, R., Rätsch, G., Mott, R. Multiple reference genomes and transcriptomes for Arabidopsis thaliana Nature, 477(7365):419–423, September 2011 (article)

Web DOI [BibTex]

Hierarchical Multitask Structured Output Learning for Large-scale Sequence Segmentation

Görnitz, N., Widmer, C., Zeller, G., Kahles, A., Sonnenburg, S., Rätsch, G.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24, pages: 2690-2698, (Editors: J Shawe-Taylor and RS Zemel and P Bartlett and FCN Pereira and KQ Weinberger), Curran Associates, Inc., Red Hook, NY, USA, Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2011 (inproceedings)

PDF Project Page [BibTex]

Görnitz, N., Widmer, C., Zeller, G., Kahles, A., Sonnenburg, S., Rätsch, G. Hierarchical Multitask Structured Output Learning for Large-scale Sequence Segmentation In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24, pages: 2690-2698, (Editors: J Shawe-Taylor and RS Zemel and P Bartlett and FCN Pereira and KQ Weinberger), Curran Associates, Inc., Red Hook, NY, USA, Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2011 (inproceedings)

PDF Project Page [BibTex]

2010

Statistical Tests for Detecting Differential RNA-Transcript Expression from Read Counts

Stegle, O., Drewe, P., Bohnert, R., Borgwardt, K., Rätsch, G.

Nature Precedings, 2010, pages: 1-11, May 2010 (article)

Abstract

As a fruit of the current revolution in sequencing technology, transcriptomes can now be analyzed at an unprecedented level of detail. These advances have been exploited for detecting differential expressed genes across biological samples and for quantifying the abundances of various RNA transcripts within one gene. However, explicit strategies for detecting the hidden differential abundances of RNA transcripts in biological samples have not been defined. In this work, we present two novel statistical tests to address this issue: a "gene structure sensitive" Poisson test for detecting differential expression when the transcript structure of the gene is known, and a kernel-based test called Maximum Mean Discrepancy when it is unknown. We analyzed the proposed approaches on simulated read data for two artificial samples as well as on factual reads generated by the Illumina Genome Analyzer for two C. elegans samples. Our analysis shows that the Poisson test identifies genes with differential transcript expression considerably better that previously proposed RNA transcript quantification approaches for this task. The MMD test is able to detect a large fraction (75%) of such differential cases without the knowledge of the annotated transcripts. It is therefore well-suited to analyze RNA-Seq experiments when the genome annotations are incomplete or not available, where other approaches have to fail.

PDF DOI [BibTex]

2010

Stegle, O., Drewe, P., Bohnert, R., Borgwardt, K., Rätsch, G. Statistical Tests for Detecting Differential RNA-Transcript Expression from Read Counts Nature Precedings, 2010, pages: 1-11, May 2010 (article)

PDF DOI [BibTex]

Leveraging Sequence Classification by Taxonomy-based Multitask Learning

Widmer, C., Leiva, J., Altun, Y., Rätsch, G.

In Research in Computational Molecular Biology, LNCS, Vol. 6044, pages: 522-534, (Editors: B Berger), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 14th Annual International Conference, RECOMB, 2010 (inproceedings)

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Widmer, C., Leiva, J., Altun, Y., Rätsch, G. Leveraging Sequence Classification by Taxonomy-based Multitask Learning In Research in Computational Molecular Biology, LNCS, Vol. 6044, pages: 522-534, (Editors: B Berger), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 14th Annual International Conference, RECOMB, 2010 (inproceedings)

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Novel machine learning methods for MHC Class I binding prediction

Widmer, C., Toussaint, N., Altun, Y., Kohlbacher, O., Rätsch, G.

In Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics, pages: 98-109, (Editors: TMH Dijkstra and E Tsivtsivadze and E Marchiori and T Heskes), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 5th IAPR International Conference, PRIB, 2010 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

Widmer, C., Toussaint, N., Altun, Y., Kohlbacher, O., Rätsch, G. Novel machine learning methods for MHC Class I binding prediction In Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics, pages: 98-109, (Editors: TMH Dijkstra and E Tsivtsivadze and E Marchiori and T Heskes), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 5th IAPR International Conference, PRIB, 2010 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

Inferring latent task structure for Multitask Learning by Multiple Kernel Learning

Widmer, C., Toussaint, N., Altun, Y., Rätsch, G.

BMC Bioinformatics, 11 Suppl 8, pages: S5, 2010 (article)

Abstract

The lack of sufficient training data is the limiting factor for many Machine Learning applications in Computational Biology. If data is available for several different but related problem domains, Multitask Learning algorithms can be used to learn a model based on all available information. In Bioinformatics, many problems can be cast into the Multitask Learning scenario by incorporating data from several organisms. However, combining information from several tasks requires careful consideration of the degree of similarity between tasks. Our proposed method simultaneously learns or refines the similarity between tasks along with the Multitask Learning classifier. This is done by formulating the Multitask Learning problem as Multiple Kernel Learning, using the recently published q-Norm MKL algorithm.

Web DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Widmer, C., Toussaint, N., Altun, Y., Rätsch, G. Inferring latent task structure for Multitask Learning by Multiple Kernel Learning BMC Bioinformatics, 11 Suppl 8, pages: S5, 2010 (article)

Web DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2009

An Empirical Analysis of Domain Adaptation Algorithms for Genomic Sequence Analysis

Schweikert, G., Widmer, C., Schölkopf, B., Rätsch, G.

In Advances in neural information processing systems 21, pages: 1433-1440, (Editors: D Koller and D Schuurmans and Y Bengio and L Bottou), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), June 2009 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We study the problem of domain transfer for a supervised classification task in mRNA splicing. We consider a number of recent domain transfer methods from machine learning, including some that are novel, and evaluate them on genomic sequence data from model organisms of varying evolutionary distance. We find that in cases where the organisms are not closely related, the use of domain adaptation methods can help improve classification performance.

