Curiosity of human nature drives us to explore the origins of what makes each of us different. From ancient legends and mythology, Mendel's law, Punnett square to modern genetic research, we carry on this old but eternal question. Thanks to technological revolution, today's scientists try to answer this question using easily measurable gene expression and other profiling data. However, the exploration can easily get lost in the data of growing volume, dimension, noise and complexity. This dissertation is aimed at developing new machine learning methods that take data from different classes as input, augment them with knowledge of feature relationships, and train classification models that serve two goals: 1) class prediction for previously unseen samples; 2) knowledge discovery of the underlying causes of class differences. Application of our methods in genetic studies can help scientist take advantage of existing biological networks, generate diagnosis with higher accuracy, and discover the driver networks behind the differences. We proposed three new graph-based regularization algorithms. Graph Connectivity Constrained AdaBoost algorithm combines a connectivity module, a deletion function, and a model retraining procedure with the AdaBoost classifier. Graph-regularized Linear Programming Support Vector Machine integrates penalty term based on submodular graph cut function into linear classifier's objective function. Proximal Graph LogisticBoost adds lasso and graph-based penalties into logistic risk function of an ensemble classifier. Results of tests of our models on simulated biological datasets show that the proposed methods are able to produce accurate, sparse classifiers, and can help discover true genetic differences between phenotypes.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Ensemble learning is a multiple-classi&amp / #64257 / er machine learning approach which combines, produces collections and ensembles statistical classi&amp / #64257 / ers to build up more accurate classi&amp / #64257 / er than the individual classi&amp / #64257 / ers. Bagging, boosting and voting methods are the basic examples of ensemble learning. In this thesis, a novel boosting technique targeting to solve partial problems of AdaBoost, a well-known boosting algorithm, is proposed. The proposed systems &amp / #64257 / nd an elegant way of boosting a bunch of classi&amp / #64257 / ers successively to form a better classi&amp / #64257 / er than each ensembled classi&amp / #64257 / er. AdaBoost algorithm employs a greedy search over hypothesis space to &amp / #64257 / nd a good suboptimal solution. On the other hand, this work proposes an evolutionary search with genetic algorithms instead of greedy search. Empirical results show that classi&amp / #64257 / cation with boosted evolutionary computing outperforms AdaBoost in equivalent experimental environments.

There is a rising interest in geospatial object detection due to not only the complexity of manual processing of such huge amount of data provided by high resolution satellite imagery but also for military application needs. A fundamental and yet state-of-the art approach for object detection is based on methods that utilize the global appearance. In such a holistic approach, the information of the object class is aimed to be modeled as a whole in the learning phase. And during the classification, a decision is taken at each window of the test image. In this thesis, two different discriminative methods are investigated for airplane detection from satellite images. In the first method, Haar-like features are used as weak classifiers for the airplane class representation. Then the AdaBoost learning algorithm is used to select the critical visual features that represent the airplanes best. Finally, a cascade of classifiers is constructed in order to speed-up the classifier. In the second method, a computationally efficient appearance-based algorithm for airplane detection is presented. An operator exploiting the edge information via gray level differences between the target and its background is constructed with Haar-like polygon regions using the shape information of the airplane as an invariant. The airplanes matching the operator are supposed to yield higher responses around the centroid of the object. Fast evaluation of the operator is achieved by means of integral image. The proposed algorithm has promising results in terms of accuracy in detecting aircraft type geospatial objects from satellite imagery.

In this thesis we investigate visual place categorization by combining successful global image descriptors with a method of visual attention in order to automatically detect meaningful objects for places. The idea behind this is to incorporate information about typical objects for place categorization without the need for tedious labelling of important objects. Instead, the applied attention mechanism is intended to find the objects a human observer would focus first, so that the algorithm can use their discriminative power to conclude the place category. Besides this object-based place categorization approach we employ the Gist and the Centrist descriptor as holistic image descriptors. To access the power of all these descriptors we employ SVM-DAS (discriminative accumulation scheme) for cue integration and furthermore smooth the output trajectory with a delayed Hidden Markov Model. For the classification of the variety of descriptors we present and evaluate several classification methods. Among them is a joint probability modelling approach with two approximations as well as a modified KNN classifier, AdaBoost and SVM. The latter two classifiers are enhanced for multi-class use with a probabilistic computation scheme which treats the individual classifiers as peers and not as a hierarchical sequence. We check and tweak the different descriptors and classifiers in extensive tests mainly with a dataset of six homes. After these experiments we extend the basic algorithm with further filtering and tracking methods and evaluate their influence on the performance. Finally, we also test our algorithm within a university environment and on a real robot within a home environment.

