Compact Graph based Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Diagnosis in Alzheimer's Disease.

Dementia is one of the most common neurological disorders among the elderly. Identifying those who are of high risk suffering dementia is important for early diagnosis in order to slow down the disease progression and help preserve some cognitive functions of the brain. To achieve accurate classification, significant amount of subject feature information are involved. Hence identification of demented subjects can be transformed into a pattern classification problem. In this letter, we introduce a graph based semi-supervised learning algorithm for Medical Diagnosis by using partly labeled samples and large amount of unlabeled samples. The new method is derived by a compact graph that can well grasp the manifold structure of medical data. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve better sensitivities and specificities compared with other state-of-art graph based semi-supervised learning methods.

Causal Disentanglement Domain Generalization for time-series signal fault diagnosis.

Domain generalization-based fault diagnosis (DGFD) presents significant prospects for recognizing faults without the accessibility of the target domain. Previous DGFD methods have achieved significant progress; however, there are some limitations. First, most DGFG methods statistically model the dependence between time-series data and labels, and they are superficial descriptions to the actual data-generating process. Second, most of the existing DGFD methods are only verified on vibrational time-series datasets, which is insufficient to show the potential of domain generalization in the fault diagnosis area. In response to the above issues, this paper first proposes a DGFD method named Causal Disentanglement Domain Generalization (CDDG), which can reestablish the data-generating process by disentangling time-series data into the causal factors (fault-related representation) and no-casual factors (domain-related representation) with a structural causal model. Specifically, in CDDG, causal aggregation loss is designed to separate the unobservable causal and non-causal factors. Meanwhile, the reconstruction loss is proposed to ensure the information completeness of the disentangled factors. We also introduce a redundancy reduction loss to learn efficient features. The proposed CDDG is verified on five cross-machine vibrational fault diagnosis cases and three cross-environment acoustical anomaly detection cases by comparing it with eight state-of-the-art (SOTA) DGFD methods. We publicize the open-source time-series DGFD Benchmark containing CDDG and the eight SOTA methods. The code repository will be available at https://github.com/ShaneSpace/DGFDBenchmark.

STAR-RL: Spatial-temporal Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Interpretable Pathology Image Super-Resolution.

Pathology image are essential for accurately interpreting lesion cells in cytopathology screening, but acquiring high-resolution digital slides requires specialized equipment and long scanning times. Though super-resolution (SR) techniques can alleviate this problem, existing deep learning models recover pathology image in a black-box manner, which can lead to untruthful biological details and misdiagnosis. Additionally, current methods allocate the same computational resources to recover each pixel of pathology image, leading to the sub-optimal recovery issue due to the large variation of pathology image. In this paper, we propose the first hierarchical reinforcement learning framework named Spatial-Temporal hierARchical Reinforcement Learning (STAR-RL), mainly for addressing the aforementioned issues in pathology image super-resolution problem. We reformulate the SR problem as a Markov decision process of interpretable operations and adopt the hierarchical recovery mechanism in patch level, to avoid sub-optimal recovery. Specifically, the higher-level spatial manager is proposed to pick out the most corrupted patch for the lower-level patch worker. Moreover, the higher-level temporal manager is advanced to evaluate the selected patch and determine whether the optimization should be stopped earlier, thereby avoiding the over-processed problem. Under the guidance of spatial-temporal managers, the lower-level patch worker processes the selected patch with pixel-wise interpretable actions at each time step. Experimental results on medical images degraded by different kernels show the effectiveness of STAR-RL. Furthermore, STAR-RL validates the promotion in tumor diagnosis with a large margin and shows generalizability under various degradation. The source code is to be released.

Trace Ratio Linear Discriminant Analysis for Medical Diagnosis: A Case Study of Dementia.