PDF Web Project Page [BibTex]

2009

Schweikert, G., Widmer, C., Schölkopf, B., Rätsch, G. An Empirical Analysis of Domain Adaptation Algorithms for Genomic Sequence Analysis In Advances in neural information processing systems 21, pages: 1433-1440, (Editors: D Koller and D Schuurmans and Y Bengio and L Bottou), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), June 2009 (inproceedings)

PDF Web Project Page [BibTex]

Prototype Classification: Insights from Machine Learning

Graf, A., Bousquet, O., Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B.

Neural Computation, 21(1):272-300, January 2009 (article)

Abstract

We shed light on the discrimination between patterns belonging to two different classes by casting this decoding problem into a generalized prototype framework. The discrimination process is then separated into two stages: a projection stage that reduces the dimensionality of the data by projecting it on a line and a threshold stage where the distributions of the projected patterns of both classes are separated. For this, we extend the popular mean-of-class prototype classification using algorithms from machine learning that satisfy a set of invariance properties. We report a simple yet general approach to express different types of linear classification algorithms in an identical and easy-to-visualize formal framework using generalized prototypes where these prototypes are used to express the normal vector and offset of the hyperplane. We investigate nonmargin classifiers such as the classical prototype classifier, the Fisher classifier, and the relevance vector machine. We then study hard and soft margin cl assifiers such as the support vector machine and a boosted version of the prototype classifier. Subsequently, we relate mean-of-class prototype classification to other classification algorithms by showing that the prototype classifier is a limit of any soft margin classifier and that boosting a prototype classifier yields the support vector machine. While giving novel insights into classification per se by presenting a common and unified formalism, our generalized prototype framework also provides an efficient visualization and a principled comparison of machine learning classification.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Graf, A., Bousquet, O., Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B. Prototype Classification: Insights from Machine Learning Neural Computation, 21(1):272-300, January 2009 (article)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

mGene: accurate SVM-based gene finding with an application to nematode genomes

Schweikert, G., Zien, A., Zeller, G., Behr, J., Dieterich, C., Ong, C., Philips, P., De Bona, F., Hartmann, L., Bohlen, A., Krüger, N., Sonnenburg, S., Rätsch, G.

Genome Research, 19(11):2133-43, 2009 (article)

Abstract

We present a highly accurate gene-prediction system for eukaryotic genomes, called mGene. It combines in an unprecedented manner the flexibility of generalized hidden Markov models (gHMMs) with the predictive power of modern machine learning methods, such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Its excellent performance was proved in an objective competition based on the genome of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Considering the average of sensitivity and specificity, the developmental version of mGene exhibited the best prediction performance on nucleotide, exon, and transcript level for ab initio and multiple-genome gene-prediction tasks. The fully developed version shows superior performance in 10 out of 12 evaluation criteria compared with the other participating gene finders, including Fgenesh++ and Augustus. An in-depth analysis of mGene's genome-wide predictions revealed that approximately 2200 predicted genes were not contained in the current genome annotation. Testing a subset of 57 of these genes by RT-PCR and sequencing, we confirmed expression for 24 (42%) of them. mGene missed 300 annotated genes, out of which 205 were unconfirmed. RT-PCR testing of 24 of these genes resulted in a success rate of merely 8%. These findings suggest that even the gene catalog of a well-studied organism such as C. elegans can be substantially improved by mGene's predictions. We also provide gene predictions for the four nematodes C. briggsae, C. brenneri, C. japonica, and C. remanei. Comparing the resulting proteomes among these organisms and to the known protein universe, we identified many species-specific gene inventions. In a quality assessment of several available annotations for these genomes, we find that mGene's predictions are most accurate.

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Schweikert, G., Zien, A., Zeller, G., Behr, J., Dieterich, C., Ong, C., Philips, P., De Bona, F., Hartmann, L., Bohlen, A., Krüger, N., Sonnenburg, S., Rätsch, G. mGene: accurate SVM-based gene finding with an application to nematode genomes Genome Research, 19(11):2133-43, 2009 (article)

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

mGene.web: a web service for accurate computational gene finding

Schweikert, G., Behr, J., Zien, A., Zeller, G., Ong, C., Sonnenburg, S., Rätsch, G.

Nucleic Acids Research, 37, pages: W312-6, 2009 (article)

Abstract

We describe mGene.web, a web service for the genome-wide prediction of protein coding genes from eukaryotic DNA sequences. It offers pre-trained models for the recognition of gene structures including untranslated regions in an increasing number of organisms. With mGene.web, users have the additional possibility to train the system with their own data for other organisms on the push of a button, a functionality that will greatly accelerate the annotation of newly sequenced genomes. The system is built in a highly modular way, such that individual components of the framework, like the promoter prediction tool or the splice site predictor, can be used autonomously. The underlying gene finding system mGene is based on discriminative machine learning techniques and its high accuracy has been demonstrated in an international competition on nematode genomes. mGene.web is available at http://www.mgene.org/web, it is free of charge and can be used for eukaryotic genomes of small to moderate size (several hundred Mbp).

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Schweikert, G., Behr, J., Zien, A., Zeller, G., Ong, C., Sonnenburg, S., Rätsch, G. mGene.web: a web service for accurate computational gene finding Nucleic Acids Research, 37, pages: W312-6, 2009 (article)

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2008

Support Vector Machines and Kernels for Computational Biology

Ben-Hur, A., Ong, C., Sonnenburg, S., Schölkopf, B., Rätsch, G.