<p>Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping SLAM-problemet är ett robotikproblem som består av att låta en robot kartlägga ett tidigare okänt område, och samtidigt lokalisera sig i den skapade kartan. Det här exjobbet presenterar ett försök till en lösning på SLAM-problemet som fungerar i konstant tid i en urban miljö. En sådan lösning måste hantera en datamängd som ständigt ökar, utan att beräkningskomplexiteten ökar signifikant.</p><p>Ett informationsfilter på fördröjd tillståndsform används för estimering av robotens trajektoria, och kamera och laseravståndssensorer används för att samla spatial information om omgivningarna längs färdvägen. Två olika metoder för att detektera loopslutningar föreslås. Den första är bildbaserad och använder Tree of Words för jämförelse av bilder. Den andra metoden är laserbaserad och använder en tränad klassificerare för att jämföra laserscans. När två posar, position och riktning, kopplats samman i en loopslutning beräknas den relativa posen med laserscansinriktning med hjälp av en kombination av Conditional Random Field-Match och Iterative Closest Point.</p><p>Experiment visar att både bild- och laserscansbaserad loopslutningsdetektion fungerar bra i stadsmiljö, och resulterar i good estimering av kartan såväl som robotens trajektoria.</p> / <p>In robotics, the Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping SLAM problem consists of letting a robot map a previously unknown environment, while simultaneously localising the robot in the same map. In this thesis, an attempt to solve the SLAM problem in constant time in a complex environment, such as a suburban area, is made. Such a solution must handle increasing amounts of data without significant increase in computation time.</p><p>A delayed state information filter is used to estimate the robot's trajectory, and camera and laser range sensors are used to acquire spatial information about the environment along the trajectory. Two approaches to loop closure detection are proposed. The first is image based using Tree of Words for image comparison. The second is laser based using a trained classifier for laser scan comparison. The relative pose, the difference in position and heading, of two poses matched in loop closure is calculated with laser scan alignment using a combination of Conditional Random Field-Match and Iterative Closest Point.</p><p>Experiments show that both image and laser based loop closure detection works well in a suburban area, and results in good estimation of the map as well as the robot's trajectory.</p>

Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping SLAM-problemet är ett robotikproblem som består av att låta en robot kartlägga ett tidigare okänt område, och samtidigt lokalisera sig i den skapade kartan. Det här exjobbet presenterar ett försök till en lösning på SLAM-problemet som fungerar i konstant tid i en urban miljö. En sådan lösning måste hantera en datamängd som ständigt ökar, utan att beräkningskomplexiteten ökar signifikant. Ett informationsfilter på fördröjd tillståndsform används för estimering av robotens trajektoria, och kamera och laseravståndssensorer används för att samla spatial information om omgivningarna längs färdvägen. Två olika metoder för att detektera loopslutningar föreslås. Den första är bildbaserad och använder Tree of Words för jämförelse av bilder. Den andra metoden är laserbaserad och använder en tränad klassificerare för att jämföra laserscans. När två posar, position och riktning, kopplats samman i en loopslutning beräknas den relativa posen med laserscansinriktning med hjälp av en kombination av Conditional Random Field-Match och Iterative Closest Point. Experiment visar att både bild- och laserscansbaserad loopslutningsdetektion fungerar bra i stadsmiljö, och resulterar i good estimering av kartan såväl som robotens trajektoria. / In robotics, the Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping SLAM problem consists of letting a robot map a previously unknown environment, while simultaneously localising the robot in the same map. In this thesis, an attempt to solve the SLAM problem in constant time in a complex environment, such as a suburban area, is made. Such a solution must handle increasing amounts of data without significant increase in computation time. A delayed state information filter is used to estimate the robot's trajectory, and camera and laser range sensors are used to acquire spatial information about the environment along the trajectory. Two approaches to loop closure detection are proposed. The first is image based using Tree of Words for image comparison. The second is laser based using a trained classifier for laser scan comparison. The relative pose, the difference in position and heading, of two poses matched in loop closure is calculated with laser scan alignment using a combination of Conditional Random Field-Match and Iterative Closest Point. Experiments show that both image and laser based loop closure detection works well in a suburban area, and results in good estimation of the map as well as the robot's trajectory.

