Question - What is the difference (or are they the same) between ensemble learning and classifier fusion?
As I understood, ensemble learning is averaging models when making the final prediction, whereas classifier fusion is also the same in meaning. However, when I'm searching for references on ensemble learning, I don't find any mention of the term 'fusion' in some literature. Besides, some references use these two terms (e.g., https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8695622). Any suggestion/resource is appreciated to my question.
If I'm not really mistaken, both are the same.
It's common to read fusion as the act of creating an ensemble from a bunch of classifiers - that is the case for the paper you linked.
After some search I found the difference: ensemble learning involves training multiple classifiers and combining their predictions, while classifier fusion involves combining the predictions of pre-trained classifiers.
Related
When reading about few-shot learning, I can never seem to find an exact definition. When the concept is explained, it is often done by saying something along the lines of 'using few data samples'.
Is there a precise definition of few-shot learning, or when a task is considered few-shot learning? When the term 'N-way-K-shot learning' is used, are there any boundaries on which values N and K can have?
The idea behind few-shot learning is to train a classifier using only a small number of labelled samples. More precisely, given N classes and k samples, the aim is to use samples per class where m << k to train the classifier. Few-shot learning is a popular option when the number of available labelled samples is limited.
However, when it comes to implementing few-shot learning, one popular method is to use contrastive learning to fine-tune an existing model to learn the similarities between samples belonging to the same class.
SetFit is a few-shot learning framework that uses contrastive learning for fine-tuning sentence transformers to be used for text classification. I suggest you read SetFit's paper (available on Axriv; here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11055). I believe it has the technical details you need to answer your question. Moreover, SetFit's implementation is available on GitHub (here: https://github.com/huggingface/setfit).
I hope it helped.
Clustering (eg: K-means , EM algorithm etc) is used for unsupervised classification by forming clusters in the data sets using some distance measurement between data points
My question is :
Other than clustering what can I use to perform unsupervised classification and how? Or is there no other option other than clustering for unsupervised Classification?
Edit: Yes I meant k-means
The short answer is NO, clustering is not the only field under unsupervised learning. Unsupervised Learning is way more broader than only clustering. Clustering is just a sub-field of (or type of) unsupervised learning.
Little correction: KNN is not a clustering method, it is a classification algorithm. You probably meant to say k-means.
The essence of unsupervised learning is basically learning data without ground truth labels. Thus, the goal of unsupervised learning is to find representations of data given. The applications of unupervised learning vary a lot, though academically it is true that the field is less attractive to researchers due to its complexity and effort to build new stuff and/or make improvements.
Dimension reduction can be considered under unsupervised learning as you want to find a good representation of data in lower dimensions. They are also useful for visualizing high-dimension data. PCA, SNE, tSNE, Isomap, etc. are type of these applications.
Clustering methods are type of unsupervised learning as well where you want to group and label values based on some distance/divergence measure. Some applications could be K-means, Hierarchical clustering, etc.
Generative models, generative models model the conditional probability P(X|Y=y). The research in this field boomed since the publication of GAN (see paper). GANs can learn the data distribution without seeing the data explicitly. Methods are various where GANs, VAE, Gaussian Mixture, LDA, Hidden Markov model.
You can read further here on unsupervised learning.
Clustering is a general term that stands for the case where data points will be split into classes without any information about the true choices. So no matter what kind of algorithm you are applying, it will be a clustering if it is unsupervised classification.
Of course there are many different approaches depending on the case, data, problem and etc. If you could provide more context about your exact task, I might name some approaches.
I am new to Machine Learning.I am working on a project where the machine learning concept need to be applied.
Problem Statement:
I have large number(say 3000)key words.These need to be classified into seven fixed categories.Each category is having training data(sample keywords).I need to come with a algorithm, when a new keyword is passed to that,it should predict to which category this key word belongs to.
I am not aware of which text classification technique need to applied for this.do we have any tools that can be used.