PLoS Computational Biology, 4(10: e1000173):1-10, October 2008 (article)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

2008

Ben-Hur, A., Ong, C., Sonnenburg, S., Schölkopf, B., Rätsch, G. Support Vector Machines and Kernels for Computational Biology PLoS Computational Biology, 4(10: e1000173):1-10, October 2008 (article)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

mGene: A Novel Discriminative Gene Finder

Schweikert, G., Zeller, G., Zien, A., Behr, J., Sonnenburg, S., Philips, P., Ong, C., Rätsch, G.

Worm Genomics and Systems Biology meeting, July 2008 (talk)

[BibTex]

Schweikert, G., Zeller, G., Zien, A., Behr, J., Sonnenburg, S., Philips, P., Ong, C., Rätsch, G. mGene: A Novel Discriminative Gene Finder Worm Genomics and Systems Biology meeting, July 2008 (talk)

[BibTex]

Discovering Common Sequence Variation in Arabidopsis thaliana

16th Annual International Conference Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), July 2008 (talk)

Web [BibTex]

Rätsch, G., Clark, R., Schweikert, G., Toomajian, C., Ossowski, S., Zeller, G., Shinn, P., Warthman, N., Hu, T., Fu, G., Hinds, D., Cheng, H., Frazer, K., Huson, D., Schölkopf, B., Nordborg, M., Ecker, J., Weigel, D., Schneeberger, K., Bohlen, A. Discovering Common Sequence Variation in Arabidopsis thaliana 16th Annual International Conference Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), July 2008 (talk)

Web [BibTex]

At-TAX: A Whole Genome Tiling Array Resource for Developmental Expression Analysis and Transcript Identification in Arabidopsis thaliana

Laubinger, S., Zeller, G., Henz, S., Sachsenberg, T., Widmer, C., Naouar, N., Vuylsteke, M., Schölkopf, B., Rätsch, G., Weigel, D.

Genome Biology, 9(7: R112):1-16, July 2008 (article)

Abstract

Gene expression maps for model organisms, including Arabidopsis thaliana, have typically been created using gene-centric expression arrays. Here, we describe a comprehensive expression atlas, Arabidopsis thaliana Tiling Array Express (At-TAX), which is based on whole-genome tiling arrays. We demonstrate that tiling arrays are accurate tools for gene expression analysis and identified more than 1,000 unannotated transcribed regions. Visualizations of gene expression estimates, transcribed regions, and tiling probe measurements are accessible online at the At-TAX homepage.

PDF DOI [BibTex]

Laubinger, S., Zeller, G., Henz, S., Sachsenberg, T., Widmer, C., Naouar, N., Vuylsteke, M., Schölkopf, B., Rätsch, G., Weigel, D. At-TAX: A Whole Genome Tiling Array Resource for Developmental Expression Analysis and Transcript Identification in Arabidopsis thaliana Genome Biology, 9(7: R112):1-16, July 2008 (article)

PDF DOI [BibTex]

2007

Positional Oligomer Importance Matrices

Sonnenburg, S., Zien, A., Philips, P., Rätsch, G.

NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning in Computational Biology, December 2007 (talk)

Abstract

At the heart of many important bioinformatics problems, such as gene finding and function prediction, is the classification of biological sequences, above all of DNA and proteins. In many cases, the most accurate classifiers are obtained by training SVMs with complex sequence kernels, for instance for transcription starts or splice sites. However, an often criticized downside of SVMs with complex kernels is that it is very hard for humans to understand the learned decision rules and to derive biological insights from them. To close this gap, we introduce the concept of positional oligomer importance matrices (POIMs) and develop an efficient algorithm for their computation. We demonstrate how they overcome the limitations of sequence logos, and how they can be used to find relevant motifs for different biological phenomena in a straight-forward way. Note that the concept of POIMs is not limited to interpreting SVMs, but is applicable to general k−mer based scoring systems.

Web [BibTex]

2007

Sonnenburg, S., Zien, A., Philips, P., Rätsch, G. Positional Oligomer Importance Matrices NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning in Computational Biology, December 2007 (talk)

Web [BibTex]

Machine Learning Algorithms for Polymorphism Detection

Schweikert, G., Zeller, G., Weigel, D., Schölkopf, B., Rätsch, G.

NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning in Computational Biology, December 2007 (talk)

Web [BibTex]

Schweikert, G., Zeller, G., Weigel, D., Schölkopf, B., Rätsch, G. Machine Learning Algorithms for Polymorphism Detection NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning in Computational Biology, December 2007 (talk)

Web [BibTex]

Accurate Splice site Prediction Using Support Vector Machines

Sonnenburg, S., Schweikert, G., Philips, P., Behr, J., Rätsch, G.

BMC Bioinformatics, 8(Supplement 10):1-16, December 2007 (article)

Abstract

Background: For splice site recognition, one has to solve two classification problems: discriminating true from decoy splice sites for both acceptor and donor sites. Gene finding systems typically rely on Markov Chains to solve these tasks. Results: In this work we consider Support Vector Machines for splice site recognition. We employ the so-called weighted degree kernel which turns out well suited for this task, as we will illustrate in several experiments where we compare its prediction accuracy with that of recently proposed systems. We apply our method to the genome-wide recognition of splice sites in Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, Arabidopsis thaliana, Danio rerio, and Homo sapiens. Our performance estimates indicate that splice sites can be recognized very accurately in these genomes and that our method outperforms many other methods including Markov Chains, GeneSplicer and SpliceMachine. We provide genome-wide predictions of splice sites and a stand-alone prediction tool ready to be used for incorporation in a gene finder. Availability: Data, splits, additional information on the model selection, the whole genome predictions, as well as the stand-alone prediction tool are available for download at http:// www.fml.mpg.de/raetsch/projects/splice.

