Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

October 10, 2011

Nearest Neighbor Search: the Old, the New, and the Impossible

Filed under: Edit Distance,Levenshtein Distance,Nearest Neighbor,Neighbors — Patrick Durusau @ 6:16 pm

Nearest Neighbor Search: the Old, the New, and the Impossible, the MIT PhD thesis of Alexandr Andoni.

To be honest, it is the discovery of gems like this one that keep me prowling journals, pre-publication sites, homepages, etc.

Alexandr walks the reader through a very complete review of the literature on nearest neighbor search, all the while laying a foundation for the significant progress he has made.

Not for the faint of heart but it promises to be well worth the effort.

March 12, 2011

Combining Pattern Classifiers: Methods and Algorithms

Filed under: Bayesian Models,Classifier,Classifier Fusion,Linear Regression,Neighbors — Patrick Durusau @ 6:46 pm

Combining Pattern Classifiers: Methods and Algorithms, Ludmila I. Kuncheva (2004)

WorldCat entry: Combining Pattern Classifiers: Methods and Algorithms

From the preface:

Everyday life throws at us an endless number of pattern recognition problems: smells, images, voices, faces, situations, and so on. Most of these problems we solve at a sensory level or intuitively, without an explicit method or algorithm. As soon as we are able to provide an algorithm the problem becomes trivial and we happily delegate it to the computer. Indeed, machines have confidently replaced humans in many formerly difficult or impossible, now just tedious pattern recognition tasks such as mail sorting, medical test reading, military target recognition, signature verification, meteorological forecasting, DNA matching, fingerprint recognition, and so on.

In the past, pattern recognition focused on designing single classifiers. This book is about combining the “opinions” of an ensemble of pattern classifiers in the hope that the new opinion will be better than the individual ones. “Vox populi, vox Dei.”

The field of combining classifiers is like a teenager: full of energy, enthusiasm, spontaneity, and confusion; undergoing quick changes and obstructing the attempts to bring some order to its cluttered box of accessories. When I started writing this book, the field was small and tidy, but it has grown so rapidly that I am faced with the Herculean task of cutting out a (hopefully) useful piece of this rich, dynamic, and loosely structured discipline. This will explain why some methods and algorithms are only sketched, mentioned, or even left out and why there is a chapter called “Miscellanea” containing a collection of important topics that I could not fit anywhere else.

Appreciate the author’s suggesting of older material to see how the pattern recognition developed.

Suggestions/comments on this or later literature on pattern recognition?

January 25, 2011

LSH Algorithm and Implementation (E2LSH)

Filed under: Hashing,High Dimensionality,Neighbors — Patrick Durusau @ 10:56 am

LSH Algorithm and Implementation (E2LSH) Authors: Alexandr Andoni and Piotr Indyk

Andoni and Indyk aren’t any better with titles than they were in Whose Your Nearest Neighbor but here you will find additional information on their high dimension nearest neighbor algorithm as well as an implementation of the algorithm.

Whose Your Nearest Neighbor?

Filed under: Hashing,High Dimensionality,Neighbors — Patrick Durusau @ 10:24 am

Near-Optimal Hashing Algorithms for Approximate Nearest Neighbor in High Dimensions Authors: Alexandr Andoni and Piotr Indyk

OK, I lied about the title.

You would think there would be short courses on title writing. Maybe I should start offering a one-day seminar in effective title writing.

Anyway, whatever the title issues, this is a deeply fascinating work on detection of nearest neighbors.

The short version is that really close neighbors bump into each other when hashing. So collisions become a way to detect neighbors. Rather clever.

I think of collisions as a basis for identify the same subjects.

Works in metric spaces but topic maps apply to metric spaces as well. After all, subjects are what define and occupy metric spaces.

For the longer explanation, read the paper.

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