Machine Learning General Concepts

Machine Learning General Concepts
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Contents
1
Machine learning
1.1
Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.1.1
Types of problems and tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
History and relationships to other elds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.2.1
Relation to statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.3
Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4
Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.1
Decision tree learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.2
Association rule learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.3
Articial neural networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.4
Inductive logic programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.5
Support vector machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.6
Clustering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.7
Bayesian networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.8
Reinforcement learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.9
Representation learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.10 Similarity and metric learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.11 Sparse dictionary learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4.12 Genetic algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.5
Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.6
Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.6.1
Open-source software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.6.2
Commercial software with open-source editions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.6.3
Commercial software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.7
Journals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.8
Conferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.9
See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.10 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.11 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.12 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Data mining
2.1
1.2
Etymology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
i
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CONTENTS
2.2
Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.2.1
Research and evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
10
Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
10
2.3.1
Pre-processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11
2.3.2
Data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11
2.3.3
Results validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11
2.4
Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11
2.5
Notable uses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
12
2.5.1
Games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
12
2.5.2
Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
12
2.5.3
Science and engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
13
2.5.4
Human rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
14
2.5.5
Medical data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
14
2.5.6
Spatial data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
14
2.5.7
Temporal data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15
2.5.8
Sensor data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15
2.5.9
Visual data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15
2.5.10 Music data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15
2.5.11 Surveillance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15
2.5.12 Pattern mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15
2.5.13 Subject-based data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
16
2.5.14 Knowledge grid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
16
Privacy concerns and ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
16
2.6.1
Situation in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
16
2.6.2
Situation in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
16
Copyright Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
17
2.7.1
Situation in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
17
2.7.2
Situation in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
17
Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
17
2.8.1
Free open-source data mining software and applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
17
2.8.2
Commercial data-mining software and applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
18
2.8.3
Marketplace surveys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
18
See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
18
2.10 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
19
2.11 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
22
2.12 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
23
Statistical classication
24
3.1
Relation to other problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
24
3.2
Frequentist procedures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
3.3
Bayesian procedures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
3.4
Binary and multiclass classication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
2.3
2.6
2.7
2.8
2.9
CONTENTS
iii
3.5
Feature vectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
3.6
Linear classiers
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
3.7
Algorithms
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
26
3.8
Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
26
3.9
Application domains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
26
3.10 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
26
3.11 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
27
3.12 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
27
Cluster analysis
28
4.1
Denition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
28
4.2
Algorithms
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
29
4.2.1
Connectivity based clustering (hierarchical clustering) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
29
4.2.2
Centroid-based clustering
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
30
4.2.3
Distribution-based clustering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
30
4.2.4
Density-based clustering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
31
4.2.5
Recent developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
31
4.2.6
Other methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
32
4.3
Evaluation and assessment
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
32
4.3.1
Internal evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
32
4.3.2
External evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
32
4.4
Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
34
4.5
See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
34
4.5.1
Specialized types of cluster analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
34
4.5.2
Techniques used in cluster analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
35
4.5.3
Data projection and preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
35
4.5.4
Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
35
4.6
References
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
35
4.7
External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
36
Anomaly detection
37
5.1
Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
5.2
Popular techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
5.3
Application to data security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
5.4
Software
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
38
5.5
See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
38
5.6
References
38
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Association rule learning
40
6.1
Denition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
40
6.2
Useful Concepts
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
40
6.3
Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
41
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CONTENTS
6.4
History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
41
6.5
Alternative measures of interestingness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
41
6.6
Statistically sound associations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
41
6.7
Algorithms
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
42
6.7.1
Apriori algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
42
6.7.2
Eclat algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
42
6.7.3
FP-growth algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
42
6.7.4
Others
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
42
6.8
Lore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
43
6.9
Other types of association mining
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
43
6.10 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
44
6.11 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
44
6.12 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
45
6.12.1 Bibliographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
45
6.12.2 Implementations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
45
Reinforcement learning
47
7.1
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
47
7.2
Exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
48
7.3
Algorithms for control learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
48
7.3.1
Criterion of optimality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
48
7.3.2
Brute force . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
49
7.3.3
Value function approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
49
7.3.4
Direct policy search
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
50
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
51
7.4
Theory
7.5
Current research
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
51
7.6
Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
51
7.6.1
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
51
7.7
See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
52
7.8
Implementations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
52
7.9
References
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
52
7.10 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
53
Structured prediction
54
8.1
Example: sequence tagging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
54
8.2
Structured perceptron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
54
8.3
See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
55
8.4
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
55
8.5
External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
55
Conferences, journals
Feature learning
56
9.1
56
Supervised feature learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CONTENTS
9.2
9.3
9.1.1
Supervised dictionary learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
56
9.1.2
Neural networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
56
Unsupervised feature learning
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
57
9.2.1
K-means clustering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
57
9.2.2
Principal component analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
57
9.2.3
Local linear embedding
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
57
9.2.4
Independent component analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
58
9.2.5
Unsupervised dictionary learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
58
Multilayer/Deep architectures
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
58
9.3.1
Restricted Boltzmann machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
58
9.3.2
Autoencoder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
58
9.4
See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
58
9.5
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
59
10 Online machine learning
60
10.1 A prototypical online supervised learning algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
60
10.1.1 The algorithm and its interpretations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
61
10.2 Example: Complexity in the Case of Linear Least Squares . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
61
10.2.1 Batch Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
62
10.2.2 Online Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
62
10.3 Books with substantial treatment of online machine learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
62
10.4 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
62
10.5 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
62
10.6 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
62
11 Semi-supervised learning
63
11.1 Assumptions used in semi-supervised learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
64
11.1.1 Smoothness assumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
64
11.1.2 Cluster assumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
64
11.1.3 Manifold assumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
64
11.2 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
64
11.3 Methods for semi-supervised learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
64
11.3.1 Generative models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
64
11.3.2 Low-density separation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
65
11.3.3 Graph-based methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
65
11.3.4 Heuristic approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
65
11.4 Semi-supervised learning in human cognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
65
11.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
66
11.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
66
11.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
66
12 Grammar induction
67
vi
CONTENTS
12.1 Grammar Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
67
12.2 Learning Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
67
12.3 Methodologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
67
12.3.1 Grammatical inference by trial-and-error
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
12.3.2 Grammatical inference by genetic algorithms
67
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
67
12.3.3 Grammatical inference by greedy algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
68
12.3.4 Distributional Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
68
12.3.5 Learning of Pattern languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
68
12.3.6 Pattern theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
68
12.4 Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
69
12.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
69
12.6 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
69
12.7 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
69
12.8 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
70
12.8.1 Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
70
12.8.2 Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
72
12.8.3 Content license . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
73
Chapter 1
Machine learning
For the journal, see Machine Learning (journal).
"Computing Machinery and Intelligence" that the question Can machines think?" be replaced with the ques[1] tion Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can
Machine learning is a subeld of computer science
[9]
that evolved from the study of pattern recognition and do?"
computational learning theory in articial intelligence.[1]
Machine learning explores the construction and study of
1.1.1 Types of problems and tasks
algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on
data.[2] Such algorithms operate by building a model from
Machine learning tasks are typically classied into three
example inputs in order to make data-driven predictions
broad categories, depending on the nature of the learnor decisions,[3]:2 rather than following strictly static proing signal or feedback available to a learning system.
gram instructions.
These are:[10]
Machine learning is closely related to and often overlaps with computational statistics; a discipline that also
Supervised learning. The computer is presented
specializes in prediction-making. It has strong ties to
with example inputs and their desired outputs, given
mathematical optimization, which deliver methods, theby a teacher, and the goal is to learn a general rule
ory and application domains to the eld. Machine learnthat maps inputs to outputs.
ing is employed in a range of computing tasks where designing and programming explicit, rule-based algorithms
Unsupervised learning, no labels are given to the
is infeasible. Example applications include spam lterlearning algorithm, leaving it on its own to nd strucing, optical character recognition (OCR),[4] search enture in its input. Unsupervised learning can be a goal
gines and computer vision. Machine learning is somein itself (discovering hidden patterns in data) or a
times conated with data mining,[5] although that focuses
means towards an end.
more on exploratory data analysis.[6] Machine learning
In reinforcement learning, a computer program inand pattern recognition can be viewed as two facets of
[3]:vii
teracts with a dynamic environment in which it must
the same eld.
perform a certain goal (such as driving a vehicle),
When employed in industrial contexts, machine learnwithout a teacher explicitly telling it whether it has
ing methods may be referred to as predictive analytics or
come close to its goal or not. Another example
predictive modelling.
is learning to play a game by playing against an
opponent.[3]:3
1.1 Overview
Between supervised and unsupervised learning is semisupervised learning, where the teacher gives an incomIn 1959, Arthur Samuel dened machine learning as a plete training signal: a training set with some (often
Field of study that gives computers the ability to learn many) of the target outputs missing. Transduction is a
without being explicitly programmed.[7]
special case of this principle where the entire set of probTom M. Mitchell provided a widely quoted, more for- lem instances is known at learning time, except that part
mal denition: A computer program is said to learn of the targets are missing.
from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T Among other categories of machine learning problems,
and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks learning to learn learns its own inductive bias based on
in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.[8] previous experience. Developmental learning, elaboThis denition is notable for its dening machine learn- rated for robot learning, generates its own sequences (also
ing in fundamentally operational rather than cognitive called curriculum) of learning situations to cumulatively
terms, thus following Alan Turing's proposal in his paper acquire repertoires of novel skills through autonomous
1
CHAPTER 1. MACHINE LEARNING
1.2 History and relationships to

other elds
As a scientic endeavour, machine learning grew out
of the quest for articial intelligence. Already in the
early days of AI as an academic discipline, some researchers were interested in having machines learn from
data. They attempted to approach the problem with various symbolic methods, as well as what were then termed
"neural networks"; these were mostly perceptrons and
other models that were later found to be reinventions of
the generalized linear models of statistics. Probabilistic
reasoning was also employed, especially in automated
medical diagnosis.[10]:488
A support vector machine is a classier that divides its input space

into two regions, separated by a linear boundary. Here, it has
learned to distinguish black and white circles.
self-exploration and social interaction with human teachers, and using guidance mechanisms such as active learning, maturation, motor synergies, and imitation.
Another categorization of machine learning tasks arises
when one considers the desired output of a machinelearned system:[3]:3
In classication, inputs are divided into two or more
classes, and the learner must produce a model that
assigns unseen inputs to one (or multi-label classication) or more of these classes. This is typically
tackled in a supervised way. Spam ltering is an example of classication, where the inputs are email
(or other) messages and the classes are spam and
not spam.
However, an increasing emphasis on the logical,

knowledge-based approach caused a rift between AI and
machine learning. Probabilistic systems were plagued
by theoretical and practical problems of data acquisition
and representation.[10]:488 By 1980, expert systems had
come to dominate AI, and statistics was out of favor.[11]
Work on symbolic/knowledge-based learning did continue within AI, leading to inductive logic programming,
but the more statistical line of research was now outside the eld of AI proper, in pattern recognition and
information retrieval.[10]:708710; 755 Neural networks research had been abandoned by AI and computer science
around the same time. This line, too, was continued outside the AI/CS eld, as "connectionism", by researchers
from other disciplines including Hopeld, Rumelhart and
Hinton. Their main success came in the mid-1980s with
the reinvention of backpropagation.[10]:25
Machine learning, reorganized as a separate eld, started
to ourish in the 1990s. The eld changed its goal from
achieving articial intelligence to tackling solvable problems of a practical nature. It shifted focus away from
the symbolic approaches it had inherited from AI, and
toward methods and models borrowed from statistics and
probability theory.[11] It also beneted from the increasing availability of digitized information, and the possibility to distribute that via the internet.
In regression, also a supervised problem, the outputs

Machine learning and data mining often employ the same
are continuous rather than discrete.
methods and overlap signicantly. They can be roughly
distinguished as follows:
In clustering, a set of inputs is to be divided into
groups. Unlike in classication, the groups are not
Machine learning focuses on prediction, based on
known beforehand, making this typically an unsuknown properties learned from the training data.
pervised task.
Density estimation nds the distribution of inputs in
some space.
Dimensionality reduction simplies inputs by mapping them into a lower-dimensional space. Topic
modeling is a related problem, where a program is
given a list of human language documents and is
tasked to nd out which documents cover similar
topics.
Data mining focuses on the discovery of (previously)

unknown properties in the data. This is the analysis
step of Knowledge Discovery in Databases.
The two areas overlap in many ways: data mining uses
many machine learning methods, but often with a slightly
dierent goal in mind. On the other hand, machine
learning also employs data mining methods as unsupervised learning or as a preprocessing step to improve
1.4. APPROACHES
learner accuracy. Much of the confusion between these
two research communities (which do often have separate conferences and separate journals, ECML PKDD
being a major exception) comes from the basic assumptions they work with: in machine learning, performance
is usually evaluated with respect to the ability to reproduce known knowledge, while in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) the key task is the discovery of previously unknown knowledge. Evaluated with
respect to known knowledge, an uninformed (unsupervised) method will easily be outperformed by supervised
methods, while in a typical KDD task, supervised methods cannot be used due to the unavailability of training
data.
Machine learning also has intimate ties to optimization:
many learning problems are formulated as minimization
of some loss function on a training set of examples. Loss
functions expresses the discrepancy between the predictions of the model being trained and the actual problem instances (for example, in classication, one wants
to assign a label to instances, and models are trained
to correctly predict the pre-assigned labels of a set examples). The dierence between the two elds arises
from the goal of generalization: while optimization algorithms can minimize the loss on a training set, machine
learning is concerned with minimizing the loss on unseen
samples.[12]
1.2.1
Relation to statistics
3
resentative of the space of occurrences) and the learner
has to build a general model about this space that enables it to produce suciently accurate predictions in new
cases.
The computational analysis of machine learning algorithms and their performance is a branch of theoretical
computer science known as computational learning theory. Because training sets are nite and the future is uncertain, learning theory usually does not yield guarantees
of the performance of algorithms. Instead, probabilistic bounds on the performance are quite common. The
biasvariance decomposition is one way to quantify generalization error.
In addition to performance bounds, computational learning theorists study the time complexity and feasibility of
learning. In computational learning theory, a computation is considered feasible if it can be done in polynomial
time. There are two kinds of time complexity results.
Positive results show that a certain class of functions can
be learned in polynomial time. Negative results show that
certain classes cannot be learned in polynomial time.
There are many similarities between machine learning
theory and statistical inference, although they use dierent terms.
1.4 Approaches
Main article: List of machine learning algorithms
Machine learning and statistics are closely related elds.

According to Michael I. Jordan, the ideas of machine
learning, from methodological principles to theoretical 1.4.1 Decision tree learning
tools, have had a long pre-history in statistics.[13] He also
suggested the term data science as a placeholder to call Main article: Decision tree learning
the overall eld.[13]
Leo Breiman distinguished two statistical modelling Decision tree learning uses a decision tree as a predictive
paradigms: data model and algorithmic model,[14] model, which maps observations about an item to concluwherein 'algorithmic model' means more or less the ma- sions about the items target value.
chine learning algorithms like Random forest.
Some statisticians have adopted methods from machine
1.4.2 Association rule learning
learning, leading to a combined eld that they call statistical learning.[15]
Main article: Association rule learning
1.3 Theory
Association rule learning is a method for discovering interesting relations between variables in large databases.
Main article: Computational learning theory
1.4.3 Articial neural networks

A core objective of a learner is to generalize from its
experience.[3][16] Generalization in this context is the ability of a learning machine to perform accurately on new,
unseen examples/tasks after having experienced a learning data set. The training examples come from some generally unknown probability distribution (considered rep-
Main article: Articial neural network

An articial neural network (ANN) learning algorithm,
usually called neural network (NN), is a learning algorithm that is inspired by the structure and func-
tional aspects of biological neural networks. Computations are structured in terms of an interconnected
group of articial neurons, processing information using
a connectionist approach to computation. Modern neural networks are non-linear statistical data modeling tools.
They are usually used to model complex relationships between inputs and outputs, to nd patterns in data, or to
capture the statistical structure in an unknown joint probability distribution between observed variables.
1.4.4
Inductive logic programming
Main article: Inductive logic programming

Inductive logic programming (ILP) is an approach to rule
learning using logic programming as a uniform representation for input examples, background knowledge, and
hypotheses. Given an encoding of the known background
knowledge and a set of examples represented as a logical database of facts, an ILP system will derive a hypothesized logic program that entails all positive and no
negative examples. Inductive programming is a related
eld that considers any kind of programming languages
for representing hypotheses (and not only logic programming), such as functional programs.
1.4.5
Support vector machines
1.4.7 Bayesian networks

Main article: Bayesian network
A Bayesian network, belief network or directed acyclic
graphical model is a probabilistic graphical model that
represents a set of random variables and their conditional
independencies via a directed acyclic graph (DAG). For
example, a Bayesian network could represent the probabilistic relationships between diseases and symptoms.
Given symptoms, the network can be used to compute
the probabilities of the presence of various diseases. Efcient algorithms exist that perform inference and learning.
1.4.8 Reinforcement learning

Main article: Reinforcement learning
Reinforcement learning is concerned with how an agent
ought to take actions in an environment so as to maximize some notion of long-term reward. Reinforcement
learning algorithms attempt to nd a policy that maps
states of the world to the actions the agent ought to take
in those states. Reinforcement learning diers from the
supervised learning problem in that correct input/output
pairs are never presented, nor sub-optimal actions explicitly corrected.
Main article: Support vector machines
1.4.9 Representation learning

Support vector machines (SVMs) are a set of related
supervised learning methods used for classication and
regression. Given a set of training examples, each marked
as belonging to one of two categories, an SVM training
algorithm builds a model that predicts whether a new example falls into one category or the other.
Main article: Representation learning
Several learning algorithms, mostly unsupervised learning algorithms, aim at discovering better representations
of the inputs provided during training. Classical examples include principal components analysis and cluster
analysis. Representation learning algorithms often at1.4.6 Clustering
tempt to preserve the information in their input but transform it in a way that makes it useful, often as a preMain article: Cluster analysis
processing step before performing classication or predictions, allowing to reconstruct the inputs coming from
Cluster analysis is the assignment of a set of observations the unknown data generating distribution, while not being
into subsets (called clusters) so that observations within necessarily faithful for congurations that are implausible
the same cluster are similar according to some predes- under that distribution.
ignated criterion or criteria, while observations drawn Manifold learning algorithms attempt to do so under
from dierent clusters are dissimilar. Dierent cluster- the constraint that the learned representation is lowing techniques make dierent assumptions on the struc- dimensional. Sparse coding algorithms attempt to do
ture of the data, often dened by some similarity metric so under the constraint that the learned representation is
and evaluated for example by internal compactness (simi- sparse (has many zeros). Multilinear subspace learning
larity between members of the same cluster) and separa- algorithms aim to learn low-dimensional representations
tion between dierent clusters. Other methods are based directly from tensor representations for multidimensional
on estimated density and graph connectivity. Clustering is data, without reshaping them into (high-dimensional)
a method of unsupervised learning, and a common tech- vectors.[17] Deep learning algorithms discover multiple
nique for statistical data analysis.
levels of representation, or a hierarchy of features, with
1.5. APPLICATIONS
higher-level, more abstract features dened in terms of techniques have been used to improve the performance
(or generating) lower-level features. It has been argued of genetic and evolutionary algorithms.[23]
that an intelligent machine is one that learns a representation that disentangles the underlying factors of variation
that explain the observed data.[18]
1.5 Applications
1.4.10
Similarity and metric learning
Main article: Similarity learning

In this problem, the learning machine is given pairs of examples that are considered similar and pairs of less similar objects. It then needs to learn a similarity function (or
a distance metric function) that can predict if new objects
are similar. It is sometimes used in Recommendation systems.
Applications for machine learning include:

Adaptive websites
Aective computing
Bioinformatics
Brain-machine interfaces
Cheminformatics
Classifying DNA sequences
1.4.11
Sparse dictionary learning
Computational advertising
In this method, a datum is represented as a linear combination of basis functions, and the coecients are assumed to be sparse. Let x be a d-dimensional datum, D
be a d by n matrix, where each column of D represents
a basis function. r is the coecient to represent x using
D. Mathematically, sparse dictionary learning means the
following x Dr where r is sparse. Generally speaking,
n is assumed to be larger than d to allow the freedom for
a sparse representation.
Computational nance
Learning a dictionary along with sparse representations is strongly NP-hard and also dicult to solve
approximately.[19] A popular heuristic method for sparse
dictionary learning is K-SVD.
Internet fraud detection
Sparse dictionary learning has been applied in several

contexts. In classication, the problem is to determine
which classes a previously unseen datum belongs to. Suppose a dictionary for each class has already been built.
Then a new datum is associated with the class such that
its best sparsely represented by the corresponding dictionary. Sparse dictionary learning has also been applied
in image de-noising. The key idea is that a clean image
patch can be sparsely represented by an image dictionary,
but the noise cannot.[20]
Computer vision, including object recognition

Detecting credit card fraud
Game playing[24]
Information retrieval
Machine perception
Medical diagnosis
Natural language processing[25]
Optimization and metaheuristic
Recommender systems
Robot locomotion
Search engines
Sentiment analysis (or opinion mining)
1.4.12
Genetic algorithms
Main article: Genetic algorithm

A genetic algorithm (GA) is a search heuristic that mimics the process of natural selection, and uses methods such
as mutation and crossover to generate new genotype in
the hope of nding good solutions to a given problem. In
machine learning, genetic algorithms found some uses in
the 1980s and 1990s.[21][22] Vice versa, machine learning
Sequence mining
Software engineering
Speech and handwriting recognition
Stock market analysis
Structural health monitoring
Syntactic pattern recognition
In 2006, the online movie company Netix held the rst 1.6.2 Commercial software with open"Netix Prize" competition to nd a program to better
source editions
predict user preferences and improve the accuracy on its
existing Cinematch movie recommendation algorithm by
KNIME
at least 10%. A joint team made up of researchers from
AT&T Labs-Research in collaboration with the teams Big
RapidMiner
Chaos and Pragmatic Theory built an ensemble model to
win the Grand Prize in 2009 for $1 million.[26] Shortly
after the prize was awarded, Netix realized that viewers ratings were not the best indicators of their view- 1.6.3 Commercial software
ing patterns (everything is a recommendation) and they
Amazon Machine Learning
changed their recommendation engine accordingly.[27]
In 2010 The Wall Street Journal wrote about money management rm Rebellion Researchs use of machine learning to predict economic movements. The article describes Rebellion Researchs prediction of the nancial
crisis and economic recovery.[28]
In 2014 it has been reported that a machine learning algorithm has been applied in Art History to study ne art
paintings, and that it may have revealed previously unrecognized inuences between artists.[29]
1.6 Software
Software suites containing a variety of machine learning
algorithms include the following:
1.6.1
Open-source software
dlib
ELKI
Encog
H2O
Mahout
Angoss KnowledgeSTUDIO
Databricks
IBM SPSS Modeler
KXEN Modeler
LIONsolver
Mathematica
MATLAB
Microsoft Azure
NeuroSolutions
Oracle Data Mining
RCASE
SAS Enterprise Miner
STATISTICA Data Miner
mlpy
MLPACK
MOA (Massive Online Analysis)
ND4J with Deeplearning4j
OpenCV
OpenNN
Orange
1.7 Journals
Journal of Machine Learning Research
Machine Learning
Neural Computation
R
scikit-learn
1.8 Conferences
Shogun
Spark
Yooreeka
Weka
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

International Conference on Machine Learning
1.10. REFERENCES
1.9 See also
[10] Russell, Stuart; Norvig, Peter (2003) [1995]. Articial

Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall.
ISBN 978-0137903955.
Adaptive control
Adversarial machine learning
Automatic reasoning
Cache language model
Cognitive model
Cognitive science
Computational intelligence
Computational neuroscience
Ethics of articial intelligence
Existential risk of articial general intelligence
Explanation-based learning
Hidden Markov model
Important publications in machine learning
List of machine learning algorithms
1.10 References
[1] http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1116194/
machine-learning This is a tertiary source that clearly
includes information from other sources but does not
name them.
[2] Ron Kohavi; Foster Provost (1998). Glossary of terms.
Machine Learning 30: 271274.
[3] C. M. Bishop (2006). Pattern Recognition and Machine
Learning. Springer. ISBN 0-387-31073-8.
[4] Wernick, Yang, Brankov, Yourganov and Strother, Machine Learning in Medical Imaging, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 27, no. 4, July 2010, pp. 25-38
[5] Mannila, Heikki (1996). Data mining: machine learning,
statistics, and databases. Int'l Conf. Scientic and Statistical Database Management. IEEE Computer Society.
[6] Friedman, Jerome H. (1998). Data Mining and Statistics:
Whats the connection?". Computing Science and Statistics
29 (1): 39.
[7] Phil Simon (March 18, 2013). Too Big to Ignore: The
Business Case for Big Data. Wiley. p. 89. ISBN 9781118638170.
[8]
Mitchell, T. (1997). Machine Learning, McGraw

Hill. ISBN 0-07-042807-7, p.2.
[9] Harnad, Stevan (2008), The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery, and Intelligence,
in Epstein, Robert; Peters, Grace, The Turing Test Sourcebook: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest
for the Thinking Computer, Kluwer
[11] Langley, Pat (2011). The changing science of machine learning. Machine Learning 82 (3): 275279.
doi:10.1007/s10994-011-5242-y.
[12] Le Roux, Nicolas; Bengio, Yoshua; Fitzgibbon, Andrew
(2012). Improving First and Second-Order Methods by
Modeling Uncertainty. In Sra, Suvrit; Nowozin, Sebastian; Wright, Stephen J. Optimization for Machine Learning. MIT Press. p. 404.
[13] MI Jordan (2014-09-10). statistics and machine learning. reddit. Retrieved 2014-10-01.
[14] http://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ss/
1009213726
[15] Gareth James; Daniela Witten; Trevor Hastie; Robert Tibshirani (2013). An Introduction to Statistical Learning.
Springer. p. vii.
[16] Mehryar Mohri, Afshin Rostamizadeh, Ameet Talwalkar
(2012) Foundations of Machine Learning, MIT Press
ISBN 9780262018258.
[17] Lu, Haiping; Plataniotis, K.N.; Venetsanopoulos, A.N.
(2011). A Survey of Multilinear Subspace Learning for
Tensor Data (PDF). Pattern Recognition 44 (7): 1540
1551. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2011.01.004.
[18] Yoshua Bengio (2009). Learning Deep Architectures for
AI. Now Publishers Inc. pp. 13. ISBN 978-1-60198294-0.
[19] A. M. Tillmann, "On the Computational Intractability of
Exact and Approximate Dictionary Learning", IEEE Signal Processing Letters 22(1), 2015: 4549.
[20] Aharon, M, M Elad, and A Bruckstein. 2006. KSVD: An Algorithm for Designing Overcomplete Dictionaries for Sparse Representation. Signal Processing,
IEEE Transactions on 54 (11): 4311-4322
[21] Goldberg, David E.; Holland, John H. (1988). Genetic
algorithms and machine learning. Machine Learning 3
(2): 9599.
[22] Michie, D.; Spiegelhalter, D. J.; Taylor, C. C. (1994). Machine Learning, Neural and Statistical Classication. Ellis
Horwood.
[23] Zhang, Jun; Zhan, Zhi-hui; Lin, Ying; Chen, Ni; Gong,
Yue-jiao; Zhong, Jing-hui; Chung, Henry S.H.; Li, Yun;
Shi, Yu-hui (2011). Evolutionary Computation Meets
Machine Learning: A Survey (PDF). Computational Intelligence Magazine (IEEE) 6 (4): 6875.
[24] Tesauro, Gerald (March 1995). Temporal Dierence
Learning and TD-Gammon". Communications of the
ACM 38 (3).
[25] Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin (2009). Speech and
Language Processing. Pearson Education. pp. 207 .
[26] BelKor Home Page research.att.com
[27]
[28]
[29] When A Machine Learning Algorithm Studied Fine Art
Paintings, It Saw Things Art Historians Had Never Noticed, The Physics at ArXiv blog
1.11 Further reading

