Types of Machine Learning Algorithms 19

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Types of Machine Learning Algorithms

Taiwo Oladipupo Ayodele
University of Portsmouth
United Kingdom

1. Machine Learning: Algorithms Types

Machine learning algorithms are organized into taxonomy, based on the desired outcome of
the algorithm. Common algorithm types include:

Supervised learning --- where the algorithm generates a function that maps inputs
to desired outputs. One standard formulation of the supervised learning task is the
classification problem: the learner is required to learn (to approximate the behavior
of) a function which maps a vector into one of several classes by looking at several
input-output examples of the function.
Unsupervised learning --- which models a set of inputs: labeled examples are not
available.
Semi-supervised learning --- which combines both labeled and unlabeled examples
to generate an appropriate function or classifier.
Reinforcement learning --- where the algorithm learns a policy of how to act given
an observation of the world. Every action has some impact in the environment, and
the environment provides feedback that guides the learning algorithm.
Transduction --- similar to supervised learning, but does not explicitly construct a
function: instead, tries to predict new outputs based on training inputs, training
outputs, and new inputs.
Learning to learn --- where the algorithm learns its own inductive bias based on
previous experience.

The performance and computational analysis of machine learning algorithms is a branch of

statistics known as computational learning theory.
Machine learning is about designing algorithms that allow a computer to learn. Learning is
not necessarily involves consciousness but learning is a matter of finding statistical
regularities or other patterns in the data. Thus, many machine learning algorithms will
barely resemble how human might approach a learning task. However, learning algorithms
can give insight into the relative difficulty of learning in different environments.

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20 New Advances in Machine Learning

1.1 Supervised Learning Approach

Supervised learning 1 is fairly common in classification problems because the goal is often to
get the computer to learn a classification system that we have created. Digit recognition,
once again, is a common example of classification learning. More generally, classification
learning is appropriate for any problem where deducing a classification is useful and the
classification is easy to determine. In some cases, it might not even be necessary to give pre-
determined classifications to every instance of a problem if the agent can work out the
classifications for itself. This would be an example of unsupervised learning in a
classification context.
Supervised learning 2 often leaves the probability for inputs undefined. This model is not
needed as long as the inputs are available, but if some of the input values are missing, it is
not possible to infer anything about the outputs. Unsupervised learning, all the observations
are assumed to be caused by latent variables, that is, the observations is assumed to be at the
end of the causal chain. Examples of supervised learning and unsupervised learning are
shown in the figure 1 below:

Fig. 1. Examples of Supervised and Unsupervised Learning

Supervised learning 3 is the most common technique for training neural networks and
decision trees. Both of these techniques are highly dependent on the information given by
the pre-determined classifications. In the case of neural networks, the classification is used
to determine the error of the network and then adjust the network to minimize it, and in
decision trees, the classifications are used to determine what attributes provide the most
information that can be used to solve the classification puzzle. We'll look at both of these in
more detail, but for now, it should be sufficient to know that both of these examples thrive
on having some "supervision" in the form of pre-determined classifications.
Inductive machine learning is the process of learning a set of rules from instances (examples
in a training set), or more generally speaking, creating a classifier that can
be used to generalize from new instances. The process of applying supervised ML to a real-
world problem is described in Figure F. The first step is collecting the dataset. If a requisite
expert is available, then s/he could suggest which fields (attributes, features) are the most

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Types of Machine Learning Algorithms 21

