MACHINE LEARNING (ML) Basics: CS5200

The goal of learning is prediction. Learning falls into many categories,

including:
- Supervised learning,
- Unsupervised learning,
- Semi-supervised learning
- Transfer Learning
- Online learning, and
- Reinforcement learning
- Incremental Learning
- Deep Learning.

Supervised learning is best understood and studied.

Machine Learning is …

an algorithm that can learn from data without relying on rules-based

programming.
 In supervised learning, an algorithm is given samples that are labeled
in some useful way. For example, the samples might be descriptions of
apples, and the labels could be whether or not the apples are edible.

Supervised learning involves learning from a training set of data. Every

point in the training is an input-output pair, where the input maps to an
output. The learning problem consists of inferring the function that maps
between the input and the output in a predictive fashion, such that the
learned function can be used to predict output from future input.

The algorithm takes these previously labeled samples and uses them
to induce a classifier. This classifier is a function that assigns labels to
samples including the samples that have never been previously seen by the
algorithm.

The goal of the supervised learning algorithm is to optimize some

measure of performance such as minimizing the number of mistakes made on
new samples.
Machine Learning is …
a subfield of computer science and artificial intelligence which deals with
building systems that can learn from data, instead of explicitly programmed
instructions.
Textbooks
Elements of Statistical Learning. Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman. Springer.
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. Christopher Bishop.

Data Mining: Tools and Techniques, 3rd Edition. Jiawei Han and Michelline Kamber.

Kevin R Murphy, "Machine Learning - A Probabilistic Perspective", The MIT Press, 2012.

http://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~vplab/E_machine_learning.html
 Computational learning theory studies the time complexity and feasibility
of learning. In computational learning theory, a computation is considered
feasible if it can be done in polynomial time.

Classification problems are those for which the output will be an element
from a discrete set of labels. Classification is very common for machine learning
applications. The input would be represented by a large multidimensional vector
whose elements represent pixels in the picture, say CV applications.

After learning a function based on the training set data, that function is
validated on a test set of data, data that did not appear in the training set.
 Computational learning theory
(Wikipedia)
• Probably approximately correct learning (PAC learning) --
Leslie Valiant
• inspired boosting
• VC theory --Vladimir Vapnik
• led to SVMs
• Bayesian inference --Thomas Bayes
• Algorithmic learning theory --E. M. Gold
• Online machine learning --Nick Littlestone
• SRM (Structural risk minimization)
• model estimation
Example: Recognition of Handwritten Digits

l Data: images are single digits 16x16 8-bit l Non-binary classification problem
gray-scale, normalized for size and l Low tolerance to misclassifications
orientation
l Classify: newly written digits

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 Categories of Supervised Learning:

- Linear Regression – Prediction using Least Squares

- Function Approximation – Linear basis expansion, cross entropy

- Bayes

- Regularization
- Logistic Regression, LDA
- Kernel methods & SVM;
- Inductive Learning
- Basis and Dictionary methods;
- Decision Trees
- Model selection
- Deep Learning
- Perceptron, ANN

- Bagging, Boosting, Additive Trees

 Unsupervised Learning
• No training data in the form of (input, output) pair is available
• Applications:
– Dimensionality reduction
– Data compression
– Outlier detection
– Classification
– Segmentation/clustering
– Probability density estimation
– …

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 Semi-supervised Learning
• Uses both labeled data (in the form (input, output) pairs)
and unlabelled data for learning
• When labeling of data is a costly affair semi-supervised
techniques could be very useful
• Examples: Generative models, self-training, co-training

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Example: Semi-supervised Learning

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Source: Semi-supervised literature survey by X. Zhu, Technical Report
 Reinforcement Learning
• Reinforcement learning is the problem faced by an agent that must learn
behavior through trial-and-error interactions with a dynamic environment.
• There is no teacher telling the agent wrong or right
• There is critic that gives a reward / penalty for the agent’s action
• Applications:
– Robotics
– Combinatorial search problems, such as games
– Industrial manufacturing
– Many others!

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 Kernels and SVM
ONLINE Learning

Transfer Learning
Reinforcement Learning
Applications:

- Document Classification and email SPAM filtering;

- Object Recognition + face, fingerprint , hand-writing, printed text (OCR), inpainting

- Action Classification in videos; Video surveillance, Self-driving cars

- Exit polls, Stock Market, Weather, Social media

- Identifying patterns/clusters/structures in big data

- Search Engines, market analysis, Robotics

- Matrix completion

- Virtual Assistance – Alexa etc.

- Manufacturing; Quality Control, Customer support, product recommendations

- Health care, collaborative filtering, software/hardware design

- Agriculture
 Decision trees
• One possible representation for hypotheses
• E.g., here is the “true” tree for deciding whether to wait:

https://www.crondose.com/2016/07/easy-way-understand-decision-trees/
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/teaching/pre2012/v231/lecture11.html
 ONLINE LEARNING (src: Wiki)

In Online machine learning data becomes available in a sequential order and is

used to update our best predictor for future data at each step, as opposed to batch
learning techniques which generate the best predictor by learning on the entire training
data set at once.