Mehryar Mohri, Afshin Rostamizadeh, Ameet Talwalkar (2012). Foundations of Machine Learning,
The MIT Press. ISBN 9780262018258.
Ian H. Witten and Eibe Frank (2011). Data Mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques Morgan Kaufmann, 664pp., ISBN 9780123748560.
Sergios Theodoridis, Konstantinos Koutroumbas
(2009) Pattern Recognition, 4th Edition, Academic Press, ISBN 978-1-59749-272-0.
Mierswa, Ingo and Wurst, Michael and Klinkenberg, Ralf and Scholz, Martin and Euler, Timm:
YALE: Rapid Prototyping for Complex Data Mining
Tasks, in Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD
International Conference on Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining (KDD-06), 2006.
Bing Liu (2007), Web Data Mining: Exploring Hyperlinks, Contents and Usage Data. Springer, ISBN
3-540-37881-2
Toby Segaran (2007), Programming Collective Intelligence, O'Reilly, ISBN 0-596-52932-5
Huang T.-M., Kecman V., Kopriva I. (2006),
Kernel Based Algorithms for Mining Huge Data
Sets, Supervised, Semi-supervised, and Unsupervised Learning, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 260 pp. 96 illus., Hardcover, ISBN 3-54031681-7.
Ethem Alpaydn (2004) Introduction to Machine
Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine
Learning), MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-01211-1
MacKay, D.J.C. (2003). Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64298-1.
KECMAN Vojislav (2001), Learning and Soft
Computing, Support Vector Machines, Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic Models, The MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 608 pp., 268 illus., ISBN 0-26211255-8.
Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman (2001). The Elements of Statistical Learning,
Springer. ISBN 0-387-95284-5.
Richard O. Duda, Peter E. Hart, David G. Stork

(2001) Pattern classication (2nd edition), Wiley,
New York, ISBN 0-471-05669-3.
Bishop, C.M. (1995). Neural Networks for Pattern
Recognition, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19853864-2.
Ryszard S. Michalski, George Tecuci (1994), Machine Learning: A Multistrategy Approach, Volume
IV, Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN 1-55860-251-8.
Sholom Weiss and Casimir Kulikowski (1991).
Computer Systems That Learn, Morgan Kaufmann.
ISBN 1-55860-065-5.
Yves Kodrato, Ryszard S. Michalski (1990), Machine Learning: An Articial Intelligence Approach,
Volume III, Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN 1-55860119-8.
Ryszard S. Michalski, Jaime G. Carbonell, Tom
M. Mitchell (1986), Machine Learning: An Articial Intelligence Approach, Volume II, Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN 0-934613-00-1.
Ryszard S. Michalski, Jaime G. Carbonell, Tom M.
Mitchell (1983), Machine Learning: An Articial
Intelligence Approach, Tioga Publishing Company,
ISBN 0-935382-05-4.
Vladimir Vapnik (1998). Statistical Learning Theory. Wiley-Interscience, ISBN 0-471-03003-1.
Ray Solomono, An Inductive Inference Machine,
IRE Convention Record, Section on Information
Theory, Part 2, pp., 56-62, 1957.
Ray Solomono, "An Inductive Inference Machine" A privately circulated report from the 1956
Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on AI.
1.12 External links

International Machine Learning Society
Popular online course by Andrew Ng, at Coursera.
It uses GNU Octave. The course is a free version
of Stanford University's actual course taught by Ng,
whose lectures are also available for free.
Machine Learning Video Lectures
mloss is an academic database of open-source machine learning software.
Chapter 2
Data mining
Not to be confused with analytics, information extrac- might identify multiple groups in the data, which can then
tion, or data analysis.
be used to obtain more accurate prediction results by a
decision support system. Neither the data collection, data
Data mining (the analysis step of the Knowledge Dis- preparation, nor result interpretation and reporting are
part of the data mining step, but do belong to the overall
covery in Databases process, or KDD),[1] an interdisci[2][3][4]
plinary subeld of computer science,
is the com- KDD process as additional steps.
putational process of discovering patterns in large data
sets involving methods at the intersection of articial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, and database systems.[2] The overall goal of the data mining process is
to extract information from a data set and transform it
into an understandable structure for further use.[2] Aside
from the raw analysis step, it involves database and
data management aspects, data pre-processing, model
and inference considerations, interestingness metrics,
complexity considerations, post-processing of discovered
structures, visualization, and online updating.[2]
The related terms data dredging, data shing, and data

snooping refer to the use of data mining methods to sample parts of a larger population data set that are (or may
be) too small for reliable statistical inferences to be made
about the validity of any patterns discovered. These
methods can, however, be used in creating new hypotheses to test against the larger data populations.
2.1 Etymology
The term is a misnomer, because the goal is the extraction of patterns and knowledge from large amount
of data, not the extraction of data itself.[5] It also is
a buzzword[6] and is frequently applied to any form of
large-scale data or information processing (collection,
extraction, warehousing, analysis, and statistics) as well
as any application of computer decision support system, including articial intelligence, machine learning,
and business intelligence. The popular book Data mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques with
Java[7] (which covers mostly machine learning material)
was originally to be named just Practical machine learning, and the term data mining was only added for marketing reasons.[8] Often the more general terms "(large
scale) data analysis", or "analytics" or when referring to
actual methods, articial intelligence and machine learning are more appropriate.
In the 1960s, statisticians used terms like Data Fishing or Data Dredging to refer to what they considered the bad practice of analyzing data without an a-priori
hypothesis. The term Data Mining appeared around
1990 in the database community. For a short time in
1980s, a phrase database mining", was used, but since
it was trademarked by HNC, a San Diego-based company, to pitch their Database Mining Workstation;[9] researchers consequently turned to data mining. Other
terms used include Data Archaeology, Information Harvesting, Information Discovery, Knowledge Extraction,
etc. Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro coined the term Knowledge Discovery in Databases for the rst workshop on
the same topic (KDD-1989) and this term became more
popular in AI and Machine Learning Community. However, the term data mining became more popular in the
business and press communities.[10] Currently, Data MinThe actual data mining task is the automatic or semi- ing and Knowledge Discovery are used interchangeably.
automatic analysis of large quantities of data to extract Since about 2007, Predictive Analytics and since 2011,
previously unknown interesting patterns such as groups of Data Science terms were also used to describe this eld.
data records (cluster analysis), unusual records (anomaly
detection) and dependencies (association rule mining).
This usually involves using database techniques such as
spatial indices. These patterns can then be seen as a kind 2.2 Background
of summary of the input data, and may be used in further analysis or, for example, in machine learning and The manual extraction of patterns from data has occurred
predictive analytics. For example, the data mining step for centuries. Early methods of identifying patterns in
9
10
CHAPTER 2. DATA MINING
data include Bayes theorem (1700s) and regression analysis (1800s). The proliferation, ubiquity and increasing power of computer technology has dramatically increased data collection, storage, and manipulation ability. As data sets have grown in size and complexity, direct hands-on data analysis has increasingly been augmented with indirect, automated data processing, aided
by other discoveries in computer science, such as neural
networks, cluster analysis, genetic algorithms (1950s),
decision trees and decision rules (1960s), and support
vector machines (1990s). Data mining is the process
of applying these methods with the intention of uncovering hidden patterns[11] in large data sets. It bridges
the gap from applied statistics and articial intelligence
(which usually provide the mathematical background) to
database management by exploiting the way data is stored
and indexed in databases to execute the actual learning
and discovery algorithms more eciently, allowing such
methods to be applied to ever larger data sets.
2.2.1
Research and evolution
PAKDD Conference The annual Pacic-Asia

Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
PAW Conference Predictive Analytics World
SDM Conference SIAM International Conference
on Data Mining (SIAM)
SSTD Symposium Symposium on Spatial and
Temporal Databases
WSDM Conference ACM Conference on Web
Search and Data Mining
Data mining topics are also present on many data management/database conferences such as the ICDE Conference, SIGMOD Conference and International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
2.3 Process
The premier professional body in the eld is the The Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) proAssociation for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special cess is commonly dened with the stages:
Interest Group (SIG) on Knowledge Discovery and Data
Mining (SIGKDD).[12][13] Since 1989 this ACM SIG has
(1) Selection
hosted an annual international conference and published
(2) Pre-processing
its proceedings,[14] and since 1999 it has published a bian(3) Transformation
nual academic journal titled SIGKDD Explorations.[15]
(4) Data Mining
Computer science conferences on data mining include:
(5) Interpretation/Evaluation.[1]
CIKM Conference ACM Conference on InformaIt exists, however, in many variations on this theme, such
tion and Knowledge Management
as the Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining
DMIN Conference International Conference on (CRISP-DM) which denes six phases:
Data Mining
DMKD Conference Research Issues on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
ECDM Conference European Conference on Data
Mining
ECML-PKDD Conference European Conference
on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of
Knowledge Discovery in Databases
(1) Business Understanding

(2) Data Understanding
(3) Data Preparation
(4) Modeling
(5) Evaluation
(6) Deployment
or a simplied process such as (1) pre-processing, (2) data

EDM Conference International Conference on mining, and (3) results validation.
Educational Data Mining
Polls conducted in 2002, 2004, and 2007 show that
is the leading methodology
ICDM Conference IEEE International Conference the CRISP-DM methodology
[16][17][18]
The only other data mining
used
by
data
miners.
on Data Mining
standard named in these polls was SEMMA. However, 3 KDD Conference ACM SIGKDD Conference on 4 times as many people reported using CRISP-DM. Several teams of researchers have published reviews of data
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
mining process models,[19][20] and Azevedo and Santos
MLDM Conference Machine Learning and Data conducted a comparison of CRISP-DM and SEMMA in
Mining in Pattern Recognition
2008.[21]
2.4. STANDARDS
2.3.1
11
Pre-processing
A simple version of this problem in machine learning is

known as overtting, but the same problem can arise at
Before data mining algorithms can be used, a target data dierent phases of the process and thus a train/test split
set must be assembled. As data mining can only uncover - when applicable at all - may not be sucient to prevent
patterns actually present in the data, the target data set this from happening.
must be large enough to contain these patterns while reThe nal step of knowledge discovery from data is to vermaining concise enough to be mined within an acceptable
ify that the patterns produced by the data mining algotime limit. A common source for data is a data mart or
rithms occur in the wider data set. Not all patterns found
data warehouse. Pre-processing is essential to analyze the
by the data mining algorithms are necessarily valid. It is
multivariate data sets before data mining. The target set
common for the data mining algorithms to nd patterns
is then cleaned. Data cleaning removes the observations
in the training set which are not present in the general
containing noise and those with missing data.
data set. This is called overtting. To overcome this, the
evaluation uses a test set of data on which the data mining algorithm was not trained. The learned patterns are
2.3.2 Data mining
applied to this test set, and the resulting output is compared to the desired output. For example, a data mining
[1]
Data mining involves six common classes of tasks:
algorithm trying to distinguish spam from legitimate
emails would be trained on a training set of sample e Anomaly detection (Outlier/change/deviation demails. Once trained, the learned patterns would be aptection) The identication of unusual data records,
plied to the test set of e-mails on which it had not been
that might be interesting or data errors that require
trained. The accuracy of the patterns can then be meafurther investigation.
sured from how many e-mails they correctly classify. A
number of statistical methods may be used to evaluate the
Association rule learning (Dependency modelling) algorithm, such as ROC curves.
Searches for relationships between variables. For
example a supermarket might gather data on cus- If the learned patterns do not meet the desired standards,
tomer purchasing habits. Using association rule subsequently it is necessary to re-evaluate and change the
learning, the supermarket can determine which pre-processing and data mining steps. If the learned patproducts are frequently bought together and use this terns do meet the desired standards, then the nal step is
information for marketing purposes. This is some- to interpret the learned patterns and turn them into knowledge.
times referred to as market basket analysis.
Clustering is the task of discovering groups and
structures in the data that are in some way or another similar, without using known structures in
the data.
Classication is the task of generalizing known 2.4 Standards
structure to apply to new data. For example, an email program might attempt to classify an e-mail as
There have been some eorts to dene standards for
legitimate or as spam.
the data mining process, for example the 1999 European Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining
Regression attempts to nd a function which mod(CRISP-DM 1.0) and the 2004 Java Data Mining stanels the data with the least error.
dard (JDM 1.0). Development on successors to these processes (CRISP-DM 2.0 and JDM 2.0) was active in 2006,
Summarization providing a more compact repre- but has stalled since. JDM 2.0 was withdrawn without
sentation of the data set, including visualization and reaching a nal draft.
report generation.
For exchanging the extracted models in particular for
use in predictive analytics the key standard is the
Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), which is
2.3.3 Results validation
an XML-based language developed by the Data MinData mining can unintentionally be misused, and can then ing Group (DMG) and supported as exchange format by
produce results which appear to be signicant; but which many data mining applications. As the name suggests, it
do not actually predict future behavior and cannot be only covers prediction models, a particular data mining
reproduced on a new sample of data and bear little use. task of high importance to business applications. HowOften this results from investigating too many hypotheses ever, extensions to cover (for example) subspace clusterand not performing proper statistical hypothesis testing. ing have been proposed independently of the DMG.[22]
12
2.5 Notable uses

See also: Category:Applied data mining.
2.5.1
Games
Since the early 1960s, with the availability of oracles

for certain combinatorial games, also called tablebases
(e.g. for 3x3-chess) with any beginning conguration,
small-board dots-and-boxes, small-board-hex, and certain endgames in chess, dots-and-boxes, and hex; a new
area for data mining has been opened. This is the extraction of human-usable strategies from these oracles.
Current pattern recognition approaches do not seem to
fully acquire the high level of abstraction required to be
applied successfully. Instead, extensive experimentation
with the tablebases combined with an intensive study
of tablebase-answers to well designed problems, and with
knowledge of prior art (i.e., pre-tablebase knowledge)
is used to yield insightful patterns. Berlekamp (in dotsand-boxes, etc.) and John Nunn (in chess endgames) are
notable examples of researchers doing this work, though
they were not and are not involved in tablebase generation.
2.5.2
Business
In business, data mining is the analysis of historical business activities, stored as static data in data warehouse
databases. The goal is to reveal hidden patterns and
trends. Data mining software uses advanced pattern
recognition algorithms to sift through large amounts of
data to assist in discovering previously unknown strategic business information. Examples of what businesses
use data mining for include performing market analysis
to identify new product bundles, nding the root cause
of manufacturing problems, to prevent customer attrition
and acquire new customers, cross-selling to existing customers, and proling customers with more accuracy.[23]
In todays world raw data is being collected by companies at an exploding rate. For example, Walmart
processes over 20 million point-of-sale transactions
every day. This information is stored in a centralized
database, but would be useless without some type of
data mining software to analyze it. If Walmart analyzed their point-of-sale data with data mining techniques they would be able to determine sales trends,
develop marketing campaigns, and more accurately
predict customer loyalty.[24]
Every time a credit card or a store loyalty card is
being used, or a warranty card is being lled, data
is being collected about the users behavior. Many
people nd the amount of information stored about
us from companies, such as Google, Facebook, and

Amazon, disturbing and are concerned about privacy. Although there is the potential for our personal data to be used in harmful, or unwanted, ways
it is also being used to make our lives better. For
example, Ford and Audi hope to one day collect information about customer driving patterns so they
can recommend safer routes and warn drivers about
dangerous road conditions.[25]
Data mining in customer relationship management
applications can contribute signicantly to the bottom line. Rather than randomly contacting a
prospect or customer through a call center or sending mail, a company can concentrate its eorts on
prospects that are predicted to have a high likelihood of responding to an oer. More sophisticated
methods may be used to optimize resources across
campaigns so that one may predict to which channel
and to which oer an individual is most likely to respond (across all potential oers). Additionally, sophisticated applications could be used to automate
mailing. Once the results from data mining (potential prospect/customer and channel/oer) are determined, this sophisticated application can either
automatically send an e-mail or a regular mail. Finally, in cases where many people will take an action
without an oer, "uplift modeling" can be used to
determine which people have the greatest increase in
response if given an oer. Uplift modeling thereby
enables marketers to focus mailings and oers on
persuadable people, and not to send oers to people who will buy the product without an oer. Data
clustering can also be used to automatically discover
the segments or groups within a customer data set.
Businesses employing data mining may see a return
on investment, but also they recognize that the number of predictive models can quickly become very
large. For example, rather than using one model to
predict how many customers will churn, a business
may choose to build a separate model for each region
and customer type. In situations where a large number of models need to be maintained, some businesses turn to more automated data mining methodologies.
Data mining can be helpful to human resources
(HR) departments in identifying the characteristics
of their most successful employees. Information obtained such as universities attended by highly successful employees can help HR focus recruiting efforts accordingly. Additionally, Strategic Enterprise
Management applications help a company translate corporate-level goals, such as prot and margin
share targets, into operational decisions, such as production plans and workforce levels.[26]
2.5. NOTABLE USES

Market basket analysis, relates to data-mining use
in retail sales. If a clothing store records the purchases of customers, a data mining system could
identify those customers who favor silk shirts over
cotton ones. Although some explanations of relationships may be dicult, taking advantage of it
is easier. The example deals with association rules
within transaction-based data. Not all data are transaction based and logical, or inexact rules may also be
present within a database.
Market basket analysis has been used to identify the
purchase patterns of the Alpha Consumer. Analyzing the data collected on this type of user has allowed
companies to predict future buying trends and forecast supply demands.
Data mining is a highly eective tool in the catalog
marketing industry. Catalogers have a rich database
of history of their customer transactions for millions
of customers dating back a number of years. Data
mining tools can identify patterns among customers
and help identify the most likely customers to respond to upcoming mailing campaigns.
Data mining for business applications can be integrated into a complex modeling and decision making process.[27] Reactive business intelligence (RBI)
advocates a holistic approach that integrates data
mining, modeling, and interactive visualization into
an end-to-end discovery and continuous innovation process powered by human and automated
learning.[28]
In the area of decision making, the RBI approach
has been used to mine knowledge that is progressively acquired from the decision maker, and then
self-tune the decision method accordingly.[29] The
relation between the quality of a data mining system and the amount of investment that the decision maker is willing to make was formalized by
providing an economic perspective on the value
of extracted knowledge in terms of its payo to
the organization[27] This decision-theoretic classication framework[27] was applied to a real-world
semiconductor wafer manufacturing line, where
decision rules for eectively monitoring and controlling the semiconductor wafer fabrication line
were developed.[30]
An example of data mining related to an integratedcircuit (IC) production line is described in the
paper Mining IC Test Data to Optimize VLSI
Testing.[31] In this paper, the application of data
mining and decision analysis to the problem of dielevel functional testing is described. Experiments
mentioned demonstrate the ability to apply a system
13
of mining historical die-test data to create a probabilistic model of patterns of die failure. These patterns are then utilized to decide, in real time, which
die to test next and when to stop testing. This system
has been shown, based on experiments with historical test data, to have the potential to improve prots
on mature IC products. Other examples[32][33] of the
application of data mining methodologies in semiconductor manufacturing environments suggest that
data mining methodologies may be particularly useful when data is scarce, and the various physical and
chemical parameters that aect the process exhibit
highly complex interactions. Another implication is
that on-line monitoring of the semiconductor manufacturing process using data mining may be highly
eective.
2.5.3 Science and engineering

In recent years, data mining has been used widely in the
areas of science and engineering, such as bioinformatics,
genetics, medicine, education and electrical power engineering.
In the study of human genetics, sequence mining
helps address the important goal of understanding the mapping relationship between the interindividual variations in human DNA sequence and
the variability in disease susceptibility. In simple
terms, it aims to nd out how the changes in an
individuals DNA sequence aects the risks of developing common diseases such as cancer, which is
of great importance to improving methods of diagnosing, preventing, and treating these diseases. One
data mining method that is used to perform this task
is known as multifactor dimensionality reduction.[34]
In the area of electrical power engineering, data
mining methods have been widely used for condition
monitoring of high voltage electrical equipment.
The purpose of condition monitoring is to obtain
valuable information on, for example, the status of
the insulation (or other important safety-related parameters). Data clustering techniques such as the
self-organizing map (SOM), have been applied to
vibration monitoring and analysis of transformer onload tap-changers (OLTCS). Using vibration monitoring, it can be observed that each tap change
operation generates a signal that contains information about the condition of the tap changer contacts
and the drive mechanisms. Obviously, dierent tap
positions will generate dierent signals. However,
there was considerable variability amongst normal
condition signals for exactly the same tap position.
SOM has been applied to detect abnormal conditions and to hypothesize about the nature of the
abnormalities.[35]
14
Data mining methods have been applied to dissolved

gas analysis (DGA) in power transformers. DGA, as
a diagnostics for power transformers, has been available for many years. Methods such as SOM has been
applied to analyze generated data and to determine
trends which are not obvious to the standard DGA
ratio methods (such as Duval Triangle).[35]
(HITECH Act) helped to initiate the adoption of the electronic health record (EHR) and supporting technology in
the United States.[46] The HITECH Act was signed into
law on February 17, 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and helped to open
the door to medical data mining.[47] Prior to the signing
of this law, estimates of only 20% of United States-based
physicians were utilizing electronic patient records.[46]
Sren Brunak notes that the patient record becomes as
information-rich as possible and thereby maximizes the
data mining opportunities.[46] Hence, electronic patient
records further expands the possibilities regarding medical data mining thereby opening the door to a vast source
of medical data analysis.
In educational research, where data mining has

been used to study the factors leading students to
choose to engage in behaviors which reduce their
learning,[36] and to understand factors inuencing
university student retention.[37] A similar example of social application of data mining is its use
in expertise nding systems, whereby descriptors
of human expertise are extracted, normalized, and
2.5.6 Spatial data mining
classied so as to facilitate the nding of experts,
particularly in scientic and technical elds. In this
Spatial data mining is the application of data mining
way, data mining can facilitate institutional memory.
methods to spatial data. The end objective of spatial data
mining is to nd patterns in data with respect to geog Data mining methods of biomedical data facili- raphy. So far, data mining and Geographic Information
tated by domain ontologies,[38] mining clinical trial Systems (GIS) have existed as two separate technologies,
data,[39] and trac analysis using SOM.[40]
each with its own methods, traditions, and approaches to
visualization and data analysis. Particularly, most con In adverse drug reaction surveillance, the Uppsala temporary GIS have only very basic spatial analysis funcMonitoring Centre has, since 1998, used data min- tionality. The immense explosion in geographically refing methods to routinely screen for reporting pat- erenced data occasioned by developments in IT, digital
terns indicative of emerging drug safety issues in mapping, remote sensing, and the global diusion of GIS
the WHO global database of 4.6 million suspected emphasizes the importance of developing data-driven inadverse drug reaction incidents.[41] Recently, simi- ductive approaches to geographical analysis and modellar methodology has been developed to mine large ing.
collections of electronic health records for tempoData mining oers great potential benets for GIS-based
ral patterns associating drug prescriptions to mediapplied decision-making. Recently, the task of integratcal diagnoses.[42]
ing these two technologies has become of critical importance, especially as various public and private sector or Data mining has been applied to software artifacts ganizations possessing huge databases with thematic and
within the realm of software engineering: Mining geographically referenced data begin to realize the huge
Software Repositories.
potential of the information contained therein. Among
those organizations are:
2.5.4
Human rights
Data mining of government records particularly records

of the justice system (i.e., courts, prisons) enables the
discovery of systemic human rights violations in connection to generation and publication of invalid or fraudulent
legal records by various government agencies.[43][44]
2.5.5
Medical data mining
In 2011, the case of Sorrell v. IMS Health, Inc., decided

by the Supreme Court of the United States, ruled that
pharmacies may share information with outside companies. This practice was authorized under the 1st Amendment of the Constitution, protecting the freedom of
speech.[45] However, the passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act
oces requiring analysis or dissemination of georeferenced statistical data

public health services searching for explanations of
disease clustering
environmental agencies assessing the impact of
changing land-use patterns on climate change
geo-marketing companies doing customer segmentation based on spatial location.
Challenges in Spatial mining: Geospatial data repositories tend to be very large. Moreover, existing GIS datasets
are often splintered into feature and attribute components that are conventionally archived in hybrid data management systems. Algorithmic requirements dier substantially for relational (attribute) data management and
2.5. NOTABLE USES
15
for topological (feature) data management.[48] Related to

this is the range and diversity of geographic data formats, which present unique challenges. The digital geographic data revolution is creating new types of data
formats beyond the traditional vector and raster formats. Geographic data repositories increasingly include
ill-structured data, such as imagery and geo-referenced
multi-media.[49]
applications such as air pollution monitoring.[51] A characteristic of such networks is that nearby sensor nodes
monitoring an environmental feature typically register
similar values. This kind of data redundancy due to the
spatial correlation between sensor observations inspires
the techniques for in-network data aggregation and mining. By measuring the spatial correlation between data
sampled by dierent sensors, a wide class of specialized
algorithms can be developed to develop more ecient
There are several critical research challenges in geo[52]
graphic knowledge discovery and data mining. Miller and spatial data mining algorithms.
Han[50] oer the following list of emerging research topics in the eld:
2.5.9 Visual data mining
Developing and supporting geographic data
warehouses (GDWs): Spatial properties are often
reduced to simple aspatial attributes in mainstream
data warehouses. Creating an integrated GDW requires solving issues of spatial and temporal data interoperability including dierences in semantics,
referencing systems, geometry, accuracy, and position.
Better spatio-temporal representations in geographic knowledge discovery: Current geographic
knowledge discovery (GKD) methods generally use
very simple representations of geographic objects
and spatial relationships. Geographic data mining methods should recognize more complex geographic objects (i.e., lines and polygons) and relationships (i.e., non-Euclidean distances, direction,
connectivity, and interaction through attributed geographic space such as terrain). Furthermore, the
time dimension needs to be more fully integrated
into these geographic representations and relationships.
Geographic knowledge discovery using diverse
data types: GKD methods should be developed
that can handle diverse data types beyond the traditional raster and vector models, including imagery
and geo-referenced multimedia, as well as dynamic
data types (video streams, animation).
2.5.7
Temporal data mining
In the process of turning from analogical into digital, large data sets have been generated, collected, and
stored discovering statistical patterns, trends and information which is hidden in data, in order to build predictive patterns. Studies suggest visual data mining is
faster and much more intuitive than is traditional data
mining.[53][54][55] See also Computer vision.
2.5.10 Music data mining

