Semantic labeling of 3D point clouds is important for the derivation of 3D models from real world scenarios in several economic fields such as building industry, facility management, town planning or heritage conservation. In contrast to these most common applications, we describe in this study the semantic labeling of 3D point clouds derived from plant organs by high-precision scanning. Our approach is optimized for the task of plant phenotyping with its very specific challenges and is employing a deep learning framework. Thereby, we report important experiences concerning detailed parameter initialization and optimization techniques. By evaluating our approach with challenging datasets we achieve state-of-the-art results without difficult and time consuming feature engineering as being necessary in traditional approaches to semantic labeling.
Machine Learning algorithms are increasingly being used in recent years due to their flexibility in model fitting and increased predictive performance. However, the complexity of the models makes them hard for the data analyst to interpret the results and explain them without additional tools. This has led to much research in developing various approaches to understand the model behavior. In this paper, we present the Explainable Neural Network (xNN), a structured neural network designed especially to learn interpretable features. Unlike fully connected neural networks, the features engineered by the xNN can be extracted from the network in a relatively straightforward manner and the results displayed. With appropriate regularization, the xNN provides a parsimonious explanation of the relationship between the features and the output. We illustrate this interpretable feature--engineering property on simulated examples.
Parallel sentence extraction is a task addressing the data sparsity problem found in multilingual natural language processing applications. We propose a bidirectional recurrent neural network based approach to extract parallel sentences from collections of multilingual texts. Our experiments with noisy parallel corpora show that we can achieve promising results against a competitive baseline by removing the need of specific feature engineering or additional external resources. To justify the utility of our approach, we extract sentence pairs from Wikipedia articles to train machine translation systems and show significant improvements in translation performance.
Automated service classification plays a crucial role in service discovery, selection, and composition. Machine learning has been widely used for service classification in recent years. However, the performance of conventional machine learning methods highly depends on the quality of manual feature engineering. In this paper, we present a novel deep neural network to automatically abstract low-level representation of both service name and service description to high-level merged features without feature engineering and the length limitation, and then predict service classification on 50 service categories. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a comprehensive experimental study by comparing 10 machine learning methods on 10,000 real-world web services. The result shows that the proposed deep neural network can achieve higher accuracy in classification and more robust than other machine learning methods.
Binary classification is one of the most common problem in machine learning. It consists in predicting whether a given element belongs to a particular class. In this paper, a new algorithm for binary classification is proposed using a hypergraph representation. The method is agnostic to data representation, can work with multiple data sources or in non-metric spaces, and accommodates with missing values. As a result, it drastically reduces the need for data preprocessing or feature engineering. Each element to be classified is partitioned according to its interactions with the training set. For each class, a seminorm over the training set partition is learnt to represent the distribution of evidence supporting this class. Empirical validation demonstrates its high potential on a wide range of well-known datasets and the results are compared to the state-of-the-art. The time complexity is given and empirically validated. Its robustness with regard to hyperparameter sensitivity is studied and compared to standard classification methods. Finally, the limitation of the model space is discussed, and some potential solutions proposed.
Feature engineering is one of the most important but most tedious tasks in data science. This work studies automation of feature learning from relational database. We first prove theoretically that finding the optimal features from relational data for predictive tasks is NP-hard. We propose an efficient rule-based approach based on heuristics and a deep neural network to automatically learn appropriate features from relational data. We benchmark our approaches in ensembles in past Kaggle competitions. Our new approach wins late medals and beats the state-of-the-art solutions with significant margins. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time an automated data science system could win medals in Kaggle competitions with complex relational database.