Dementia is one of the most common neurological disorders among the elderly. Identifying those who are of high risk suffering dementia is important to the administration of early treatment in order to slow down the progression of dementia symptoms. However, to achieve accurate classification, significant amount of subject feature information are involved. Hence identification of demented subjects can be transformed into a pattern recognition problem with high-dimensional nonlinear datasets. In this paper, we introduce trace ratio linear discriminant analysis (TR-LDA) for dementia diagnosis. An improved ITR algorithm (iITR) is developed to solve the TR-LDA problem. This novel method can be integrated with advanced missing value imputation method and utilized for the analysis of the nonlinear datasets in many real-world medical diagnosis problems. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that our method can achieve higher accuracies for identifying the demented patients than other state-of-art algorithms.

Modeling Sequential Annotations for Sequence Labeling With Crowds.

Crowd sequential annotations can be an efficient and cost-effective way to build large datasets for sequence labeling. Different from tagging independent instances, for crowd sequential annotations, the quality of label sequence relies on the expertise level of annotators in capturing internal dependencies for each token in the sequence. In this article, we propose modeling sequential annotation for sequence labeling with crowds (SA-SLC). First, a conditional probabilistic model is developed to jointly model sequential data and annotators' expertise, in which categorical distribution is introduced to estimate the reliability of each annotator in capturing local and nonlocal label dependencies for sequential annotation. To accelerate the marginalization of the proposed model, a valid label sequence inference (VLSE) method is proposed to derive the valid ground-truth label sequences from crowd sequential annotations. VLSE derives possible ground-truth labels from the tokenwise level and further prunes subpaths in the forward inference for label sequence decoding. VLSE reduces the number of candidate label sequences and improves the quality of possible ground-truth label sequences. The experimental results on several sequence labeling tasks of Natural Language Processing show the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Modeling Self-Representation Label Correlations for Textual Aspects and Emojis Recommendation.

The rapid development of Internet services and social platforms encourages users to share their opinions. To help users give valuable comments, content providers expect the recommender system to offer appropriate suggestions, including specific features of the item described in texts and emojis, which are all considered aspects of the user reviews. Hence, the review aspect recommendation task has become significant, where the key lies in handling personal preferences and semantic correlations between suggested items. This article proposes a correlation-aware review aspect recommender (CARAR) system model by constructing self-representation correlations between different views of review aspects, including textual aspects and emojis to make a personalized recommendation. The dependencies between different textual aspects and emojis can be identified and utilized to facilitate the factorization process to learn user and item latent factors. The cross-view correlation mapping between textual aspects and emojis can be built to enhance the recommendation performance. Moreover, the additional information in the real-world environment is also applied to our model to adjust the recommendation results. We constructed experiments on five self-collected and public datasets and compared with six existing models. The results show that our model can outperform the existing models on review aspects recommendation tasks, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

ExpGCN: Review-aware Graph Convolution Network for explainable recommendation.

Existing works in recommender system have widely explored extracting reviews as explanations beyond user-item interactions, and formulated the explanation generation as a ranking task to enhance item recommendation performance. To associate explanations with users and items, graph neural networks (GNN) are usually employed to learn node representations on the heterogeneous user-item-explanation interaction graph. However, modeling heterogeneous graph convolution poses limitations in both message passing styles and computational efficiency, resulting in sub-optimal recommendation performance. To address the limitations, we propose an Explanation-aware Graph Convolution Network (ExpGCN). In particular, the heterogeneous interaction graph is divided to subgraphs regard to the edge types in ExpGCN. By aggregating information from distinct subgraphs, ExpGCN is capable of generating node representations for explanation ranking task and item recommendation task respectively. Task-oriented graph convolution can not only reduce the complexity of heterogeneous node aggregation, but also alleviate the performance degeneration caused by the conflicts between task learning objectives, which has been neglected in current studies. Extensive experiments on four public datasets show that ExpGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with high efficiency, demonstrating the effectiveness of ExpGCN in explainable recommendations.

Partial Sequence Labeling With Structured Gaussian Processes.

