Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques offers a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying machine learning tools and techniques in real-world data mining situations. This highly anticipated third edition of the most acclaimed work on data mining and machine learning will teach you everything you need to know about preparing inputs, interpreting outputs, evaluating results, and the algorithmic methods at the heart of successful data mining. Thorough updates reflect the technical changes and modernizations that have taken place in the field since the last edition, including new material on Data Transformations, Ensemble Learning, Massive Data Sets, Multi-instance Learning, plus a new version of the popular Weka machine learning software developed by the authors. Witten, Frank, and Hall include both tried-and-true techniques of today as well as methods at the leading edge of contemporary research. *Provides a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying the tools and techniques to your data mining projects *Offers concrete tips and techniques for performance improvement that work by transforming the input or output in machine learning methods *Includes downloadable Weka software toolkit, a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks-in an updated, interactive interface. Algorithms in toolkit cover: data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, visualization

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

We will review some of the major results in random graphs and some of the more challenging open problems. We will cover algorithmic and structural questions. We will touch on newer models, including those related to the WWW.

Random graphs

Indoor Trajectory Identification: Snapping with Uncertainty.

Real passenger data available to city planners are usually incomplete. The goal of our work is to generate synthetic passenger data using a novel methodology that leverages joint traffic-passenger modeling and simulation on a city scale. A demonstration of such an idea in generating synthetic bus passenger data was implemented. Specifically, we 1) learned a bus passenger demand model from indirect people-mobility data to generate bus passenger demand samples, and we 2) developed a bus passenger behavior model, which runs jointly with a traffic simulator (SUMO), to generate synthetic bus passenger data. We applied the proposed methodology for a case study of Porto city, Portugal. The synthetic bus passenger data presents significant similarity in terms of spatial-temporal distributions to the real-world bus passenger data collected by the bus automated fare collection (AFC) system in Porto.

Generating Synthetic Passenger Data through Joint Traffic-Passenger Modeling and Simulation

In this paper, we consider an autonomous robot that persists over time performing tasks and the problem of providing one additional task to the robot’s task library. We present an approach to generalize tasks, represented as parameterized graphs with sequences, conditionals, and looping constructs of sensing and actuation primitives. Our approach performs graph-structure task generalization, while maintaining task executability and parameter value distributions. We present an algorithm that, given the initial steps of a new task, proposes an autocompletion based on a recognized past similar task. Our generalization and autocompletion contributions are effective on different real robots. We show concrete examples of the robot primitives and task graphs, as well as results, with Baxter. In experiments with multiple tasks, we show a significant reduction in the number of new task steps to be provided.

/pdf/graph-based-task-libraries-for-robots-generalization-and-3gjd089g1e.pdf

Graph-Based Task Libraries for Robots: Generalization and Autocompletion

■ Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain that involves multiple agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve specific objectives. In this article, we describe CMUNITED, the team of small robotic agents that we developed to enter the RoboCup-97 competition. We designed and built the robotic agents, devised the appropriate vision algorithm, and developed and implemented algorithms for strategic collaboration between the robots in an uncertain and dynamic environment. The robots can organize themselves in formations, hold specific roles, and pursue their goals. In game situations, they have demonstrated their collaborative behaviors on multiple occasions. We present an overview of the vision-processing algorithm that successfully tracks multiple moving objects and predicts trajectories. The article then focuses on the agent behaviors, ranging from low-level individual behaviors to coordinated, strategic team behaviors. CMUNITED won the RoboCup-97 small-robot competition at the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Nagoya, Japan.

RoboCup-97 Small-Robot World Champion Team

Agents providing assistance to humans are faced with the challenge of automatically adjusting the level of assistance to ensure optimal performance. In this work, we argue that identifying the right level of assistance consists in balancing positive assistance outcomes and some (domain-dependent) measure of cost associated with assistive actions. Towards this goal, we contribute a general mathematical framework for structured tasks where an agent playing the role of a ‘provider’—e.g., therapist, teacher—assists a human ‘receiver’—e.g., patient, student. We specifically consider tasks where the provider agent needs to plan a sequence of actions over a fixed time horizon, where actions are organized along a hierarchy with increasing success probabilities, and some associated costs. The goal of the provider is to achieve a success with the lowest expected cost possible. We present OAssistMe, an algorithm that generates cost-optimal action sequences given the action parameters, and investigate several extensions of it, motivated by different potential application domains. We provide an analysis of the algorithms, including proofs for a number of properties of optimal solutions that, we show, align with typical human provider strategies. Finally, we instantiate our theoretical framework in the context of robot-assisted therapy tasks for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In this context, we present methods for determining action parameters based on a survey of domain experts and real child-robot interaction data. Our contributions unlock increased levels of flexibility for agents introduced in a variety of assistive contexts.

Manuela Veloso

Papers

Indoor Trajectory Identification: Snapping with Uncertainty.

Generating Synthetic Passenger Data through Joint Traffic-Passenger Modeling and Simulation

Graph-Based Task Libraries for Robots: Generalization and Autocompletion

RoboCup-97 Small-Robot World Champion Team

Optimal action sequence generation for assistive agents in fixed horizon tasks