Please help.
Thanks in advance.
This comes under linear classification. You can use naive-bayes classifier for this. Most of the ml frameworks will have an implementation for naive-bayes. ex: mahout
Yes, I would also suggest to use Naive Bayes, which is more or less the baseline classification algorithm here. On the other hand, there are obviously many other algorithms. Random forests and Support Vector Machines come to mind. See http://machinelearningmastery.com/use-random-forest-testing-179-classifiers-121-datasets/ If you use a standard toolkit, such as Weka, Rapidminer, etc. these algorithms should be available. There is also OpenNLP for Java, which comes with a maximum entropy classifier.
You could use the Word2Vec Word Cosine distance between descriptions of each your category and keywords in the dataset and then simple match each keyword to a category with the closest distance
Alternatively, you could create a training dataset from already matched to category, keywords and use any ML classifier, for example, based on artificial neural networks by using vectors of keywords Cosine distances to each category as an input to your model. But it could require a big quantity of data for training to reach good accuracy. For example, the MNIST dataset contains 70000 of the samples and it allowed me reach 99,62% model's cross validation accuracy with a simple CNN, for another dataset with only 2000 samples I was able reached only about 90% accuracy
There are many classification algorithms. Your example looks to be a text classification problems - some good classifiers to try out would be SVM and naive bayes. For SVM, liblinear and libshorttext classifiers are good options (and have been used in many industrial applcitions):
liblinear: https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/liblinear/
libshorttext:https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libshorttext/
They are also included with ML tools such as scikit-learna and WEKA.
With classifiers, it is still some operation to build and validate a pratically useful classifier. One of the challenges is to mix
discrete (boolean and enumerable)
and continuous ('numbers')
predictive variables seamlessly. Some algorithmic preprocessing is generally necessary.
Neural networks do offer the possibility of using both types of variables. However, they require skilled data scientists to yield good results. A straight-forward option is to use an online classifier web service like Insight Classifiers to build and validate a classifier in one go. N-fold cross validation is being used there.
You can represent the presence or absence of each word in a separate column. The outcome variable is desired category.
I know SVMs are supposedly 'ANN killers' in that they automatically select representation complexity and find a global optimum (see here for some SVM praising quotes).
But here is where I'm unclear -- do all of these claims of superiority hold for just the case of a 2 class decision problem or do they go further? (I assume they hold for non-linearly separable classes or else no-one would care)
So a sample of some of the cases I'd like to be cleared up:
Are SVMs better than ANNs with many classes?
in an online setting?
What about in a semi-supervised case like reinforcement learning?
Is there a better unsupervised version of SVMs?
I don't expect someone to answer all of these lil' subquestions, but rather to give some general bounds for when SVMs are better than the common ANN equivalents (e.g. FFBP, recurrent BP, Boltzmann machines, SOMs, etc.) in practice, and preferably, in theory as well.
Are SVMs better than ANN with many classes? You are probably referring to the fact that SVMs are in essence, either either one-class or two-class classifiers. Indeed they are and there's no way to modify a SVM algorithm to classify more than two classes.
The fundamental feature of a SVM is the separating maximum-margin hyperplane whose position is determined by maximizing its distance from the support vectors. And yet SVMs are routinely used for multi-class classification, which is accomplished with a processing wrapper around multiple SVM classifiers that work in a "one against many" pattern--i.e., the training data is shown to the first SVM which classifies those instances as "Class I" or "not Class I". The data in the second class, is then shown to a second SVM which classifies this data as "Class II" or "not Class II", and so on. In practice, this works quite well. So as you would expect, the superior resolution of SVMs compared to other classifiers is not limited to two-class data.