Existing partial sequence labeling models mainly focus on a max-margin framework that fails to provide an uncertainty estimation of the prediction. Furthermore, the unique ground-truth disambiguation strategy employed by these models may include wrong label information for parameter learning. In this article, we propose structured Gaussian processes for partial sequence labeling (SGPPSL), which encodes uncertainty in the prediction and does not need extra effort for model selection and hyperparameter learning. The model employs factor-as-piece approximation that divides the linear-chain graph structure into the set of pieces, which preserves the basic Markov random field structure and effectively avoids handling a large number of candidate output sequences generated by partially annotated data. Then, confidence measure is introduced in the model to address different contributions of candidate labels, which enables the ground-truth label information to be utilized in parameter learning. Based on the derived lower bound of the variational lower bound of the proposed model, variational parameters and confidence measures are estimated in the framework of alternating optimization. Moreover, a weighted Viterbi algorithm is proposed to incorporate confidence measures to sequence prediction, which considers label ambiguity arose from multiple annotations in the training data and thus helps improve the performance. SGPPSL is evaluated on several sequence labeling tasks and the experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Semantic-Gap-Oriented Feature Selection and Classifier Construction in Multilabel Learning.

Multilabel learning focuses on assigning instances with different labels. In essence, the multilabel learning aims at learning a predictive function from feature space to a label space. The predictive function learning procedure can be regarded as a feature selection procedure and as a classifier construction procedure. For feature selection, we extract features for each label based on the learned positive and negative feature-label correlations. The positive and negative relationships can illustrate which labels can and cannot be well presented by the corresponding features, respectively, due to the semantic gap. For classifier construction, we perform sample-specific and label-specific classifications. The interlabel and interinstance correlations are combined in these two kinds of classifications. These two correlations are learned from both input features and output labels when the output labels are too sparse to reveal the informative correlation. However, there exists the semantic gap when combining input and output spaces to mine the labelwise relationship. The semantic gap can be bridged by the learned feature-label correlation. Finally, extensive experimental results on several benchmarks under four domains are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Topic-Based Instance and Feature Selection in Multilabel Classification.

Multilabel learning has been extensively studied in the past years, as it has many applications in different domains. It aims at annotating the labels for unseen data according to training data, which are often high dimensional in both instance and feature levels. The training data often have noisy and redundant information on these two levels. As an effective data preprocessing step, instance and feature selection should both be performed to find relevant training instances for each testing instance and relevant features for each label, respectively. However, most of the existing methods overlook the input-output correlation in each kind of selection. It will lead to the performance degradation. This article presents a formulation for multilabel learning from a topic view that exploits the dependence between features and labels in a topic space. We can perform effective instance and feature selection in the latent topic space, as the relationship between the input and output spaces is well captured in this space. The results from intensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Weak Disambiguation for Partial Structured Output Learning.

Existing disambiguation strategies for partial structured output learning just cannot generalize well to solve the problem that there are some candidates that can be false positive or similar to the ground-truth label. In this article, we propose a novel weak disambiguation for partial structured output learning (WD-PSL). First, a piecewise large margin formulation is generalized to partial structured output learning, which effectively avoids handling a large number of candidate-structured outputs for complex structures. Second, in the proposed weak disambiguation strategy, each candidate label is assigned with a confidence value indicating how likely it is the true label, which aims to reduce the negative effects of wrong ground-truth label assignment in the learning process. Then, two large margins are formulated to combine two types of constraints which are the disambiguation between candidates and noncandidates, and the weak disambiguation for candidates. In the framework of alternating optimization, a new 2n -slack variables cutting plane algorithm is developed to accelerate each iteration of optimization. The experimental results on several sequence labeling tasks of natural language processing show the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Multilabel Classification With Group-Based Mapping: A Framework With Local Feature Selection and Local Label Correlation.

Multilabel learning, which handles instances associated with multiple labels, has attracted much attention in recent years. Many extant multilabel feature selection methods target global feature selection, which means feature selection weights for each label are shared by all instances. Also, many extant multilabel classification methods exploit global label selection, which means labels correlations are shared by all instances. In real-world objects, however, different subsets of instances may share different feature selection weights and different label correlations. In this article, we propose a novel framework with local feature selection and local label correlation, where we assume instances can be clustered into different groups, and the feature selection weights and label correlations can only be shared by instances in the same group. The proposed framework includes a group-specific feature selection process and a label-specific group selection process. The former process projects instances into different groups by extracting the instance-group correlation. The latter process selects labels for each instance based on its related groups by extracting the group-label correlation. In addition, we also exploit the intergroup correlation. These three kinds of group-based correlations are combined to perform effective multilabel classification. The experimental results on various datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Multilabel Classification With Label-Specific Features and Classifiers: A Coarse- and Fine-Tuned Framework.