informative. If not, then the simplest method is that of brute-force, which means
measuring everything available in the hope that the right (informative, relevant) features
can be isolated. However, a dataset collected by the brute-force method is not directly
suitable for induction. It contains in most cases noise and missing feature values, and
therefore requires significant pre-processing according to Zhang et al (Zhang, 2002).
The second step is the data preparation and data pre-processing. Depending on the
circumstances, researchers have a number of methods to choose from to handle missing data
(Batista, 2003). Hodge et al (Hodge, 2004) , have recently introduced a survey of
contemporary techniques for outlier (noise) detection. These researchers have identified the
techniques advantages and disadvantages. Instance selection is not only used to handle
noise but to cope with the infeasibility of learning from very large datasets. Instance
selection in these datasets is an optimization problem that attempts to maintain the mining
quality while minimizing the sample size. It reduces data and enables a data mining
algorithm to function and work effectively with very large datasets. There is a variety of
procedures for sampling instances from a large dataset. See figure 2 below.
Feature subset selection is the process of identifying and removing as many irrelevant and
redundant features as possible (Yu, 2004) . This reduces the dimensionality of the data and
enables data mining algorithms to operate faster and more effectively. The fact that many
features depend on one another often unduly influences the accuracy of supervised ML
classification models. This problem can be addressed by constructing new features from the
basic feature set. This technique is called feature construction/transformation. These newly
generated features may lead to the creation of more concise and accurate classifiers. In
addition, the discovery of meaningful features contributes to better comprehensibility of the
produced classifier, and a better understanding of the learned concept.Speech recognition
using hidden Markov models and Bayesian networks relies on some elements of
supervision as well in order to adjust parameters to, as usual, minimize the error on the
given inputs.Notice something important here: in the classification problem, the goal of the
learning algorithm is to minimize the error with respect to the given inputs. These inputs,
often called the "training set", are the examples from which the agent tries to learn. But
learning the training set well is not necessarily the best thing to do. For instance, if I tried to
teach you exclusive-or, but only showed you combinations consisting of one true and one
false, but never both false or both true, you might learn the rule that the answer is always
true. Similarly, with machine learning algorithms, a common problem is over-fitting the
data and essentially memorizing the training set rather than learning a more general
classification technique. As you might imagine, not all training sets have the inputs
classified correctly. This can lead to problems if the algorithm used is powerful enough to
memorize even the apparently "special cases" that don't fit the more general principles. This,
too, can lead to over fitting, and it is a challenge to find algorithms that are both powerful
enough to learn complex functions and robust enough to produce generalisable results.

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22 New Advances in Machine Learning

Problem

Identification of
Data

Data Pre-Processing

Definition of training set

Algorithm
selection

Parameter
Tuning Training

Evaluation with test

set

NO
YES Classifier
OK

Fig. 2. Machine Learning Supervise Process

1.2 Unsupervised learning

Unsupervised learning 4 seems much harder: the goal is to have the computer learn how to
do something that we don't tell it how to do! There are actually two approaches to
unsupervised learning. The first approach is to teach the agent not by giving explicit
categorizations, but by using some sort of reward system to indicate success. Note that this
type of training will generally fit into the decision problem framework because the goal is
not to produce a classification but to make decisions that maximize rewards. This approach
nicely generalizes to the real world, where agents might be rewarded for doing certain

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Types of Machine Learning Algorithms 23

actions and punished for doing others. Often, a form of reinforcement learning can be used
for unsupervised learning, where the agent bases its actions on the previous rewards and
punishments without necessarily even learning any information about the exact ways that
its actions affect the world. In a way, all of this information is unnecessary because by
learning a reward function, the agent simply knows what to do without any processing
because it knows the exact reward it expects to achieve for each action it could take. This can
be extremely beneficial in cases where calculating every possibility is very time consuming
(even if all of the transition probabilities between world states were known). On the other
hand, it can be very time consuming to learn by, essentially, trial and error. But this kind of
learning can be powerful because it assumes no pre-discovered classification of examples. In
some cases, for example, our classifications may not be the best possible. One striking
exmaple is that the conventional wisdom about the game of backgammon was turned on its
head when a series of computer programs (neuro-gammon and TD-gammon) that learned
through unsupervised learning became stronger than the best human chess players merely
by playing themselves over and over. These programs discovered some principles that
surprised the backgammon experts and performed better than backgammon programs
trained on pre-classified examples. A second type of unsupervised learning is called
clustering. In this type of learning, the goal is not to maximize a utility function, but simply
to find similarities in the training data. The assumption is often that the clusters discovered
will match reasonably well with an intuitive classification. For instance, clustering
individuals based on demographics might result in a clustering of the wealthy in one group
and the poor in another. Although the algorithm won't have names to assign to these
clusters, it can produce them and then use those clusters to assign new examples into one or
the other of the clusters. This is a data-driven approach that can work well when there is
sufficient data; for instance, social information filtering algorithms, such as those that
Amazon.com use to recommend books, are based on the principle of finding similar groups
of people and then assigning new users to groups. In some cases, such as with social
information filtering, the information about other members of a cluster (such as what books
they read) can be sufficient for the algorithm to produce meaningful results. In other cases, it
may be the case that the clusters are merely a useful tool for a human analyst.
Unfortunately, even unsupervised learning suffers from the problem of overfitting the
training data. There's no silver bullet to avoiding the problem because any algorithm that
can learn from its inputs needs to be quite powerful.
Unsupervised learning algorithms according to Ghahramani (Ghahramani, 2008) are
designed to extract structure from data samples. The quality of a structure is measured by a
cost function which is usually minimized to infer optimal parameters characterizing the
hidden structure in the data. Reliable and robust inference requires a guarantee that
extracted structures are typical for the data source, i.e., similar structures have to be
extracted from a second sample set of the same data source. Lack of robustness is known as
over fitting from the statistics and the machine learning literature. In this talk I characterize
the over fitting phenomenon for a class of histogram clustering models which play a
prominent role in information retrieval, linguistic and computer vision applications.
Learning algorithms with robustness to sample fluctuations are derived from large
deviation results and the maximum entropy principle for the learning process.