In this case, it is necessary for the algorithm to dynamically adapt to new patterns
in the data, or when the data itself is generated as a function of time, e.g. stock price
prediction. Online learning algorithms may be prone to catastrophic interference. This
problem is tackled by incremental learning approaches.

A purely online model would learn based on just the new input , the current best
predictor and some extra stored information (which is usually expected to have storage
requirements independent of training data size).

A common strategy to overcome the issue of storage, is to learn using mini-

batches, which process a small batch of data points at a time, this can be considered as
pseudo-online learning for much smaller than the total number of training points.
A Fundamental Dilemma of Science:
Model Complexity vs Prediction Accuracy

Limited data
Accuracy

Possible
Models/representations

Complexity
 Tradeoff between y=f(x)
accuracy and simplicity

Good models
should enable
Prediction
of new data…

X
Concrete learning paradigm- linear separators

The predictor h: Sign ( wi xi+b)

(where w is the weight vector of the hyperplane h,

and x=(x1, …xi,…xn) is the example to classify)
Potential problem –
data may not be linearly separable
The SVM Paradigm

 Choose an Embedding of the domain X into

some high dimensional Euclidean space,
so that the data sample becomes (almost)
linearly separable.
 Find a large-margin data-separating hyperplane
in this image space, and use it for prediction.
Important gain: When the data is separable,
finding such a hyperplane is computationally feasible.
The SVM Idea: an Example
The SVM Idea: an Example

x ↦ (x, x2)
The SVM Idea: an Example
Controlling Computational Complexity

Potentially the embeddings may require

very high Euclidean dimension.
How can we search for hyperplanes
efficiently?
The Kernel Trick: Use algorithms that
depend only on the inner product of
sample points.
Kernel-Based Algorithms

Rather than define the embedding explicitly, define

just the matrix of the inner products in the range
space.
K(x1x1) K(x1x2) ........ K(x1xm)

.......
....... K(xixj)

K(xmx1) ............ K(xmxm)

Mercer Theorem: If the matrix is symmetric and positive

semi-definite, then it is the inner product matrix with
respect to some embedding
Support Vector Machines (SVMs)

On input: Sample (x1 y1) ... (xmym) and a

kernel matrix K
Output: A “good” separating
hyperplane
The Margins of a Sample

max min wn ⋅ xi
separating h xi

(where wn is the weight vector of the hyperplane h)

Summary of SVM learning

1. The user chooses a “Kernel Matrix”

- a measure of similarity between input points.
2. Upon viewing the training data, the algorithm finds a
linear separator the maximizes the margins (in the
high dimensional “Feature Space”).
- Model Selection;

- Online Learning

- Curse of Dimensionality

- Bias-Variance Tradeoff

- Transfer Learning – Domain Adaptation

- BOW, Sparse Coding

- Incremental Learning
 References and Journals
• Text: The Elements of Statistical Learning by Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman (book website: http://www-
stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/)
• Reference books:
• Pattern Classification by Duda, Hart and Stork
• Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by C.M. Bishop
• Machine Learning by T. Mitchell
• Introduction to Machine Learning by E. Alpaydin
• Some related journals / associations:
• Machine Learning (Kluwer).
• Journal of Machine Learning Research.
• Journal of AI Research (JAIR).
• Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery - An International Journal.
• Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (JETAI).
• Evolutionary Computation.
• Artificial Life.
• Fuzzy Sets and Systems
• IEEE Intelligent Systems (Formerly IEEE Expert)
• IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
• IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
• IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics
• Journal of AI Research
• Journal of Intelligent Information Systems
• Journal of the American Statistical Association
• Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 36
 References and Journals…
– Pattern Recognition
– Pattern Recognition Letters
– Pattern Analysis and Applications.
– Computational Intelligence .
– Journal of Intelligent Systems .
– Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.
– IDEAL, the online scientific journal library by Academic Press.
–
– ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).
– Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence.
– ACM SIGAR
– ACM SIGMOD
– American Statistical Association.
– Artificial Intelligence
– Artificial Intelligence in Engineering
– Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
– Artificial Intelligence Review
– Bioinformatics
– Data and Knowledge Engineering
– Evolutionary Computation

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 Some Conferences & Workshops
• Congress on Evolutionary Computation

• European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery

• The ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

• National Conference on Artificial Intelligence ECCAI (European Coordinating Committee on

Artificial Intelligence).
• Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
AAAI (American Association for Artificial
Intelligence).
• International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML, ECML, ICLR)
NIPS, CVPR
• Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

• European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks Advances in Computational Intelligence and

Learning

• Artificial and Ambient Intelligence

• Computational Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering

• IEEE International Symposium on Approximate Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement

Learning

• International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)

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 EXAM PATTERN (tentative range, to be
finalized before ES):
Visit:
http://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~vplab/E_machine_learning.html END SEM ( 3 Hrs) - 40-50;

Quiz (MS) 2 (1 Hr. each) – 20-30;

Software Assignments – 20-25

Quiz 1 - 29-02-2020 (Duration: 60 mins)

Quiz 2 - 30-03-2020 (Duration: 60 mins)

End Semester - 18-04-2020 (Duration: 150-180 mins)

Software Assignment 1:
Announcement: 25-01-2020
Deadline: 25-02-2020

Software Assignment 2:
Announcement: 21-02-2020
Deadline: 05-04-2020