Hyperspectral imagery is often associated with high storage and transmission costs. Dimensionality reduction aims to reduce the time and space complexity of hyperspectral imagery by projecting data into a low-dimensional space such that all the important information in the data is preserved. Dimensionality-reduction methods based on transforms are widely used and give a data-dependent representation that is unfortunately costly to compute. Recently, there has been a growing interest in data-independent representations for dimensionality reduction; of particular prominence are random projections which are attractive due to their computational efficiency and simplicity of implementation. This dissertation concentrates on exploring the realm of computationally fast and efficient random projections by considering projections based on a random Hadamard matrix. These Hadamard-based projections are offered as an alternative to more widely used random projections based on dense Gaussian matrices. Such Hadamard matrices are then coupled with a fast singular value decomposition in order to implement a two-stage dimensionality reduction that marries the computational benefits of the data-independent random projection to the structure-capturing capability of the data-dependent singular value transform. Finally, random projections are applied in conjunction with nonnegative least squares to provide a computationally lightweight methodology for the well-known spectral-unmixing problem. Overall, it is seen that random projections offer a computationally efficient framework for dimensionality reduction that permits hyperspectral-analysis tasks such as unmixing and classification to be conducted in a lower-dimensional space without sacrificing analysis performance while reducing computational costs significantly.

The compressed sensing (CS) model of signal processing, while offering many unique advantages in terms of low-cost sensor design, poses interesting challenges for both signal acquisition and recovery, especially for signals of large size. In this work, we investigate how CS might be applied practically and efficiently in the context of natural video. We make use of a CS video acquisition approach in line with the popular single-pixel camera framework of blind, nonaptive, random sampling while proposing new approaches for the subsequent recovery of the video signal which leverage interrame redundancy to minimize recovery error. We introduce a method of approximation, which we term multihypothesis (MH) frame prediction, to create accurate frame predictions by comparing hypotheses drawn from the spatial domain of chosen reference frames to the non-overlapping, block-by-block CS measurements of subsequent frames. We accomplish this frame prediction via a novel distance-weighted Tikhonov regularization technique. We verify through our experiments that MH frame prediction via distance-weighted regularization provides state-of-the-art performance for the recovery of natural video sequences from blind CS measurements. The distance-weighted regularization we propose need not be limited to just frame prediction for CS video recovery, but may also be used in a variety of contexts where approximations must be generated from a set of hypotheses or training data. To show this, we apply our technique to supervised hyperspectral image (HSI) classification via a novel classifier we term the nearest regularized subspace (NRS) classifier. We show that the distance-weighted regularization used in the NRS method provides greater classification accuracy than state-of-the-art classifiers for supervised HSI classification tasks. We also propose two modifications to the core NRS classifier to improve its robustness to variation of input parameters and and to further increase its classification accuracy.

In this dissertation, the general problem of the dimensionality reduction of hyperspectral imagery is considered. Data dimension can be reduced through compression, in which an original image is encoded into bitstream of greatly reduced size; through application of a transformation, in which a high-dimensional space is mapped into a low-dimensional space; and through a simple process of subsampling, wherein the number of pixels is reduced spatially during image acquisition. All three techniques are investigated in the course of the dissertation. For data compression, an approach to calculate an operational bitrate for JPEG2000 in conjunction with principal component analysis is proposed. It is shown that an optimal bitrate for such a lossy compression method can be estimated while maintaining both class separability as well as anomalous pixels in the original data. On the other hand, the transformation paradigm is studied for spectral dimensionality reduction; specifically, dataindependent random spectral projections are considered, while the compressive projection principal component analysis algorithm is adopted for data reconstruction. It is shown that, by incorporating both spectral and spatial partitioning of the original data, reconstruction accuracy can be improved. Additionally, a new supervised spectral dimensionality reduction approach using a sparsity-preserving graph is developed. The resulting sparse graph-based discriminant analysis is seen to yield superior classification performance at low dimensionality. Finally, for spatial dimensionality reduction, a simple spatial subsampling scheme is considered for a multitemporal hyperspectral image sequence, such that the original image is reconstructed using a sparse dictionary learned from a prior image in the sequence.

Communication is one of the most demanding andimportant parts of effective software development.Furthermore, the effectiveness of software developmentcommunication can be measured with the three collaborativeinterpersonal problem-solving conversation dimensions:Active Discussion, Creative Conflict, and ConversationManagement.Previous work that utilized these dimensions to analyzecommunication relied on manually labeling thecommunication, a process that is time-consuming and notapplicable to real-time use.In this study, natural language processing and supervisedmachine learning were investigated for the automaticclassification and measurement of collaborativeinterpersonal problem-solving conversation dimensions intranscribed software development communication. Thisapproach enables the evaluation of communication andprovides suggestions to improve software developmentefficiency.To determine the optimal classification approach, this workexamined nine different classifiers. It was determined thatthe classifier that scored the highest was Random Forest,followed by Decision Tree and SVM.Random Forest managed to achieve accuracy, precision, andrecall up to 93.66%, 93.76%, and 93.63%, respectively whentrained and tested with stratified 10-fold cross-validation.