PDF DOI [BibTex]

Sonnenburg, S., Schweikert, G., Philips, P., Behr, J., Rätsch, G. Accurate Splice site Prediction Using Support Vector Machines BMC Bioinformatics, 8(Supplement 10):1-16, December 2007 (article)

PDF DOI [BibTex]

The Need for Open Source Software in Machine Learning

Journal of Machine Learning Research, 8, pages: 2443-2466, October 2007 (article)

Abstract

Open source tools have recently reached a level of maturity which makes them suitable for building large-scale real-world systems. At the same time, the field of machine learning has developed a large body of powerful learning algorithms for diverse applications. However, the true potential of these methods is not realized, since existing implementations are not openly shared, resulting in software with low usability, and weak interoperability. We argue that this situation can be significantly improved by increasing incentives for researchers to publish their software under an open source model. Additionally, we outline the problems authors are faced with when trying to publish algorithmic implementations of machine learning methods. We believe that a resource of peer reviewed software accompanied by short articles would be highly valuable to both the machine learning and the general scientific community.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Sonnenburg, S., Braun, M., Ong, C., Bengio, S., Bottou, L., Holmes, G., LeCun, Y., Müller, K., Pereira, F., Rasmussen, C., Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A., Vincent, P., Weston, J., Williamson, R. The Need for Open Source Software in Machine Learning Journal of Machine Learning Research, 8, pages: 2443-2466, October 2007 (article)

PDF Web [BibTex]

Common Sequence Polymorphisms Shaping Genetic Diversity in Arabidopsis thaliana

Science, 317(5836):338-342, July 2007 (article)

Abstract

The genomes of individuals from the same species vary in sequence as a result of different evolutionary processes. To examine the patterns of, and the forces shaping, sequence variation in Arabidopsis thaliana, we performed high-density array resequencing of 20 diverse strains (accessions). More than 1 million nonredundant single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were identified at moderate false discovery rates (FDRs), and ~4% of the genome was identified as being highly dissimilar or deleted relative to the reference genome sequence. Patterns of polymorphism are highly nonrandom among gene families, with genes mediating interaction with the biotic environment having exceptional polymorphism levels. At the chromosomal scale, regional variation in polymorphism was readily apparent. A scan for recent selective sweeps revealed several candidate regions, including a notable example in which almost all variation was removed in a 500-kilobase window. Analyzing the polymorphisms we describe in larger sets of accessions will enable a detailed understanding of forces shaping population-wide sequence variation in A. thaliana.

PDF DOI [BibTex]

Clark, R., Schweikert, G., Toomajian, C., Ossowski, S., Zeller, G., Shinn, P., Warthmann, N., Hu, T., Fu, G., Hinds, D., Chen, H., Frazer, K., Huson, D., Schölkopf, B., Nordborg, M., Rätsch, G., Ecker, J., Weigel, D. Common Sequence Polymorphisms Shaping Genetic Diversity in Arabidopsis thaliana Science, 317(5836):338-342, July 2007 (article)

PDF DOI [BibTex]

PALMA: mRNA to Genome Alignments using Large Margin Algorithms

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

Bioinformatics, 23(15):1892-1900, May 2007 (article)

Abstract

Motivation: 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. Results: We present a novel approach based on large margin learning that combines accurate plice 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 true alignments score higher than other alignments. We study the accuracy of alignments of mRNAs containing artificially generated micro-exons to genomic DNA. In a carefully designed experiment, we show that our algorithm accurately identifies the intron boundaries as well as boundaries of the optimal local alignment. It outperforms all other methods: for 5702 artificially shortened EST sequences from C. elegans and human it correctly identifies the intron boundaries in all except two cases. The best other method is a recently proposed method called exalin which misaligns 37 of the sequences. Our method also demonstrates robustness to mutations, insertions and deletions, retaining accuracy even at high noise levels. Availability: Datasets for training, evaluation and testing, additional results and a stand-alone alignment tool implemented in C++ and python are available at http://www.fml.mpg.de/raetsch/projects/palma.

Web DOI [BibTex]

Schulze, U., Hepp, B., Ong, C., Rätsch, G. PALMA: mRNA to Genome Alignments using Large Margin Algorithms Bioinformatics, 23(15):1892-1900, May 2007 (article)

Web DOI [BibTex]

Improving the Caenorhabditis elegans Genome Annotation Using Machine Learning

Rätsch, G., Sonnenburg, S., Srinivasan, J., Witte, H., Müller, K., Sommer, R., Schölkopf, B.

PLoS Computational Biology, 3(2, e20):0313-0322, February 2007 (article)

PDF DOI [BibTex]

Rätsch, G., Sonnenburg, S., Srinivasan, J., Witte, H., Müller, K., Sommer, R., Schölkopf, B. Improving the Caenorhabditis elegans Genome Annotation Using Machine Learning PLoS Computational Biology, 3(2, e20):0313-0322, February 2007 (article)

PDF DOI [BibTex]

2006

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]

2006

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]

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)

PDF Web [BibTex]

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&amp;amp;amp;lsquo; (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.&amp;amp;amp;lsquo;&amp;amp;amp;lsquo; We present an approach to ``sharpening&amp;amp;amp;lsquo;&amp;amp;amp;lsquo; 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)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Machine Learning Algorithms for Polymorphism Detection

Schweikert, G., Zeller, G., Clark, R., Ossowski, S., Warthmann, N., Shinn, P., Frazer, K., Ecker, J., Huson, D., Weigel, D., Schölkopf, B., Rätsch, G.

2nd ISCB Student Council Symposium, August 2006 (talk)

Abstract

Analyzing resequencing array data using machine learning, we obtain a genome-wide inventory of polymorphisms in 20 wild strains of Arabidopsis thaliana, including 750,000 single nucleotide poly- morphisms (SNPs) and thousands of highly polymorphic regions and deletions. We thus provide an unprecedented resource for the study of natural variation in plants.