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24 New Advances in Machine Learning

Unsupervised learning has produced many successes, such as world-champion calibre

backgammon programs and even machines capable of driving cars! It can be a powerful
technique when there is an easy way to assign values to actions. Clustering can be useful
when there is enough data to form clusters (though this turns out to be difficult at times)
and especially when additional data about members of a cluster can be used to produce
further results due to dependencies in the data. Classification learning is powerful when the
classifications are known to be correct (for instance, when dealing with diseases, it's
generally straight-forward to determine the design after the fact by an autopsy), or when the
classifications are simply arbitrary things that we would like the computer to be able to
recognize for us. Classification learning is often necessary when the decisions made by the
algorithm will be required as input somewhere else. Otherwise, it wouldn't be easy for
whoever requires that input to figure out what it means. Both techniques can be valuable
and which one you choose should depend on the circumstances--what kind of problem is
being solved, how much time is allotted to solving it (supervised learning or clustering is
often faster than reinforcement learning techniques), and whether supervised learning is
even possible.

1.3 Algorithm Types

In the area of supervised learning which deals much with classification. These are the
algorithms types:

Linear Classifiers
Logical Regression
Nave Bayes Classifier
Perceptron
Support Vector Machine
Quadratic Classifiers
K-Means Clustering
Boosting
Decision Tree
Random Forest
Neural networks
Bayesian Networks

Linear Classifiers: In machine learning, the goal of classification is to group items that have
similar feature values, into groups. Timothy et al (Timothy Jason Shepard, 1998) stated that
a linear classifier achieves this by making a classification decision based on the value of
the linear combination of the features. If the input feature vector to the classifier is
a real vector , then the output score is

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Types of Machine Learning Algorithms 25

where is a real vector of weights and f is a function that converts the dot product of the
two vectors into the desired output. The weight vector is learned from a set of labelled
training samples. Often f is a simple function that maps all values above a certain threshold
to the first class and all other values to the second class. A more complex f might give the
probability that an item belongs to a certain class.
For a two-class classification problem, one can visualize the operation of a linear classifier as
splitting a high-dimensional input space with a hyperplane: all points on one side of the
hyper plane are classified as "yes", while the others are classified as "no". A linear classifier is
often used in situations where the speed of classification is an issue, since it is often the
fastest classifier, especially when is sparse. However, decision trees can be faster. Also,
linear classifiers often work very well when the number of dimensions in is large, as
in document classification, where each element in is typically the number of counts of a
word in a document (see document-term matrix). In such cases, the classifier should be well-
regularized.