Background: Machine learning is a field of computer science that focuses on creating models that can predict patterns and relations among data. In this thesis, we use machine learning to predict Airbnb prices in various European cities to help the hosts in setting reasonable prices for their properties. Different supervised machine learning algorithms will be used to determine which model will provide the highest accuracy so that hosts set profitable prices for their housing properties. Objectives: The main goal of this thesis is to use machine learning algorithms to assist the hosts in setting reasonable rental prices for their properties so that they can keep their properties affordable for renters across Europe and achieve maximum occupancy. Methods: The dataset for Airbnb in European cities is gathered from Kaggle and then has been pre-processed using techniques like one-hot encoding, label encoder, standardscaler and principle component analysis. The data set is divided into three parts for training, validation and testing. Next, feature selection is done to determine the most important features that contribute to the pricing, and the dimensionality of the dataset is reduced. Supervised machine learning algorithms are utilized for training. The models are evaluated with reliable performance estimates after tuning the hyperparameters using k-fold cross-validation. Results: The feature_importance_ predicts that room capacity, type of room(shared or not), and the country appear in all three algorithms. Although scores vary between algorithms, these are among the top five attributes that influence the target variable. Day, cleanliness rating, and attr index are some other attributes that are among the top five characteristics. Among the chosen learning algorithms, the random forest regressor gave the best regression model with a R2 score of 0.70. The second best is the gradient boosting regressor with a R2 score of 0.32. While SVM gave the least score of 0.06. Conclusions: Random forest regressor was the best algorithm for predicting the prices of Airbnb and suggests hosts setting reasonable rental prices for their properties with more accurate pricing for renters across Europe compared to other chosen models. Contrary to our expectations SVM had performed the least for this dataset.

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Rangeland monitoring is used by land managers for assessing multiple-use management practices on western rangelands. Managers benefit from improved monitoring methods that provide rapid, accurate, cost-effective, and robust measures of rangeland health and ecological trend. In this study, we used a supervised classification image analysis approach to estimate plant cover and bare ground by functional group that can be used to monitor and assess rangeland structure. High-resolution color infrared imagery taken of 40 research plots was acquired with a UltraCam X (UCX) digital camera during summer 2011. Ground estimates of cover were simultaneously collected by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources' Range Trend Project field crew within these same areas. Image analysis was conducted using supervised classification to determine percent cover from Red, Green, Blue and infrared images. Classification accuracy and mean difference between cover estimates from remote sensed imagery and those obtained from the ground were compared using an accuracy assessment with Kappa statistic and a t-test analysis, respectively. Percent cover estimates from remote sensing ranged from underestimating the surface class (rock, pavement, and bare ground) by 27% to overestimating shrubs by less than 1% when compared to field-based measurements. Overall accuracy of the supervised classification was 91% with a kappa statistic of 0.88. The highest accuracy was observed when classifying surface values (bare ground, rock) which had a user's and producer's accuracy of 92% and 93%, respectively. Although surface cover varied significantly from field-based estimates, plant cover varied only slightly, giving managers an option to assess plant cover effectively and efficiently on greater temporal and spatial extents.

As the capability for capturing and storing data increases and becomes more ubiquitous, an increasing number of organizations are looking to use machine learning techniques as a means of understanding and leveraging their data. However, the success of applying machine learning techniques depends on which learning algorithm is selected, the hyperparameters that are provided to the selected learning algorithm, and the data that is supplied to the learning algorithm. Even among machine learning experts, selecting an appropriate learning algorithm, setting its associated hyperparameters, and preprocessing the data can be a challenging task and is generally left to the expertise of an experienced practitioner, intuition, trial and error, or another heuristic approach. This dissertation proposes a more principled approach to understand how the learning algorithm, hyperparameters, and data interact with each other to facilitate a data-driven approach for applying machine learning techniques. Specifically, this dissertation examines the properties of the training data and proposes techniques to integrate this information into the learning process and for preprocessing the training set.It also proposes techniques and tools to address selecting a learning algorithm and setting its hyperparameters.This dissertation is comprised of a collection of papers that address understanding the data used in machine learning and the relationship between the data, the performance of a learning algorithm, and the learning algorithms associated hyperparameter settings.Contributions of this dissertation include:* Instance hardness that examines how difficult an instance is to classify correctly.* hardness measures that characterize properties of why an instance may be misclassified.* Several techniques for integrating instance hardness into the learning process. These techniques demonstrate the importance of considering each instance individually rather than doing a global optimization which considers all instances equally.* Large-scale examinations of the investigated techniques including a large numbers of examined data sets and learning algorithms. This provides more robust results that are less likely to be affected by noise.* The Machine Learning Results Repository, a repository for storing the results from machine learning experiments at the instance level (the prediction for each instance is stored). This allows many data set-level measures to be calculated such as accuracy, precision, or recall. These results can be used to better understand the interaction between the data, learning algorithms, and associated hyperparameters. Further, the repository is designed to be a tool for the community where data can be downloaded and uploaded to follow the development of machine learning algorithms and applications.

