Predicting Structured Data

Machine learning develops intelligent computer systems that are able to generalize from previously seen examples. A new domain of machine learning, in which the prediction must satisfy the additional constraints found in structured data, poses one of machine learning's greatest challenges: learning functional dependencies between arbitrary input and output domains. This volume presents and analyzes the state of the art in machine learning algorithms and theory in this novel field. The contributors discuss applications as diverse as machine translation, document markup, computational biology, and information extraction, among others, providing a timely overview of an exciting field. Contributors Yasemin Altun, Gökhan Bakir, Olivier Bousquet, Sumit Chopra, Corinna Cortes, Hal Daumé III, Ofer Dekel, Zoubin Ghahramani, Raia Hadsell, Thomas Hofmann, Fu Jie Huang, Yann LeCun, Tobias Mann, Daniel Marcu, David McAllester, Mehryar Mohri, William Stafford Noble, Fernando Pérez-Cruz, Massimiliano Pontil, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, Juho Rousu, Craig Saunders, Bernhard Schölkopf, Matthias W. Seeger, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, John Shawe-Taylor, Yoram Singer, Alexander J. Smola, Sandor Szedmak, Ben Taskar, Ioannis Tsochantaridis, S.V.N Vishwanathan, Jason Weston.

State-of-the-art algorithms and theory in a novel domain of machine learning, prediction when the output has structure.

An overview of recent work in the field of structured prediction, the building of predictive machine learning models for interrelated and dependent outputs. The goal of structured prediction is to build machine learning models that predict relational information that itself has structure, such as being composed of multiple interrelated parts. These models, which reflect prior knowledge, task-specific relations, and constraints, are used in fields including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and computational biology. They can carry out such tasks as predicting a natural language sentence, or segmenting an image into meaningful components. These models are expressive and powerful, but exact computation is often intractable. A broad research effort in recent years has aimed at designing structured prediction models and approximate inference and learning procedures that are computationally efficient. This volume offers an overview of this recent research in order to make the work accessible to a broader research community. The chapters, by leading researchers in the field, cover a range of topics, including research trends, the linear programming relaxation approach, innovations in probabilistic modeling, recent theoretical progress, and resource-aware learning. Contributors Jonas Behr, Yutian Chen, Fernando De La Torre, Justin Domke, Peter V. Gehler, Andrew E. Gelfand, Sébastien Giguère, Amir Globerson, Fred A. Hamprecht, Minh Hoai, Tommi Jaakkola, Jeremy Jancsary, Joseph Keshet, Marius Kloft, Vladimir Kolmogorov, Christoph H. Lampert, François Laviolette, Xinghua Lou, Mario Marchand, André F. T. Martins, Ofer Meshi, Sebastian Nowozin, George Papandreou, Daniel Průša, Gunnar Rätsch, Amélie Rolland, Bogdan Savchynskyy, Stefan Schmidt, Thomas Schoenemann, Gabriele Schweikert, Ben Taskar, Sinisa Todorovic, Max Welling, David Weiss, Thomáš Werner, Alan Yuille, Stanislav Živný

A major part of natural language processing now depends on the use of text data to build linguistic analyzers. We consider statistical, computational approaches to modeling linguistic structure. We seek to unify across many approaches and many kinds of linguistic structures. Assuming a basic understanding of natural language processing and/or machine learning, we seek to bridge the gap between the two fields. Approaches to decoding (i.e., carrying out linguistic structure prediction) and supervised and unsupervised learning of models that predict discrete structures as outputs are the focus. We also survey natural language processing problems to which these methods are being applied, and we address related topics in probabilistic inference, optimization, and experimental methodology. Table of Contents: Representations and Linguistic Data / Decoding: Making Predictions / Learning Structure from Annotated Data / Learning Structure from Incomplete Data / Beyond Decoding: Inference

Structured Learning and Prediction in Computer Vision introduces the reader to the most popular classes of structured models in computer vision.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2012, held in Natal, Brazil, in August 2012. The 100 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 200 submissions for inclusion in the book and present the latest theoretical advances and real-world applications in computational intelligence.

This in-depth guide provides managers with a solid understanding of data and data trends, the opportunities that it can offer to businesses, and the dangers of these technologies. Written in an accessible style, Steven Finlay provides a contextual roadmap for developing solutions that deliver benefits to organizations.