Data mining techniques, and in particular co-occurrence
analysis, has been used to discover relevant similarities
among music corpora (radio lists, CD databases) for purposes including classifying music into genres in a more
objective manner.[56]
2.5.11 Surveillance
Data mining has been used by the U.S. government. Programs include the Total Information Awareness (TIA)
program, Secure Flight (formerly known as ComputerAssisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II)),
Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE),[57] and the Multi-state AntiTerrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX).[58] These
programs have been discontinued due to controversy over
whether they violate the 4th Amendment to the United
States Constitution, although many programs that were
formed under them continue to be funded by dierent
organizations or under dierent names.[59]
In the context of combating terrorism, two particularly

plausible methods of data mining are pattern mining
Data may contain attributes generated and recorded at and subject-based data mining.
dierent times. In this case nding meaningful relationships in the data may require considering the temporal
order of the attributes. A temporal relationship may in- 2.5.12 Pattern mining
dicate a causal relationship, or simply an association.
Pattern mining is a data mining method that involves
nding existing patterns in data. In this context patterns
2.5.8 Sensor data mining
often means association rules. The original motivation
for searching association rules came from the desire to
Wireless sensor networks can be used for facilitating the analyze supermarket transaction data, that is, to examine
collection of data for spatial data mining for a variety of customer behavior in terms of the purchased products.
16
For example, an association rule beer potato chips ment or commercial data sets for national security or law
(80%)" states that four out of ve customers that bought enforcement purposes, such as in the Total Information
beer also bought potato chips.
Awareness Program or in ADVISE, has raised privacy
[69][70]
In the context of pattern mining as a tool to identify concerns.
terrorist activity, the National Research Council provides the following denition: Pattern-based data mining looks for patterns (including anomalous data patterns)
that might be associated with terrorist activity these
patterns might be regarded as small signals in a large
ocean of noise.[60][61][62] Pattern Mining includes new
areas such a Music Information Retrieval (MIR) where
patterns seen both in the temporal and non temporal
domains are imported to classical knowledge discovery
search methods.
Data mining requires data preparation which can uncover

information or patterns which may compromise condentiality and privacy obligations. A common way for this
to occur is through data aggregation. Data aggregation
involves combining data together (possibly from various
sources) in a way that facilitates analysis (but that also
might make identication of private, individual-level data
deducible or otherwise apparent).[71] This is not data mining per se, but a result of the preparation of data before
and for the purposes of the analysis. The threat to an
individuals privacy comes into play when the data, once
compiled, cause the data miner, or anyone who has access
2.5.13 Subject-based data mining
to the newly compiled data set, to be able to identify specic individuals, especially when the data were originally
Subject-based data mining is a data mining method anonymous.[72][73][74]
involving the search for associations between individuIt is recommended that an individual is made aware of the
als in data. In the context of combating terrorism, the
following before data are collected:[71]
National Research Council provides the following denition: Subject-based data mining uses an initiating in the purpose of the data collection and any (known)
dividual or other datum that is considered, based on other
data mining projects;
information, to be of high interest, and the goal is to de how the data will be used;
termine what other persons or nancial transactions or
movements, etc., are related to that initiating datum.[61]
who will be able to mine the data and use the data
and their derivatives;
2.5.14
Knowledge grid
Knowledge discovery On the Grid generally refers to

conducting knowledge discovery in an open environment
using grid computing concepts, allowing users to integrate data from various online data sources, as well make
use of remote resources, for executing their data mining
tasks. The earliest example was the Discovery Net,[63][64]
developed at Imperial College London, which won the
Most Innovative Data-Intensive Application Award at
the ACM SC02 (Supercomputing 2002) conference and
exhibition, based on a demonstration of a fully interactive
distributed knowledge discovery application for a bioinformatics application. Other examples include work conducted by researchers at the University of Calabria, who
developed a Knowledge Grid architecture for distributed
knowledge discovery, based on grid computing.[65][66]
the status of security surrounding access to the data;

how collected data can be updated.
Data may also be modied so as to become anonymous,
so that individuals may not readily be identied.[71] However, even de-identied"/"anonymized data sets can potentially contain enough information to allow identication of individuals, as occurred when journalists were
able to nd several individuals based on a set of search
histories that were inadvertently released by AOL.[75]
2.6.1 Situation in Europe
Europe has rather strong privacy laws, and eorts are underway to further strengthen the rights of the consumers.
However, the U.S.-E.U. Safe Harbor Principles currently
eectively expose European users to privacy exploitation
by U.S. companies. As a consequence of Edward Snowden's Global surveillance disclosure, there has been in2.6 Privacy concerns and ethics
creased discussion to revoke this agreement, as in particWhile the term data mining itself has no ethical im- ular the data will be fully exposed to the National Security
plications, it is often associated with the mining of in- Agency, and attempts to reach an agreement have failed.
formation in relation to peoples behavior (ethical and
otherwise).[67]
2.6.2 Situation in the United States
The ways in which data mining can be used can in some

cases and contexts raise questions regarding privacy, le- In the United States, privacy concerns have been adgality, and ethics.[68] In particular, data mining govern- dressed by the US Congress via the passage of regulatory
2.8. SOFTWARE
controls such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The HIPAA requires individuals to give their informed consent regarding information they provide and its intended present and future uses.
According to an article in Biotech Business Week', "'[i]n
practice, HIPAA may not oer any greater protection than
the longstanding regulations in the research arena,' says
the AAHC. More importantly, the rules goal of protection
through informed consent is undermined by the complexity
of consent forms that are required of patients and participants, which approach a level of incomprehensibility to
average individuals.[76] This underscores the necessity for
data anonymity in data aggregation and mining practices.
17
fair use. For example as part of the Google Book settlement the presiding judge on the case ruled that Googles
digitisation project of in-copyright books was lawful, in
part because of the transformative uses that the digitisation project displayed - one being text and data mining.[80]
2.8 Software
See also: Category:Data mining and machine learning
software.
U.S. information privacy legislation such as HIPAA and

the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) 2.8.1 Free open-source data mining software and applications
applies only to the specic areas that each such law addresses. Use of data mining by the majority of businesses
Carrot2: Text and search results clustering framein the U.S. is not controlled by any legislation.
work.
2.7 Copyright Law

2.7.1
Situation in Europe
Chemicalize.org: A chemical structure miner and

web search engine.
ELKI: A university research project with advanced
cluster analysis and outlier detection methods written in the Java language.
Due to a lack of exibilities in European copyright and

database law, the mining of in-copyright works such
as web mining without the permission of the copyright
owner is not legal. Where a database is pure data in Europe there is likely to be no copyright, but database rights
may exist so data mining becomes subject to regulations
by the Database Directive. On the recommendation of
the Hargreaves review this led to the UK government to
amend its copyright law in 2014[77] to allow content mining as a limitation and exception. Only the second country in the world to do so after Japan, which introduced an
exception in 2009 for data mining. However due to the
restriction of the Copyright Directive, the UK exception
only allows content mining for non-commercial purposes.
UK copyright law also does not allow this provision to
be overridden by contractual terms and conditions. The
European Commission facilitated stakeholder discussion
on text and data mining in 2013, under the title of Licences for Europe.[78] The focus on the solution to this
legal issue being licences and not limitations and exceptions led to representatives of universities, researchers,
libraries, civil society groups and open access publishers
to leave the stakeholder dialogue in May 2013.[79]
GATE: a natural language processing and language

engineering tool.
2.7.2
OpenNN: Open neural networks library.
Situation in the United States
By contrast to Europe, the exible nature of US copyright

law, and in particular fair use means that content mining
in America, as well as other fair use countries such as Israel, Taiwan and South Korea is viewed as being legal. As
content mining is transformative, that is it does not supplant the original work, it is viewed as being lawful under
KNIME: The Konstanz Information Miner, a user

friendly and comprehensive data analytics framework.
ML-Flex: A software package that enables users
to integrate with third-party machine-learning packages written in any programming language, execute classication analyses in parallel across multiple computing nodes, and produce HTML reports
of classication results.
MLPACK library: a collection of ready-to-use machine learning algorithms written in the C++ language.
Massive Online Analysis (MOA): a real-time big
data stream mining with concept drift tool in the
Java programming language.
NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit): A suite of libraries and programs for symbolic and statistical
natural language processing (NLP) for the Python
language.
Orange: A component-based data mining and

machine learning software suite written in the
Python language.
R: A programming language and software environment for statistical computing, data mining, and
graphics. It is part of the GNU Project.
18
SCaViS: Java cross-platform data analysis framework developed at Argonne National Laboratory.
Qlucore Omics Explorer: data mining software provided by Qlucore.
SenticNet API: A semantic and aective resource

for opinion mining and sentiment analysis.
2.8.3
Marketplace surveys
Tanagra: A visualisation-oriented data mining softSeveral researchers and organizations have conducted reware, also for teaching.
views of data mining tools and surveys of data miners.
Torch: An open source deep learning library for the These identify some of the strengths and weaknesses of
Lua programming language and scientic comput- the software packages. They also provide an overview
ing framework with wide support for machine learn- of the behaviors, preferences and views of data miners.
Some of these reports include:
ing algorithms.
UIMA: The UIMA (Unstructured Information
Management Architecture) is a component framework for analyzing unstructured content such as text,
audio and video originally developed by IBM.
Weka: A suite of machine learning software applications written in the Java programming language.
2.8.2
Commercial data-mining software

and applications
Angoss KnowledgeSTUDIO: data mining tool provided by Angoss.

Clarabridge: enterprise class text analytics solution.
HP Vertica Analytics Platform: data mining software provided by HP.
IBM SPSS Modeler: data mining software provided
by IBM.
KXEN Modeler: data mining tool provided by
KXEN.
2011 Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining

and Knowledge Discovery[81]
Rexer Analytics Data Miner Surveys (2007
2013)[82]
Forrester Research 2010 Predictive Analytics and
Data Mining Solutions report[83]
Gartner 2008 Magic Quadrant report[84]
Robert A. Nisbets 2006 Three Part Series of articles Data Mining Tools: Which One is Best For
CRM?"[85]
Haughton et al.'s 2003 Review of Data Mining Software Packages in The American Statistician[86]
Goebel & Gruenwald 1999 A Survey of Data
Mining a Knowledge Discovery Software Tools in
SIGKDD Explorations[87]
2.9 See also
Grapheme: data mining and visualization software

Methods
provided by iChrome.
LIONsolver: an integrated software application for
data mining, business intelligence, and modeling
that implements the Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN (LION) approach.
Microsoft Analysis Services: data mining software
provided by Microsoft.
NetOwl: suite of multilingual text and entity analytics products that enable data mining.
Oracle Data Mining: data mining software by
Oracle.
RapidMiner: An environment for machine learning
and data mining experiments.
SAS Enterprise Miner: data mining software provided by the SAS Institute.
STATISTICA Data Miner: data mining software
provided by StatSoft.
Anomaly/outlier/change detection
Classication
Cluster analysis
Decision tree
Factor analysis
Genetic algorithms
Intention mining
Multilinear subspace learning
Neural networks
Regression analysis
Sequence mining
2.10. REFERENCES
Structured data analysis
Text mining
Online analytical processing (OLAP)
Application domains
Analytics
Bioinformatics
Business intelligence
Data analysis
Data warehouse
Decision support system
Drug discovery
Exploratory data analysis
Predictive analytics
Web mining
Application examples
See also: Category:Applied data mining.
Customer analytics
Data mining in agriculture
Data mining in meteorology
Educational data mining
National Security Agency
Police-enforced ANPR in the UK
Quantitative structureactivity relationship
Surveillance / Mass surveillance (e.g., Stellar Wind)
Related topics
19
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is Best for CRM? Part 1, Information Management Special
Reports, January 2006
[86] Haughton, Dominique; Deichmann, Joel; Eshghi, Abdolreza; Sayek, Selin; Teebagy, Nicholas; and Topi, Heikki
(2003); A Review of Software Packages for Data Mining,
The American Statistician, Vol. 57, No. 4, pp. 290309
[87] Goebel, Michael; Gruenwald, Le (1999); A Survey of
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Software Tools,
SIGKDD Explorations, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 2033
2.11 Further reading

Cabena, Peter; Hadjnian, Pablo; Stadler, Rolf; Verhees, Jaap; and Zanasi, Alessandro (1997); Discovering Data Mining: From Concept to Implementation,
Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-743980-6
M.S. Chen, J. Han, P.S. Yu (1996) "Data mining: an
overview from a database perspective". Knowledge
and data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on 8 (6),
866-883
Feldman, Ronen; and Sanger, James; The Text Mining Handbook, Cambridge University Press, ISBN
978-0-521-83657-9
Guo, Yike; and Grossman, Robert (editors) (1999);
High Performance Data Mining: Scaling Algorithms,
Applications and Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers
Han, Jiawei, Micheline Kamber, and Jian Pei. Data
mining: concepts and techniques. Morgan kaufmann, 2006.
Hastie, Trevor, Tibshirani, Robert and Friedman,
Jerome (2001); The Elements of Statistical Learning:
Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Springer,
ISBN 0-387-95284-5
Liu, Bing (2007); Web Data Mining: Exploring Hyperlinks, Contents and Usage Data, Springer, ISBN
3-540-37881-2
Murphy, Chris (16 May 2011). Is Data Mining
Free Speech?". InformationWeek (UMB): 12.
Nisbet, Robert; Elder, John; Miner, Gary (2009);
Handbook of Statistical Analysis & Data Mining Applications, Academic Press/Elsevier, ISBN 978-012-374765-5
Poncelet, Pascal; Masseglia, Florent; and Teisseire,
Maguelonne (editors) (October 2007); Data Mining Patterns: New Methods and Applications, Information Science Reference, ISBN 978-1-59904162-9
Tan, Pang-Ning; Steinbach, Michael; and Kumar,
Vipin (2005); Introduction to Data Mining, ISBN 0321-32136-7
Theodoridis, Sergios; and Koutroumbas, Konstantinos (2009); Pattern Recognition, 4th Edition, Academic Press, ISBN 978-1-59749-272-0
Weiss, Sholom M.; and Indurkhya, Nitin (1998);
Predictive Data Mining, Morgan Kaufmann
Witten, Ian H.; Frank, Eibe; Hall, Mark A. (30 January 2011). Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (3 ed.). Elsevier. ISBN
978-0-12-374856-0. (See also Free Weka software)
2.12. EXTERNAL LINKS

Ye, Nong (2003); The Handbook of Data Mining,
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
2.12 External links
23
Chapter 3
Statistical classication
For the unsupervised learning approach, see Cluster stances, the explanatory variables are termed features
analysis.
(grouped into a feature vector), and the possible categories to be predicted are classes. There is also some argument over whether classication methods that do not
In machine learning and statistics, classication is the
problem of identifying to which of a set of categories involve a statistical model can be considered statistical. Other elds may use dierent terminology: e.g.
(sub-populations) a new observation belongs, on the basis of a training set of data containing observations (or in community ecology, the term classication normally
refers to cluster analysis, i.e. a type of unsupervised
instances) whose category membership is known. An example would be assigning a given email into spam or learning, rather than the supervised learning described in
this article.
non-spam classes or assigning a diagnosis to a given patient as described by observed characteristics of the patient (gender, blood pressure, presence or absence of certain symptoms, etc.).
3.1 Relation to other problems
In the terminology of machine learning,[1] classication is
considered an instance of supervised learning, i.e. learning where a training set of correctly identied observations is available. The corresponding unsupervised procedure is known as clustering, and involves grouping data
into categories based on some measure of inherent similarity or distance.
Often, the individual observations are analyzed into a set
of quantiable properties, known variously explanatory
variables, features, etc. These properties may variously be categorical (e.g. A, B, AB or O, for
blood type), ordinal (e.g. large, medium or small),
integer-valued (e.g. the number of occurrences of a part
word in an email) or real-valued (e.g. a measurement
of blood pressure). Other classiers work by comparing observations to previous observations by means of a
similarity or distance function.
Classication and clustering are examples of the more

general problem of pattern recognition, which is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value. Other examples are regression, which assigns
a real-valued output to each input; sequence labeling,
which assigns a class to each member of a sequence of
values (for example, part of speech tagging, which assigns a part of speech to each word in an input sentence);
parsing, which assigns a parse tree to an input sentence,
describing the syntactic structure of the sentence; etc.
A common subclass of classication is probabilistic classication. Algorithms of this nature use statistical inference to nd the best class for a given instance. Unlike other algorithms, which simply output a best class,
probabilistic algorithms output a probability of the instance being a member of each of the possible classes.
An algorithm that implements classication, especially in The best class is normally then selected as the one with
a concrete implementation, is known as a classier. The the highest probability. However, such an algorithm has
term classier sometimes also refers to the mathemat- numerous advantages over non-probabilistic classiers:
ical function, implemented by a classication algorithm,
that maps input data to a category.
It can output a condence value associated with its
choice (in general, a classier that can do this is
Terminology across elds is quite varied. In statistics,
known as a condence-weighted classier).
where classication is often done with logistic regression or a similar procedure, the properties of observations are termed explanatory variables (or independent
variables, regressors, etc.), and the categories to be predicted are known as outcomes, which are considered to
be possible values of the dependent variable. In machine learning, the observations are often known as in-
24
Correspondingly, it can abstain when its condence

of choosing any particular output is too low.
Because of the probabilities which are generated,
probabilistic classiers can be more eectively incorporated into larger machine-learning tasks, in a
3.5. FEATURE VECTORS

way that partially or completely avoids the problem
of error propagation.
3.2 Frequentist procedures
25
3.5 Feature vectors

Most algorithms describe an individual instance whose
category is to be predicted using a feature vector of individual, measurable properties of the instance. Each property is termed a feature, also known in statistics as an
explanatory variable (or independent variable, although in
general dierent features may or may not be statistically
independent). Features may variously be binary (male
or female); categorical (e.g. A, B, AB or O, for
blood type); ordinal (e.g. large, medium or small);
integer-valued (e.g. the number of occurrences of a particular word in an email); or real-valued (e.g. a measurement of blood pressure). If the instance is an image, the
feature values might correspond to the pixels of an image;
if the instance is a piece of text, the feature values might
be occurrence frequencies of dierent words. Some algorithms work only in terms of discrete data and require
that real-valued or integer-valued data be discretized into
groups (e.g. less than 5, between 5 and 10, or greater than
10).
Early work on statistical classication was undertaken by

Fisher,[2][3] in the context of two-group problems, leading
to Fishers linear discriminant function as the rule for assigning a group to a new observation.[4] This early work
assumed that data-values within each of the two groups
had a multivariate normal distribution. The extension
of this same context to more than two-groups has also
been considered with a restriction imposed that the classication rule should be linear.[4][5] Later work for the
multivariate normal distribution allowed the classier to
be nonlinear:[6] several classication rules can be derived
based on slight dierent adjustments of the Mahalanobis
distance, with a new observation being assigned to the
group whose centre has the lowest adjusted distance from
the observation.
The vector space associated with these vectors is often
called the feature space. In order to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space, a number of dimensionality
reduction techniques can be employed.
3.3 Bayesian procedures
Unlike frequentist procedures, Bayesian classication

procedures provide a natural way of taking into account any available information about the relative sizes of
the sub-populations associated with the dierent groups
within the overall population.[7] Bayesian procedures tend
to be computationally expensive and, in the days before
Markov chain Monte Carlo computations were developed, approximations for Bayesian clustering rules were
devised.[8]
3.6 Linear classiers

A large number of algorithms for classication can be
phrased in terms of a linear function that assigns a score
to each possible category k by combining the feature vector of an instance with a vector of weights, using a dot
product. The predicted category is the one with the highest score. This type of score function is known as a linear
predictor function and has the following general form:
Some Bayesian procedures involve the calculation of

group membership probabilities: these can be viewed as
providing a more informative outcome of a data analysis score(Xi , k) = k Xi ,
than a simple attribution of a single group-label to each
where Xi is the feature vector for instance i, k is the vecnew observation.
tor of weights corresponding to category k, and score(Xi,
k) is the score associated with assigning instance i to category k. In discrete choice theory, where instances represent people and categories represent choices, the score
3.4 Binary and multiclass classi- is considered the utility associated with person i choosing
category k.
cation
Classication can be thought of as two separate problems
binary classication and multiclass classication. In
binary classication, a better understood task, only two
classes are involved, whereas multiclass classication involves assigning an object to one of several classes.[9]
Since many classication methods have been developed
specically for binary classication, multiclass classication often requires the combined use of multiple binary
classiers.
Algorithms with this basic setup are known as linear classiers. What distinguishes them is the procedure for determining (training) the optimal weights/coecients and
the way that the score is interpreted.
Examples of such algorithms are
Logistic regression and Multinomial logistic regression
Probit regression
26
CHAPTER 3. STATISTICAL CLASSIFICATION
The perceptron algorithm

3.9 Application domains

See also: Cluster analysis Applications
Linear discriminant analysis.
3.7 Algorithms
Examples of classication algorithms include:
Linear classiers
Fishers linear discriminant
Logistic regression
Naive Bayes classier
Perceptron
Least squares support vector machines
Quadratic classiers
Kernel estimation
k-nearest neighbor
Boosting (meta-algorithm)
Decision trees
Random forests
Neural networks
Learning vector quantization
3.8 Evaluation
Classier performance depends greatly on the characteristics of the data to be classied. There is no single classier that works best on all given problems (a phenomenon
that may be explained by the no-free-lunch theorem).
Various empirical tests have been performed to compare
classier performance and to nd the characteristics of
data that determine classier performance. Determining
a suitable classier for a given problem is however still
more an art than a science.
The measures precision and recall are popular metrics
used to evaluate the quality of a classication system.
More recently, receiver operating characteristic (ROC)
curves have been used to evaluate the tradeo between
true- and false-positive rates of classication algorithms.
As a performance metric, the uncertainty coecient has
the advantage over simple accuracy in that it is not affected by the relative sizes of the dierent classes. [10]
Further, it will not penalize an algorithm for simply rearranging the classes.
Classication has many applications. In some of these it

is employed as a data mining procedure, while in others
more detailed statistical modeling is undertaken.
Computer vision
Medical imaging and medical image analysis
Optical character recognition
Video tracking
Drug discovery and development
Toxicogenomics
Quantitative structure-activity relationship
Geostatistics
Speech recognition
Handwriting recognition
Biometric identication
Biological classication
Statistical natural language processing
Document classication
Internet search engines
Credit scoring
Pattern recognition
Micro-array classication
3.10 See also

Class membership probabilities
Classication rule
Binary classication
Compound term processing
Data mining
Fuzzy logic
Data warehouse
Information retrieval
Articial intelligence
Machine learning
Recommender system
3.11 References
[1] Alpaydin, Ethem (2010). Introduction to Machine Learning. MIT Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-262-01243-0.
[2] Fisher R.A. (1936) " The use of multiple measurements
in taxonomic problems, Annals of Eugenics, 7, 179188
[3] Fisher R.A. (1938) " The statistical utilization of multiple
measurements, Annals of Eugenics, 8, 376386
[4] Gnanadesikan, R. (1977) Methods for Statistical Data
Analysis of Multivariate Observations, Wiley. ISBN 0471-30845-5 (p. 8386)
[5] Rao, C.R. (1952) Advanced Statistical Methods in Multivariate Analysis, Wiley. (Section 9c)
[6] Anderson,T.W. (1958) An Introduction to Multivariate
Statistical Analysis, Wiley.
[7] Binder, D.A. (1978) Bayesian cluster analysis,
Biometrika, 65, 3138.
[8] Binder, D.A. (1981) Approximations to Bayesian clustering rules, Biometrika, 68, 275285.
[9] Har-Peled, S., Roth, D., Zimak, D. (2003) Constraint
Classication for Multiclass Classication and Ranking.
In: Becker, B., Thrun, S., Obermayer, K. (Eds) Advances
in Neural Information Processing Systems 15: Proceedings
of the 2002 Conference, MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-02550-7
[10] Peter Mills (2011). Ecient statistical classication of
satellite measurements. International Journal of Remote
Sensing. doi:10.1080/01431161.2010.507795.
3.12 External links

Classier showdown A practical comparison of classication algorithms.
Statistical Pattern Recognition Toolbox for Matlab.
TOOLDIAG Pattern recognition toolbox.
Statistical classication software based on adaptive
kernel density estimation.
PAL Classication suite written in Java.
kNN and Potential energy (Applet), University of
Leicester
scikit-learn a widely used package in python
Weka A java based package with an extensive variety of algorithms.
27
Chapter 4
Cluster analysis
For the supervised learning approach, see Statistical clas- ing and model parameters until the result achieves the desication.
sired properties.
Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of grouping Besides the term clustering, there are a number of terms
with similar meanings, including automatic classication,
numerical taxonomy, botryology (from Greek
grape) and typological analysis. The subtle dierences
are often in the usage of the results: while in data mining, the resulting groups are the matter of interest, in automatic classication the resulting discriminative power
is of interest. This often leads to misunderstandings between researchers coming from the elds of data mining
and machine learning, since they use the same terms and
often the same algorithms, but have dierent goals.
Cluster analysis was originated in anthropology by Driver
and Kroeber in 1932 and introduced to psychology by Zubin in 1938 and Robert Tryon in 1939[1][2] and famously
used by Cattell beginning in 1943[3] for trait theory classication in personality psychology.
The result of a cluster analysis shown as the coloring of the

squares into three clusters.
a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same

group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense
or another) to each other than to those in other groups
(clusters). It is a main task of exploratory data mining, and a common technique for statistical data analysis,
used in many elds, including machine learning, pattern
recognition, image analysis, information retrieval, and
bioinformatics.
Cluster analysis itself is not one specic algorithm, but
the general task to be solved. It can be achieved by various algorithms that dier signicantly in their notion
of what constitutes a cluster and how to eciently nd
them. Popular notions of clusters include groups with
small distances among the cluster members, dense areas of the data space, intervals or particular statistical
distributions. Clustering can therefore be formulated as
a multi-objective optimization problem. The appropriate clustering algorithm and parameter settings (including values such as the distance function to use, a density
threshold or the number of expected clusters) depend on
the individual data set and intended use of the results.
Cluster analysis as such is not an automatic task, but an
iterative process of knowledge discovery or interactive
multi-objective optimization that involves trial and failure. It will often be necessary to modify data preprocess-
4.1 Denition
According to Vladimir Estivill-Castro, the notion of a
cluster cannot be precisely dened, which is one of the
reasons why there are so many clustering algorithms.[4]
There is a common denominator: a group of data objects. However, dierent researchers employ dierent
cluster models, and for each of these cluster models again
dierent algorithms can be given. The notion of a cluster, as found by dierent algorithms, varies signicantly
in its properties. Understanding these cluster models is
key to understanding the dierences between the various
algorithms. Typical cluster models include:
28
Connectivity models: for example hierarchical clustering builds models based on distance connectivity.
Centroid models: for example the k-means algorithm represents each cluster by a single mean vector.
Distribution models: clusters are modeled using statistical distributions, such as multivariate normal
distributions used by the Expectation-maximization
algorithm.
4.2. ALGORITHMS
29
Density models: for example DBSCAN and will only list the most prominent examples of clustering
OPTICS denes clusters as connected dense regions algorithms, as there are possibly over 100 published clusin the data space.
tering algorithms. Not all provide models for their clusters and can thus not easily be categorized. An overview
Subspace models: in Biclustering (also known as of algorithms explained in Wikipedia can be found in the
Co-clustering or two-mode-clustering), clusters are list of statistics algorithms.
modeled with both cluster members and relevant atThere is no objectively correct clustering algorithm,
tributes.
but as it was noted, clustering is in the eye of the
Group models: some algorithms do not provide a beholder.[4] The most appropriate clustering algorithm
rened model for their results and just provide the for a particular problem often needs to be chosen expergrouping information.
imentally, unless there is a mathematical reason to prefer
one cluster model over another. It should be noted that
Graph-based models: a clique, i.e., a subset of nodes
an algorithm that is designed for one kind of model has
in a graph such that every two nodes in the subset are
no chance on a data set that contains a radically dierconnected by an edge can be considered as a protoent kind of model.[4] For example, k-means cannot nd
typical form of cluster. Relaxations of the complete
non-convex clusters.[4]
connectivity requirement (a fraction of the edges can
be missing) are known as quasi-cliques.
4.2.1 Connectivity based clustering (hierA clustering is essentially a set of such clusters, usually
archical clustering)
containing all objects in the data set. Additionally, it may
specify the relationship of the clusters to each other, for Main article: Hierarchical clustering
example a hierarchy of clusters embedded in each other.
Clusterings can be roughly distinguished as:
Connectivity based clustering, also known as hierarchical
clustering, is based on the core idea of objects being
hard clustering: each object belongs to a cluster or
more related to nearby objects than to objects farther
not
away. These algorithms connect objects to form clus soft clustering (also: fuzzy clustering): each object ters based on their distance. A cluster can be described
belongs to each cluster to a certain degree (e.g. a largely by the maximum distance needed to connect parts
of the cluster. At dierent distances, dierent clusters
likelihood of belonging to the cluster)
will form, which can be represented using a dendrogram,
which explains where the common name hierarchical
There are also ner distinctions possible, for example:
clustering comes from: these algorithms do not provide
strict partitioning clustering: here each object be- a single partitioning of the data set, but instead provide
an extensive hierarchy of clusters that merge with each
longs to exactly one cluster
other at certain distances. In a dendrogram, the y-axis
strict partitioning clustering with outliers: objects marks the distance at which the clusters merge, while the
can also belong to no cluster, and are considered objects are placed along the x-axis such that the clusters
don't mix.
outliers.
overlapping clustering (also: alternative clustering, Connectivity based clustering is a whole family of methmulti-view clustering): while usually a hard cluster- ods that dier by the way distances are computed. Apart
from the usual choice of distance functions, the user also
ing, objects may belong to more than one cluster.
needs to decide on the linkage criterion (since a clus hierarchical clustering: objects that belong to a child ter consists of multiple objects, there are multiple candicluster also belong to the parent cluster
dates to compute the distance to) to use. Popular choices
are known as single-linkage clustering (the minimum of
subspace clustering: while an overlapping clusterobject distances), complete linkage clustering (the maxiing, within a uniquely dened subspace, clusters are
mum of object distances) or UPGMA (Unweighted Pair
not expected to overlap.
Group Method with Arithmetic Mean, also known as average linkage clustering). Furthermore, hierarchical clustering can be agglomerative (starting with single elements
4.2 Algorithms
and aggregating them into clusters) or divisive (starting
with the complete data set and dividing it into partitions).
Main category: Data clustering algorithms
These methods will not produce a unique partitioning of
the data set, but a hierarchy from which the user still
Clustering algorithms can be categorized based on their needs to choose appropriate clusters. They are not very
cluster model, as listed above. The following overview robust towards outliers, which will either show up as ad-
30
ditional clusters or even cause other clusters to merge
(known as chaining phenomenon, in particular with
single-linkage clustering). In the general case, the complexity is O(n3 ) , which makes them too slow for large
data sets. For some special cases, optimal ecient methods (of complexity O(n2 ) ) are known: SLINK[5] for
single-linkage and CLINK[6] for complete-linkage clustering. In the data mining community these methods are
recognized as a theoretical foundation of cluster analysis,
but often considered obsolete. They did however provide
inspiration for many later methods such as density based
clustering.
Linkage clustering examples
Single-linkage on Gaussian data. At 35 clusters, the
biggest cluster starts fragmenting into smaller parts,
while before it was still connected to the second
largest due to the single-link eect.
CHAPTER 4. CLUSTER ANALYSIS

prising, as the algorithm optimized cluster centers, not
cluster borders).
K-means has a number of interesting theoretical properties. On the one hand, it partitions the data space
into a structure known as a Voronoi diagram. On the
other hand, it is conceptually close to nearest neighbor
classication, and as such is popular in machine learning. Third, it can be seen as a variation of model based
classication, and Lloyds algorithm as a variation of the
Expectation-maximization algorithm for this model discussed below.
k-Means clustering examples
K-means separates data into Voronoi-cells, which
assumes equal-sized clusters (not adequate here)
K-means cannot represent density-based clusters
4.2.3 Distribution-based clustering
Single-linkage on density-based clusters. 20 clusters

extracted, most of which contain single elements, The clustering model most closely related to statistics is
since linkage clustering does not have a notion of based on distribution models. Clusters can then easily be
noise.
dened as objects belonging most likely to the same distribution. A convenient property of this approach is that
this closely resembles the way articial data sets are gen4.2.2 Centroid-based clustering
erated: by sampling random objects from a distribution.
While the theoretical foundation of these methods is
excellent, they suer from one key problem known as
overtting, unless constraints are put on the model comIn centroid-based clustering, clusters are represented by plexity. A more complex model will usually be able to
a central vector, which may not necessarily be a mem- explain the data better, which makes choosing the approber of the data set. When the number of clusters is xed priate model complexity inherently dicult.
to k, k-means clustering gives a formal denition as an
optimization problem: nd the k cluster centers and as- One prominent method is known as Gaussian mixture
sign the objects to the nearest cluster center, such that the models (using the expectation-maximization algorithm).
Here, the data set is usually modelled with a xed (to
squared distances from the cluster are minimized.
avoid overtting) number of Gaussian distributions that
The optimization problem itself is known to be NP-hard, are initialized randomly and whose parameters are iterand thus the common approach is to search only for ap- atively optimized to t better to the data set. This will
proximate solutions. A particularly well known approxi- converge to a local optimum, so multiple runs may promative method is Lloyds algorithm,[7] often actually reduce dierent results. In order to obtain a hard clustering,
ferred to as "k-means algorithm". It does however only objects are often then assigned to the Gaussian distribund a local optimum, and is commonly run multiple times tion they most likely belong to; for soft clusterings, this is
with dierent random initializations. Variations of k- not necessary.
means often include such optimizations as choosing the
best of multiple runs, but also restricting the centroids to Distribution-based clustering produces complex models
members of the data set (k-medoids), choosing medians for clusters that can capture correlation and dependence
(k-medians clustering), choosing the initial centers less between attributes. However, these algorithms put an exrandomly (K-means++) or allowing a fuzzy cluster as- tra burden on the user: for many real data sets, there may
be no concisely dened mathematical model (e.g. assumsignment (Fuzzy c-means).
ing Gaussian distributions is a rather strong assumption
Most k-means-type algorithms require the number of on the data).
clusters - k - to be specied in advance, which is considered to be one of the biggest drawbacks of these al Expectation-Maximization (EM) clustering examgorithms. Furthermore, the algorithms prefer clusters of
ples
approximately similar size, as they will always assign an
On Gaussian-distributed data, EM works well, since
object to the nearest centroid. This often leads to incorit uses Gaussians for modelling clusters
rectly cut borders in between of clusters (which is not surMain article: k-means clustering
4.2. ALGORITHMS
31
Density-based clusters cannot be modeled using slower than DBSCAN or k-Means.