Web [BibTex]

Schweikert, G., Zeller, G., Clark, R., Ossowski, S., Warthmann, N., Shinn, P., Frazer, K., Ecker, J., Huson, D., Weigel, D., Schölkopf, B., Rätsch, G. Machine Learning Algorithms for Polymorphism Detection 2nd ISCB Student Council Symposium, August 2006 (talk)

Web [BibTex]

ARTS: Accurate Recognition of Transcription Starts in Human

Sonnenburg, S., Zien, A., Rätsch, G.

Bioinformatics, 22(14):e472-e480, July 2006 (article)

Abstract

Motivation: One of the most important features of genomic DNA are the protein-coding genes. While it is of great value to identify those genes and the encoded proteins, it is also crucial to understand how their transcription is regulated. To this end one has to identify the corresponding promoters and the contained transcription factor binding sites. TSS finders can be used to locate potential promoters. They may also be used in combination with other signal and content detectors to resolve entire gene structures. Results: We have developed a novel kernel based method - called ARTS - that accurately recognizes transcription start sites in human. The application of otherwise too computationally expensive Support Vector Machines was made possible due to the use of efficient training and evaluation techniques using suffix tries. In a carefully designed experimental study, we compare our TSS finder to state-of-the-art methods from the literature: McPromoter, Eponine and FirstEF. For given false positive rates within a reasonable range, we consistently achieve considerably higher true positive rates. For instance, ARTS finds about 24% true positives at a false positive rate of 1/1000, where the other methods find less than half (10.5%). Availability: Datasets, model selection results, whole genome predictions, and additional experimental results are available at http://www.fml.tuebingen.mpg.de/raetsch/projects/arts

Web DOI [BibTex]

Sonnenburg, S., Zien, A., Rätsch, G. ARTS: Accurate Recognition of Transcription Starts in Human Bioinformatics, 22(14):e472-e480, July 2006 (article)

Web DOI [BibTex]

Large Scale Multiple Kernel Learning

Sonnenburg, S., Rätsch, G., Schäfer, C., Schölkopf, B.

Journal of Machine Learning Research, 7, pages: 1531-1565, July 2006 (article)

Abstract

While classical kernel-based learning algorithms are based on a single kernel, in practice it is often desirable to use multiple kernels. Lanckriet et al. (2004) considered conic combinations of kernel matrices for classification, leading to a convex quadratically constrained quadratic program. We show that it can be rewritten as a semi-infinite linear program that can be efficiently solved by recycling the standard SVM implementations. Moreover, we generalize the formulation and our method to a larger class of problems, including regression and one-class classification. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm works for hundred thousands of examples or hundreds of kernels to be combined, and helps for automatic model selection, improving the interpretability of the learning result. In a second part we discuss general speed up mechanism for SVMs, especially when used with sparse feature maps as appear for string kernels, allowing us to train a string kernel SVM on a 10 million real-world splice data set from computational biology. We integrated multiple kernel learning in our machine learning toolbox SHOGUN for which the source code is publicly available at http://www.fml.tuebingen.mpg.de/raetsch/projects/shogun.

PDF [BibTex]

Sonnenburg, S., Rätsch, G., Schäfer, C., Schölkopf, B. Large Scale Multiple Kernel Learning Journal of Machine Learning Research, 7, pages: 1531-1565, July 2006 (article)

PDF [BibTex]

An Inventory of Sequence Polymorphisms For Arabidopsis

Clark, R., Ossowski, S., Schweikert, G., Rätsch, G., Shinn, P., Zeller, G., Warthmann, N., Fu, G., Hinds, D., Chen, H., Frazer, K., Huson, D., Schölkopf, B., Nordborg, M., Ecker, J., Weigel, D.

17th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research, April 2006 (talk)

Abstract

We have used high-density oligonucleotide arrays to characterize common sequence variation in 20 wild strains of Arabidopsis thaliana that were chosen for maximal genetic diversity. Both strands of each possible SNP of the 119 Mb reference genome were represented on the arrays, which were hybridized with whole genome, isothermally amplified DNA to minimize ascertainment biases. Using two complementary approaches, a model based algorithm, and a newly developed machine learning method, we identified over 550,000 SNPs with a false discovery rate of ~ 0.03 (average of 1 SNP for every 216 bp of the genome). A heuristic algorithm predicted in addition ~700 highly polymorphic or deleted regions per accession. Over 700 predicted polymorphisms with major functional effects (e.g., premature stop codons, or deletions of coding sequence) were validated by dideoxy sequencing. Using this data set, we provide the first systematic description of the types of genes that harbor major effect polymorphisms in natural populations at moderate allele frequencies. The data also provide an unprecedented resource for the study of genetic variation in an experimentally tractable, multicellular model organism.

[BibTex]

Clark, R., Ossowski, S., Schweikert, G., Rätsch, G., Shinn, P., Zeller, G., Warthmann, N., Fu, G., Hinds, D., Chen, H., Frazer, K., Huson, D., Schölkopf, B., Nordborg, M., Ecker, J., Weigel, D. An Inventory of Sequence Polymorphisms For Arabidopsis 17th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research, April 2006 (talk)

[BibTex]

2005

Matrix Exponential Gradient Updates for On-line Learning and Bregman Projection

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G., Warmuth, M.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17, pages: 1425-1432, (Editors: Saul, L.K. , Y. Weiss, L. Bottou), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Eighteenth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), July 2005 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We address the problem of learning a symmetric positive definite matrix. The central issue is to design parameter updates that preserve positive definiteness. Our updates are motivated with the von Neumann divergence. Rather than treating the most general case, we focus on two key applications that exemplify our methods: On-line learning with a simple square loss and finding a symmetric positive definite matrix subject to symmetric linear constraints. The updates generalize the Exponentiated Gradient (EG) update and AdaBoost, respectively: the parameter is now a symmetric positive definite matrix of trace one instead of a probability vector (which in this context is a diagonal positive definite matrix with trace one). The generalized updates use matrix logarithms and exponentials to preserve positive definiteness. Most importantly, we show how the analysis of each algorithm generalizes to the non-diagonal case. We apply both new algorithms, called the Matrix Exponentiated Gradient (MEG) update and DefiniteBoost, to learn a kernel matrix from distance measurements.