This work is aimed at exploring semi-supervised learning techniques to improve the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition systems. Semi-supervised learning takes advantage of unlabeled data in order to improve the quality of the representations extracted from the data.The proposed model is a neural network where the weights are updated by minimizing the weighted sum of a supervised and an unsupervised cost function, simultaneously. These costs are evaluated on the labeled and unlabeled portions of the data set, respectively. The combined cost is optimized through mini-batch stochastic gradient descent via standard backpropagation.The model was tested on a phone classification task on the TIMIT American English data set and on a written digit classification task on the MNIST data set. Our results show that the model outperforms a network trained with standard backpropagation on the labelled material alone. The results are also in line with state-of-the-art graph-based semi-supervised training methods. / Detta arbete syftar till att utforska halvövervakade inlärningstekniker (semi-supervised learning techniques) för att förbättra prestandan hos automatiska taligenkänningssystem.Halvövervakad maskininlärning använder sig av data ej märkt med klasstillhörighetsinformation för att förbättra kvaliteten hos den från datan extraherade representationen.Modellen som beskrivs i arbetet är ett neuralt nätverk där vikterna uppdateras genom att samtidigt minimera den viktade summan av en övervakad och en oövervakad kostnadsfunktion.Dessa kostnadsfunktioner evalueras på den märkta respektive den omärkta datamängden.De kombinerade kostnadsfunktionerna optimeras genom gradient descent med hjälp av traditionell backpropagation.Modellen har evaluerats genom en fonklassificeringsuppgift på datamängden TIMIT American English, samt en sifferklassificeringsuppgift på datamängden MNIST.Resultaten visar att modellen presterar bättre än ett nätverk tränat med backpropagation på endast märkt data.Resultaten är även konkurrenskraftiga med rådande state of the art, grafbaserade halvövervakade inlärningsmetoder.

This project focuses on semi-supervised human activity recognition (HAR) tasks, in which the inputs are partly labeled time series data acquired from sensors such as accelerometer data, and the outputs are predefined human activities. Most state-of-the-art existing work in HAR area is supervised now, which relies on fully labeled datasets. Since the cost to label the collective instances increases fast with the increasing scale of data, semi-supervised methods are now widely required. This report proposed two semi-supervised methods and then investigated how well they perform on a partly labeled dataset, comparing to the state-of-the-art supervised method. One of these methods is designed based on the state-of-the-art supervised method, Deep-ConvLSTM, together with the semi-supervised learning concepts, self-training. Another one is modified based on a semi-supervised deep learning method, LSTM initialized by seq2seq autoencoder, which is firstly introduced for natural language processing. According to the experiments on a published dataset (Opportunity Activity Recognition dataset), both of these semi-supervised methods have better performance than the state-of-the-art supervised methods. / Detta projekt fokuserar på halvövervakad Human Activity Recognition (HAR), där indata delvis är märkta tidsseriedata från sensorer som t.ex. accelerometrar, och utdata är fördefinierade mänskliga aktiviteter. De främsta arbetena inom HAR-området använder numera övervakade metoder, vilka bygger på fullt märkta dataset. Eftersom kostnaden för att märka de samlade instanserna ökar snabbt med den ökade omfattningen av data, föredras numera ofta halvövervakade metoder. I denna rapport föreslås två halvövervakade metoder och det undersöks hur bra de presterar på ett delvis märkt dataset jämfört med den moderna övervakade metoden. En av dessa metoder utformas baserat på en högkvalitativ övervakad metod, DeepConvLSTM, kombinerad med självutbildning. En annan metod baseras på en halvövervakad djupinlärningsmetod, LSTM, initierad av seq2seq autoencoder, som först införs för behandling av naturligt språk. Enligt experimenten på ett publicerat dataset (Opportunity Activity Recognition dataset) har båda dessa metoder bättre prestanda än de toppmoderna övervakade metoderna.