This master thesis deals with real-time algorithms and techniques for face detection and facetracking in videos. A new approach is presented where optical flow information is incorporatedinto the Viola-Jones face detection algorithm, allowing the algorithm to update the expectedposition of detected faces in the next frame. This continuity between video frames is not exploitedby the original algorithm from Viola and Jones, in which face detection is static asinformation from previous frames is not considered.In contrast to the Viola-Jones face detector and also to the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi tracker, theproposed face tracker preserves information about near-positives.In general terms the developed algorithm builds a likelihood map from results of the Viola-Jones algorithm, then computes the optical flow between two consecutive frames and finallyinterpolates the likelihood map in the next frame by the computed flow map. Faces get extractedfrom the likelihood map using image segmentation techniques. Compared to the Viola-Jonesalgorithm an increase in stability as well as an improvement of the detection rate is achieved.Firstly, the real-time face detection algorithm from Viola and Jones is discussed. Secondly theauthor presents methods which are suitable for tracking faces. The theoretical overview leadsto the description of the proposed face tracking algorithm. Both principle and implementationare discussed in detail. The software is written in C++ using the Open Computer Vision Libraryas well as the Matlab MEX interface.The resulting face tracker was tested on the Boston Head Tracking Database for which groundtruth information is available. The proposed face tracking algorithm outperforms the Viola-Jones face detector in terms of average detection rate and temporal consistency.

Many automotive safety applications in modern cars make use of cameras and object detection to analyze the surrounding environment. Pedestrians, animals and other vehicles can be detected and safety actions can be taken before dangerous situations arise. To detect occurrences of the different objects, these systems are traditionally trained to learn a classification model using a set of images that carry labels corresponding to their content. To obtain high performance with a variety of object appearances, the required amount of data is very large. Acquiring unlabeled images is easy, while the manual work of labeling is both time-consuming and costly. Semi-supervised learning refers to methods that utilize both labeled and unlabeled data, a situation that is highly desirable if it can lead to improved accuracy and at the same time alleviate the demand of labeled data. This has been an active area of research in the last few decades, but few studies have investigated the performance of these algorithms in larger systems. In this thesis, we investigate if and how semi-supervised learning can be used in a large-scale pedestrian detection system. With the area of application being automotive safety, where real-time performance is of high importance, the work is focused around boosting classifiers. Results are presented on a few publicly available UCI data sets and on a large data set for pedestrian detection captured in real-life traffic situations. By evaluating the algorithms on the pedestrian data set, we add the complexity of data set size, a large variety of object appearances and high input dimension. It is possible to find situations in low dimensions where an additional set of unlabeled data can be used successfully to improve a classification model, but the results show that it is hard to efficiently utilize semi-supervised learning in large-scale object detection systems. The results are hard to scale to large data sets of higher dimensions as pair-wise computations are of high complexity and proper similarity measures are hard to find.

abstract: Alzheimer’s disease (AD), is a chronic neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and gets worse over time. It is the cause of 60% to 70% of cases of dementia. There is growing interest in identifying brain image biomarkers that help evaluate AD risk pre-symptomatically. High-dimensional non-linear pattern classification methods have been applied to structural magnetic resonance images (MRI’s) and used to discriminate between clinical groups in Alzheimers progression. Using Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) as the pre- ferred imaging modality, this thesis develops two independent machine learning based patch analysis methods and uses them to perform six binary classification experiments across different (AD) diagnostic categories. Specifically, features were extracted and learned using dimensionality reduction and dictionary learning & sparse coding by taking overlapping patches in and around the cerebral cortex and using them as fea- tures. Using AdaBoost as the preferred choice of classifier both methods try to utilize 18F-FDG PET as a biological marker in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s . Addi- tional we investigate the involvement of rich demographic features (ApoeE3, ApoeE4 and Functional Activities Questionnaires (FAQ)) in classification. The experimental results on Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging initiative (ADNI) dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of both the proposed systems. The use of 18F-FDG PET may offer a new sensitive biomarker and enrich the brain imaging analysis toolset for studying the diagnosis and prognosis of AD. / Dissertation/Thesis / Thesis Defense Presentation / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2017