Gaussian distributions
Density-based clustering examples
4.2.4
Density-based clustering
In density-based clustering,[8] clusters are dened as areas

of higher density than the remainder of the data set. Objects in these sparse areas - that are required to separate
clusters - are usually considered to be noise and border
points.
The most popular[9] density based clustering method is
DBSCAN.[10] In contrast to many newer methods, it
features a well-dened cluster model called densityreachability. Similar to linkage based clustering, it is
based on connecting points within certain distance thresholds. However, it only connects points that satisfy a density criterion, in the original variant dened as a minimum
number of other objects within this radius. A cluster consists of all density-connected objects (which can form a
cluster of an arbitrary shape, in contrast to many other
methods) plus all objects that are within these objects
range. Another interesting property of DBSCAN is that
its complexity is fairly low - it requires a linear number
of range queries on the database - and that it will discover essentially the same results (it is deterministic for
core and noise points, but not for border points) in each
run, therefore there is no need to run it multiple times.
OPTICS[11] is a generalization of DBSCAN that removes
the need to choose an appropriate value for the range parameter , and produces a hierarchical result related to
that of linkage clustering. DeLi-Clu,[12] Density-LinkClustering combines ideas from single-linkage clustering
and OPTICS, eliminating the parameter entirely and offering performance improvements over OPTICS by using
an R-tree index.
The key drawback of DBSCAN and OPTICS is that they
expect some kind of density drop to detect cluster borders. Moreover, they cannot detect intrinsic cluster structures which are prevalent in the majority of real life data.
A variation of DBSCAN, EnDBSCAN,[13] eciently detects such kinds of structures. On data sets with, for example, overlapping Gaussian distributions - a common
use case in articial data - the cluster borders produced
by these algorithms will often look arbitrary, because
the cluster density decreases continuously. On a data set
consisting of mixtures of Gaussians, these algorithms are
nearly always outperformed by methods such as EM clustering that are able to precisely model this kind of data.
Mean-shift is a clustering approach where each object is
moved to the densest area in its vicinity, based on kernel
density estimation. Eventually, objects converge to local
maxima of density. Similar to k-means clustering, these
density attractors can serve as representatives for the
data set, but mean-shift can detect arbitrary-shaped clusters similar to DBSCAN. Due to the expensive iterative
procedure and density estimation, mean-shift is usually
Density-based clustering with DBSCAN.

DBSCAN assumes clusters of similar density, and
may have problems separating nearby clusters
OPTICS is a DBSCAN variant that handles dierent
densities much better
4.2.5 Recent developments

In recent years considerable eort has been put into improving the performance of existing algorithms.[14][15]
Among them are CLARANS (Ng and Han, 1994),[16] and
BIRCH (Zhang et al., 1996).[17] With the recent need to
process larger and larger data sets (also known as big
data), the willingness to trade semantic meaning of the
generated clusters for performance has been increasing.
This led to the development of pre-clustering methods
such as canopy clustering, which can process huge data
sets eciently, but the resulting clusters are merely a
rough pre-partitioning of the data set to then analyze the
partitions with existing slower methods such as k-means
clustering. Various other approaches to clustering have
been tried such as seed based clustering.[18]
For high-dimensional data, many of the existing methods fail due to the curse of dimensionality, which renders particular distance functions problematic in highdimensional spaces. This led to new clustering algorithms
for high-dimensional data that focus on subspace clustering (where only some attributes are used, and cluster
models include the relevant attributes for the cluster) and
correlation clustering that also looks for arbitrary rotated
(correlated) subspace clusters that can be modeled by
giving a correlation of their attributes. Examples for such
clustering algorithms are CLIQUE[19] and SUBCLU.[20]
Ideas from density-based clustering methods (in particular the DBSCAN/OPTICS family of algorithms) have
been adopted to subspace clustering (HiSC,[21] hierarchical subspace clustering and DiSH[22] ) and correlation
clustering (HiCO,[23] hierarchical correlation clustering,
4C[24] using correlation connectivity and ERiC[25] exploring hierarchical density-based correlation clusters).
Several dierent clustering systems based on mutual information have been proposed. One is Marina Meil's
variation of information metric;[26] another provides hierarchical clustering.[27] Using genetic algorithms, a wide
range of dierent t-functions can be optimized, including mutual information.[28] Also message passing algorithms, a recent development in Computer Science and
Statistical Physics, has led to the creation of new types of
clustering algorithms.[29]
32
4.2.6
Other methods
Basic sequential algorithmic scheme (BSAS)
4.3 Evaluation and assessment

Evaluation of clustering results sometimes is referred to
as cluster validation.
There have been several suggestions for a measure of similarity between two clusterings. Such a measure can be
used to compare how well dierent data clustering algorithms perform on a set of data. These measures are
usually tied to the type of criterion being considered in
assessing the quality of a clustering method.
4.3.1
Internal evaluation
When a clustering result is evaluated based on the data

that was clustered itself, this is called internal evaluation.
These methods usually assign the best score to the algorithm that produces clusters with high similarity within a
cluster and low similarity between clusters. One drawback of using internal criteria in cluster evaluation is that
high scores on an internal measure do not necessarily result in eective information retrieval applications.[30] Additionally, this evaluation is biased towards algorithms
that use the same cluster model. For example k-Means
clustering naturally optimizes object distances, and a
distance-based internal criterion will likely overrate the
resulting clustering.
Therefore, the internal evaluation measures are best
suited to get some insight into situations where one algorithm performs better than another, but this shall not
imply that one algorithm produces more valid results than
another.[4] Validity as measured by such an index depends
on the claim that this kind of structure exists in the data
set. An algorithm designed for some kind of models has
no chance if the data set contains a radically dierent set
of models, or if the evaluation measures a radically different criterion.[4] For example, k-means clustering can
only nd convex clusters, and many evaluation indexes
assume convex clusters. On a data set with non-convex
clusters neither the use of k-means, nor of an evaluation
criterion that assumes convexity, is sound.
The following methods can be used to assess the quality
of clustering algorithms based on internal criterion:
DaviesBouldin index
The DaviesBouldin index can be calculated by
the following formula:
)
(
n
+
DB = n1 i=1 maxj=i d(ci i ,cjj)
where n is the number of clusters, cx is the
centroid of cluster x , x is the average dis-
tance of all elements in cluster x to centroid

cx , and d(ci , cj ) is the distance between centroids ci and cj . Since algorithms that produce clusters with low intra-cluster distances
(high intra-cluster similarity) and high intercluster distances (low inter-cluster similarity)
will have a low DaviesBouldin index, the clustering algorithm that produces a collection of
clusters with the smallest DaviesBouldin index is considered the best algorithm based on
this criterion.
Dunn index
The Dunn index aims to identify dense and
well-separated clusters. It is dened as the ratio
between the minimal inter-cluster distance to
maximal intra-cluster distance. For each cluster partition, the Dunn index can be calculated
by the following formula:[31]
D=
min1i<jn d(i,j)
max1kn d (k)
where d(i,j) represents the distance between

clusters i and j, and d '(k) measures the intracluster distance of cluster k. The inter-cluster
distance d(i,j) between two clusters may be
any number of distance measures, such as the
distance between the centroids of the clusters.
Similarly, the intra-cluster distance d '(k) may
be measured in a variety ways, such as the maximal distance between any pair of elements in
cluster k. Since internal criterion seek clusters
with high intra-cluster similarity and low intercluster similarity, algorithms that produce clusters with high Dunn index are more desirable.
Silhouette coecient
The silhouette coecient contrasts the average
distance to elements in the same cluster with
the average distance to elements in other clusters. Objects with a high silhouette value are
considered well clustered, objects with a low
value may be outliers. This index works well
with k-means clustering, and is also used to determine the optimal number of clusters.
4.3.2 External evaluation

In external evaluation, clustering results are evaluated
based on data that was not used for clustering, such
as known class labels and external benchmarks. Such
benchmarks consist of a set of pre-classied items, and
these sets are often created by human (experts). Thus, the
benchmark sets can be thought of as a gold standard for
evaluation. These types of evaluation methods measure
4.3. EVALUATION AND ASSESSMENT

how close the clustering is to the predetermined benchmark classes. However, it has recently been discussed
whether this is adequate for real data, or only on synthetic data sets with a factual ground truth, since classes
can contain internal structure, the attributes present may
not allow separation of clusters or the classes may contain
anomalies.[32] Additionally, from a knowledge discovery
point of view, the reproduction of known knowledge may
not necessarily be the intended result.[32]
A number of measures are adapted from variants used
to evaluate classication tasks. In place of counting the
number of times a class was correctly assigned to a single data point (known as true positives), such pair counting metrics assess whether each pair of data points that
is truly in the same cluster is predicted to be in the same
cluster.
Some of the measures of quality of a cluster algorithm
using external criterion include:
Rand measure (William M. Rand 1971)[33]
The Rand index computes how similar the clusters (returned by the clustering algorithm) are
to the benchmark classications. One can also
view the Rand index as a measure of the percentage of correct decisions made by the algorithm. It can be computed using the following
formula:
RI =
T P +T N
T P +F P +F N +T N
where T P is the number of true positives, T N

is the number of true negatives, F P is the number of false positives, and F N is the number
of false negatives. One issue with the Rand index is that false positives and false negatives are
equally weighted. This may be an undesirable
characteristic for some clustering applications.
The F-measure addresses this concern, as does
the chance-corrected adjusted Rand index.
F-measure
The F-measure can be used to balance the contribution of false negatives by weighting recall
through a parameter 0 . Let precision and
recall be dened as follows:
P =
TP
T P +F P
R=
TP
T P +F N
where P is the precision rate and R is the recall

rate. We can calculate the F-measure by using
the following formula:[30]
F =
( 2 +1)P R
2 P +R
Notice that when = 0 , F0 = P . In other

words, recall has no impact on the F-measure
33
when = 0 , and increasing allocates an increasing amount of weight to recall in the nal
F-measure.
Jaccard index
The Jaccard index is used to quantify the similarity between two datasets. The Jaccard index
takes on a value between 0 and 1. An index of
1 means that the two dataset are identical, and
an index of 0 indicates that the datasets have
no common elements. The Jaccard index is dened by the following formula:
J(A, B) =
|AB|
|AB|
TP
T P +F P +F N
This is simply the number of unique elements

common to both sets divided by the total number of unique elements in both sets.
FowlkesMallows index (E. B. Fowlkes & C. L.
Mallows 1983)[34]
The Fowlkes-Mallows index computes the similarity between the clusters returned by the
clustering algorithm and the benchmark classications. The higher the value of the FowlkesMallows index the more similar the clusters
and the benchmark classications are. It can
be computed using the following formula:
TP
P
F M = T PT+F
P T P +F N
where T P is the number of true positives, F P
is the number of false positives, and F N is the
number of false negatives. The F M index is
the geometric mean of the precision and recall
P and R , while the F-measure is their harmonic mean.[35] Moreover, precision and recall
are also known as Wallaces indices B I and
B II .[36]
The Mutual Information is an information theoretic measure of how much information is shared
between a clustering and a ground-truth classication that can detect a non-linear similarity between
two clusterings. Adjusted mutual information is the
corrected-for-chance variant of this that has a reduced bias for varying cluster numbers.
Confusion matrix
A confusion matrix can be used to quickly visualize the results of a classication (or clustering) algorithm. It shows how dierent a cluster
is from the gold standard cluster.
34
4.4 Applications
4.5 See also
4.5.1 Specialized types of cluster analysis
Others
Social science
Computer science
World wide web
Business and marketing
Medicine
Biology, computational biology and bioinformatics
Plant and animal ecologycluster analysis is used to
describe and to make spatial and temporal comparisons of communities (assemblages) of organisms in heterogeneous environments; it is
also used in plant systematics to generate articial phylogenies or clusters of organisms (individuals) at the species, genus or higher level that
share a number of attributes
Transcriptomicsclustering is used to build groups
of genes with related expression patterns (also
known as coexpressed genes). Often such
groups contain functionally related proteins,
such as enzymes for a specic pathway, or genes
that are co-regulated. High throughput experiments using expressed sequence tags (ESTs) Medical imaging
or DNA microarrays can be a powerful tool
for genome annotation, a general aspect of
genomics.
Sequence analysisclustering is used to group homologous sequences into gene families. This is a
very important concept in bioinformatics, and
evolutionary biology in general. See evolution
by gene duplication.
High-throughput genotyping platformsclustering algorithms are used to automatically assign genotypes.
Human genetic clusteringThe similarity of genetic
data is used in clustering to infer population
structures.
On PET scans, cluster analysis can be used to
dierentiate between dierent types of tissue
and blood in a three-dimensional image. In this
application, actual position does not matter,
but the voxel intensity is considered as a vector,
with a dimension for each image that was taken
over time. This technique allows, for example,
accurate measurement of the rate a radioactive
tracer is delivered to the area of interest,
without a separate sampling of arterial blood,
an intrusive technique that is most common
today.
Market research
Social network analysis
Software evolution
Analysis of antimicrobial activityCluster

analysis
can be used to analyse patterns of antibiotic
resistance, to classify antimicrobial compounds
according to their mechanism of action, to classify antibiotics according to their antibacterial
activity.
IMRT segmentationClustering can be used to divide
a uence map into distinct regions for conversion into deliverable elds in MLC-based Radiation Therapy.
Crime analysis
4.6. REFERENCES
Clustering high-dimensional data
Conceptual clustering
Consensus clustering
Constrained clustering
Data stream clustering
Sequence clustering
Spectral clustering
4.5.2
Techniques used in cluster analysis
Articial neural network (ANN)

Nearest neighbor search
Neighbourhood components analysis
Latent class analysis
4.5.3
Data projection and preprocessing
Dimension reduction
Principal component analysis
Multidimensional scaling
4.5.4
Other
Cluster-weighted modeling
Curse of dimensionality
Determining the number of clusters in a data set
Parallel coordinates
Structured data analysis
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4.7 External links

Data Mining at DMOZ
Chapter 5
Anomaly detection
In data mining, anomaly detection (or outlier detec- tically signicant increase in accuracy.[4][5]
tion) is the identication of items, events or observations
which do not conform to an expected pattern or other
items in a dataset.[1] Typically the anomalous items will
translate to some kind of problem such as bank fraud, a 5.2 Popular techniques
structural defect, medical problems or nding errors in
text. Anomalies are also referred to as outliers, novelties, Several anomaly detection techniques have been proposed in literature. Some of the popular techniques are:
noise, deviations and exceptions.[2]
In particular in the context of abuse and network intrusion detection, the interesting objects are often not rare
objects, but unexpected bursts in activity. This pattern
does not adhere to the common statistical denition of an
outlier as a rare object, and many outlier detection methods (in particular unsupervised methods) will fail on such
data, unless it has been aggregated appropriately. Instead,
a cluster analysis algorithm may be able to detect the micro clusters formed by these patterns.[3]
Three broad categories of anomaly detection techniques
exist. Unsupervised anomaly detection techniques detect anomalies in an unlabeled test data set under the assumption that the majority of the instances in the data set
are normal by looking for instances that seem to t least
to the remainder of the data set. Supervised anomaly
detection techniques require a data set that has been labeled as normal and abnormal and involves training a
classier (the key dierence to many other statistical classication problems is the inherent unbalanced nature of
outlier detection). Semi-supervised anomaly detection
techniques construct a model representing normal behavior from a given normal training data set, and then testing
the likelihood of a test instance to be generated by the
learnt model.
5.1 Applications
Anomaly detection is applicable in a variety of domains,
such as intrusion detection, fraud detection, fault detection, system health monitoring, event detection in sensor
networks, and detecting Eco-system disturbances. It is
often used in preprocessing to remove anomalous data
from the dataset. In supervised learning, removing the
anomalous data from the dataset often results in a statis-
Density-based techniques (k-nearest neighbor,[6][7][8] local outlier factor,[9] and many more
variations of this concept[10] ).
Subspace-[11] and correlation-based [12] outlier detection for high-dimensional data.[13]
One class support vector machines.[14]
Replicator neural networks.
Cluster analysis based outlier detection.[15]
Deviations from association rules and frequent itemsets.
Fuzzy logic based outlier detection.
Ensemble techniques, using feature bagging,[16][17]
score normalization[18][19] and dierent sources of
diversity.[20][21]
5.3 Application to data security

Anomaly detection was proposed for Intrusion detection
systems (IDS) by Dorothy Denning in 1986.[22] Anomaly
detection for IDS is normally accomplished with thresholds and statistics, but can also be done with Soft computing, and inductive learning.[23] Types of statistics proposed by 1999 included proles of users, workstations,
networks, remote hosts, groups of users, and programs
based on frequencies, means, variances, covariances, and
standard deviations.[24] The counterpart of anomaly detection in intrusion detection is misuse detection.
37
38
5.4 Software
ELKI is an open-source Java data mining toolkit that
contains several anomaly detection algorithms, as
well as index acceleration for them.
5.5 See also

Outliers in statistics
Change detection
Novelty detection
5.6 References
[1] Chandola, V.; Banerjee, A.; Kumar, V. (2009).
Anomaly detection: A survey (PDF). ACM Computing
Surveys 41 (3): 1. doi:10.1145/1541880.1541882.
CHAPTER 5. ANOMALY DETECTION
[9] Breunig, M. M.; Kriegel, H.-P.; Ng, R. T.; Sander, J.

(2000). LOF: Identifying Density-based Local Outliers
(PDF). Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data. SIGMOD:
93104. doi:10.1145/335191.335388. ISBN 1-58113217-4.
[10] Schubert, E.; Zimek, A.; Kriegel, H. -P. (2012). Local
outlier detection reconsidered: A generalized view on locality with applications to spatial, video, and network outlier detection. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.
doi:10.1007/s10618-012-0300-z.
[11] Kriegel, H. P.; Krger, P.; Schubert, E.; Zimek, A.
(2009). Outlier Detection in Axis-Parallel Subspaces of
High Dimensional Data. Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5476. p. 831. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-01307-2_86.
ISBN 978-3-642-01306-5.
[12] Kriegel, H. P.; Kroger, P.; Schubert, E.; Zimek, A.
(2012). Outlier Detection in Arbitrarily Oriented Subspaces. 2012 IEEE 12th International Conference on Data
Mining. p. 379. doi:10.1109/ICDM.2012.21. ISBN
978-1-4673-4649-8.
[2] Hodge, V. J.; Austin, J. (2004). A Survey of Outlier Detection Methodologies (PDF). Articial Intelligence Review 22 (2): 85. doi:10.1007/s10462-004-4304-y.
[13] Zimek, A.; Schubert, E.; Kriegel, H.-P. (2012). A survey on unsupervised outlier detection in high-dimensional
numerical data. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining 5
(5): 363387. doi:10.1002/sam.11161.
[3] Dokas, Paul; Ertoz, Levent; Kumar, Vipin; Lazarevic,

Aleksandar; Srivastava, Jaideep; Tan, Pang-Ning (2002).
Data mining for network intrusion detection (PDF).
Proceedings NSF Workshop on Next Generation Data Mining.
[14] Schlkopf, B.; Platt, J. C.; Shawe-Taylor, J.; Smola, A. J.;

Williamson, R. C. (2001). Estimating the Support of a
High-Dimensional Distribution. Neural Computation 13
(7): 1443. doi:10.1162/089976601750264965.
[4] Tomek, Ivan (1976).

An Experiment with the
Edited Nearest-Neighbor Rule.
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 6 (6): 448.
doi:10.1109/TSMC.1976.4309523.
[5] Smith, M. R.; Martinez, T. (2011). Improving classication accuracy by identifying and removing instances
that should be misclassied. The 2011 International
Joint Conference on Neural Networks (PDF). p. 2690.
doi:10.1109/IJCNN.2011.6033571. ISBN 978-1-42449635-8.
[6] Knorr, E. M.; Ng, R. T.; Tucakov, V. (2000). Distancebased outliers: Algorithms and applications. The VLDB
Journal the International Journal on Very Large Data
Bases 8 (34): 237. doi:10.1007/s007780050006.
[7] Ramaswamy, S.; Rastogi, R.; Shim, K. (2000). Ecient
algorithms for mining outliers from large data sets. Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data - SIGMOD '00. p. 427.
doi:10.1145/342009.335437. ISBN 1581132174.
[8] Angiulli, F.; Pizzuti, C. (2002). Fast Outlier Detection in
High Dimensional Spaces. Principles of Data Mining and
Knowledge Discovery. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2431. p. 15. doi:10.1007/3-540-45681-3_2. ISBN
978-3-540-44037-6.
[15] He, Z.; Xu, X.; Deng, S. (2003). Discovering clusterbased local outliers. Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (9
10): 1641. doi:10.1016/S0167-8655(03)00003-5.
[16] Lazarevic, A.; Kumar, V. (2005). Feature bagging for
outlier detection. Proc. 11th ACM SIGKDD international
conference on Knowledge Discovery in Data Mining: 157
166. doi:10.1145/1081870.1081891.
[17] Nguyen, H. V.; Ang, H. H.; Gopalkrishnan, V. (2010).
Mining Outliers with Ensemble of Heterogeneous Detectors
on Random Subspaces. Database Systems for Advanced
Applications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5981.
p. 368. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-12026-8_29. ISBN 9783-642-12025-1.
[18] Kriegel, H. P.; Krger, P.; Schubert, E.; Zimek,
A. (2011). Interpreting and Unifying Outlier Scores
(PDF). Proceedings of the 2011 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining.
pp.
1324.
doi:10.1137/1.9781611972818.2. ISBN 978-0-89871992-5.
[19] Schubert, E.; Wojdanowski, R.; Zimek, A.; Kriegel, H.
P. (2012). On Evaluation of Outlier Rankings and Outlier Scores (PDF). Proceedings of the 2012 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining. pp. 10471058.
doi:10.1137/1.9781611972825.90. ISBN 978-1-61197232-0.
5.6. REFERENCES
[20] Zimek, A.; Campello, R. J. G. B.; Sander, J. R.

(2014). Ensembles for unsupervised outlier detection. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter 15: 11.
doi:10.1145/2594473.2594476.
[21] Zimek, A.; Campello, R. J. G. B.; Sander, J. R. (2014).
Data perturbation for outlier detection ensembles. Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Scientic and Statistical Database Management - SSDBM
'14. p. 1. doi:10.1145/2618243.2618257. ISBN
9781450327220.
[22] Denning, D. E. (1987).
An Intrusion-Detection
Model (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2): 222. doi:10.1109/TSE.1987.232894. CiteSeerX:
10.1.1.102.5127.
[23] Teng, H. S.; Chen, K.; Lu, S. C. (1990). Adaptive realtime anomaly detection using inductively generated sequential patterns (PDF). Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy: 278284. doi:10.1109/RISP.1990.63857. ISBN
0-8186-2060-9.
[24] Jones, Anita K.; Sielken, Robert S. (1999). Computer
System Intrusion Detection: A Survey. Technical Report,
Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, VA. CiteSeerX: 10.1.1.24.7802.
39
Chapter 6

Association rule learning is a popular and well researched method for discovering interesting relations between variables in large databases. It is intended to identify strong rules discovered in databases using dierent
measures of interestingness.[1] Based on the concept of
strong rules, Rakesh Agrawal et al.[2] introduced association rules for discovering regularities between products
in large-scale transaction data recorded by point-of-sale
(POS) systems in supermarkets. For example, the rule
{onions, potatoes} {burger} found in the sales data
of a supermarket would indicate that if a customer buys
onions and potatoes together, they are likely to also buy
hamburger meat. Such information can be used as the basis for decisions about marketing activities such as, e.g.,
promotional pricing or product placements. In addition
to the above example from market basket analysis association rules are employed today in many application
areas including Web usage mining, intrusion detection,
Continuous production, and bioinformatics. In contrast
with sequence mining, association rule learning typically
does not consider the order of items either within a transaction or across transactions.
bread are bought, customers also buy milk.