Multilabel classification deals with instances assigned with multiple labels simultaneously. It focuses on learning a mapping from feature space to label a space for out-of-sample extrapolation. The mapping can be seen as a feature selection process in the feature domain or as a classifier training process in the classifier domain. The existing methods do not effectively learn the mapping when combining these two domains together. In this article, we derive a mechanism to extract label-specific features in local and global levels. We also derive a mechanism to train label-specific classifiers in individual and joint levels. Extracting features globally and training classifiers jointly can be seen as a dual process of learning the mapping function on two domains in a coarse-tuned way, while extracting features locally and training classifiers individually can be seen as a dual process of learning the mapping function on two domains in a fine-tuned way. The two-level feature selection and the two-level classifier training are derived to make the entire mapping learning process robust. Finally, extensive experimental results on several benchmarks under four domains are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Effective strategy of adding nodes and links for maximizing the traffic capacity of scale-free network.

In this paper, we propose an efficient strategy to enhance traffic capacity via the process of nodes and links increment. We show that by adding shortcut links to the existing networks, packets are avoided flowing through hub nodes. We investigate the performances of our proposed strategy under the shortest path routing strategy and the local routing strategy. Our obtained results show that using the proposed strategy, the traffic capacity can be effectively enhanced under the shortest path routing strategy. Under the local routing strategy, the obtained results show that the proposed strategy is efficient only when packets are more likely to be forwarded to low-degree nodes in their routing paths. Compared with other strategies, the obtained results indicate that our proposed strategy of adding nodes and links is the most effective in enhancing the traffic capacity, i.e., the traffic capacity can be maximally enhanced with the least number of additional nodes and links.

Exactly Robust Kernel Principal Component Analysis.

Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) can recover low-rank matrices when they are corrupted by sparse noises. In practice, many matrices are, however, of high rank and, hence, cannot be recovered by RPCA. We propose a novel method called robust kernel principal component analysis (RKPCA) to decompose a partially corrupted matrix as a sparse matrix plus a high- or full-rank matrix with low latent dimensionality. RKPCA can be applied to many problems such as noise removal and subspace clustering and is still the only unsupervised nonlinear method robust to sparse noises. Our theoretical analysis shows that, with high probability, RKPCA can provide high recovery accuracy. The optimization of RKPCA involves nonconvex and indifferentiable problems. We propose two nonconvex optimization algorithms for RKPCA. They are alternating direction method of multipliers with backtracking line search and proximal linearized minimization with adaptive step size (AdSS). Comparative studies in noise removal and robust subspace clustering corroborate the effectiveness and the superiority of RKPCA.

Spatiotemporal Tree Filtering for Enhancing Image Change Detection.

Change detection has received extensive attention because of its realistic significance and broad application fields. However, none of the existing change detection algorithms can handle all scenarios and tasks so far. Different from the most of contributions from the research community in recent years, this paper does not work on designing new change detection algorithms. We, instead, solve the problem from another perspective by enhancing the raw detection results after change detection. As a result, the proposed method is applicable to various kinds of change detection methods, and regardless of how the results are detected. In this paper, we propose Fast Spatiotemporal Tree Filter (FSTF), a purely unsupervised detection method, to enhance coarse binary detection masks obtained by different kinds of change detection methods. In detail, the proposed FSTF has adopted a volumetric structure to effectively synthesize spatiotemporal information of the same target from the current time and history frames to enhance detection. The computational complexity analyzed in the view of graph theory also show that the fast realization of FSTF is a linear time algorithm, which is capable of handling efficient on-line detection tasks. Finally, comprehensive experiments based on qualitative and quantitative analysis verify that FSTF-based change detection enhancement is superior to several other state-of-the-art methods including fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF), joint bilateral filter, and guided filter. It is illustrated that FSTF is versatile enough to also improve saliency detection as well as semantic image segmentation.