PDF Web [BibTex]

2005

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G., Warmuth, M. Matrix Exponential Gradient Updates for On-line Learning and Bregman Projection In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17, pages: 1425-1432, (Editors: Saul, L.K. , Y. Weiss, L. Bottou), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Eighteenth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), July 2005 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

Image Reconstruction by Linear Programming

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G.

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 14(6):737-744, June 2005 (article)

Abstract

One way of image denoising is to project a noisy image to the subspace of admissible images derived, for instance, by PCA. However, a major drawback of this method is that all pixels are updated by the projection, even when only a few pixels are corrupted by noise or occlusion. We propose a new method to identify the noisy pixels by l1-norm penalization and to update the identified pixels only. The identification and updating of noisy pixels are formulated as one linear program which can be efficiently solved. In particular, one can apply the upsilon trick to directly specify the fraction of pixels to be reconstructed. Moreover, we extend the linear program to be able to exploit prior knowledge that occlusions often appear in contiguous blocks (e.g., sunglasses on faces). The basic idea is to penalize boundary points and interior points of the occluded area differently. We are also able to show the upsilon property for this extended LP leading to a method which is easy to use. Experimental results demonstrate the power of our approach.

PDF DOI [BibTex]

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G. Image Reconstruction by Linear Programming IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 14(6):737-744, June 2005 (article)

PDF DOI [BibTex]

RASE: recognition of alternatively spliced exons in C.elegans

Rätsch, G., Sonnenburg, S., Schölkopf, B.

Bioinformatics, 21(Suppl. 1):i369-i377, June 2005 (article)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Rätsch, G., Sonnenburg, S., Schölkopf, B. RASE: recognition of alternatively spliced exons in C.elegans Bioinformatics, 21(Suppl. 1):i369-i377, June 2005 (article)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Matrix Exponentiated Gradient Updates for On-line Learning and Bregman Projection

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G., Warmuth, M.

Journal of Machine Learning Research, 6, pages: 995-1018, June 2005 (article)

Abstract

We address the problem of learning a symmetric positive definite matrix. The central issue is to design parameter updates that preserve positive definiteness. Our updates are motivated with the von Neumann divergence. Rather than treating the most general case, we focus on two key applications that exemplify our methods: on-line learning with a simple square loss, and finding a symmetric positive definite matrix subject to linear constraints. The updates generalize the exponentiated gradient (EG) update and AdaBoost, respectively: the parameter is now a symmetric positive definite matrix of trace one instead of a probability vector (which in this context is a diagonal positive definite matrix with trace one). The generalized updates use matrix logarithms and exponentials to preserve positive definiteness. Most importantly, we show how the derivation and the analyses of the original EG update and AdaBoost generalize to the non-diagonal case. We apply the resulting matrix exponentiated gradient (MEG) update and DefiniteBoost to the problem of learning a kernel matrix from distance measurements.

PDF [BibTex]

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G., Warmuth, M. Matrix Exponentiated Gradient Updates for On-line Learning and Bregman Projection Journal of Machine Learning Research, 6, pages: 995-1018, June 2005 (article)

PDF [BibTex]

Large Scale Genomic Sequence SVM Classifiers

Sonnenburg, S., Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B.

In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 849-856, (Editors: L De Raedt and S Wrobel), ACM, New York, NY, USA, ICML, 2005 (inproceedings)

Abstract

In genomic sequence analysis tasks like splice site recognition or promoter identification, large amounts of training sequences are available, and indeed needed to achieve sufficiently high classification performances. In this work we study two recently proposed and successfully used kernels, namely the Spectrum kernel and the Weighted Degree kernel (WD). In particular, we suggest several extensions using Suffix Trees and modi cations of an SMO-like SVM training algorithm in order to accelerate the training of the SVMs and their evaluation on test sequences. Our simulations show that for the spectrum kernel and WD kernel, large scale SVM training can be accelerated by factors of 20 and 4 times, respectively, while using much less memory (e.g. no kernel caching). The evaluation on new sequences is often several thousand times faster using the new techniques (depending on the number of Support Vectors). Our method allows us to train on sets as large as one million sequences.

PDF [BibTex]

Sonnenburg, S., Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B. Large Scale Genomic Sequence SVM Classifiers In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 849-856, (Editors: L De Raedt and S Wrobel), ACM, New York, NY, USA, ICML, 2005 (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]

2004

Advanced Lectures on Machine Learning

Bousquet, O., von Luxburg, U., Rätsch, G.

ML Summer Schools 2003, LNAI 3176, pages: 240, Springer, Berlin, Germany, ML Summer Schools, September 2004 (proceedings)

Abstract

Machine Learning has become a key enabling technology for many engineering applications, investigating scientific questions and theoretical problems alike. To stimulate discussions and to disseminate new results, a summer school series was started in February 2002, the documentation of which is published as LNAI 2600. This book presents revised lectures of two subsequent summer schools held in 2003 in Canberra, Australia, and in T{\"u}bingen, Germany. The tutorial lectures included are devoted to statistical learning theory, unsupervised learning, Bayesian inference, and applications in pattern recognition; they provide in-depth overviews of exciting new developments and contain a large number of references. Graduate students, lecturers, researchers and professionals alike will find this book a useful resource in learning and teaching machine learning.