Note: this example is extremely small. In practical applications, a rule needs a support of several hundred transactions before it can be considered statistically signicant,
and datasets often contain thousands or millions of transactions.
6.2 Useful Concepts

To select interesting rules from the set of all possible
rules, constraints on various measures of signicance and
interest can be used. The best-known constraints are minimum thresholds on support and condence.
6.1 Denition
Following the original denition by Agrawal et al.[2] the
problem of association rule mining is dened as: Let
I = {i1 , i2 , . . . , in } be a set of n binary attributes called
items. Let D = {t1 , t2 , . . . , tm } be a set of transactions
called the database. Each transaction in D has a unique
transaction ID and contains a subset of the items in I .
A rule is dened as an implication of the form X Y
where X, Y I and X Y = . The sets of items (for
short itemsets) X and Y are called antecedent (left-handside or LHS) and consequent (right-hand-side or RHS) of
the rule respectively.
To illustrate the concepts, we use a small example from
the supermarket domain. The set of items is I =
{milk, bread, butter, beer, diapers} and in the table to the
right is shown a small database containing the items (1
codes presence and 0 codes absence of an item in a transaction). An example rule for the supermarket could be
{butter, bread} {milk} meaning that if butter and
40
The support supp(X) of an itemset X is dened

as the proportion of transactions in the database
which contain the itemset. In the example database,
the itemset {milk, bread, butter} has a support of
1/5 = 0.2 since it occurs in 20% of all transactions
(1 out of 5 transactions). The argument of supp()
is a set of preconditions, and thus becomes more restrictive as it grows (instead of more inclusive).
The condence of a rule is dened as conf(X
Y ) = supp(X Y )/supp(X) . For example, the
rule {butter, bread} {milk} has a condence of
0.2/0.2 = 1.0 in the database, which means that
for 100% of the transactions containing butter and
bread the rule is correct (100% of the times a customer buys butter and bread, milk is bought as well).
Note that supp(X Y ) means the support of the
union of the items in X and Y. This is somewhat confusing since we normally think in terms of probabilities of events and not sets of items. We can rewrite
supp(X Y ) as the joint probability P (EX EY )
, where EX and EY are the events that a transaction contains itemset X or Y , respectively.[3] Thus
condence can be interpreted as an estimate of the
conditional probability P (EY |EX ) , the probability
of nding the RHS of the rule in transactions under
the condition that these transactions also contain the
LHS.[4]
6.4. HISTORY
41
The lift of a rule is dened as lift(X Y ) =

supp(XY )
supp(X)supp(Y ) or the ratio of the observed support to that expected if X and Y were independent.
The rule {milk, bread} {butter} has a lift of
0.2
0.40.4 = 1.25 .
combinations). The set of possible itemsets is the power

set over I and has size 2n 1 (excluding the empty
set which is not a valid itemset). Although the size
of the powerset grows exponentially in the number of
items n in I , ecient search is possible using the
downward-closure property of support[2][5] (also called
[6]
The conviction of a rule is dened as conv(X anti-monotonicity ) which guarantees that for a frequent
1supp(Y )
itemset, all its subsets are also frequent and thus for an
Y ) = 1conf(XY
) . The rule {milk, bread}
infrequent itemset, all its supersets must also be infre{butter} has a conviction of 10.4
1.5 = 1.2 , and quent. Exploiting this property, ecient algorithms (e.g.,
can be interpreted as the ratio of the expected freApriori[7] and Eclat[8] ) can nd all frequent itemsets.
quency that X occurs without Y (that is to say, the
frequency that the rule makes an incorrect prediction) if X and Y were independent divided by the
observed frequency of incorrect predictions. In this 6.4 History
example, the conviction value of 1.2 shows that the
rule {milk, bread} {butter} would be incorrect The concept of association rules was popularised particu20% more often (1.2 times as often) if the associa- larly due to the 1993 article of Agrawal et al.,[2] which has
acquired more than 6000 citations according to Google
tion between X and Y was purely random chance.
Scholar, as of March 2008, and is thus one of the most
cited papers in the Data Mining eld. However, it is possible that what is now called association rules is similar
6.3 Process
to what appears in the 1966 paper[9] on GUHA, a general
data mining method developed by Petr Hjek et al.[10]
6.5 Alternative measures of interestingness

In addition to condence, other measures of interestingness for rules have been proposed. Some popular measures are:
All-condence[11]
Collective strength[12]
Frequent itemset lattice, where the color of the box indicates how
many transactions contain the combination of items. Note that
lower levels of the lattice can contain at most the minimum number of their parents items; e.g. {ac} can have only at most
min(a, c) items. This is called the downward-closure property.[2]
Conviction[13]
Leverage[14]
Lift (originally called interest)[15]

Association rules are usually required to satisfy a userspecied minimum support and a user-specied miniA denition of these measures can be found here. Sevmum condence at the same time. Association rule general more measures are presented and compared by Tan
eration is usually split up into two separate steps:
et al.[16] Looking for techniques that can model what the
user has known (and using these models as interestingness
1. First, minimum support is applied to nd all frequent
measures) is currently an active research trend under the
itemsets in a database.
name of Subjective Interestingness.
2. Second, these frequent itemsets and the minimum
condence constraint are used to form rules.
6.6 Statistically sound associations
While the second step is straightforward, the rst step

needs more attention.
One limitation of the standard approach to discovering
Finding all frequent itemsets in a database is dicult associations is that by searching massive numbers of possince it involves searching all possible itemsets (item sible associations to look for collections of items that
42
CHAPTER 6. ASSOCIATION RULE LEARNING
appear to be associated, there is a large risk of nding many spurious associations. These are collections
of items that co-occur with unexpected frequency in the
data, but only do so by chance. For example, suppose we are considering a collection of 10,000 items
and looking for rules containing two items in the lefthand-side and 1 item in the right-hand-side. There are
approximately 1,000,000,000,000 such rules. If we apply a statistical test for independence with a signicance
level of 0.05 it means there is only a 5% chance of accepting a rule if there is no association. If we assume
there are no associations, we should nonetheless expect
to nd 50,000,000,000 rules. Statistically sound association discovery[17][18] controls this risk, in most cases reducing the risk of nding any spurious associations to a
user-specied signicance level.
6.7 Algorithms
Many algorithms for generating association rules were
presented over time.
6.7.3 FP-growth algorithm

FP stands for frequent pattern.
In the rst pass, the algorithm counts occurrence of items
(attribute-value pairs) in the dataset, and stores them to
'header table'. In the second pass, it builds the FP-tree
structure by inserting instances. Items in each instance
have to be sorted by descending order of their frequency
in the dataset, so that the tree can be processed quickly.
Items in each instance that do not meet minimum coverage threshold are discarded. If many instances share most
frequent items, FP-tree provides high compression close
to tree root.
Recursive processing of this compressed version of main
dataset grows large item sets directly, instead of generating candidate items and testing them against the entire
database. Growth starts from the bottom of the header
table (having longest branches), by nding all instances
matching given condition. New tree is created, with
counts projected from the original tree corresponding to
the set of instances that are conditional on the attribute,
with each node getting sum of its children counts. Recursive growth ends when no individual items conditional on
the attribute meet minimum support threshold, and processing continues on the remaining header items of the
original FP-tree.
Some well known algorithms are Apriori, Eclat and FPGrowth, but they only do half the job, since they are algorithms for mining frequent itemsets. Another step needs
to be done after to generate rules from frequent itemsets
found in a database.
Once the recursive process has completed, all large item
sets with minimum coverage have been found, and association rule creation begins.[19]
6.7.1
Apriori algorithm
Main article: Apriori algorithm
6.7.4 Others
Apriori[7] is the best-known algorithm to mine association rules. It uses a breadth-rst search strategy to count
the support of itemsets and uses a candidate generation
function which exploits the downward closure property
of support.
AprioriDP
6.7.2
Eclat algorithm
Eclat[8] (alt. ECLAT, stands for Equivalence Class Transformation) is a depth-rst search algorithm using set intersection. It is a naturally elegant algorithm suitable for
both sequential as well as parallel execution with locality enhancing properties. It was rst introduced by Zaki,
Parthasarathy, Li and Ogihara in a series of papers written in 1997.
AprioriDP[20] utilizes Dynamic Programming in Frequent itemset mining. The working principle is to eliminate the candidate generation like FP-tree, but it stores
support count in specialized data structure instead of tree.
Context Based Association Rule Mining Algorithm
Main article: Context Based Association Rules
CBPNARM is the newly developed algorithm which is
developed in 2013 to mine association rules on the basis
of context. It uses context variable on the basis of which
the support of an itemset is changed on the basis of which
the rules are nally populated to the rule set.
Mohammed Javeed Zaki, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Wei

Li: A Localized Algorithm for Parallel Association Mining. SPAA 1997: 321-330
Node-set-based algorithms
Mohammed Javeed Zaki, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Mitsunori Ogihara, Wei Li: Parallel Algorithms for Discov- FIN,[21] PrePost [22] and PPV [23] are three algorithms
ery of Association Rules. Data Min. Knowl. Discov. based on node sets. They use nodes in a coding FP-tree to
represent itemsets, and employ a depth-rst search strat1(4): 343-373 (1997)
6.9. OTHER TYPES OF ASSOCIATION MINING
43
egy to discovery frequent itemsets using intersection of

node sets.
6.9 Other types of association mining
GUHA procedure ASSOC
Multi-Relation Association Rules: Multi-Relation Association Rules (MRAR) is a new class of association
rules which in contrast to primitive, simple and even
multi-relational association rules (that are usually extracted from multi-relational databases), each rule item
consists of one entity but several relations. These relations indicate indirect relationship between the entities.
Consider the following MRAR where the rst item consists of three relations live in, nearby and humid: Those
who live in a place which is near by a city with humid
climate type and also are younger than 20 -> their health
condition is good. Such association rules are extractable
from RDBMS data or semantic web data.[30]
GUHA is a general method for exploratory data analysis that has theoretical foundations in observational calculi.[24]
The ASSOC procedure[25] is a GUHA method which

mines for generalized association rules using fast
bitstrings operations. The association rules mined by this
method are more general than those output by apriori, for
example items can be connected both with conjunction
and disjunctions and the relation between antecedent and
consequent of the rule is not restricted to setting minimum support and condence as in apriori: an arbitrary
combination of supported interest measures can be used. Context Based Association Rules is a form of association rule. Context Based Association Rules claims
more accuracy in association rule mining by considering
a hidden variable named context variable which changes
OPUS search
the nal set of association rules depending upon the value
of context variables. For example the baskets orientation
OPUS is an ecient algorithm for rule discovery that, in market basket analysis reects an odd pattern in the
in contrast to most alternatives, does not require either early days of month.This might be because of abnormal
monotone or anti-monotone constraints such as mini- context i.e. salary is drawn at the start of the month [31]
mum support.[26] Initially used to nd rules for a xed Contrast set learning is a form of associative learning.
consequent[26][27] it has subsequently been extended to Contrast set learners use rules that dier meaningfully
nd rules with any item as a consequent.[28] OPUS search in their distribution across subsets.[32][33]
is the core technology in the popular Magnum Opus asWeighted class learning is another form of associative
sociation discovery system.
learning in which weight may be assigned to classes to
give focus to a particular issue of concern for the consumer of the data mining results.
6.8 Lore
A famous story about association rule mining is the beer
and diaper story. A purported survey of behavior of supermarket shoppers discovered that customers (presumably young men) who buy diapers tend also to buy beer.
This anecdote became popular as an example of how unexpected association rules might be found from everyday
data. There are varying opinions as to how much of the
story is true.[29] Daniel Powers says:[29]
In 1992, Thomas Blischok, manager of a

retail consulting group at Teradata, and his sta
prepared an analysis of 1.2 million market baskets from about 25 Osco Drug stores. Database
queries were developed to identify anities.
The analysis did discover that between 5:00
and 7:00 p.m. that consumers bought beer and
diapers. Osco managers did NOT exploit the
beer and diapers relationship by moving the
products closer together on the shelves.
High-order pattern discovery facilitate the capture of

high-order (polythetic) patterns or event associations that
are intrinsic to complex real-world data. [34]
K-optimal pattern discovery provides an alternative to
the standard approach to association rule learning that requires that each pattern appear frequently in the data.
Approximate Frequent Itemset mining is a relaxed version of Frequent Itemset mining that allows some of the
items in some of the rows to be 0.[35]
Generalized Association Rules hierarchical taxonomy
(concept hierarchy)
Quantitative Association Rules categorical and quantitative data [36]
Interval Data Association Rules e.g. partition the age
into 5-year-increment ranged
Maximal Association Rules
Sequential pattern mining discovers subsequences that
are common to more than minsup sequences in a sequence database, where minsup is set by the user. A sequence is an ordered list of transactions.[37]
44
Sequential Rules discovering relationships between [9] Hjek, Petr; Havel, Ivan; Chytil, Metodj; The GUHA
method of automatic hypotheses determination, Computitems while considering the time ordering. It is genering 1 (1966) 293-308
ally applied on a sequence database. For example, a sequential rule found in database of sequences of customer
[10] Hjek, Petr; Feglar, Tomas; Rauch, Jan; and Coufal,
transactions can be that customers who bought a comDavid; The GUHA method, data preprocessing and minputer and CD-Roms, later bought a webcam, with a given
ing, Database Support for Data Mining Applications,
condence and support.
Springer, 2004, ISBN 978-3-540-22479-2
Warmr is shipped as part of the ACE data mining suite. [11] Omiecinski, Edward R.; Alternative interest measures for
It allows association rule learning for rst order relational
mining associations in databases, IEEE Transactions on
rules.[38]
Knowledge and Data Engineering, 15(1):57-69, Jan/Feb
2003
6.10 See also

Sequence mining
Production system
6.11 References
[1] Piatetsky-Shapiro, Gregory (1991), Discovery, analysis,
and presentation of strong rules, in Piatetsky-Shapiro,
Gregory; and Frawley, William J.; eds., Knowledge Discovery in Databases, AAAI/MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
[2] Agrawal, R.; Imieliski, T.; Swami, A. (1993). Mining
association rules between sets of items in large databases.
Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data - SIGMOD '93. p. 207.
doi:10.1145/170035.170072. ISBN 0897915925.
[3] Michael Hahsler (2015). A Probabilistic Comparison
of Commonly Used Interest Measures for Association
Rules. http://michael.hahsler.net/research/association_
rules/measures.html
[4] Hipp, J.; Gntzer, U.; Nakhaeizadeh, G. (2000). Algorithms for association rule mining --- a general survey and
comparison. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter 2:
58. doi:10.1145/360402.360421.
[5] Tan, Pang-Ning; Michael, Steinbach; Kumar, Vipin
(2005). Chapter 6. Association Analysis: Basic Concepts and Algorithms (PDF). Introduction to Data Mining. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-321-32136-7.
[6] Pei, Jian; Han, Jiawei; and Lakshmanan, Laks V. S.; Mining frequent itemsets with convertible constraints, in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Data Engineering, April 26, 2001, Heidelberg, Germany, 2001,
pages 433-442
[7] Agrawal, Rakesh; and Srikant, Ramakrishnan; Fast algorithms for mining association rules in large databases, in
Bocca, Jorge B.; Jarke, Matthias; and Zaniolo, Carlo; editors, Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on
Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Santiago, Chile, September 1994, pages 487-499
[8] Zaki, M. J. (2000). Scalable algorithms for association
mining. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 12 (3): 372390. doi:10.1109/69.846291.
[12] Aggarwal, Charu C.; and Yu, Philip S.; A new framework
for itemset generation, in PODS 98, Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, Seattle, WA, USA, 1998, pages
18-24
[13] Brin, Sergey; Motwani, Rajeev; Ullman, Jerey D.; and
Tsur, Shalom; Dynamic itemset counting and implication
rules for market basket data, in SIGMOD 1997, Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on
Management of Data (SIGMOD 1997), Tucson, Arizona,
USA, May 1997, pp. 255-264
[14] Piatetsky-Shapiro, Gregory; Discovery, analysis, and
presentation of strong rules, Knowledge Discovery in
Databases, 1991, pp. 229-248
[15] Brin, Sergey; Motwani, Rajeev; Ullman, Jerey D.; and
Tsur, Shalom; Dynamic itemset counting and implication
rules for market basket data, in SIGMOD 1997, Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on
Management of Data (SIGMOD 1997), Tucson, Arizona,
USA, May 1997, pp. 265-276
[16] Tan, Pang-Ning; Kumar, Vipin; and Srivastava, Jaideep;
Selecting the right objective measure for association analysis, Information Systems, 29(4):293-313, 2004
[17] Webb, Georey I. (2007); Discovering Signicant Patterns, Machine Learning 68(1), Netherlands: Springer,
pp. 1-33 online access
[18] Gionis, Aristides; Mannila, Heikki; Mielikinen, Taneli;
and Tsaparas, Panayiotis; Assessing Data Mining Results
via Swap Randomization, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), Volume 1, Issue 3
(December 2007), Article No. 14
[19] Witten, Frank, Hall: Data mining practical machine
learning tools and techniques, 3rd edition
[20] D. Bhalodiya, K. M. Patel and C. Patel. An Ecient way to Find Frequent Pattern with Dynamic Programming Approach . NIRMA UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING, NUiCONE-2013, 28-30 NOVEMBER, 2013.
[21] Z. H. Deng and S. L. Lv. Fast mining frequent itemsets using Nodesets.. Expert Systems with Applications, 41(10):
45054512, 2014.
[22] Z. H. Deng, Z. Wang,and J. Jiang. A New Algorithm for
Fast Mining Frequent Itemsets Using N-Lists . SCIENCE
CHINA Information Sciences, 55 (9): 2008 - 2030, 2012.
45
[23] Z. H. Deng and Z. Wang. A New Fast Vertical Method for

Mining Frequent Patterns . International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems, 3(6): 733 - 744, 2010.
[38] Warmr: a data mining tool for chemical data.. J Comput Aided Mol Des 15 (2): 17381. Feb 2001. PMID
11272703.
[24] Rauch, Jan; Logical calculi for knowledge discovery in

databases, in Proceedings of the First European Symposium on Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Springer, 1997, pp. 47-57
6.12 External links
[25] Hjek, Petr; Havrnek, Tom (1978). Mechanizing Hypothesis Formation: Mathematical Foundations for a General Theory. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 3-540-08738-9.
[26] Webb, Georey I. (1995); OPUS: An Ecient Admissible
Algorithm for Unordered Search, Journal of Articial Intelligence Research 3, Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, pp.
431-465 online access
[27] Bayardo, Roberto J., Jr.; Agrawal, Rakesh; Gunopulos,
Dimitrios (2000). Constraint-based rule mining in large,
dense databases. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
4 (2): 217240. doi:10.1023/A:1009895914772.
[28] Webb, Georey I. (2000); Ecient Search for Association Rules, in Ramakrishnan, Raghu; and Stolfo, Sal; eds.;
Proceedings of the Sixth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD2000), Boston, MA, New York, NY: The Association for
Computing Machinery, pp. 99-107 online access
6.12.1 Bibliographies
Extensive Bibliography on Association Rules by
J.M. Luna
Annotated Bibliography on Association Rules by M.
Hahsler
Statsoft Electronic Statistics Textbook: Association
Rules by Dell Software
6.12.2 Implementations
Open-Source data-mining suites
Christian Borgelts implementations of Apriori, FPGrowth and Eclat written in C with Python bindings.
[29] http://www.dssresources.com/newsletters/66.php
ELKI includes Java implementations of Apriori,

Eclat and FPGrowth.
[30] Ramezani, Reza, Mohamad Saraee, and Mohammad Ali

Nematbakhsh; MRAR: Mining Multi-Relation Association
Rules, Journal of Computing and Security, 1, no. 2 (2014)
Orange module orngAssoc.
[31] Shaheen, M; Shahbaz, M; and Guergachi, A; Context

Based Positive and Negative Spatio Temporal Association
Rule Mining, Elsevier Knowledge-Based Systems, Jan
2013, pp. 261-273
[32] GI Webb and S. Butler and D. Newlands (2003). On Detecting Dierences Between Groups. KDD'03 Proceedings
of the Ninth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
[33] Menzies, Tim; and Hu, Ying; Data Mining for Very Busy
People, IEEE Computer, October 2003, pp. 18-25
[34] Wong, Andrew K.C.; Wang, Yang (1997). High-order
pattern discovery from discrete-valued data. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE):
877893.
[35] Jinze Liu, Susan Paulsen, Xing Sun, Wei Wang, Andrew Nobel, J. P. (2006). Mining approximate frequent
itemsets in the presence of noise: Algorithm and analysis. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/
summary?doi=10.1.1.62.3805
[36] Salleb-Aouissi, Ansaf; Vrain, Christel; Nortet, Cyril
(2007). QuantMiner: A Genetic Algorithm for Mining
Quantitative Association Rules. International Joint Conference on Articial Intelligence (IJCAI): 10351040.
[37] Zaki, Mohammed J. (2001); SPADE: An Ecient Algorithm for Mining Frequent Sequences, Machine Learning
Journal, 42, pp. 3160
R package arules for mining association rules and

frequent itemsets.
SPMF oers many open-source implementations
for association rule mining, itemset mining and sequential pattern mining.
Weka, a collection of machine learning algorithms
for data mining tasks written in Java
Academic example code
ARtool, GPL Java association rule mining application with GUI, oering implementations of multiple algorithms for discovery of frequent patterns and
extraction of association rules (includes Apriori and
FPgrowth, last updated 2002)
Bart Goethals frequent pattern mining implementations
Ferda Dataminer, an extensible visual data mining
platform, implements GUHA procedures ASSOC
and features multirelational data mining
Frequent Itemset Mining Implementations Repository (FIMI)
Java implementations of association rule mining algorithms by KDIS
46
Ruby implementation (AI4R)
Zaki, Mohammed J.; Data Mining Software
Commercial oers
KNIME, an open source workow oriented data
preprocessing and analysis platform
KXEN, a commercial Data Mining software
LISp Miner, mines for generalized (GUHA) association rules (uses bitstrings, not apriori algorithm)
Magnum Opus, a system for statistically sound association discovery
RapidMiner, a Java data mining software suite
STATISTICA, commercial statistics software with
an Association Rules module
Chapter 7
Reinforcement learning
For reinforcement
Reinforcement.
learning
in
psychology,
see
7.1 Introduction
The basic reinforcement learning model consists of:
Reinforcement learning is an area of machine learning inspired by behaviorist psychology, concerned with
how software agents ought to take actions in an environment so as to maximize some notion of cumulative reward. The problem, due to its generality, is studied in
many other disciplines, such as game theory, control theory, operations research, information theory, simulationbased optimization, multi-agent systems, swarm intelligence, statistics, and genetic algorithms. In the operations research and control literature, the eld where reinforcement learning methods are studied is called approximate dynamic programming. The problem has been studied in the theory of optimal control, though most studies are concerned with the existence of optimal solutions
and their characterization, and not with the learning or
approximation aspects. In economics and game theory,
reinforcement learning may be used to explain how equilibrium may arise under bounded rationality.
In machine learning, the environment is typically formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP) as many reinforcement learning algorithms for this context utilize
dynamic programming techniques. The main dierence
between the classical techniques and reinforcement learning algorithms is that the latter do not need knowledge
about the MDP and they target large MDPs where exact
methods become infeasible.
1. a set of environment states S ;

2. a set of actions A ;
3. rules of transitioning between states;
4. rules that determine the scalar immediate reward of
a transition; and
5. rules that describe what the agent observes.
The rules are often stochastic. The observation typically
involves the scalar immediate reward associated with the
last transition. In many works, the agent is also assumed
to observe the current environmental state, in which case
we talk about full observability, whereas in the opposing
case we talk about partial observability. Sometimes the
set of actions available to the agent is restricted (e.g., you
cannot spend more money than what you possess).
A reinforcement learning agent interacts with its environment in discrete time steps. At each time t , the agent
receives an observation ot , which typically includes the
reward rt . It then chooses an action at from the set of actions available, which is subsequently sent to the environment. The environment moves to a new state st+1 and the
reward rt+1 associated with the transition (st , at , st+1 )
is determined. The goal of a reinforcement learning agent
Reinforcement learning diers from standard supervised is to collect as much reward as possible. The agent can
learning in that correct input/output pairs are never pre- choose any action as a function of the history and it can
sented, nor sub-optimal actions explicitly corrected. Fur- even randomize its action selection.
ther, there is a focus on on-line performance, which
involves nding a balance between exploration (of un- When the agents performance is compared to that of an
charted territory) and exploitation (of current knowl- agent which acts optimally from the beginning, the difedge). The exploration vs. exploitation trade-o in reference in performance gives rise to the notion of regret.
inforcement learning has been most thoroughly studied Note that in order to act near optimally, the agent must
through the multi-armed bandit problem and in nite reason about the long term consequences of its actions:
In order to maximize my future income I had better go
MDPs.
to school now, although the immediate monetary reward
associated with this might be negative.
Thus, reinforcement learning is particularly well suited to
problems which include a long-term versus short-term reward trade-o. It has been applied successfully to various
47
48
CHAPTER 7. REINFORCEMENT LEARNING
problems, including robot control, elevator scheduling, 7.3.1 Criterion of optimality

telecommunications, backgammon and checkers (Sutton
and Barto 1998, Chapter 11).
For simplicity, assume for a moment that the problem
Two components make reinforcement learning power- studied is episodic, an episode ending when some terful: The use of samples to optimize performance and the minal state is reached. Assume further that no matter
use of function approximation to deal with large environ- what course of actions the agent takes, termination is
ments. Thanks to these two key components, reinforce- inevitable. Under some additional mild regularity conment learning can be used in large environments in any ditions the expectation of the total reward is then welldened, for any policy and any initial distribution over
of the following situations:
the states. Here, a policy refers to a mapping that assigns
some probability distribution over the actions to all pos A model of the environment is known, but an ana- sible histories.
lytic solution is not available;
Given a xed initial distribution , we can thus assign the
Only a simulation model of the environment is given
(the subject of simulation-based optimization);[1]
expected return to policy :
= E[R|],
The only way to collect information about the environment is by interacting with it.
where the random variable R denotes the return and is
dened by
The rst two of these problems could be considered planning problems (since some form of the model is availN
1
able), while the last one could be considered as a genR=

rt+1 ,
uine learning problem. However, under a reinforcement
t=0
learning methodology both planning problems would be
converted to machine learning problems.
where rt+1 is the reward received after the t -th transition,
the initial state is sampled at random from and actions
are selected by policy . Here, N denotes the (random)
time when a terminal state is reached, i.e., the time when
7.2 Exploration
the episode terminates.
The reinforcement learning problem as described requires clever exploration mechanisms. Randomly selecting actions, without reference to an estimated probability
distribution, is known to give rise to very poor performance. The case of (small) nite MDPs is relatively well
understood by now. However, due to the lack of algorithms that would provably scale well with the number
of states (or scale to problems with innite state spaces),
in practice people resort to simple exploration methods.
One such method is -greedy, when the agent chooses the
action that it believes has the best long-term eect with
probability 1 , and it chooses an action uniformly at
random, otherwise. Here, 0 < < 1 is a tuning parameter, which is sometimes changed, either according
to a xed schedule (making the agent explore less as time
goes by), or adaptively based on some heuristics (Tokic
& Palm, 2011).
7.3 Algorithms for control learning

Even if the issue of exploration is disregarded and even
if the state was observable (which we assume from now
on), the problem remains to nd out which actions are
good based on past experience.
In the case of non-episodic problems the return is often

discounted,
R=
t rt+1 ,
t=0
giving rise to the total expected discounted reward criterion. Here 0 1 is the so-called discount-factor.
Since the undiscounted return is a special case of the discounted return, from now on we will assume discounting.
Although this looks innocent enough, discounting is in
fact problematic if one cares about online performance.
This is because discounting makes the initial time steps
more important. Since a learning agent is likely to make
mistakes during the rst few steps after its life starts, no
uninformed learning algorithm can achieve near-optimal
performance under discounting even if the class of environments is restricted to that of nite MDPs. (This
does not mean though that, given enough time, a learning agent cannot gure how to act near-optimally, if time
was restarted.)
The problem then is to specify an algorithm that can be
used to nd a policy with maximum expected return.
From the theory of MDPs it is known that, without loss
of generality, the search can be restricted to the set of the
7.3. ALGORITHMS FOR CONTROL LEARNING

so-called stationary policies. A policy is called stationary if the action-distribution returned by it depends only
on the last state visited (which is part of the observation
history of the agent, by our simplifying assumption). In
fact, the search can be further restricted to deterministic
stationary policies. A deterministic stationary policy is
one which deterministically selects actions based on the
current state. Since any such policy can be identied with
a mapping from the set of states to the set of actions, these
policies can be identied with such mappings with no loss
of generality.
7.3.2
Brute force
49
V (s) = sup V (s).
A policy which achieves these optimal values in each state

is called optimal. Clearly, a policy optimal in this strong
sense is also optimal in the sense that it maximizes the
expected return , since = E[V (S)] , where S is
a state randomly sampled from the distribution .
Although state-values suce to dene optimality, it will
prove to be useful to dene action-values. Given a state s
, an action a and a policy , the action-value of the pair
(s, a) under is dened by
The brute force approach entails the following two steps: Q (s, a) = E[R|s, a, ],
where, now, R stands for the random return associated
1. For each possible policy, sample returns while folwith rst taking action a in state s and following , therelowing it
after.
2. Choose the policy with the largest expected return
One problem with this is that the number of policies can
be extremely large, or even innite. Another is that variance of the returns might be large, in which case a large
number of samples will be required to accurately estimate
the return of each policy.
These problems can be ameliorated if we assume some
structure and perhaps allow samples generated from one
policy to inuence the estimates made for another. The
two main approaches for achieving this are value function
estimation and direct policy search.
It is well-known from the theory of MDPs that if someone

gives us Q for an optimal policy, we can always choose
optimal actions (and thus act optimally) by simply choosing the action with the highest value at each state. The
action-value function of such an optimal policy is called
the optimal action-value function and is denoted by Q .
In summary, the knowledge of the optimal action-value
function alone suces to know how to act optimally.
Assuming full knowledge of the MDP, there are two basic approaches to compute the optimal action-value function, value iteration and policy iteration. Both algorithms
compute a sequence of functions Qk ( k = 0, 1, 2, . . . ,
) which converge to Q . Computing these functions
involves computing expectations over the whole statespace, which is impractical for all, but the smallest (nite)
7.3.3 Value function approaches
MDPs, never mind the case when the MDP is unknown.
In reinforcement learning methods the expectations are
Value function approaches attempt to nd a policy that
approximated by averaging over samples and one uses
maximizes the return by maintaining a set of estimates
function approximation techniques to cope with the need
of expected returns for some policy (usually either the
to represent value functions over large state-action spaces.
current or the optimal one).
These methods rely on the theory of MDPs, where optimality is dened in a sense which is stronger than the
above one: A policy is called optimal if it achieves the
best expected return from any initial state (i.e., initial distributions play no role in this denition). Again, one can
always nd an optimal policy amongst stationary policies.
To dene optimality in a formal manner, dene the value
of a policy by
V (s) = E[R|s, ],
where R stands for the random return associated with following from the initial state s . Dene V (s) as the
maximum possible value of V (s) , where is allowed
to change:
Monte Carlo methods