Bridging User Interest to Item Content for Recommender Systems: An Optimization Model.

Recommender systems are currently utilized widely in e-commerce for product recommendations and within content delivery platforms. Previous studies usually use independent features to represent item content. As a result, the relationship hidden among the content features is overlooked. In fact, the reason that an item attracts a user may be attributed to only a few set of features. In addition, these features are often semantically coupled. In this paper, we present an optimization model for extracting the relationship hidden in content features by considering user preferences. The learned feature relationship matrix is then applied to address the cold-start recommendations and content-based recommendations. It could also easily be employed for the visualization of feature relation graphs. Our proposed method was examined on three public datasets: 1) hetrec-movielens-2k-v2; 2) book-crossing; and 3) Netflix. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in comparison to the state-of-the-art recommendation methods.

Three-dimensional ultrasound evaluation of the effects of pomegranate therapy on carotid plaque texture using locality preserving projection.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Dietary supplements are expected to confer a smaller beneficial effect than medical treatments. Therefore, there is a need to develop cost-effective biomarkers that can demonstrate the efficacy of such supplements for carotid atherosclerosis. The aim of this study is to develop such a biomarker based on the changes of 376 plaque textural features measured from 3D ultrasound images. METHODS: Since the number of features (376) was greater than the number of subjects (171) in this study, principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to reduce the dimensionality of feature vectors. To generate a scalar biomarker for each subject, elements in the reduced feature vectors produced by PCA were weighted using locality preserving projections (LPP) to capture essential patterns exhibited locally in the feature space. 96 subjects treated by pomegranate juice and tablets, and 75 subjects receiving placebo-matching juice and tablets were evaluated in this study. The discriminative power of the proposed biomarker was evaluated and compared with existing biomarkers using t-tests. As the cost of a clinical trial is directly related to the number of subjects enrolled, the cost-effectiveness of the proposed biomarker was evaluated by sample size estimation. RESULTS: The proposed biomarker was more able to discriminate plaque changes exhibited by the pomegranate and placebo groups than total plaque volume (TPV) according to the result of t-tests (TPV: p=0.34, Proposed biomarker: p=1.5×10-5). The sample size required by the new biomarker to detect a significant effect was 20 times smaller than that required by TPV. CONCLUSION: With the increase in cost-effectiveness afforded by the proposed biomarker, more proof-of-principle studies for novel treatment options could be performed.

Investigation of both local and global topological ingredients on transport efficiency in scale-free networks.

This paper investigates the combined effect of local and global topological ingredients for routing packets on transport efficiency in scale-free networks with different degree exponents. Four different transport efficiency measurements, namely, the critical packet generation rate, the average number of overall packet loads, the relative variance of packet number on each node, and the relative variance of transport time from source to destination, are investigated in this paper. The combined effects of global and local ingredients on four measurements are presented and analyzed. We also investigate the effect of degree exponent on four measurements. Based on the results we obtained, we propose an improved routing strategy with memory information. Simulation results show that the critical packet generation rate can be efficiently improved by using the improved routing strategy with memory information, especially when packets are showing strong inclination of being forwarded to low-degree or high-degree nodes in scale-free networks with small degree exponents.

Topic-Based Algorithm for Multilabel Learning With Missing Labels.

In multilabel learning (MLL), each instance can be assigned by several concepts simultaneously from a class dictionary. Usually, labels in the class dictionary have semantic correlations and semantic hierarchy. Instances can be categorized into different topics. Each topic has its own label candidates, and some topics have overlapped label candidates. In this paper, we propose a novel MLL method to deal with missing labels. The proposed algorithm can recover the label matrix according to local, topic-wise, and global semantic properties. Specifically, in the global level, label consistency, label-wise semantic correlations, and semantic hierarchy are exploited; in the local level, label importance and instance-wise semantic correlations in each topic are extracted; and in the topic level, label importance similarities and instance-wise semantic similarities between topics are mined. The experimental results on five image data sets in different applications demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.