Web [BibTex]

2004

Bousquet, O., von Luxburg, U., Rätsch, G. Advanced Lectures on Machine Learning ML Summer Schools 2003, LNAI 3176, pages: 240, Springer, Berlin, Germany, ML Summer Schools, September 2004 (proceedings)

Web [BibTex]

Image Construction by Linear Programming

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16, pages: 57-64, (Editors: Thrun, S., L.K. Saul, B. Schölkopf), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Seventeenth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), June 2004 (inproceedings)

Abstract

A common way of image denoising is to project a noisy image to the subspace of admissible images made for instance by PCA. However, a major drawback of this method is that all pixels are updated by the projection, even when only a few pixels are corrupted by noise or occlusion. We propose a new method to identify the noisy pixels by 1-norm penalization and update the identified pixels only. The identification and updating of noisy pixels are formulated as one linear program which can be solved efficiently. Especially, one can apply the ν-trick to directly specify the fraction of pixels to be reconstructed. Moreover, we extend the linear program to be able to exploit prior knowledge that occlusions often appear in contiguous blocks (e.g. sunglasses on faces). The basic idea is to penalize boundary points and interior points of the occluded area differently. We are able to show the ν-property also for this extended LP leading a method which is easy to use. Experimental results impressively demonstrate the power of our approach.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G. Image Construction by Linear Programming In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16, pages: 57-64, (Editors: Thrun, S., L.K. Saul, B. Schölkopf), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Seventeenth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), June 2004 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

2003

Image Reconstruction by Linear Programming

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G.

(118), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, October 2003 (techreport)

PDF [BibTex]

2003

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G. Image Reconstruction by Linear Programming (118), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, October 2003 (techreport)

PDF [BibTex]

Constructing Descriptive and Discriminative Non-linear Features: Rayleigh Coefficients in Kernel Feature Spaces

Mika, S., Rätsch, G., Weston, J., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A., Müller, K.

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 25(5):623-628, May 2003 (article)

Abstract

We incorporate prior knowledge to construct nonlinear algorithms for invariant feature extraction and discrimination. Employing a unified framework in terms of a nonlinearized variant of the Rayleigh coefficient, we propose nonlinear generalizations of Fisher‘s discriminant and oriented PCA using support vector kernel functions. Extensive simulations show the utility of our approach.

DOI [BibTex]

Mika, S., Rätsch, G., Weston, J., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A., Müller, K. Constructing Descriptive and Discriminative Non-linear Features: Rayleigh Coefficients in Kernel Feature Spaces IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 25(5):623-628, May 2003 (article)

DOI [BibTex]

2002

A New Discriminative Kernel from Probabilistic Models

Tsuda, K., Kawanabe, M., Rätsch, G., Sonnenburg, S., Müller, K.

Neural Computation, 14(10):2397-2414, October 2002 (article)

PDF [BibTex]

2002

Tsuda, K., Kawanabe, M., Rätsch, G., Sonnenburg, S., Müller, K. A New Discriminative Kernel from Probabilistic Models Neural Computation, 14(10):2397-2414, October 2002 (article)

PDF [BibTex]

A new discriminative kernel from probabilistic models

Tsuda, K., Kawanabe, M., Rätsch, G., Sonnenburg, S., Müller, K.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14, pages: 977-984, (Editors: Dietterich, T.G. , S. Becker, Z. Ghahramani), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Fifteenth Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS), September 2002 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Recently, Jaakkola and Haussler proposed a method for constructing kernel functions from probabilistic models. Their so called \Fisher kernel" has been combined with discriminative classi ers such as SVM and applied successfully in e.g. DNA and protein analysis. Whereas the Fisher kernel (FK) is calculated from the marginal log-likelihood, we propose the TOP kernel derived from Tangent vectors Of Posterior log-odds. Furthermore, we develop a theoretical framework on feature extractors from probabilistic models and use it for analyzing the TOP kernel. In experiments our new discriminative TOP kernel compares favorably to the Fisher kernel.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Tsuda, K., Kawanabe, M., Rätsch, G., Sonnenburg, S., Müller, K. A new discriminative kernel from probabilistic models In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14, pages: 977-984, (Editors: Dietterich, T.G. , S. Becker, Z. Ghahramani), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Fifteenth Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS), September 2002 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

Constructing Boosting algorithms from SVMs: an application to one-class classification.

Rätsch, G., Mika, S., Schölkopf, B., Müller, K.

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 24(9):1184-1199, September 2002 (article)

Abstract

We show via an equivalence of mathematical programs that a support vector (SV) algorithm can be translated into an equivalent boosting-like algorithm and vice versa. We exemplify this translation procedure for a new algorithmone-class leveragingstarting from the one-class support vector machine (1-SVM). This is a first step toward unsupervised learning in a boosting framework. Building on so-called barrier methods known from the theory of constrained optimization, it returns a function, written as a convex combination of base hypotheses, that characterizes whether a given test point is likely to have been generated from the distribution underlying the training data. Simulations on one-class classification problems demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.

DOI [BibTex]

Rätsch, G., Mika, S., Schölkopf, B., Müller, K. Constructing Boosting algorithms from SVMs: an application to one-class classification. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 24(9):1184-1199, September 2002 (article)

DOI [BibTex]

2001

An Introduction to Kernel-Based Learning Algorithms

Müller, K., Mika, S., Rätsch, G., Tsuda, K., Schölkopf, B.

IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 12(2):181-201, March 2001 (article)

Abstract

This paper provides an introduction to support vector machines, kernel Fisher discriminant analysis, and kernel principal component analysis, as examples for successful kernel-based learning methods. We first give a short background about Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory and kernel feature spaces and then proceed to kernel based learning in supervised and unsupervised scenarios including practical and algorithmic considerations. We illustrate the usefulness of kernel algorithms by discussing applications such as optical character recognition and DNA analysis

DOI [BibTex]

2001

Müller, K., Mika, S., Rätsch, G., Tsuda, K., Schölkopf, B. An Introduction to Kernel-Based Learning Algorithms IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 12(2):181-201, March 2001 (article)

DOI [BibTex]

Learning to predict the leave-one-out error of kernel based classifiers

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G., Mika, S., Müller, K.

In International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN'01, (LNCS 2130):331-338, (Editors: G. Dorffner, H. Bischof and K. Hornik), International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN'01, 2001 (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]

Tsuda, K., Rätsch, G., Mika, S., Müller, K. Learning to predict the leave-one-out error of kernel based classifiers In International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN'01, (LNCS 2130):331-338, (Editors: G. Dorffner, H. Bischof and K. Hornik), International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN'01, 2001 (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]

2000

Robust ensemble learning

Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A., Mika, S., Onoda, T., Müller, K.

In Advances in Large Margin Classifiers, pages: 207-220, Neural Information Processing Series, (Editors: AJ Smola and PJ Bartlett and B Schölkopf and D. Schuurmans), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, October 2000 (inbook)

[BibTex]

2000

Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A., Mika, S., Onoda, T., Müller, K. Robust ensemble learning In Advances in Large Margin Classifiers, pages: 207-220, Neural Information Processing Series, (Editors: AJ Smola and PJ Bartlett and B Schölkopf and D. Schuurmans), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, October 2000 (inbook)

[BibTex]

Engineering Support Vector Machine Kernels That Recognize Translation Initiation Sites

Zien, A., Rätsch, G., Mika, S., Schölkopf, B., Lengauer, T., Müller, K.

Bioinformatics, 16(9):799-807, September 2000 (article)

Abstract

Motivation: In order to extract protein sequences from nucleotide sequences, it is an important step to recognize points at which regions start that code for proteins. These points are called translation initiation sites (TIS). Results: The task of finding TIS can be modeled as a classification problem. We demonstrate the applicability of support vector machines for this task, and show how to incorporate prior biological knowledge by engineering an appropriate kernel function. With the described techniques the recognition performance can be improved by 26% over leading existing approaches. We provide evidence that existing related methods (e.g. ESTScan) could profit from advanced TIS recognition.

Web DOI [BibTex]

Zien, A., Rätsch, G., Mika, S., Schölkopf, B., Lengauer, T., Müller, K. Engineering Support Vector Machine Kernels That Recognize Translation Initiation Sites Bioinformatics, 16(9):799-807, September 2000 (article)

Web DOI [BibTex]

v-Arc: Ensemble Learning in the Presence of Outliers

Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A., Müller, K., Onoda, T., Mika, S.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 12, pages: 561-567, (Editors: SA Solla and TK Leen and K-R Müller), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 13th Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS), June 2000 (inproceedings)

Abstract

AdaBoost and other ensemble methods have successfully been applied to a number of classification tasks, seemingly defying problems of overfitting. AdaBoost performs gradient descent in an error function with respect to the margin, asymptotically concentrating on the patterns which are hardest to learn. For very noisy problems, however, this can be disadvantageous. Indeed, theoretical analysis has shown that the margin distribution, as opposed to just the minimal margin, plays a crucial role in understanding this phenomenon. Loosely speaking, some outliers should be tolerated if this has the benefit of substantially increasing the margin on the remaining points. We propose a new boosting algorithm which allows for the possibility of a pre-specified fraction of points to lie in the margin area or even on the wrong side of the decision boundary.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A., Müller, K., Onoda, T., Mika, S. v-Arc: Ensemble Learning in the Presence of Outliers In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 12, pages: 561-567, (Editors: SA Solla and TK Leen and K-R Müller), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 13th Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS), June 2000 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

Invariant feature extraction and classification in kernel spaces

Mika, S., Rätsch, G., Weston, J., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A., Müller, K.

In Advances in neural information processing systems 12, pages: 526-532, (Editors: SA Solla and TK Leen and K-R Müller), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 13th Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS), June 2000 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

Mika, S., Rätsch, G., Weston, J., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A., Müller, K. Invariant feature extraction and classification in kernel spaces In Advances in neural information processing systems 12, pages: 526-532, (Editors: SA Solla and TK Leen and K-R Müller), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 13th Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS), June 2000 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

An Introduction to Kernel-Based Learning Algorithms

Müller, K., Mika, S., Rätsch, G., Tsuda, K., Schölkopf, B.

In Handbook of Neural Network Signal Processing, 4, (Editors: Yu Hen Hu and Jang-Neng Hwang), CRC Press, 2000 (inbook)

[BibTex]

Müller, K., Mika, S., Rätsch, G., Tsuda, K., Schölkopf, B. An Introduction to Kernel-Based Learning Algorithms In Handbook of Neural Network Signal Processing, 4, (Editors: Yu Hen Hu and Jang-Neng Hwang), CRC Press, 2000 (inbook)

[BibTex]

Robust Ensemble Learning for Data Mining

Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A., Mika, S., Onoda, T., Müller, K.

In Fourth Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 1805, pages: 341-341, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, (Editors: H. Terano), Fourth Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2000 (inproceedings)

[BibTex]

Rätsch, G., Schölkopf, B., Smola, A., Mika, S., Onoda, T., Müller, K. Robust Ensemble Learning for Data Mining In Fourth Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 1805, pages: 341-341, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, (Editors: H. Terano), Fourth Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2000 (inproceedings)

[BibTex]

Gunnar Rätsch

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