The simplest Monte Carlo methods can be used in an
algorithm that mimics policy iteration. Policy iteration
consists of two steps: policy evaluation and policy improvement. The Monte Carlo methods are used in the
policy evaluation step. In this step, given a stationary,
deterministic policy , the goal is to compute the function values Q (s, a) (or a good approximation to them)
for all state-action pairs (s, a) . Assume (for simplicity) that the MDP is nite and in fact a table representing
the action-values ts into the memory. Further, assume
that the problem is episodic and after each episode a new
one starts from some random initial state. Then, the estimate of the value of a given state-action pair (s, a) can be
computed by simply averaging the sampled returns which
50
originated from (s, a) over time. Given enough time, this
procedure can thus construct a precise estimate Q of the
action-value function Q . This nishes the description
of the policy evaluation step. In the policy improvement
step, as it is done in the standard policy iteration algorithm, the next policy is obtained by computing a greedy
policy with respect to Q : Given a state s , this new policy returns an action that maximizes Q(s, ) . In practice
one often avoids computing and storing the new policy,
but uses lazy evaluation to defer the computation of the
maximizing actions to when they are actually needed.

linear function approximation one starts with a mapping
that assigns a nite-dimensional vector to each stateaction pair. Then, the action values of a state-action pair
(s, a) are obtained by linearly combining the components
of (s, a) with some weights :
Q(s, a) =
i i (s, a)
i=1
The algorithms then adjust the weights, instead of adjusting the values associated with the individual state-action
A few problems with this procedure are as follows:
pairs. However, linear function approximation is not the
only choice. More recently, methods based on ideas from
The procedure may waste too much time on evalu- nonparametric statistics (which can be seen to construct
ating a suboptimal policy;
their own features) have been explored.
It uses samples ineciently in that a long trajectory So far, the discussion was restricted to how policy iteris used to improve the estimate only of the single ation can be used as a basis of the designing reinforcestate-action pair that started the trajectory;
ment learning algorithms. Equally importantly, value iteration can also be used as a starting point, giving rise to
When the returns along the trajectories have high
the Q-Learning algorithm (Watkins 1989) and its many
variance, convergence will be slow;
variants.
It works in episodic problems only;
The problem with methods that use action-values is that
It works in small, nite MDPs only.
Temporal dierence methods
The rst issue is easily corrected by allowing the procedure to change the policy (at all, or at some states) before
the values settle. However good this sounds, this may be
dangerous as this might prevent convergence. Still, most
current algorithms implement this idea, giving rise to the
class of generalized policy iteration algorithm. We note in
passing that actor critic methods belong to this category.
The second issue can be corrected within the algorithm
by allowing trajectories to contribute to any state-action
pair in them. This may also help to some extent with
the third problem, although a better solution when returns
have high variance is to use Sutton's temporal dierence
(TD) methods which are based on the recursive Bellman
equation. Note that the computation in TD methods can
be incremental (when after each transition the memory
is changed and the transition is thrown away), or batch
(when the transitions are collected and then the estimates
are computed once based on a large number of transitions). Batch methods, a prime example of which is the
least-squares temporal dierence method due to Bradtke
and Barto (1996), may use the information in the samples
better, whereas incremental methods are the only choice
when batch methods become infeasible due to their high
computational or memory complexity. In addition, there
exist methods that try to unify the advantages of the two
approaches. Methods based on temporal dierences also
overcome the second but last issue.
they may need highly precise estimates of the competing

action values, which can be hard to obtain when the returns are noisy. Though this problem is mitigated to some
extent by temporal dierence methods and if one uses
the so-called compatible function approximation method,
more work remains to be done to increase generality and
eciency. Another problem specic to temporal dierence methods comes from their reliance on the recursive
Bellman equation. Most temporal dierence methods
have a so-called parameter (0 1) that allows one
to continuously interpolate between Monte-Carlo methods (which do not rely on the Bellman equations) and the
basic temporal dierence methods (which rely entirely
on the Bellman equations), which can thus be eective in
palliating this issue.
7.3.4 Direct policy search

An alternative method to nd a good policy is to search
directly in (some subset) of the policy space, in which
case the problem becomes an instance of stochastic optimization. The two approaches available are gradientbased and gradient-free methods.
Gradient-based methods (giving rise to the so-called policy gradient methods) start with a mapping from a nitedimensional (parameter) space to the space of policies:
given the parameter vector , let denote the policy
associated to . Dene the performance function by
() = .
In order to address the last issue mentioned in the previ- Under mild conditions this function will be dierentiable
ous section, function approximation methods are used. In as a function of the parameter vector . If the gradient
7.5. CURRENT RESEARCH

of was known, one could use gradient ascent. Since an
analytic expression for the gradient is not available, one
must rely on a noisy estimate. Such an estimate can be
constructed in many ways, giving rise to algorithms like
Williams REINFORCE method (which is also known as
the likelihood ratio method in the simulation-based optimization literature). Policy gradient methods have received a lot of attention in the last couple of years (e.g.,
Peters et al. (2003)), but they remain an active eld.
An overview of policy search methods in the context of
robotics has been given by Deisenroth, Neumann and
Peters.[2] The issue with many of these methods is that
they may get stuck in local optima (as they are based on
local search).
51
7.5 Current research

Current research topics include: adaptive methods which
work with fewer (or no) parameters under a large number
of conditions, addressing the exploration problem in large
MDPs, large-scale empirical evaluations, learning and
acting under partial information (e.g., using Predictive
State Representation), modular and hierarchical reinforcement learning, improving existing value-function
and policy search methods, algorithms that work well
with large (or continuous) action spaces, transfer learning, lifelong learning, ecient sample-based planning
(e.g., based on Monte-Carlo tree search). Multiagent or
Distributed Reinforcement Learning is also a topic of interest in current research. There is also a growing interest
in real life applications of reinforcement learning. Successes of reinforcement learning are collected on here and
here.
A large class of methods avoids relying on gradient information. These include simulated annealing, crossentropy search or methods of evolutionary computation.
Many gradient-free methods can achieve (in theory and
in the limit) a global optimum. In a number of cases they Reinforcement learning algorithms such as TD learning
have indeed demonstrated remarkable performance.
are also being investigated as a model for DopamineThe issue with policy search methods is that they may based learning in the brain. In this model, the dopaminconverge slowly if the information based on which they ergic projections from the substantia nigra to the basal
act is noisy. For example, this happens when in episodic ganglia function as the prediction error. Reinforcement
problems the trajectories are long and the variance of the learning has also been used as a part of the model for
returns is large. As argued beforehand, value-function human skill learning, especially in relation to the interbased methods that rely on temporal dierences might action between implicit and explicit learning in skill achelp in this case. In recent years, several actor-critic al- quisition (the rst publication on this application was
gorithms have been proposed following this idea and were in 1995-1996, and there have been many follow-up
studies). See http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~{}sutton/
demonstrated to perform well in various problems.
RL-FAQ.html#behaviorism for further details of these
research areas above.
7.6 Literature
7.4 Theory
The theory for small, nite MDPs is quite mature. Both
the asymptotic and nite-sample behavior of most algorithms is well-understood. As mentioned beforehand,
algorithms with provably good online performance (addressing the exploration issue) are known. The theory of large MDPs needs more work. Ecient exploration is largely untouched (except for the case of bandit problems). Although nite-time performance bounds
appeared for many algorithms in the recent years, these
bounds are expected to be rather loose and thus more
work is needed to better understand the relative advantages, as well as the limitations of these algorithms.
For incremental algorithm asymptotic convergence issues
have been settled. Recently, new incremental, temporaldierence-based algorithms have appeared which converge under a much wider set of conditions than was previously possible (for example, when used with arbitrary,
smooth function approximation).
7.6.1 Conferences, journals

Most reinforcement learning papers are published at the
major machine learning and AI conferences (ICML,
NIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, UAI, AI and Statistics) and journals (JAIR, JMLR, Machine learning journal, IEEE TCIAIG). Some theory papers are published at COLT
and ALT. However, many papers appear in robotics
conferences (IROS, ICRA) and the agent conference
AAMAS. Operations researchers publish their papers
at the INFORMS conference and, for example, in the
Operation Research, and the Mathematics of Operations
Research journals. Control researchers publish their papers at the CDC and ACC conferences, or, e.g., in the
journals IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, or
Automatica, although applied works tend to be published
in more specialized journals. The Winter Simulation
Conference also publishes many relevant papers. Other
than this, papers also published in the major conferences of the neural networks, fuzzy, and evolutionary
computation communities. The annual IEEE symposium titled Approximate Dynamic Programming and Re-
52
inforcement Learning (ADPRL) and the biannual European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL) are
two regularly held meetings where RL researchers meet.
7.7 See also

Temporal dierence learning
Q-learning
SARSA
Fictitious play
Learning classier system
Optimal control
Dynamic treatment regimes
Error-driven learning
Multi-agent system
Distributed articial intelligence
7.8 Implementations
RL-Glue provides a standard interface that allows
you to connect agents, environments, and experiment programs together, even if they are written in
dierent languages.
Maja Machine Learning Framework The Maja Machine Learning Framework (MMLF) is a general
framework for problems in the domain of Reinforcement Learning (RL) written in python.
Software Tools for Reinforcement Learning (Matlab
and Python)
PyBrain(Python)
TeachingBox is a Java reinforcement learning
framework supporting many features like RBF networks, gradient descent learning methods, ...
C++ and Python implementations for some well
known reinforcement learning algorithms with
source.
Orange, a free data mining software suite, module
orngReinforcement
Policy Gradient Toolbox provides a package for
learning about policy gradient approaches.
BURLAP is an open source Java library that provides a wide range of single and multi-agent learning
and planning methods.
7.9 References
Sutton, Richard S. (1984). Temporal Credit Assignment in Reinforcement Learning (PhD thesis). University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.
Williams, Ronald J. (1987). A class of gradientestimating algorithms for reinforcement learning in
neural networks. Proceedings of the IEEE First International Conference on Neural Networks.
Sutton, Richard S. (1988).
Learning to
predict by the method of temporal dierences. Machine Learning (Springer) 3: 944.
doi:10.1007/BF00115009.
Watkins, Christopher J.C.H. (1989). Learning from
Delayed Rewards (PDF) (PhD thesis). Kings College, Cambridge, UK.
Bradtke, Steven J.; Andrew G. Barto (1996).
Learning to predict by the method of temporal differences. Machine Learning (Springer) 22: 3357.
doi:10.1023/A:1018056104778.
Bertsekas, Dimitri P.; John Tsitsiklis (1996).
Neuro-Dynamic Programming.
Nashua, NH:
Athena Scientic. ISBN 1-886529-10-8.
Kaelbling, Leslie P.; Michael L. Littman; Andrew
W. Moore (1996). Reinforcement Learning: A
Survey. Journal of Articial Intelligence Research
4: 237285.
Sutton, Richard S.; Barto, Andrew G. (1998).
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. MIT
Press. ISBN 0-262-19398-1.
Peters, Jan; Sethu Vijayakumar; Stefan Schaal
(2003). Reinforcement Learning for Humanoid
Robotics (PDF). IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots.
Powell, Warren (2007). Approximate dynamic programming: solving the curses of dimensionality.
Wiley-Interscience. ISBN 0-470-17155-3.
Auer, Peter; Thomas Jaksch; Ronald Ortner (2010).
Near-optimal regret bounds for reinforcement
learning. Journal of Machine Learning Research
11: 15631600.
Szita, Istvan; Csaba Szepesvari (2010). Modelbased Reinforcement Learning with Nearly Tight
Exploration Complexity Bounds (PDF). ICML
2010. Omnipress. pp. 10311038.

Bertsekas, Dimitri P. (August 2010). Chapter
6 (online): Approximate Dynamic Programming.
Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control (PDF)
II (3 ed.).
Busoniu, Lucian; Robert Babuska ; Bart De Schutter ; Damien Ernst (2010). Reinforcement Learning
and Dynamic Programming using Function Approximators. Taylor & Francis CRC Press. ISBN 9781-4398-2108-4.
Tokic, Michel; Gnther Palm ; (2011). ValueDierence Based Exploration: Adaptive Control
between Epsilon-Greedy and Softmax. KI 2011:
Advances in Articial Intelligence (PDF). Lecture
Notes in Computer Science 7006. Springer Berlin /
Heidelberg. pp. 335346.
Rttger, Michael C.; Andreas W. Liehr (2009).
Control task for Reinforcement Learning
with known optimal solution for discrete and
continuous actions.
Journal of Intelligent
Learning Systems and Applications 1: 2639.
doi:10.4236/jilsa.2009.11002.
Deisenroth, Marc Peter; Gerhard Neumann; Jan Peters (2013). A Survey on Policy Search for Robotics.
Foundations and Trends in Robotics 2. NOW Publishers. pp. 1142.
[1] Gosavi, Abhijit (2003). Simulation-based Optimization:
Parametric Optimization Techniques and Reinforcement.
Springer. ISBN 1-4020-7454-9.
[2] Deisenroth, Marc Peter; Neumann, Gerhard; Peters, Jan
(2013). A Survey on Policy Search for Robotics. NOW
Publishers. pp. 1142. ISBN 978-1-60198-702-0.
7.10 External links

Website for Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (1998), by Rich Sutton and Andrew Barto, MIT
Press, including a link to an html version of the
book.
Reinforcement Learning Repository
Reinforcement Learning and Articial Intelligence
(RLAI, Rich Suttons lab at the University of Alberta)
Autonomous Learning Laboratory (ALL, Andrew
Bartos lab at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst)
RL-Glue
Software Tools for Reinforcement Learning (Matlab
and Python)
53
The Reinforcement Learning Toolbox from the
(Graz University of Technology)
Hybrid reinforcement learning
Piqle: a Generic Java Platform for Reinforcement
Learning
A Short Introduction To Some Reinforcement
Learning Algorithms
Reinforcement Learning applied to Tic-Tac-Toe
Game
Scholarpedia Reinforcement Learning
Scholarpedia Temporal Dierence Learning
Stanford Reinforcement Learning Course
Real-world reinforcement learning experiments at
Delft University of Technology
Reinforcement Learning Tools for Matlab
Stanford University Andrew Ng Lecture on Reinforcement Learning
Chapter 8
Structured prediction
Structured prediction or structured (output) learning
is an umbrella term for supervised machine learning techniques that involve predicting structured objects, rather
than scalar discrete or real values.[1]
For example, the problem of translating a natural language sentence into a syntactic representation such as a
parse tree can be seen as a structured prediction problem in which the structured output domain is the set of
all possible parse trees.
Probabilistic graphical models form a large class of structured prediction models. In particular, Bayesian networks
and random elds are popularly used to solve structured
prediction problems in a wide variety of application domains including bioinformatics, natural language processing, speech recognition, and computer vision. Other algorithms and models for structured prediction include
inductive logic programming, structured SVMs, Markov
logic networks and constrained conditional models.
Similar to commonly used supervised learning techniques, structured prediction models are typically trained
by means of observed data in which the true prediction
value is used to adjust model parameters. Due to the
complexity of the model and the interrelations of predicted variables the process of prediction using a trained
model and of training itself is often computationally infeasible and approximate inference and learning methods
are used.
tagged JJ
sentence NN
..
The main challenge in this problem is to resolve
ambiguity: the word sentence can also be a verb in English, and so can tagged.
While this problem can be solved by simply performing classication of individual tokens, that approach does
not take into account the empirical fact that tags do not
occur independently; instead, each tag displays a strong
conditional dependence on the tag of the previous word.
This fact can be exploited in a sequence model such as a
hidden Markov model or conditional random eld[2] that
predicts the entire tag sequence for a sentence, rather than
just individual tags, by means of the Viterbi algorithm.
8.2 Structured perceptron
One of the easiest ways to understand algorithms for

general structured prediction is the structured perceptron of Collins.[3] This algorithm combines the venerable
perceptron algorithm for learning linear classiers with
an inference algorithm (classically the Viterbi algorithm
when used on sequence data) and can be described abstractly as follows. First dene a joint feature function
(x, y) that maps a training sample x and a candidate
prediction y to a vector of length n (x and y may have
any structure; n is problem-dependent, but must be xed
8.1 Example: sequence tagging
for each model). Let GEN be a function that generates
Sequence tagging is a class of problems prevalent in candidate predictions. Then:
natural language processing, where input data are often
Let w be a weight vector of length n
sequences (e.g. sentences of text). The sequence tagging
problem appears in several guises, e.g. part-of-speech
For a pre-determined number of iterations:
tagging and named entity recognition. In POS tagging,
For each sample x in the training set
each word in a sequence must receive a tag (class label)
with true output t:
that expresses its type of word:
Make a prediction = arg
max {y GEN(x)} (w
This DT
(x, y))
is VBZ
Update w , from to t: w=w+c(a DT
(x, )+ (x, t)), c is learning rate
54
8.5. EXTERNAL LINKS

In practice, nding the argmax over GEN(x) will be done
using an algorithm such as Viterbi or max-sum, rather
than an exhaustive search through an exponentially large
set of candidates.
The idea of learning is similar to multiclass perceptron.
8.3 See also

Conditional random eld
Structured support vector machine
Recurrent neural network, in particular Elman networks (SRNs)
8.4 References
[1] Gkhan BakIr, Ben Taskar, Thomas Hofmann, Bernhard
Schlkopf, Alex Smola and SVN Vishwanathan (2007),
Predicting Structured Data, MIT Press.
[2] Laerty, J., McCallum, A., Pereira, F. (2001).
Conditional random elds: Probabilistic models for
segmenting and labeling sequence data (PDF). Proc.
18th International Conf. on Machine Learning. pp.
282289.
[3] Collins, Michael (2002). Discriminative training methods
for hidden Markov models: Theory and experiments with
perceptron algorithms (PDF). Proc. EMNLP 10.
Noah Smith, Linguistic Structure Prediction, 2011.
8.5 External links

Implementation of Collins structured perceptron
55
Chapter 9
Feature learning
Feature learning or representation learning[1] is a set
of techniques that learn a transformation of raw data input to a representation that can be eectively exploited in
machine learning tasks.
Feature learning is motivated by the fact that machine
learning tasks such as classication often require input
that is mathematically and computationally convenient to
process. However, real-world data such as images, video,
and sensor measurement is usually complex, redundant,
and highly variable. Thus, it is necessary to discover useful features or representations from raw data. Traditional
hand-crafted features often require expensive human labor and often rely on expert knowledge. Also, they normally do not generalize well. This motivates the design
of ecient feature learning techniques.
weights may be found by minimizing the average representation error (over the input data), together with a L1
regularization on the weights to enable sparsity (i.e., the
representation of each data point has only a few nonzero
weights).
Supervised dictionary learning exploits both the structure

underlying the input data and the labels for optimizing the
dictionary elements. For example, a supervised dictionary learning technique was proposed by Mairal et al. in
2009.[6] The authors apply dictionary learning on classication problems by jointly optimizing the dictionary elements, weights for representing data points, and parameters of the classier based on the input data. In particular,
a minimization problem is formulated, where the objective function consists of the classication error, the repreFeature learning can be divided into two categories: su- sentation error, an L1 regularization on the representing
weights for each data point (to enable sparse representapervised and unsupervised feature learning.
tion of data), and an L2 regularization on the parameters
of the classier.
In supervised feature learning, features are learned
with labeled input data. Examples include neural
networks, multilayer perceptron, and (supervised)
dictionary learning.
In unsupervised feature learning, features are
9.1.2 Neural networks
learned with unlabeled input data. Examples include
dictionary learning, independent component analysis, autoencoders, matrix factorization,[2] and vari- Neural networks are used to illustrate a family of learnous forms of clustering.[3][4][5]
ing algorithms via a network consisting of multiple layers of inter-connected nodes. It is inspired by the nervous system, where the nodes are viewed as neurons and
edges are viewed as synapse. Each edge has an associ9.1 Supervised feature learning
ated weight, and the network denes computational rules
that passes input data from the input layer to the outSupervised feature learning is to learn features from laput layer. A network function associated with a neubeled data. Several approaches are introduced in the folral network characterizes the relationship between input
lowing.
and output layers, which is parameterized by the weights.
With appropriately dened network functions, various
learning tasks can be performed by minimizing a cost
9.1.1 Supervised dictionary learning
function over the network function (weights).
Dictionary learning is to learn a set (dictionary) of representative elements from the input data such that each
data point can be represented as a weighted sum of the
representative elements. The dictionary elements and the
Multilayer neural networks can be used to perform feature learning, since they learn a representation of their
input at the hidden layer(s) which is subsequently used
for classication or regression at the output layer.
56
9.2. UNSUPERVISED FEATURE LEARNING
9.2 Unsupervised feature learning

Unsupervised feature learning is to learn features from
unlabeled data. The goal of unsupervised feature learning is often to discover low-dimensional features that captures some structure underlying the high-dimensional input data. When the feature learning is performed in an
unsupervised way, it enables a form of semisupervised
learning where rst, features are learned from an unlabeled dataset, which are then employed to improve performance in a supervised setting with labeled data.[7][8]
Several approaches are introduced in the following.
9.2.1
K-means clustering
K-means clustering is an approach for vector quantization. In particular, given a set of n vectors, k-means clustering groups them into k clusters (i.e., subsets) in such a
way that each vector belongs to the cluster with the closest mean. The problem is computationally NP-hard, and
suboptimal greedy algorithms have been developed for kmeans clustering.
In feature learning, k-means clustering can be used to
group an unlabeled set of inputs into k clusters, and then
use the centroids of these clusters to produce features.
These features can be produced in several ways. The
simplest way is to add k binary features to each sample,
where each feature j has value one i the jth centroid
learned by k-means is the closest to the sample under
consideration.[3] It is also possible to use the distances to
the clusters as features, perhaps after transforming them
through a radial basis function (a technique that has used
to train RBF networks[9] ). Coates and Ng note that certain variants of k-means behave similarly to sparse coding
algorithms.[10]
In a comparative evaluation of unsupervised feature
learning methods, Coates, Lee and Ng found that kmeans clustering with an appropriate transformation outperforms the more recently invented auto-encoders and
RBMs on an image classication task.[3] K-means has
also been shown to improve performance in the domain of
NLP, specically for named-entity recognition;[11] there,
it competes with Brown clustering, as well as with distributed word representations (also known as neural word
embeddings).[8]
9.2.2
Principal component analysis
Principal component analysis (PCA) is often used for dimension reduction. Given a unlabeled set of n input data
vectors, PCA generates p (which is much smaller than the
dimension of the input data) right singular vectors corresponding to the p largest singular values of the data matrix, where the kth row of the data matrix is the kth input data vector shifted by the sample mean of the input
(i.e., subtracting the sample mean from the data vector).
57
Equivalently, these singular vectors are the eigenvectors
corresponding to the p largest eigenvalues of the sample
covariance matrix of the input vectors. These p singular vectors are the feature vectors learned from the input
data, and they represent directions along which the data
has the largest variations.
PCA is a linear feature learning approach since the p singular vectors are linear functions of the data matrix. The
singular vectors can be generated via a simple algorithm
with p iterations. In the ith iteration, the projection of the
data matrix on the (i-1)th eigenvector is subtracted, and
the ith singular vector is found as the right singular vector
corresponding to the largest singular of the residual data
matrix.
PCA has several limitations. First, it assumes that the
directions with large variance are of most interest, which
may not be the case in many applications. PCA only relies
on orthogonal transformations of the original data, and it
only exploits the rst- and second-order moments of the
data, which may not well characterize the distribution of
the data. Furthermore, PCA can eectively reduce dimension only when the input data vectors are correlated
(which results in a few dominant eigenvalues).
9.2.3 Local linear embedding

Local linear embedding (LLE) is a nonlinear unsupervised learning approach for generating low-dimensional
neighbor-preserving representations from (unlabeled)
high-dimension input. The approach was proposed by
Sam T. Roweis and Lawrence K. Saul in 2000.[12][13]
The general idea of LLE is to reconstruct the original high-dimensional data using lower-dimensional points
while maintaining some geometric properties of the
neighborhoods in the original data set. LLE consists
of two major steps. The rst step is for neighborpreserving, where each input data point Xi is reconstructed as a weighted sum of K nearest neighboring data
points, and the optimal weights are found by minimizing
the average squared reconstruction error (i.e., dierence
between a point and its reconstruction) under the constraint that the weights associated to each point sum up
to one. The second step is for dimension reduction,
by looking for vectors in a lower-dimensional space that
minimizes the representation error using the optimized
weights in the rst step. Note that in the rst step, the
weights are optimized with data being xed, which can
be solved as a least squares problem; while in the second step, lower-dimensional points are optimized with
the weights being xed, which can be solved via sparse
eigenvalue decomposition.
The reconstruction weights obtained in the rst step captures the intrinsic geometric properties of a neighborhood in the input data.[13] It is assumed that original data
lie on a smooth lower-dimensional manifold, and the intrinsic geometric properties captured by the weights of
58
CHAPTER 9. FEATURE LEARNING
the original data are expected also on the manifold. This

is why the same weights are used in the second step of
LLE. Compared with PCA, LLE is more powerful in exploiting the underlying structure of data.
connecting the hidden and visible nodes. It is a special

case of the more general Boltzmann machines with the
constraint of no intra-node connections. Each edge in an
RBM is associated with a weight. The weights together
with the connections dene an energy function, based on
which a joint distribution of visible and hidden nodes
9.2.4 Independent component analysis
can be devised. Based on the topology of the RBM, the
hidden (visible) variables are independent conditioned on
Independent component analysis (ICA) is technique for the visible (hidden) variables. Such conditional indepenlearning a representation of data using a weighted sum of dence facilitates computations on RBM.
independent non-Gaussian components.[14] The assumpAn RBM can be viewed as a single layer architecture for
tion of non-Gaussian is imposed since the weights cannot
unsupervised feature learning. In particular, the visible
be uniquely determined when all the components follow
variables correspond to input data, and the hidden variGaussian distribution.
ables correspond to feature detectors. The weights can
be trained by maximizing the probability of visible variables using the contrastive divergence (CD) algorithm by
9.2.5 Unsupervised dictionary learning
Georey Hinton.[18]
Dierent from supervised dictionary learning, unsupervised dictionary learning does not utilize the labels of the
data and only exploits the structure underlying the data for
optimizing the dictionary elements. An example of unsupervised dictionary learning is sparse coding, which aims
to learn basis functions (dictionary elements) for data representation from unlabeled input data. Sparse coding can
be applied to learn overcomplete dictionary, where the
number of dictionary elements is larger than the dimension of the input data.[15] Aharon et al. proposed an algorithm known as K-SVD for learning from unlabeled
input data a dictionary of elements that enables sparse
representation of the data.[16]
9.3 Multilayer/Deep architectures