As far as i can tell, the studies reported in the literature confirm this, e.g., In the provocatively titled paper Sex with Support Vector Machines substantially better resolution for sex identification (Male/Female) in 12-square pixel images, was reported for SVM compared with that of a group of traditional linear classifiers; SVM also outperformed RBF NN, as well as large ensemble RBF NN). But there seem to be plenty of similar evidence for the superior performance of SVM in multi-class problems: e.g., SVM outperformed NN in protein-fold recognition, and in time-series forecasting.
My impression from reading this literature over the past decade or so, is that the majority of the carefully designed studies--by persons skilled at configuring and using both techniques, and using data sufficiently resistant to classification to provoke some meaningful difference in resolution--report the superior performance of SVM relative to NN. But as your Question suggests, that performance delta seems to be, to a degree, domain specific.
For instance, NN outperformed SVM in a comparative study of author identification from texts in Arabic script; In a study comparing credit rating prediction, there was no discernible difference in resolution by the two classifiers; a similar result was reported in a study of high-energy particle classification.
I have read, from more than one source in the academic literature, that SVM outperforms NN as the size of the training data decreases.
Finally, the extent to which one can generalize from the results of these comparative studies is probably quite limited. For instance, in one study comparing the accuracy of SVM and NN in time series forecasting, the investigators reported that SVM did indeed outperform a conventional (back-propagating over layered nodes) NN but performance of the SVM was about the same as that of an RBF (radial basis function) NN.
[Are SVMs better than ANN] In an Online setting? SVMs are not used in an online setting (i.e., incremental training). The essence of SVMs is the separating hyperplane whose position is determined by a small number of support vectors. So even a single additional data point could in principle significantly influence the position of this hyperplane.
What about in a semi-supervised case like reinforcement learning? Until the OP's comment to this answer, i was not aware of either Neural Networks or SVMs used in this way--but they are.
The most widely used- semi-supervised variant of SVM is named Transductive SVM (TSVM), first mentioned by Vladimir Vapnick (the same guy who discovered/invented conventional SVM). I know almost nothing about this technique other than what's it is called and that is follows the principles of transduction (roughly lateral reasoning--i.e., reasoning from training data to test data). Apparently TSV is a preferred technique in the field of text classification.
Is there a better unsupervised version of SVMs? I don't believe SVMs are suitable for unsupervised learning. Separation is based on the position of the maximum-margin hyperplane determined by support vectors. This could easily be my own limited understanding, but i don't see how that would happen if those support vectors were unlabeled (i.e., if you didn't know before-hand what you were trying to separate). One crucial use case of unsupervised algorithms is when you don't have labeled data or you do and it's badly unbalanced. E.g., online fraud; here you might have in your training data, only a few data points labeled as "fraudulent accounts" (and usually with questionable accuracy) versus the remaining >99% labeled "not fraud." In this scenario, a one-class classifier, a typical configuration for SVMs, is the a good option. In particular, the training data consists of instances labeled "not fraud" and "unk" (or some other label to indicate they are not in the class)--in other words, "inside the decision boundary" and "outside the decision boundary."
I wanted to conclude by mentioning that, 20 years after their "discovery", the SVM is a firmly entrenched member in the ML library. And indeed, the consistently superior resolution compared with other state-of-the-art classifiers is well documented.
Their pedigree is both a function of their superior performance documented in numerous rigorously controlled studies as well as their conceptual elegance. W/r/t the latter point, consider that multi-layer perceptrons (MLP), though they are often excellent classifiers, are driven by a numerical optimization routine, which in practice rarely finds the global minimum; moreover, that solution has no conceptual significance. On the other hand, the numerical optimization at the heart of building an SVM classifier does in fact find the global minimum. What's more that solution is the actual decision boundary.
Still, i think SVM reputation has declined a little during the past few years.
The primary reason i suspect is the NetFlix competition. NetFlix emphasized the resolving power of fundamental techniques of matrix decomposition and even more significantly t*he power of combining classifiers. People combined classifiers long before NetFlix, but more as a contingent technique than as an attribute of classifier design. Moreover, many of the techniques for combining classifiers are extraordinarily simple to understand and also to implement. By contrast, SVMs are not only very difficult to code (in my opinion, by far the most difficult ML algorithm to implement in code) but also difficult to configure and implement as a pre-compiled library--e.g., a kernel must be selected, the results are very sensitive to how the data is re-scaled/normalized, etc.