Support Vector Machine: A Support Vector Machine as stated by Luis et al

(Luis Gonz, 2005) (SVM) performs classification by constructing an N-
dimensional hyper plane that optimally separates the data into two
categories. SVM models are closely related to neural networks. In fact, a SVM
model using a sigmoid kernel function is equivalent to a two-
layer, perceptron neural network.
Support Vector Machine (SVM) models are a close cousin to classical
multilayer perceptron neural networks. Using a kernel function, SVMs are
an alternative training method for polynomial, radial basis function and
multi-layer perceptron classifiers in which the weights of the network are
found by solving a quadratic programming problem with linear constraints,
rather than by solving a non-convex, unconstrained minimization problem as
in standard neural network training.
In the parlance of SVM literature, a predictor variable is called an attribute,
and a transformed attribute that is used to define the hyper plane is called
a feature. The task of choosing the most suitable representation is known
as feature selection. A set of features that describes one case (i.e., a row of
predictor values) is called a vector. So the goal of SVM modelling is to find
the optimal hyper plane that separates clusters of vector in such a way that
cases with one category of the target variable are on one side of the plane and
cases with the other category are on the other size of the plane. The vectors
near the hyper plane are the support vectors. The figure below presents an
overview of the SVM process.

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26 New Advances in Machine Learning

A Two-Dimensional Example
Before considering N-dimensional hyper planes, lets look at a simple 2-dimensional
example. Assume we wish to perform a classification, and our data has a categorical target
variable with two categories. Also assume that there are two predictor variables with
continuous values. If we plot the data points using the value of one predictor on the X axis
and the other on the Y axis we might end up with an image such as shown below. One
category of the target variable is represented by rectangles while the other category is
represented by ovals.

In this idealized example, the cases with one category are in the lower left corner and the
cases with the other category are in the upper right corner; the cases are completely
separated. The SVM analysis attempts to find a 1-dimensional hyper plane (i.e. a line) that
separates the cases based on their target categories. There are an infinite number of possible
lines; two candidate lines are shown above. The question is which line is better, and how do
we define the optimal line.
The dashed lines drawn parallel to the separating line mark the distance between the
dividing line and the closest vectors to the line. The distance between the dashed lines is
called the margin. The vectors (points) that constrain the width of the margin are the support
vectors. The following figure illustrates this.

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Types of Machine Learning Algorithms 27

An SVM analysis (Luis Gonz, 2005) finds the line (or, in general, hyper plane) that is
oriented so that the margin between the support vectors is maximized. In the figure above,
the line in the right panel is superior to the line in the left panel.
If all analyses consisted of two-category target variables with two predictor variables, and
the cluster of points could be divided by a straight line, life would be easy. Unfortunately,
this is not generally the case, so SVM must deal with (a) more than two predictor variables,
(b) separating the points with non-linear curves, (c) handling the cases where clusters
cannot be completely separated, and (d) handling classifications with more than two
categories.
In this chapter, we shall explain three main machine learning techniques with their
examples and how they perform in reality. These are:

K-Means Clustering
Neural Network
Self Organised Map

1.3.1 K-Means Clustering

The basic step of k-means clustering is uncomplicated. In the beginning we determine
number of cluster K and we assume the centre of these clusters. We can take any random
objects as the initial centre or the first K objects in sequence can also serve as the initial
centre. Then the K means algorithm will do the three steps below until convergence.
Iterate until stable (= no object move group):

1. Determine the centre coordinate

2. Determine the distance of each object to the centre
3. Group the object based on minimum distance

The Figure 3 shows a K- means flow diagram

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28 New Advances in Machine Learning

Fig. 3. K-means iteration

K-means (Bishop C. M., 1995) and (Tapas Kanungo, 2002) is one of the simplest
unsupervised learning algorithms that solve the well known clustering problem. The
procedure follows a simple and easy way to classify a given data set through a certain
number of clusters (assume k clusters) fixed a priori. The main idea is to define k centroids,
one for each cluster. These centroids shoud be placed in a cunning way because of different
location causes different result. So, the better choice is to place them as much as possible far
away from each other. The next step is to take each point belonging to a given data set and
associate it to the nearest centroid. When no point is pending, the first step is completed and
an early groupage is done. At this point we need to re-calculate k new centroids as
barycenters of the clusters resulting from the previous step. After we have these k new
centroids, a new binding has to be done between the same data set points and the nearest
new centroid. A loop has been generated. As a result of this loop we may notice that the k
centroids change their location step by step until no more changes are done. In other words
centroids do not move any more.
Finally, this algorithm aims at minimizing an objective function, in this case a squared error
function. The objective function

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Types of Machine Learning Algorithms 29

where is a chosen distance measure between a data point and the cluster

centre , is an indicator of the distance of the n data points from their respective cluster
centres.
The algorithm in figure 4 is composed of the following steps:

1. Place K points into the space represented by the objects that

are being clustered. These points represent initial group
centroids.
2. Assign each object to the group that has the closest
centroid.
3. When all objects have been assigned, recalculate the
positions of the K centroids.
4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until the centroids no longer move.
This produces a separation of the objects into groups from
which the metric to be minimized can be calculated.