The hierarchical architecture of the neural system inspires deep learning architectures for feature learning
by stacking multiple layers of simple learning blocks.[17]
These architectures are often designed based on the assumption of distributed representation: observed data is
generated by the interactions of many dierent factors
on multiple levels. In a deep learning architecture, the
output of each intermediate layer can be viewed as a representation of the original input data. Each level uses the
representation produced by previous level as input, and
produces new representations as output, which is then fed
to higher levels. The input of bottom layer is the raw
data, and the output of the nal layer is the nal lowdimensional feature or representation.
In general, the training of RBM by solving the above maximization problem tends to result in non-sparse representations. The sparse RBM, [19] a modication of the RBM,
was proposed to enable sparse representations. The idea
is to add a regularization term in the objective function
of data likelihood, which penalizes the deviation of the
expected hidden variables from a small constant p .
9.3.2 Autoencoder
An autoencoder consisting of encoder and decoder is a
paradigm for deep learning architectures. An example is
provided by Hinton and Salakhutdinov[18] where the encoder uses raw data (e.g., image) as input and produces
feature or representation as output, and the decoder uses
the extracted feature from the encoder as input and reconstructs the original input raw data as output. The encoder
and decoder are constructed by stacking multiple layers
of RBMs. The parameters involved in the architecture
are trained in a greedy layer-by-layer manner: after one
layer of feature detectors is learned, they are fed to upper
layers as visible variables for training the corresponding
RBM. The process can be repeated until some stopping
criteria is satised.
9.4 See also

Basis function
Deep learning
9.3.1
Restricted Boltzmann machine
Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are often

used as a building block for multilayer learning
architectures.[3][18] An RBM can be represented by an
undirected bipartite graph consisting of a group of binary
hidden variables, a group of visible variables, and edges
Feature detection (computer vision)

Feature extraction
Kernel trick
Vector quantization
9.5. REFERENCES
9.5 References
[1] Y. Bengio; A. Courville; P. Vincent (2013). Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives. IEEE
Trans. PAMI, special issue Learning Deep Architectures.
[2] Nathan Srebro; Jason D. M. Rennie; Tommi S. Jaakkola
(2004). Maximum-Margin Matrix Factorization. NIPS.
[3] Coates, Adam; Lee, Honglak; Ng, Andrew Y. (2011). An
analysis of single-layer networks in unsupervised feature
learning (PDF). Int'l Conf. on AI and Statistics (AISTATS).
[4] Csurka, Gabriella; Dance, Christopher C.; Fan, Lixin;
Willamowski, Jutta; Bray, Cdric (2004). Visual categorization with bags of keypoints (PDF). ECCV Workshop
on Statistical Learning in Computer Vision.
[5] Daniel Jurafsky; James H. Martin (2009). Speech and
Language Processing. Pearson Education International.
pp. 145146.
[6] Mairal, Julien; Bach, Francis; Ponce, Jean; Sapiro,
Guillermo; Zisserman, Andrew (2009). Supervised Dictionary Learning. Advances in neural information processing systems.
[7] Percy Liang (2005). Semi-Supervised Learning for Natural Language (PDF) (M. Eng.). MIT. pp. 4452.
[8] Joseph Turian; Lev Ratinov; Yoshua Bengio (2010).
Word representations: a simple and general method for
semi-supervised learning (PDF). Proceedings of the 48th
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics.
[9] Schwenker, Friedhelm; Kestler, Hans A.; Palm, Gnther (2001). Three learning phases for radial-basisfunction networks.
Neural Networks 14: 439
458. doi:10.1016/s0893-6080(01)00027-2. CiteSeerX:
10.1.1.109.312.
[10] Coates, Adam; Ng, Andrew Y. (2012). Learning feature
representations with k-means. In G. Montavon, G. B. Orr
and K.-R. Mller. Neural Networks: Tricks of the Trade.
Springer.
[11] Dekang Lin; Xiaoyun Wu (2009). Phrase clustering for
discriminative learning (PDF). Proc. J. Conf. of the ACL
and 4th Int'l J. Conf. on Natural Language Processing of
the AFNLP. pp. 10301038.
[12] Roweis, Sam T; Saul, Lawrence K (2000). Nonlinear
Dimensionality Reduction by Locally Linear Embedding. Science, New Series 290 (5500): 23232326.
doi:10.1126/science.290.5500.2323.
[13] Saul, Lawrence K; Roweis, Sam T (2000). An Introduction to Locally Linear Embedding.
[14] Hyvrinen, Aapo; Oja, Erkki (2000). Independent Component Analysis: Algorithms and Applications. Neural
networks (4): 411430.
[15] Lee, Honglak; Battle, Alexis; Raina, Rajat; Ng, Andrew Y
(2007). Ecient sparse coding algorithms. Ad- vances
in neural information processing systems.
59
[16] Aharon, Michal; Elad, Michael; Bruckstein, Alfred

(2006). K-SVD: An Algorithm for Designing Overcomplete Dictionaries for Sparse Representation. IEEE
Trans.
Signal Process.
54 (11): 43114322.
doi:10.1109/TSP.2006.881199.
[17] Bengio, Yoshua (2009). Learning Deep Architectures
for AI. Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning
2 (1): 1127. doi:10.1561/2200000006.
[18] Hinton, G. E.; Salakhutdinov, R. R. (2006).
Reducing the Dimensionality of Data with Neural
Networks (PDF). Science 313 (5786): 504507.
doi:10.1126/science.1127647. PMID 16873662.
[19] Lee, Honglak; Ekanadham, Chaitanya; Andrew, Ng
(2008). Sparse deep belief net model for visual area V2.
Advances in neural information processing systems.
Chapter 10
Online machine learning

Online machine learning is used in the case where the data
becomes available in a sequential fashion, in order to determine a mapping from the dataset to the corresponding
labels. The key dierence between online learning and
batch learning (or oine learning) techniques, is that in
online learning the mapping is updated after the arrival of
every new datapoint in a scalable fashion, whereas batch
techniques are used when one has access to the entire
training dataset at once. Online learning could be used
in the case of a process occurring in time, for example
the value of a stock given its history and other external
factors, in which case the mapping updates as time goes
on and we get more and more samples.
10.1 A prototypical online supervised learning algorithm
In the setting of supervised learning, or learning from examples, we are interested in learning a function f : X
Y , where X is thought of as a space of inputs and Y
as a space of outputs, that predicts well on instances that
are drawn from a joint probability distribution p(x, y) on
X Y . In this setting, we are given a loss function
V : Y Y R , such that V (f (x), y) measures the
dierence between the predicted value f (x) and the true
value y . The ideal goal is to select a function f H ,
where H is a space of functions called a hypothesis space,
Ideally in online learning, the memory needed to store
so as to minimize the expected risk:
the function remains constant even with added datapoints,
since the solution computed at one step is updated when
a new datapoint becomes available, after which that datapoint can then be discarded. For many formulations, for I[f ] = E[V (f (x), y)] = V (f (x), y) dp(x, y) .
example nonlinear kernel methods, true online learning
is not possible, though a form of hybrid online learning In reality, the learner never knows the true distribution
with recursive algorithms can be used. In this case, the p(x, y) over instances. Instead, the learner usually has acspace requirements are no longer guaranteed to be con- cess to a training set of examples (x , y ), . . . , (x , y )
1 1
n n
stant since it requires storing all previous datapoints, but that are assumed to have been drawn i.i.d. from the true
the solution may take less time to compute with the ad- distribution p(x, y) . A common paradigm in this situdition of a new datapoint, as compared to batch learning
ation is to estimate a function f through empirical risk
techniques.
minimization or regularized empirical risk minimization
As in all machine learning problems, the goal of the algo- (usually Tikhonov regularization). The choice of loss
rithm is to minimize some performance criteria using a function here gives rise to several well-known learning
loss function. For example, with stock market predic- algorithms such as regularized least squares and support
tion the algorithm may attempt to minimize the mean vector machines.
squared error between the predicted and true value of a
The above paradigm is not well-suited to the online learnstock. Another popular performance criterion is to mining setting though, as it requires complete a priori knowlimize the number of mistakes when dealing with classiedge of the entire training set. In the pure online learncation problems. In addition to applications of a sequening approach, the learning algorithm should update a setial nature, online learning algorithms are also relevant in
quence of functions f1 , f2 , . . . in a way such that the funcapplications with huge amounts of data such that tradition ft+1 depends only on the previous function ft and
tional learning approaches that use the entire data set in
the next data point (xt , yt ) . This approach has low memaggregate are computationally infeasible.
ory requirements in the sense that it only requires storage
of a representation of the current function ft and the next
data point (xt , yt ) . A related approach that has larger
memory requirements allows ft+1 to depend on ft and
all previous data points (x1 , y1 ), . . . , (xt , yt ) . We focus solely on the former approach here, and we consider
both the case where the data is coming from an innite
60
10.2. EXAMPLE: COMPLEXITY IN THE CASE OF LINEAR LEAST SQUARES
61
stream (x1 , y1 ), (x2 , y2 ), . . . and the case where the data

is coming from a nite training set (x1 , y1 ), . . . , (xn , yn )
n
, in which case the online learning algorithm may make In [w] = 1

V (w, xi , yi ) .
n i=1
multiple passes through the data.
10.1.1
The algorithm and its interpretations
Here we outline a prototypical online learning algorithm

in the supervised learning setting and we discuss several
interpretations of this algorithm. For simplicity, consider
the case where X = Rd , Y R , and H = {w, :
w Rd } is the set of all linear functionals from X into
R , i.e. we are working with a linear kernel and functions
f H can be identied with vectors w Rd . Furthermore, assume that V (, ) is a convex, dierentiable loss
function. An online learning algorithm satisfying the low
memory property discussed above consists of the following iteration:
Since the gradients of V (, ) in the above iteration are

also stochastic estimates of the gradient of In [w] , this
interpretation is also related to the stochastic gradient
descent method, but applied to minimize the empirical risk as opposed to the expected risk. Since this interpretation concerns the empirical risk and not the expected risk, multiple passes through the data are readily
allowed and actually lead to tighter bounds on the deviations In [wt ] In [wn ] , where wn is the minimizer of
In [w] .
The third interpretation of the above recursion is distinctly dierent from the rst two and concerns the case
of sequential trials discussed above, where the data are
potentially not i.i.d. and can perhaps be selected in an adversarial manner. At each step of this process, the learner
is given an input xt and makes a prediction based on the
current linear function wt . Only after making this prediction does the learner see the true label yt , at which
point the learner is allowed to update wt to wt+1 . Since
we are not making any distributional assumptions about
wt+1 wt t V (wt , xt , yt ) ,
the data, the goal here is to perform as well as if we could
view the entire sequence of examples ahead of time; that
where w1 0 , V (wt , xt , yt ) is the gradient of the is, we would like the sequence of functions w , w , . . . to
1
2
loss for the next data point (xt , yt ) evaluated at the cur- have low regret relative to any vector w :
rent linear functional wt , and t > 0 is a step-size parameter. In the case of an innite stream of data, one can
run this iteration, in principle, forever, and in the case of
T
T
a nite but large set of data, one can consider a single pass RT (w ) =
V (wt , xt , yt )
V (w , xt , yt ) .
or multiple passes (epochs) through the data.
t=1
t=1
Interestingly enough, the above simple iterative online
learning algorithm has three distinct interpretations, each
of which has distinct implications about the predictive
quality of the sequence of functions w1 , w2 , . . . . The
rst interpretation considers the above iteration as an instance of the stochastic gradient descent method applied
to the problem of minimizing the expected risk I[w] dened above.[1] Indeed, in the case of an innite stream
of data, since the examples (x1 , y1 ), (x2 , y2 ), . . . are assumed to be drawn i.i.d. from the distribution p(x, y) ,
the sequence of gradients of V (, ) in the above iteration
are an i.i.d. sample of stochastic estimates of the gradient of the expected risk I[w] and therefore one can apply complexity results for the stochastic gradient descent
method to bound the deviation I[wt ] I[w ] , where w
is the minimizer of I[w] .[2] This interpretation is also
valid in the case of a nite training set; although with multiple passes through the data the gradients are no longer
independent, still complexity results can be obtained in
special cases.
In this setting, the above recursion can be considered

as an instance of the online gradient descent method
for which there are complexity bounds that guarantee
O( T ) regret.[4]
The second interpretation applies to the case of a nite

training set and considers the above recursion as an instance of the incremental gradient descent method[3] to
minimize the empirical risk:
10.2 Example: Complexity in the

Case of Linear Least Squares
It should be noted that although the three interpretations

of this algorithm yield complexity bounds in three distinct settings, each bound depends on the choice of stepsize sequence {t } in a dierent way, and thus we cannot
simultaneously apply the consequences of all three interpretations; we must instead select the step-size sequence
in a way that is tailored for the interpretation that is most
relevant. Furthermore, the above algorithm and these interpretations can be extended to the case of a nonlinear
kernel by simply considering X to be the feature space associated with the kernel. Although in this case the memory requirements at each iteration are no longer O(d) ,
but are rather on the order of the number of data points
considered so far.
62
10.2.1
CHAPTER 10. ONLINE MACHINE LEARNING
Batch Learning
Let us consider the setting of supervised learning with

the square loss function V (w, xi , yi ) = (xTi w yi )2
, ( xi Rd , wi Rd , yi R ). The solution after
the arrival of every datapoint {xi , yi } is given by w =
(X T X)1 X T Y where X and Y is built from the i data
points, with X being i -by- d and Y being i -by- 1 . The
solution of linear least squares problem is roughly O(id2 )
.
If we have n total points in the dataset and we have to recompute the solution after the arrival of every datapoint
i = 1, . . . , n , we have a total complexity O(n2 d2 ) . Here
we assume that the matrix X T X is invertible, otherwise
we can proceed in a similar fashion with Tikhonov regularization.
10.3 Books with substantial treatment of online machine learning

Algorithmic Learning in a Random World by
Vladimir Vovk, Alex Gammerman, and Glenn
Shafer. Published by Springer Science+Business
Media, Inc. 2005 ISBN 0-387-00152-2
Prediction, learning, and games by Nicol CesaBianchi and Gbor Lugosi. Cambridge University
Press, 2006 ISBN 0-521-84108-9
10.4 See also

Hierarchical temporal memory
10.2.2
Online Learning
The recursive least squares algorithm considers an online approach to the least squares problem. It can be
shown that for suitable initializations of w0 Rd and
0 Rdxd , the solution of the linear least squares problem given in the previous section can be computed by the
following iteration:
k-nearest neighbor algorithm

Lazy learning
Learning Vector Quantization
Oine learning, the opposite model
Online algorithm
Streaming Algorithm
Perceptron
i = i1
i1 xi xTi i1
1 + xTi i1 xi
wi = wi1 i xi (xTi wi1 yi )

For the proof, see RLS.
The complexity for n steps of this algorithm is O(nd2 )
, which is an order of magnitude faster than the corresponding batch learning complexity. The storage requirements at every step i here are constant at O(d2 ) , i.e. that
of storing the matrix i .
Stochastic Gradient Descent

If we now replace wi = wi1 i xn (xTi wi1 yi ) by
wi = wi1 i xi (xTi wi1 yi ) (i.e. replacing i
Rdd by i R ), we have a stochastic gradient descent
algorithm. In this case, the complexity for n steps of this
algorithm reduces to O(nd) . The storage requirements
at every step i are constant at O(d) .
However, the stepsize i needs to be chosen carefully to
solve the expected risk minimization problem, as detailed
above.
Stochastic gradient descent

Supervised learning
10.5 References
[1] Bottou, Lon (1998). Online Algorithms and Stochastic
Approximations. Online Learning and Neural Networks.
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-65263-6
[2] Stochastic Approximation Algorithms and Applications,
Harold J. Kushner and G. George Yin, New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1997. ISBN 0-387-94916-X; 2nd ed.,
titled Stochastic Approximation and Recursive Algorithms
and Applications, 2003, ISBN 0-387-00894-2.
[3] Bertsekas, D. P. (2011). Incremental gradient, subgradient, and proximal methods for convex optimization: a
survey. Optimization for Machine Learning, 85.
[4] Shalev-Shwartz, S. (2011). Online learning and online
convex optimization. Foundations and Trends in Machine
Learning, 4(2), 107-194.
10.6 External links

http://onlineprediction.net/, Wiki for On-Line Prediction.
Chapter 11
Semi-supervised learning
ing the 3D structure of a protein or determining whether
there is oil at a particular location). The cost associated
with the labeling process thus may render a fully labeled
training set infeasible, whereas acquisition of unlabeled
data is relatively inexpensive. In such situations, semisupervised learning can be of great practical value. Semisupervised learning is also of theoretical interest in machine learning and as a model for human learning.
As in the supervised learning framework, we are given
a set of l independently identically distributed examples
x1 , . . . , xl X with corresponding labels y1 , . . . , yl
Y . Additionally, we are given u unlabeled examples
xl+1 , . . . , xl+u X . Semi-supervised learning attempts to make use of this combined information to surpass the classication performance that could be obtained
either by discarding the unlabeled data and doing supervised learning or by discarding the labels and doing unsupervised learning.
Semi-supervised learning may refer to either transductive
learning or inductive learning. The goal of transductive
learning is to infer the correct labels for the given unlabeled data xl+1 , . . . , xl+u only. The goal of inductive
learning is to infer the correct mapping from X to Y .
An example of the inuence of unlabeled data in semi-supervised

learning. The top panel shows a decision boundary we might
adopt after seeing only one positive (white circle) and one negative (black circle) example. The bottom panel shows a decision
boundary we might adopt if, in addition to the two labeled examples, we were given a collection of unlabeled data (gray circles).
This could be viewed as performing clustering and then labeling
the clusters with the labeled data, pushing the decision boundary away from high-density regions, or learning an underlying
one-dimensional manifold where the data reside.
Intuitively, we can think of the learning problem as an

exam and labeled data as the few example problems that
the teacher solved in class. The teacher also provides a set
of unsolved problems. In the transductive setting, these
unsolved problems are a take-home exam and you want
to do well on them in particular. In the inductive setting,
these are practice problems of the sort you will encounter
on the in-class exam.
Semi-supervised learning is a class of supervised learning tasks and techniques that also make use of unlabeled
data for training - typically a small amount of labeled data
with a large amount of unlabeled data. Semi-supervised
learning falls between unsupervised learning (without any
labeled training data) and supervised learning (with completely labeled training data). Many machine-learning
researchers have found that unlabeled data, when used
in conjunction with a small amount of labeled data, can
produce considerable improvement in learning accuracy.
The acquisition of labeled data for a learning problem often requires a skilled human agent (e.g. to transcribe an
audio segment) or a physical experiment (e.g. determin-
It is unnecessary (and, according to Vapniks principle,

imprudent) to perform transductive learning by way of
inferring a classication rule over the entire input space;
however, in practice, algorithms formally designed for
transduction or induction are often used interchangeably.
63
64
CHAPTER 11. SEMI-SUPERVISED LEARNING
11.1 Assumptions used in semisupervised learning
The transductive learning framework was formally introduced by Vladimir Vapnik in the 1970s.[4] Interest in inductive learning using generative models also began in the
1970s. A probably approximately correct learning bound
In order to make any use of unlabeled data, we must for semi-supervised learning of a Gaussian mixture was
assume some structure to the underlying distribution of demonstrated by Ratsaby and Venkatesh in 1995 [5]
data. Semi-supervised learning algorithms make use of
Semi-supervised learning has recently become more popat least one of the following assumptions. [1]
ular and practically relevant due to the variety of problems for which vast quantities of unlabeled data are
availablee.g. text on websites, protein sequences, or
11.1.1 Smoothness assumption
images. For a review of recent work see a survey article
[6]
Points which are close to each other are more likely to by Zhu (2008).
share a label. This is also generally assumed in supervised
learning and yields a preference for geometrically simple decision boundaries. In the case of semi-supervised 11.3
learning, the smoothness assumption additionally yields
a preference for decision boundaries in low-density regions, so that there are fewer points close to each other
but in dierent classes.
11.3.1
11.1.2
Cluster assumption
The data tend to form discrete clusters, and points in the

same cluster are more likely to share a label (although data
sharing a label may be spread across multiple clusters).
This is a special case of the smoothness assumption and
gives rise to feature learning with clustering algorithms.
11.1.3
Manifold assumption
The data lie approximately on a manifold of much lower

dimension than the input space. In this case we can attempt to learn the manifold using both the labeled and
unlabeled data to avoid the curse of dimensionality. Then
learning can proceed using distances and densities dened on the manifold.
The manifold assumption is practical when highdimensional data are being generated by some process
that may be hard to model directly, but which only has
a few degrees of freedom. For instance, human voice is
controlled by a few vocal folds,[2] and images of various
facial expressions are controlled by a few muscles. We
would like in these cases to use distances and smoothness
in the natural space of the generating problem, rather than
in the space of all possible acoustic waves or images respectively.
Methods for semi-supervised

learning
Generative models
Generative approaches to statistical learning rst seek to

estimate p(x|y) , the distribution of data points belonging
to each class. The probability p(y|x) that a given point x
has label y is then proportional to p(x|y)p(y) by Bayes
rule. Semi-supervised learning with generative models
can be viewed either as an extension of supervised learning (classication plus information about p(x) ) or as an
extension of unsupervised learning (clustering plus some
labels).
Generative models assume that the distributions take
some particular form p(x|y, ) parameterized by the vector . If these assumptions are incorrect, the unlabeled data may actually decrease the accuracy of the solution relative to what would have been obtained from
labeled data alone. [7] However, if the assumptions are
correct, then the unlabeled data necessarily improves
performance.[5]
The unlabeled data are distributed according to a mixture of individual-class distributions. In order to learn
the mixture distribution from the unlabeled data, it must
be identiable, that is, dierent parameters must yield
dierent summed distributions. Gaussian mixture distributions are identiable and commonly used for generative
models.
The parameterized joint distribution can be written as
p(x, y|) = p(y|)p(x|y, ) by using the Chain rule.
Each parameter vector is associated with a decision
function f (x) = argmax p(y|x, ) . The parameter is
y
11.2 History
then chosen based on t to both the labeled and unlabeled

data, weighted by :
The heuristic approach of self-training (also known as

(
)
self-learning or self-labeling) is historically the oldest apargmax log p({xi , yi }li=1 |) + log p({xi }l+u
|)
[1]
i=l+1
proach to semi-supervised learning, with examples of
applications starting in the 1960s (see for instance Scud[8]

der (1965)[3] ).
11.4. SEMI-SUPERVISED LEARNING IN HUMAN COGNITION
11.3.2
65
Low-density separation
and intrinsic spaces respectively. The graph is used to approximate the intrinsic regularization term. Dening the
Another major class of methods attempts to place bound- graph Laplacian L = D W where Dii = l+u
j=1 Wij
aries in regions where there are few data points (labeled or and f the vector [f (x1 ) . . . f (xl+u )] , we have
unlabeled). One of the most commonly used algorithms
is the transductive support vector machine, or TSVM
(which, despite its name, may be used for inductive learnl+u
ing as well). Whereas support vector machines for su- fT Lf =

Wij (fi fj )2
||M f (x)||2 dp(x)
M
pervised learning seek a decision boundary with maximal
i,j=1
margin over the labeled data, the goal of TSVM is a labeling of the unlabeled data such that the decision boundary The Laplacian can also be used to extend the supervised
has maximal margin over all of the data. In addition to learning algorithms: regularized least squares and supthe standard hinge loss (1 yf (x))+ for labeled data, a port vector machines (SVM) to semi-supervised versions
loss function (1 |f (x)|)+ is introduced over the unla- Laplacian regularized least squares and Laplacian SVM.
beled data by letting y = sign f (x) . TSVM then selects
f (x) = h (x) + b from a reproducing kernel Hilbert
11.3.4 Heuristic approaches
space H by minimizing the regularized empirical risk:
Some methods for semi-supervised learning are not in)
l
l+u trinsically geared to learning from both unlabeled and la
2
f = argmin
(1 yi f (xi ))+ + 1 ||h||H + 2
(1
|f
(xi )|)
beled
data,
but+instead make use of unlabeled data within
f
i=1
i=l+1 a supervised learning framework. For instance, the labeled and unlabeled examples x1 , . . . , xl+u may inform
An exact solution is intractable due to the non-convex
a choice of representation, distance metric, or kernel for
term (1 |f (x)|)+ , so research has focused on nding
the data in an unsupervised rst step. Then supervised
[8]
useful approximations.
learning proceeds from only the labeled examples.
Other approaches that implement low-density separation
Self-training is a wrapper method for semi-supervised
include Gaussian process models, information regularizalearning. First a supervised learning algorithm is used
tion, and entropy minimization (of which TSVM is a speto select a classier based on the labeled data only. This
cial case).
classier is then applied to the unlabeled data to generate
more labeled examples as input for another supervised
learning problem. Generally only the labels the classier
11.3.3 Graph-based methods
is most condent of are added at each step.
Graph-based methods for semi-supervised learning use Co-training is an extension of self-training in which mula graph representation of the data, with a node for each tiple classiers are trained on dierent (ideally disjoint)
labeled and unlabeled example. The graph may be con- sets of features and generate labeled examples for one anstructed using domain knowledge or similarity of exam- other.
ples; two common methods are to connect each data point
to its k nearest neighbors or to examples within some distance . The weight Wij of an edge between xi and xj
(
is then set to e
||xi xj ||2
Within the framework of manifold regularization, [9] [10]

the graph serves as a proxy for the manifold. A term
is added to the standard Tikhonov regularization problem to enforce smoothness of the solution relative to the
manifold (in the intrinsic space of the problem) as well
as relative to the ambient input space. The minimization
problem becomes
11.4 Semi-supervised learning in

human cognition
Human responses to formal semi-supervised learning

problems have yielded varying conclusions about the degree of inuence of the unlabeled data (for a summary
see [11] ). More natural learning problems may also be
viewed as instances of semi-supervised learning. Much
of human concept learning involves a small amount of
( l
direct instruction )
(e.g. parental labeling of objects dur
ing
childhood)
combined
with large amounts of unlabeled
2
2
1
argmin l
V (f (xi ), yi ) + A ||f ||H + I
||M f (x)|| dp(x)
experience
(e.g.
observation
of objects without naming
f H
M
i=1
[8]
or counting them, or at least without feedback).
Human infants are sensitive to the structure of unlabeled

where H is a reproducing kernel Hilbert space and M natural categories such as images of dogs and cats or male
is the manifold on which the data lie. The regularization and female faces.[12] More recent work has shown that inparameters A and I control smoothness in the ambient fants and children take into account not only the unlabeled
66
examples available, but the sampling process from which
labeled examples arise.[13][14]
11.5 See also

PU learning
11.6 References
[1] Chapelle, Olivier; Schlkopf, Bernhard; Zien, Alexander (2006). Semi-supervised learning. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03358-9.
[2] Stevens, K.N.(2000), Acoustic Phonetics, MIT Press,
ISBN 0-262-69250-3, 978-0-262-69250-2
[3] Scudder, H.J. Probability of Error of Some Adaptive
Pattern-Recognition Machines. IEEE Transaction on Information Theory, 11:363371 (1965). Cited in Chapelle
et al. 2006, page 3.
[4] Vapnik, V. and Chervonenkis, A. Theory of Pattern
Recognition [in Russian]. Nauka, Moscow (1974). Cited
in Chapelle et al. 2006, page 3.
[5] Ratsaby, J. and Venkatesh, S. Learning from a mixture
of labeled and unlabeled examples with parametric side
information. In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference on Computational Learning Theory, pages 412-417
(1995). Cited in Chapelle et al. 2006, page 4.
[6] Zhu, Xiaojin. Semi-supervised learning literature survey.
Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison
(2008).
[7] Cozman, F. and Cohen, I. Risks of semi-supervised learning: how unlabeled data can degrade performance of generative classiers. In: Chapelle et al. (2006).
[8] Zhu, Xiaojin. Semi-Supervised Learning University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
[9] M. Belkin, P. Niyogi. Semi-supervised Leifolds. Machine
Learning, 56, Special Issue on Clustering, 209-239, 2004.
[10] M. Belkin, P. Niyogi, V. Sindhwani. On Manifold Regularization. AISTATS 2005.
[11] Zhu, Xiaojin; Goldberg, Andrew B. (2009). Introduction
to semi-supervised learning. Morgan & Claypool. ISBN
9781598295481.
[12] Younger, B. A. and Fearing, D. D. (1999), Parsing Items
into Separate Categories: Developmental Change in Infant Categorization. Child Development, 70: 291303.
[13] Xu, F. and Tenenbaum, J. B. (2007), Sensitivity to sampling in Bayesian word learning. Developmental Science,
10: 288297.
[14] Gweon, H., Tenenbaum J.B., and Schulz L.E (2010), Infants consider both the sample and the sampling process
in inductive generalization. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A.,
107(20):9066-71.
CHAPTER 11. SEMI-SUPERVISED LEARNING
11.7 External links