I loved Doug's answer. I would like to add two comments.
1) Vladimir Vapnick also co-invented the VC dimension which is important in learning theory.
2) I think that SVMs were the best overall classifiers from 2000 to 2009, but after 2009, I am not sure. I think that neural nets have improved very significantly recently due to the work in Deep Learning and Sparse Denoising Auto-Encoders. I thought I saw a number of benchmarks where they outperformed SVMs. See, for example, slide 31 of
http://deeplearningworkshopnips2010.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/nips10-workshop-tutorial-final.pdf
A few of my friends have been using the sparse auto encoder technique. The neural nets build with that technique significantly outperformed the older back propagation neural networks. I will try to post some experimental results at artent.net if I get some time.
I'd expect SVM's to be better when you have good features to start with. IE, your features succinctly capture all the necessary information. You can see if your features are good if instances of the same class "clump together" in the feature space. Then SVM with Euclidian kernel should do the trick. Essentially you can view SVM as a supercharged nearest neighbor classifier, so whenever NN does well, SVM should do even better, by adding automatic quality control over the examples in your set. On the converse -- if it's a dataset where nearest neighbor (in feature space) is expected to do badly, SVM will do badly as well.
- Is there a better unsupervised version of SVMs?
Just answering only this question here. Unsupervised learning can be done by so-called one-class support vector machines. Again, similar to normal SVMs, there is an element that promotes sparsity. In normal SVMs only a few points are considered important, the support vectors. In one-class SVMs again only a few points can be used to either:
"separate" a dataset as far from the origin as possible, or
define a radius as small as possible.
The advantages of normal SVMs carry over to this case. Compared to density estimation only a few points need to be considered. The disadvantages carry over as well.
Are SVMs better than ANNs with many classes?
SVMs have been designated for discrete classification. Before moving to ANNs, try ensemble methods like Random Forest , Gradient Boosting, Gaussian Probability Classification etc
What about in a semi-supervised case like reinforcement learning?
Deep Q learning provides better alternatives.
Is there a better unsupervised version of SVMs?
SVM is not suited for unsupervised learning. You have other alternatives for unsupervised learning : K-Means, Hierarchical clustering, TSNE clustering etc
From ANN perspective, you can try Autoencoder, General adversarial network
Few more useful links:
towardsdatascience
wikipedia
I would like to classify text documents into four categories. Also I have lot of samples which are already classified that can be used for training. I would like the algorithm to learn on the fly.. please suggest an optimal algorithm that works for this requirement.
If by "on the fly" you mean online learning (where training and classification can be interleaved), I suggest the k-nearest neighbor algorithm. It's available in Weka and in the package TiMBL.
A perceptron will also be able to do this.
"Optimal" isn't a well-defined term in this context.
there are several algorithms which can be learned on fly. Examples: k-nearest neighbors, naive Bayes, neural networks. You can try how appropriate each of these methods are on a sample corpus.
Since you have unlabeled data you might want to use a model where this helps. The first thing that comes to my mind is nonlinear NCA: Learning a Nonlinear Embedding by Preserving
Class Neighbourhood Structure, (Salakhutdinov, Hinton).
Well....I have to say that document classification is kind of different what you guys are thinking.
Typically, in document classification, after preprocessing, the test data is always extremely huge, for example, O(N^2)...Therefore it might be too computationally expensive.
The another typical classifier that came into my mind is discriminant classifier...which doesn't need the generative model for your dataset. After training, you have to do is to put your single entry to the algorithm, and it is gonna be classified.
Good luck with this. For example, you can check E. Alpadin's book, Introduction to Machine Learning.