Self organizing Maps and Linear vector quantization - neural-network

Self organizing maps are more suited for clustering(dimension reduction) rather than classification. But SOM's are used in Linear vector quantization for fine tuning. But LVQ is a supervised leaning method. So to use SOM's in LVQ, LVQ should be provided with a labelled training data set. But since SOM's only do clustering and not classification and thus cannot have labelled data how can SOM be used as an input for LVQ?
Does LVQ fine tune the clusters in SOM?
Before using in LVQ should SOM be put through another classification algorithm so that it can classify the inputs so that these labelled inputs maybe used in LVQ?

It must be clear that supervised differs from unsupervised because in the first the target values are known.
Therefore, the output of supervised models is a prediction.
Instead, the output of unsupervised models is a label for which we don't know the meaning yet. For this purpose, after clustering, it is necessary to do the profiling of each one of those new label.
Having said so, you could label the dataset using an unsupervised learning technique such as SOM. Then, you should profile each class in order to be sure to understand the meaning of each class.
At this point, you can pursue two different path depending on what is your final objective:
1. use this new variable as a way for dimensionality reduction
2. use this new dataset featured with the additional variable representing the class as a labelled data that you will try to predict using the LVQ
Hope this can be useful!

Related

Face Recognition based on Deep Learning (Siamese Architecture)

I want to use pre-trained model for the face identification. I try to use Siamese architecture which requires a few number of images. Could you give me any trained model which I can change for the Siamese architecture? How can I change the network model which I can put two images to find their similarities (I do not want to create image based on the tutorial here)? I only want to use the system for real time application. Do you have any recommendations?
I suppose you can use this model, described in Xiang Wu, Ran He, Zhenan Sun, Tieniu Tan A Light CNN for Deep Face Representation with Noisy Labels (arXiv 2015) as a a strating point for your experiments.
As for the Siamese network, what you are trying to earn is a mapping from a face image into some high dimensional vector space, in which distances between points reflects (dis)similarity between faces.
To do so, you only need one network that gets a face as an input and produce a high-dim vector as an output.
However, to train this single network using the Siamese approach, you are going to duplicate it: creating two instances of the same net (you need to explicitly link the weights of the two copies). During training you are going to provide pairs of faces to the nets: one to each copy, then the single loss layer on top of the two copies can compare the high-dimensional vectors representing the two faces and compute a loss according to a "same/not same" label associated with this pair.
Hence, you only need the duplication for the training. In test time ('deploy') you are going to have a single net providing you with a semantically meaningful high dimensional representation of faces.
For a more advance Siamese architecture and loss see this thread.
On the other hand, you might want to consider the approach described in Oren Tadmor, Yonatan Wexler, Tal Rosenwein, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, Amnon Shashua Learning a Metric Embedding for Face Recognition using the Multibatch Method (arXiv 2016). This approach is more efficient and easy to implement than pair-wise losses over image pairs.

How to Combine two classification model in matlab?

I am trying to detect the faces using the Matlab built-in viola jones face detection. Is there anyway that I can combine two classification models like "FrontalFaceCART" and "ProfileFace" into one in order to get a better result?
Thank you.
You can't combine models. That's a non-sense in any classification task since every classifier is different (works differently, i.e. different algorithm behind it, and maybe is also trained differently).
According to the classification model(s) help (which can be found here), your two classifiers work as follows:
FrontalFaceCART is a model composed of weak classifiers, based on classification and regression tree analysis
ProfileFace is composed of weak classifiers, based on a decision stump
More infos can be found in the link provided but you can easily see that their inner behaviour is rather different, so you can't mix them or combine them.
It's like (in Machine Learning) mixing a Support Vector Machine with a K-Nearest Neighbour: the first one uses separating hyperplanes whereas the latter is simply based on distance(s).
You can, however, train several models in parallel (e.g. independently) and choose the model that better suits you (e.g. smaller error rate/higher accuracy): so you basically create as many different classifiers as you like, give them the same training set, evaluate each accuracy (and/or other parameters) and choose the best model.
One option is to make a hierarchical classifier. So in a first step you use the frontal face classifier (assuming that most pictures are frontal faces). If the classifier fails, you try with the profile classifier.
I did that with a dataset of faces and it improved my overall classification accuracy. Furthermore, if you have some a priori information, you can use it. In my case the faces were usually in the middle up part of the picture.
To further improve your performance, without using the two classifiers in MATLAB you are using, you would need to change your technique (and probably your programming language). This is the best method so far: Facenet.

Parameter selection of SVM

I have a dataset which I use for classifcation with libSVM in Matlab. The dataset consists of 4 classes.
For parameter selection of SVM I can do nested cross-validation. The problem is that I also need the value of the best parameters in the end.
After having done the nested cross-validation and having the final accuracy I want the values of the best parameters. Then I will train a SVM for each class (one-vs-all) with the best parameters for selecting the most important features (according to heighest weight), i.e. feature importance map.
How can I do this? Should I just not do nested cross-validation and only looping over all parameters and doing cross-validation?
Second, if I use a linear SVM then using this weight vector w for assigning importance to features works, but does it also work for non-linear SVM (e.g. rbf kernel)?
To find the "best" parameters for your kernel of choice, you have to loop through all parameters to perform a so called "grid search". LIBSVM does not support a build-in grid-search mechanismn.
Regarding your second question, I would suggest to perform a feature selection (e.g. Information Gain, Mutual Information, ...) as a pre-processing step before the actual work with the SVM and in a second step take the weight vector
s into consideration (but I am not sure, if this will work with RBF or Gaußian Kernels...).

How to use LibSVM for multiple descriptors for image classification - Matlab

I need to classify pairs of image and indicate whether they're the same of not. I use several descriptors as SIFT LBP and more.
I want now to use LIBSVM to do the training and test.
how can I use teh svmTrain.
should I save only the distance between 2 descriptors and then just have 1 1:SIftDelta, 2:LBPDelta
is this the correct way or is there any better approach?
thanks
I'm not sure this is the right forum for this question, as it deals more with "high level" notions of learning, rather the specific implementation of it in Matlab.
Having said that, it seems like you are trying to combine multiple cues for learning, which is not a trivial task.
I can propose two methods for you:
Direct method - just concatenate all your descriptors into a single, very long, one and do the learning in this high dimensional space.
Do the learning in two stages (consequently, you'll have to partition your training data into two):
At the first stage, learn K classifiers, each using a different descriptor (assuming you wish to use K different descriptors).
Then, at the second stage, (using the reminder of your training data), you classify each example using the K classifiers you have: this will give you a new K-dimensional feature vector for each sample (you can put the classification result, or use the distance from the separating hyper plane to populate the k-th entry in the new descriptor). Now you can train a second classifier on the new K-dimension vectors. This second classifier gives you the final output of your multi-descriptor system.
-Enjoy!

Matlab: K-means clustering with predefined populations

I am trying to differentiate two populations. Each population is an NxM matrix in which N is fixed between the two and M is variable in length (N=column specific attributes of each run, M=run number). I have looked at PCA and K-means for differentiating the two, but I was curious of the best practice.
To my knowledge, in K-means, there is no initial 'calibration' in which the clusters are chosen such that known bimodal populations can be differentiated. It simply minimizes the distance and assigns the data to an arbitrary number of populations. I would like to tell the clustering algorithm that I want the best fit in which the two populations are separated. I can then use the fit I get from the initial clustering on future datasets. Any help, example code, or reading material would be appreciated.
-R
K-means and PCA are typically used in unsupervised learning problems, i.e. problems where you have a single batch of data and want to find some easier way to describe it. In principle, you could run K-means (with K=2) on your data, and then evaluate the degree to which your two classes of data match up with the data clusters found by this algorithm (note: you may want multiple starts).
It sounds to like you have a supervised learning problem: you have a training data set which has already been partitioned into two classes. In this case k-nearest neighbors (as mentioned by #amas) is probably the approach most like k-means; however Support Vector Machines can also be an attractive approach.
I frequently refer to The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Second Edition (Springer Series in Statistics) by Trevor Hastie (Author), Robert Tibshirani (Author), Jerome Friedman (Author).
It really depends on the data. But just to let you know K-means does get stuck at local minima so if you wanna use it try running it from different random starting points. PCA's might also be useful how ever like any other spectral clustering method you have much less control over the clustering procedure. I recommend that you cluster the data using k-means with multiple random starting points and c how it works then you can predict and learn for each the new samples with K-NN (I don't know if it is useful for your case).
Check Lazy learners and K-NN for prediction.