Although it can be proved that the procedure will always terminate, the k-means algorithm
does not necessarily find the most optimal configuration, corresponding to the global
objective function minimum. The algorithm is also significantly sensitive to the initial
randomly selected cluster centres. The k-means algorithm can be run multiple times to
reduce this effect. K-means is a simple algorithm that has been adapted to many problem
domains. As we are going to see, it is a good candidate for extension to work with fuzzy
feature vectors.
An example
Suppose that we have n sample feature vectors x1, x2, ..., xn all from the same class, and we
know that they fall into k compact clusters, k < n. Let mi be the mean of the vectors in cluster
i. If the clusters are well separated, we can use a minimum-distance classifier to separate
them. That is, we can say that x is in cluster i if || x - mi || is the minimum of all the k
distances. This suggests the following procedure for finding the k means:

Make initial guesses for the means m1, m2, ..., mk

Until there are no changes in any mean
Use the estimated means to classify the samples into clusters
For i from 1 to k

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Replace mi with the mean of all of the samples for

cluster i
end_for
end_until

Here is an example showing how the means m1 and m2 move into the centers of two
clusters.

This is a simple version of the k-means procedure. It can be viewed as a greedy algorithm
for partitioning the n samples into k clusters so as to minimize the sum of the squared
distances to the cluster centers. It does have some weaknesses:

The way to initialize the means was not specified. One popular way to start is to
randomly choose k of the samples.
The results produced depend on the initial values for the means, and it frequently
happens that suboptimal partitions are found. The standard solution is to try a
number of different starting points.
It can happen that the set of samples closest to mi is empty, so that mi cannot be
updated. This is an annoyance that must be handled in an implementation, but that
we shall ignore.
The results depend on the metric used to measure || x - mi ||. A popular solution
is to normalize each variable by its standard deviation, though this is not always
desirable.
The results depend on the value of k.

This last problem is particularly troublesome, since we often have no way of knowing how
many clusters exist. In the example shown above, the same algorithm applied to the same
data produces the following 3-means clustering. Is it better or worse than the 2-means
clustering?

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Types of Machine Learning Algorithms 31

Unfortunately there is no general theoretical solution to find the optimal number of clusters
for any given data set. A simple approach is to compare the results of multiple runs with
different k classes and choose the best one according to a given criterion

1.3.2 Neural Network

Neural networks (Bishop C. M., 1995) can actually perform a number of regression
and/or classification tasks at once, although commonly each network performs only one. In
the vast majority of cases, therefore, the network will have a single output variable,
although in the case of many-state classification problems, this may correspond to a number
of output units (the post-processing stage takes care of the mapping from output units to
output variables). If you do define a single network with multiple output variables, it may
suffer from cross-talk (the hidden neurons experience difficulty learning, as they are
attempting to model at least two functions at once). The best solution is usually to train
separate networks for each output, then to combine them into an ensemble so that they can
be run as a unit. Neural methods are:

Multilayer Perceptrons: This is perhaps the most popular network architecture in

use today, due originally to Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) and discussed at
length in most neural network textbooks (e.g., Bishop, 1995). This is the type of
network discussed briefly in previous sections: the units each perform a biased
weighted sum of their inputs and pass this activation level through a transfer
function to produce their output, and the units are arranged in a layered feed
forward topology. The network thus has a simple interpretation as a form of input-
output model, with the weights and thresholds (biases) the free parameters of the
model. Such networks can model functions of almost arbitrary complexity, with
the number of layers, and the number of units in each layer, determining the
function complexity. Important issues in Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP) design
include specification of the number of hidden layers and the number of units in
these layers (Bishop C. M., 1995), (D. Michie, 1994).
The number of input and output units is defined by the problem (there may be
some uncertainty about precisely which inputs to use, a point to which we will
return later. However, for the moment we will assume that the input variables are

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