A freely available MATLAB implementation of the
graph-based semi-supervised algorithms Laplacian
support vector machines and Laplacian regularized
least squares.
Chapter 12
Grammar induction
Grammar induction, also known as grammatical inference or syntactic pattern recognition, refers to the process in machine learning of learning a formal grammar
(usually as a collection of re-write rules or productions
or alternatively as a nite state machine or automaton of
some kind) from a set of observations, thus constructing
a model which accounts for the characteristics of the observed objects. More generally, grammatical inference is
that branch of machine learning where the instance space
consists of discrete combinatorial objects such as strings,
trees and graphs.
12.3 Methodologies
There are a wide variety of methods for grammatical inference. Two of the classic sources are Fu (1977) and Fu
(1982). Duda, Hart & Stork (2001) also devote a brief
section to the problem, and cite a number of references.
The basic trial-and-error method they present is discussed
below. For approaches to infer subclasses of regular languages in particular, see Induction of regular languages.
A more recent textbook is de la Higuera (2010) [1] which
covers the theory of grammatical inference of regular lanThere is now a rich literature on learning dierent types of guages and nite state automata. D'Ulizia, Ferri and Grigrammar and automata, under various dierent learning foni [2] provide a survey that explores grammatical inference methods for natural languages.
models and using various dierent methodologies.
12.3.1 Grammatical inference by trialand-error
12.1 Grammar Classes

Grammatical inference has often been very focused on
the problem of learning nite state machines of various
types (see the article Induction of regular languages for
details on these approaches), since there have been ecient algorithms for this problem since the 1980s.
More recently these approaches have been extended to
the problem of inference of context-free grammars and
richer formalisms, such as multiple context-free grammars and parallel multiple context-free grammars. Other
classes of grammars for which grammatical inference has
been studied are contextual grammars, and pattern languages.
The method proposed in Section 8.7 of Duda, Hart

& Stork (2001) suggests successively guessing grammar
rules (productions) and testing them against positive and
negative observations. The rule set is expanded so as
to be able to generate each positive example, but if a
given rule set also generates a negative example, it must
be discarded. This particular approach can be characterized as hypothesis testing and bears some similarity
to Mitchels version space algorithm. The Duda, Hart
& Stork (2001) text provide a simple example which
nicely illustrates the process, but the feasibility of such
an unguided trial-and-error approach for more substantial problems is dubious.
12.3.2 Grammatical inference by genetic

algorithms
12.2 Learning Models

The simplest form of learning is where the learning algorithm merely receives a set of examples drawn from
the language in question, but other learning models have
been studied. One frequently studied alternative is the
case where the learner can ask membership queries as
in the exact query learning model or minimally adequate
teacher model introduced by Angluin.
Grammatical Induction using evolutionary algorithms is

the process of evolving a representation of the grammar of a target language through some evolutionary process. Formal grammars can easily be represented as a tree
structure of production rules that can be subjected to evolutionary operators. Algorithms of this sort stem from the
genetic programming paradigm pioneered by John Koza.
Other early work on simple formal languages used the bi-
67
68
CHAPTER 12. GRAMMAR INDUCTION
nary string representation of genetic algorithms, but the 12.3.4 Distributional Learning
inherently hierarchical structure of grammars couched in
the EBNF language made trees a more exible approach. A more recent approach is based on Distributional Learning. Algorithms using these approaches have been
Koza represented Lisp programs as trees. He was able
applied to learning context-free grammars and mildly
to nd analogues to the genetic operators within the stancontext-sensitive languages and have been proven to
dard set of tree operators. For example, swapping subbe correct and ecient for large subclasses of these
trees is equivalent to the corresponding process of genetic
grammars.[3]
crossover, where sub-strings of a genetic code are transplanted into an individual of the next generation. Fitness
is measured by scoring the output from the functions of 12.3.5 Learning of Pattern languages
the lisp code. Similar analogues between the tree structured lisp representation and the representation of gram- Angluin denes a pattern to be a string of constant
mars as trees, made the application of genetic program- symbols from and variable symbols from a disjoint
ming techniques possible for grammar induction.
set. The language of such a pattern is the set of all
In the case of Grammar Induction, the transplantation of
sub-trees corresponds to the swapping of production rules
that enable the parsing of phrases from some language.
The tness operator for the grammar is based upon some
measure of how well it performed in parsing some group
of sentences from the target language. In a tree representation of a grammar, a terminal symbol of a production
rule corresponds to a leaf node of the tree. Its parent
nodes corresponds to a non-terminal symbol (e.g. a noun
phrase or a verb phrase) in the rule set. Ultimately, the
root node might correspond to a sentence non-terminal.
12.3.3
its nonempty ground instances i.e. all strings resulting

from consistent replacement of its variable symbols by
nonempty strings of constant symbols.[note 1] A pattern is
called descriptive for a nite input set of strings if its language is minimal (with respect to set inclusion) among all
pattern languages subsuming the input set.
Angluin gives a polynomial algorithm to compute, for a
given input string set, all descriptive patterns in one variable x.[note 2] To this end, she builds an automaton representing all possibly relevant patterns; using sophisticated arguments about word lengths, which rely on x being the only variable, the state count can be drastically
reduced.[4]
Grammatical inference by greedy Erlebach et al. give a more ecient version of Angluins pattern learning algorithm, as well as a parallelized
algorithms
version.[5]
Like all greedy algorithms, greedy grammar inference algorithms make, in iterative manner, decisions that seem
to be the best at that stage. These made decisions deal
usually with things like the making of a new or the removing of the existing rules, the choosing of the applied
rule or the merging of some existing rules. Because there
are several ways to dene 'the stage' and 'the best', there
are also several greedy grammar inference algorithms.
Arimura et al. show that a language class obtained from

limited unions of patterns can be learned in polynomial
time.[6]
12.3.6 Pattern theory
Pattern theory, formulated by Ulf Grenander,[7] is a

mathematical formalism to describe knowledge of the
These context-free grammar generating algorithms make world as patterns. It diers from other approaches to
the decision after every read symbol:
articial intelligence in that it does not begin by prescribing algorithms and machinery to recognize and classify
patterns; rather, it prescribes a vocabulary to articulate
Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm creates a context-free
and recast the pattern concepts in precise language.
grammar in a deterministic way such that it is necessary to store only the start rule of the generated In addition to the new algebraic vocabulary, its statistical
approach was novel in its aim to:
grammar.
Sequitur and its modications.
These context-free grammar generating algorithms rst
read the whole given symbol-sequence and then start to
make decisions:
Byte pair encoding and its optimizations.
Identify the hidden variables of a data set using real

world data rather than articial stimuli, which was
commonplace at the time.
Formulate prior distributions for hidden variables
and models for the observed variables that form the
vertices of a Gibbs-like graph.
Study the randomness and variability of these
graphs.
12.7. REFERENCES
Create the basic classes of stochastic models applied
by listing the deformations of the patterns.
Synthesize (sample) from the models, not just analyze signals with it.
Broad in its mathematical coverage, Pattern Theory spans
algebra and statistics, as well as local topological and
global entropic properties.
12.4 Applications
The principle of grammar induction has been applied to
other aspects of natural language processing, and have
been applied (among many other problems) to morpheme
analysis, and even place name derivations. Grammar induction has also been used for lossless data compression
and statistical inference via MML and MDL principles.
12.5 See also

Articial grammar learning
Syntactic pattern recognition
Inductive inference
Straight-line grammar
Kolmogorov complexity
Automatic distillation of structure
Inductive programming
12.6 Notes
[1] The language of a pattern with at least two occurrences
of the same variable is not regular due to the pumping
lemma.
[2] x may occur several times, but no other variable y may
occur
12.7 References
[1] de la Higuera, Colin (2010). Grammatical Inference:
Learning Automata and Grammars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[2] DUlizia, A., Ferri, F., Grifoni, P. (2011) A Survey of
Grammatical Inference Methods for Natural Language
Learning, Articial Intelligence Review, Vol. 36, No.
1, pp. 1-27.
[3] Clark and Eyraud (2007) Journal of Machine Learning
Research, Ryo Yoshinaka (2011) Theoretical Computer
Science
69
[4] Dana Angluin (1980). Finding Patterns Common to a

Set of Strings (PDF). Journal of Computer and System
Sciences 21: 4662. doi:10.1016/0022-0000(80)900410.
[5] T. Erlebach, P. Rossmanith, H. Stadtherr, A. Steger, T.
Zeugmann (1997). Learning One-Variable Pattern Languages Very Eciently on Average, in Parallel, and by
Asking Queries. In M. Li and A. Maruoka. Proc. 8th International Workshop on Algorithmic Learning Theory
ALT'97. LNAI 1316. Springer. pp. 260276.
[6] Hiroki Arimura, Takeshi Shinohara, Setsuko Otsuki
(1994). Finding Minimal Generalizations for Unions of
Pattern Languages and Its Application to Inductive Inference from Positive Data. Proc. STACS 11. LNCS 775.
Springer. pp. 649660.
[7] Grenander, Ulf, and Michael I. Miller. Pattern theory:
from representation to inference. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford
university press, 2007.
Duda, Richard O.; Hart, Peter E.; Stork, David G.

(2001), Pattern Classication (2 ed.), New York:
John Wiley & Sons
Fu, King Sun (1982), Syntactic Pattern Recognition
and Applications, Englewood Clis, NJ: PrenticeHall
Fu, King Sun (1977), Syntactic Pattern Recognition,
Applications, Berlin: Springer-Verlag
Horning, James Jay (1969), A Study of Grammatical Inference (Ph.D. Thesis ed.), Stanford: Stanford
University Computer Science Department
Gold, E. Mark (1967), Language Identication in the
Limit (PDF) 10, Information and Control, pp. 447
474
, see also the corresponding Wikipedia article
70
12.8 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

12.8.1
Text
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Michael Hardy, Kku, Delirium, Ahoerstemeier, Ronz, BenKovitz, Mxn, Hike395, Silvonen, Furrykef, Buridan, Jmartinezot, Phoebe,
Shizhao, Topbanana, Robbot, Plehn, KellyCoinGuy, Fabiform, Centrx, Giftlite, Seabhcan, Levin, Dratman, Jason Quinn, Khalid hassani,
Utcursch, APH, Gene s, Clemwang, Nowozin, Bender235, ZeroOne, Superbacana, Aaronbrick, Jojit fb, Nk, Rajah, Tritium6, Haham
hanuka, Mdd, HasharBot~enwiki, Vilapi, Arcenciel, Denoir, Wjbean, Stephen Turner, Rrenaud, Leondz, Soultaco, Ruud Koot, BlaiseFEgan, JimmyShelter~enwiki, Essjay, Joerg Kurt Wegner, Adiel, BD2412, Qwertyus, Rjwilmsi, Emrysk, VKokielov, Eubot, Celendin,
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Shubhi choudhary, Jochen Burghardt, Joeinwiki, Brettrmurphy, Ppilotte, Delaf, InnocuousPilcrow, Kittensareawesome, Statpumpkin,
Neo Poz, Dustin V. S., TJLaher123, Ankit.u, Francisbach, Aleks-ger, MarinMersenne, LokeshRavindranathan, Tonyszedlak, Proneat123,
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Hynespm, Essjay, MarcoTolo, Joerg Kurt Wegner, Simsong, Lovro, Tslocum, Graham87, Deltabeignet, BD2412, Kbdank71, DePiep,
CoderGnome, Chenxlee, Sjakkalle, Rjwilmsi, Gmelli, Lavishluau, Michal.burda, Bubba73, Bensin, GeorgeBills, GregAsche, HughJorgan, Twerbrou, FlaBot, Emarsee, AlexAnglin, Ground Zero, Mathbot, Jrtayloriv, Predictor, Bmicomp, Compuneo, Vonkje, Gurubrahma,
BMF81, Chobot, DVdm, Bgwhite, The Rambling Man, YurikBot, Wavelength, NTBot~enwiki, H005, Phantomsteve, AVM, Hede2000,
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Nathanashleywild, Anilkumar 0587, Mpaye, Rabarbaro70, Thundertide, BattyBot, Aacruzr, Warrenxu, IjonTichyIjonTichy, Harsh 2580,
Dexbot, Webclient101, Mogism, TwoTwoHello, Frosty, Bradhill14, 7376a73b3bf0a490fa04bea6b76f4a4b, L8fortee, Dougs campbell,
Mark viking, Cmartines, Epicgenius, THill182, Delaf, Melonkelon, Herpderp1235689999, Revengetechy, Amykam32, The hello doctor,
Mimarios1, Huang cynthia, DavidLeighEllis, Gnust, Rbrandon87, Astigitana, Alihaghi, Philip Habing, Wccsnow, Jianhui67, Tahmina.tithi,
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MatthewP42, 115ash, LiberumConsilium, Ran0512, Daniel Bachar, Galaktikasoft, Prof PD Hoy, Gary2015 and Anonymous: 973
Statistical classication Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical%20classification?oldid=630022839 Contributors: The Anome,
Michael Hardy, GTBacchus, Hike395, Robbot, Benwing, Giftlite, Beland, Violetriga, Kierano, Jrme, Anthony Appleyard, Denoir, Oleg
Alexandrov, Bkkbrad, Qwertyus, Bgwhite, Roboto de Ajvol, YurikBot, Jrbouldin, Tianicita, Tobi Kellner, SmackBot, Object01, Mcld,
Chris the speller, Nervexmachina, Can't sleep, clown will eat me, Memming, Cybercobra, Richard001, Bohunk, Beetstra, Hu12, [email protected], Trauber, Juansempere, Thijs!bot, Prolog, Mack2, Peteymills, VoABot II, Robotman1974, Quocminh9, RJASE1,
Jamelan, ThomHImself, Gdupont, Junling, Melcombe, WikiBotas, Agor153, Addbot, Giggly37, Fgnievinski, SpBot, Movado73, Yobot,
Oleginger, AnomieBOT, Ashershow1, Verbum Veritas, FrescoBot, Gire 3pich2005, DrilBot, Classier1234, Jonkerz, Fly by Night, Microfries, Chire, Sigma0 1, Rmashhadi, ClueBot NG, Girish280, MerlIwBot, Helpful Pixie Bot, Chyvve, Swsboarder366, Klilidiplomus,
Ferrarisailor, Mark viking, Francisbach, Imphil, I Less than3 Maths, LdyBruin and Anonymous: 65
Cluster analysis Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster%20analysis?oldid=662268192 Contributors: The Anome, Fnielsen,
Nealmcb, Michael Hardy, Shyamal, Kku, Tomi, GTBacchus, Den fjttrade ankan~enwiki, Cherkash, BAxelrod, Hike395, Dbabbitt,
Phil Boswell, Robbot, Gandalf61, Babbage, Aetheling, Giftlite, Lcgarcia, Cfp, BenFrantzDale, Soundray~enwiki, Ketil, Khalid hassani, Angelo.romano, Dfrankow, Gadum, Pgan002, Gene s, EBB, Sam Hocevar, Pwaring, Jutta, Abdull, Bryan Barnard, Rich Farmbrough, Mathiasl26, NeuronExMachina, Yersinia~enwiki, Bender235, Alex Kosoruko, Aaronbrick, John Vandenberg, Greenleaf~enwiki,
Ahc, NickSchweitzer, 3mta3, Jonsafari, Jumbuck, Jrme, Terrycojones, Denoir, Jnothman, Stefan.karpinski, Hazard, Oleg Alexandrov, Soultaco, Woohookitty, Linas, Uncle G, Borb, Ruud Koot, Tabletop, Male1979, Joerg Kurt Wegner, DESiegel, Ruziklan, Sideris,
BD2412, Qwertyus, Rjwilmsi, Koavf, Salix alba, Michal.burda, Denis Diderot, Klonimus, FlaBot, Mathbot, BananaLanguage, Kcarnold,
Payo, Jrtayloriv, Windharp, BMF81, Roboto de Ajvol, The Rambling Man, YurikBot, Wavelength, Argav, SpuriousQ, Pseudomonas,
NawlinWiki, Gareth Jones, Bayle Shanks, TCrossland, JFD, Hirak 99, Zzuuzz, Rudrasharman, Zigzaglee, Closedmouth, Dontaskme,
Kevin, Killerandy, Airconswitch, SmackBot, Drakyoko, Jtneill, Pkirlin, Object01, Mcld, Ohnoitsjamie, KaragouniS, Bryan Barnard1,
MalafayaBot, Drewnoakes, Tenawy, DHN-bot~enwiki, Iwaterpolo, Zacronos, MatthewKarlsen, Krexer, Bohunk, MOO, Lambiam, Friend
of facts, Benash, ThomasHofmann, Dfass, Beetstra, Ryulong, Nabeth, Hu12, Iridescent, Ralf Klinkenberg, Madla~enwiki, Alanbino,
Origin415, Bairam, Ioannes Pragensis, Joaoluis, Megannnn, Nczempin, Harej bot, Slack---line, Playtime, Endpoint, Dgtized, Skittleys,
DumbBOT, Talgalili, Thijs!bot, Barticus88, Vinoduec, Mailseth, Danhoppe, Phoolimin, Onasraou, Denaxas, AndreasWittenstein, Daytona2, MikeLynch, JAnDbot, Inverse.chi, .anacondabot, Magioladitis, Andrimirzal, Fallschirmjger, JBIdF, David Eppstein, User A1,
Eeera, Varun raptor, LedgendGamer, Jiuguang Wang, Sommersprosse, Koko90, Smite-Meister, McSly, Dvdpwiki, DavidCBryant, AStrathman, Camrn86, TXiKiBoT, Rnc000, Tams Kdr, Mundhenk, Maxim, Winterschlaefer, Lamro, Wheatin, Arrenbas, Sesilbumu,
Tomfy, Kerveros 99, Seemu, WRK, Drdan14, Harveydrone, Graham853, Wcdriscoll, Zwerglein~enwiki, Osian.h, FghIJklm, Melcombe,
Kotsiantis, Freeman77, Victor Chmara, Kl4m, Mugvin, Manuel freire, Boing! said Zebedee, Tim32, PixelBot, Lartoven, Chaosdruid,
Aprock, Practical321, Qwfp, FORTRANslinger, Sunsetsky, Ocean931, Phantom xxiii, XLinkBot, Pichpich, Gnowor, Sujaykoduri, WikHead, Addbot, Allenchue, DOI bot, Bruce rennes, Fgnievinski, Gangcai, MrOllie, FerrousTigrus, Delaszk, Tide rolls, Lightbot, PAvdK,
Fjrohlf, Tobi, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Gulfera, Hungpuiki, AnomieBOT, Flamableconcrete, Materialscientist, Citation bot, Xqbot, Erud, Sylwia Ufnalska, Simeon87, Omnipaedista, Kamitsaha, Playthebass, FrescoBot, Sacomoto, D'ohBot, Dan Golding, JohnMeier, Slowmo0815,
Atlantia, Citation bot 1, Boxplot, Edfox0714, MondalorBot, Lotje, E.V.Krishnamurthy, Capez1, Koozedine, Tbalius, RjwilmsiBot, Ripchip
Bot, Jchemmanoor, GodfriedToussaint, Aaronzat, Helwr, EmausBot, John of Reading, Stheodor, Elixirrixile, BOUMEDJOUT, ZroBot,
Sgoder, Chire, Darthhappyface, Jucypsycho, RockMagnetist, Wakebrdkid, Fazlican, Anita5192, ClueBot NG, Marion.cuny, Ericfouh,
Simeos, Poirel, Robiminer, Michael-stanton, Girish280, Helpful Pixie Bot, Novusuna, BG19bot, Cpkex0102, Wiki13, TimSwast, Cricetus, Douglas H Fisher, Mu.ting, ColanR, Cornelius3, Illia Connell, Compsim, Mogism, Frosty, Abewley, Mark viking, Metcalm, Ninjarua,
Trouveur de faits, TCMemoire, Monkbot, Leegrc, Imsubhashjha, , Olosko, Angelababy00 and Anonymous: 325
72
Anomaly detection Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomaly%20detection?oldid=657858542 Contributors: Andreas Kaufmann,

Vonkje, Wavelength, Gareth Jones, Henryyan, Elonka, Krexer, Kvng, Nick Number, Madmarigold, Mark.hornick, Clangin, Javhar, Persian
oracle, KirbyMaster14, Melcombe, Qwfp, Dthomsen8, Addbot, Yobot, AnomieBOT, Mario777Zelda, Professor Augustus Barclay Yae,
Lkarsten~enwiki, Chire, EvaJamax, Vrlab, BG19bot, QualitycontrolUS, Gforman44, Andrea.venturini65, Nikaleido, Dexbot, Bigdata turn,
Stamptrader, Monkbot, Bippina, Hfanaee and Anonymous: 28
Association rule learning Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association%20rule%20learning?oldid=661174139 Contributors: SimonP, Michael Hardy, Angela, Azazello, Witbrock, Dfrankow, Neilc, Raand, Urhixidur, Adambro, Stesmo, WilliamKF, Rjwilmsi, Pseudomonas, Grafen, Gareth Jones, Crasshopper, Chughgaurav~enwiki, NHSavage, SmackBot, Reedy, Amux, Chris the speller, Mitar,
Lambiam, Dicklyon, Beefyt, CmdrObot, ShelfSkewed, Harrigan, UberScienceNerd, Qwertyplus, Jereydiehl, A3nm, David Eppstein,
Jnnnnn, Samtheboy, Dvdpwiki, Cobi, Hamman Samuel, Themacolyte, TXiKiBoT, Coastside, Kotsiantis, Jlpinar83, Autofei, Niceguyedc,
Auntof6, Xodarap00, Stephengmatthews, Alokito, Rahul234, Life of Riley, Sunsetsky, Addbot, MichaelMampaey, Mhahsler, Aelkris,
MrOllie, Greg4cr, Favonian, Yobot, Wim Leers, KamikazeBot, AnomieBOT, Broncobus, Citation bot, LilHelpa, Andrewmc123, FrescoBot, Citation bot 1, RedBot, Georey I Webb, Trappist the monk, Cincoutprabu, Ali hadian, RjwilmsiBot, Mango bush, 2aprilboy,
Frostyandy2k, Jbr jbr, Donner60, Chiu.chienpei, ChuispastonBot, Phoglenix, Pokbot, Kounoupis, ClueBot NG, Helpful Pixie Bot, HMSSolent, BG19bot, Uksas, Himanshujain123, Jdubin, AnsafSalleb, Ftrxx, Rahulkj, TwoTwoHello, Behroozomidvar, Dataesp, Dexterous1802,
Rmasba, Kr4gfo87, Dsousacosta, Denny73, Monkbot, 4costlygrace, D Bhalodia, Dr.shaheen.khan, Joselunaariza, Ramezanics, Gingerlime,
SnazzyFiend, Dndm97 and Anonymous: 113
Reinforcement learning Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement%20learning?oldid=655647708 Contributors: Wmorgan,
Imran, Mrwojo, Michael Hardy, Togelius, DopeshJustin, Kku, Delirium, Hike395, Charles Matthews, Robbot, Altenmann, Giftlite,
Dratman, Gene s, Juxi, Urhixidur, Bender235, Tobacman, Diego Moya, Nvrmnd, Oleg Alexandrov, Olethros, Qwertyus, Seliopou, Mathbot, Banazir, Kri, Chobot, Bgwhite, YurikBot, Wavelength, Masatran, Digfarenough, SmackBot, Fabrice.Rossi, Vermorel, Jcarroll, Chris
the speller, Ash.dyer, DHN-bot~enwiki, Mitar, Beetstra, Flohack, Ceran, Janrpeters, XApple, ShelfSkewed, Perimosocordiae, Skittleys,
Rev.bayes, Escarbot, Tremilux, Parunach, R'n'B, Wfu, Jiuguang Wang, Shyking, Kpmiyapuram, Qsung, Szepi~enwiki, Nedrutland, Mdchang, Sebastjanmm, MrinalKalakrishnan, Flyer22, Melcombe, Rinconsoleao, MBK004, XLinkBot, Addbot, DOI bot, MrOllie, Download, Mianarshad, Yobot, Maderlock, Citation bot, LilHelpa, DSisyphBot, J04n, Gosavia, FrescoBot, Fgpilot, Kartoun, Mr ashyash,
D'ohBot, Citation bot 1, Albertzeyer, Wikinacious, Skyerise, Trappist the monk, Dpbert, Stuhlmueller, RjwilmsiBot, Claggierk, EmausBot, Macopema, Chire, Jcautilli, DrewNoakes, Correction45, Rlguy, ChuispastonBot, Mbdts, Dvir-ad, Albertttt, Uymj, Helpful Pixie Bot,
BG19bot, Stephen Balaban, ChrisGualtieri, Rbabuska, Ra ules, Chrislgarry, Awliehr, Monkbot, SoloGen and Anonymous: 117
Structured prediction Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured%20prediction?oldid=643965303 Contributors: Edward, Kku,
Nowozin, Qwertyus, Brendan642, Seminalist, Geo g guy, Yobot, AnomieBOT, Venustas 12, Alfaisanomega, SwimmingFox, Weiping.thu,
Papertoys, Mathewk1300 and Anonymous: 3
Feature learning Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature%20learning?oldid=661746836 Contributors: Phil Boswell, Tobias Bergemann, Qwertyus, Rjwilmsi, Mcld, Kotabatubara, Dsimic, Yobot, AnomieBOT, BG19bot, Mavroudisv, TonyWang0316, Ixjlyons and
Anonymous: 7
Online machine learning Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online%20machine%20learning?oldid=656630296 Contributors: Mrwojo, Pgan002, Leondz, Qwertyus, Gmelli, Kri, BrotherE, R'n'B, Funandtrvl, Carriearchdale, P.r.newman, Themfromspace, AnomieBOT,
Mesterharm, Surv1v4l1st, Masterhot93, X7q, Larry.europe, Chire, Helpful Pixie Bot, Ledkas82, BattyBot, Peg49, Ss044 and Anonymous:
10
Semi-supervised learning Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-supervised%20learning?oldid=649528667 Contributors: Edward,
Delirium, Furrykef, Benwing, Rajah, Arthena, Facopad, Soultaco, Bkkbrad, Ruud Koot, Qwertyus, Gmelli, Chobot, DaveWF, Cedar101,
Jcarroll, Drono, Phoxhat, Rahimiali, Bookuser, Lamro, Tbmurphy, Addbot, MrOllie, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Gelbukh, AnomieBOT, Xqbot,
Omnipaedista, Romainbrasselet, D'ohBot, Wokonen, EmausBot, Grisendo, Stheodor, Rahulkmishra, Pintaio, Helpful Pixie Bot, BG19bot,
CarrieVS, AK456, Techerin, M.shahriarinia, Rcpt2 and Anonymous: 28
Grammar induction Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar%20induction?oldid=661963338 Contributors: Delirium, Aabs, Jim
Horning, NTiOzymandias, MCiura, Marudubshinki, Rjwilmsi, Koavf, SmackBot, Took, Bluebot, Rizzardi, Antonielly, Dfass, Hukkinen,
Gregbard, Wikid77, Bobblehead, Erxnmedia, Tremilux, Stassa, Mgalle, KoenDelaere, Aclark17, 1ForTheMoney, Bility, Hiihammuk,
Josve05a, Chire, KLBot2, BG19bot, Jochen Burghardt, Superploro and Anonymous: 7
12.8.2
Images
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The people from the Tango! project. And according to the meta-data in the le, specically: Andreas Nilsson, and Jakub Steiner (although
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Machine Learning General Concepts

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Machine Learning General Concepts

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Machine Learning General Concepts

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Types of problems and tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

History and relationships to other elds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Decision tree learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Association rule learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Articial neural networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Inductive logic programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Support vector machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.4.10 Similarity and metric learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.4.11 Sparse dictionary learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.4.12 Genetic algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Commercial software with open-source editions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.11 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.12 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Research and evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Science and engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Medical data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Spatial data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Temporal data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sensor data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Visual data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.5.10 Music data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.5.12 Pattern mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.5.13 Subject-based data mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.5.14 Knowledge grid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Privacy concerns and ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Situation in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Situation in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Free open-source data mining software and applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Commercial data-mining software and applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.11 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.12 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Relation to other problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Binary and multiclass classication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3.10 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3.12 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Connectivity based clustering (hierarchical clustering) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Evaluation and assessment

Specialized types of cluster analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Techniques used in cluster analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Data projection and preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Application to data security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Association rule learning

Alternative measures of interestingness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Statistically sound associations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Other types of association mining

6.10 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6.12 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Algorithms for control learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Value function approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Direct policy search

7.10 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Example: sequence tagging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Supervised feature learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Supervised dictionary learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Unsupervised feature learning

Principal component analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Local linear embedding

Independent component analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .