AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE ON MACHINE LEARNING.
A V Narasimhadhan
Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Surathkal, India.
Email ID: dhansiva@nitk.edu.in
Machine to do classification/recognition/regression is a difficult
task as it understands the numerical values which may be similar to
different objects to recognize. More precisely, in terms of features,
there is a lot of variability in patterns of a single class, and
probability that features vectors of patterns from different classes
can be arbitrarily close [1].
Because of simplicity in implementation, learning of machines
was started by linear models which are generally efficient. However,
linear models are not always sufficient to fit the data [2]- [5].
And, we know that the nonlinear models are always good fit
for the data. Support vector machines(SVMs), Decision trees
and neural networks provide the good parameterized class of
nonlinear functions to fit the data. Among these approaches,
neural networks gained momentum as it has the advantage of back
propagation algorithms [6]- [8], unlike other approaches such as
SVMs and Decision trees and many more. More of we have high
end computing devices to implement the non linear models. Fitting
is generally classified as classification or regression depending on
the usage. In case of classification, the output of the model takes
two or finite values whereas for the regression, out of the model
takes values from real line, for instance, localization, filtering,
denoising and synthesis etc. come under regression which is a class
of fitting. Perceptron algorithm, least squares method, fisher linear
discriminant analysis and popularly the logistic regression are used
to learn the linear classifiers [9]. On the other hand, SVMs, neural
networks present the linear and non linear classifiers as well. All
these classifiers are the approximations of the Bayesian classifiers
[10], meaning that, error we get using the Bayesian classifier is not
more than the error obtained by any other classifier. Essentially,
Bayessian sets bound on the error. However, Bayesian classifier
is unused since it has a problem of estimating the densities from
the available fewer samples. Among the linear classifiers, the
logistic regression is more close to the Bayes classifier in sense,
and in some situations, the error produced in both cases is the
same [2]. The non linear SVM classifier was popular more than a
decade before the revisit of the convolutional neural network. The
idea of this non linear classifier is that features are non linearly
transformed into higher dimension where in the classes are linearly
separable to which one can apply the linear classifier [1].
There are many types of neural networks out of which,
convolutional neural networks (CNN) are most popular. First
convolutional neural network, which is LeNet [11], came in 1998,
but due to the implementation issues, people had not shown interest
in it. With the advent of fast computing devices, convolutional
neural networks came in light in 2012 with the introduction of the
Alexnet [12]. The main advantage of convolutional neural networks
is removal of finding the features which are input to the linear or
non linear models, and importantly, these networks learn deeply
hence it is called the deep nets. Many modifications of Alexnet have
been proposed by the changes in the number of network layers.
People have noticed that increasing the layers is the reason for the
reduction of accuracy in the classification or regression. Elaborately,
more number of layers would give the more complicated non linear
function to minimize. Since the optimizers use gradient descent
methods, it may cause vanishing gradients and may end up in
the worst local minimum [13]- [14]. The computation graph that
the neural network allows to use the backpropagation algorithm
which is recursive. However, research is going on for the efficient
optimizer other the gradient methods where we have the advantages
of backpropagation algorithm. In addition to this area, research
is going on for the weight initialization, activation functions and
batch normalization techniques. The weight initialization plays an
important role in training the neural network. One of the popular is
Xavier initialization which maintains the sufficient dynamic range
at each layer. Activation function also plays crucial in avoiding
the vanishing and exploding the gradients. In 2016, people have
proposed the new architecture named residual network (RESNET)
which has the concept of learning as good/equivalent as the
previous network [15]- [18]. None of the architecture is able to
dominate the RESNET as all most all layer architectures are merely
the modifications of RESENTs [19]- [20].
One of the common problems that we would face in machine
learning is overfitting. This is because of insufficient data to train
the machine. Solutions to this problem are to either increase the
data size or use the regularization term. Adding regularization to the
data is nothing but giving prior information to the machine. Usually,
with no prior, the learning is named classical inference and with
prior, the learning is named as the Bayesian inference in statistical
sense [21]- [24]. However, in 2017, from Geoffrey Hinton’s lab,
CapsuleNet [25] has been proposed, which is different from all the
other architectures available. Importantly, the CapsuleNET does not
use the pooling layer as it only passes the dominant features to the
next layer resulting at high end layers that do not have the spatial
information. The advantage of this NET is that it works effectively
even if we have a limited number of samples in the data. Precisely,
parts of the network works as a regularization term [26]- [29].
The discussion is for the cases where we have the data with
lables which is the tranining data. Learning that we get with these
samples of the data is called the supervised learning. However, in
most of the cases, we obtained the data with no labels. Hence, we
need to train the classifiers without labels. This type of learning
is called unsupervised learning. The goal of this learning is to
get the underlying hidden structure of the data. Unsupervised
learning includes clustering, dimensionality reduction, density
estimation etc. Some of the most commonly used algorithms
in unsupervised learning include: clustering, neural networks, and
approaches for learning latent variable models. Before the evolution
of neural networks, the popular algorithms in this learning were
clustering , and approaches such as expectation maximization and
blind separation techniques. Blind separation techniques are still
sought after, which are principal component analysis, independent
component analysis, non-negative matrix factorization and singular
value decomposition [1]- [2].
In recent years, people are moving from unsupervised learning
to reinforcement learning. However, unsupervised learning still
is a hot topic in the paradigm of machine learning. As said in
the previous paragraph, unsupervised learning includes the density
estimation. Most of the cases, to estimate the density, we assume
the form of density and estimate the parameters using maximum
likelihood (ML) and Bayesian methods from the available data. Of
course, the non parametric methods are even popular for estimating
the densities. In recent years, Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs)
[30] are used to estimate the density, which has different concepts
unlike the concepts of conventional parametric and non parametric
methods. Apart from the GANs, Pixel CNN [31], Pixel RNN [32]
(Autoregressive models) and variational encoders [33] are used to
generate the new samples from given samples. However, GANs
are more popular since the generated samples follow the input
samples distribution, and it is not the case with Pixel CNN, Pixel
RNN and variational encoders.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is in between supervised learning
and unsupervised learning technique which interacts with a real
time environment unlike deep learning and machine learning which
works on pre-collected data [34]. It is analogous to how dogs and
other animals get trained. Collection of data is not always easy, in
those cases we can make our agent interact with the environment
directly and learn from it. The basic terminology of RL includes
these 4 words: State, action, reward and next state. State is used
to describe the agent about the environment, it can be as simple
as a Vector or an Image. Action is a thing which the agent can
perform while interacting with the environment, say for example
move forward, move backward, move left and right etc. Reward is
used to tell the agent whether its learning is going in the expected
manner or not, say we want to train a robot to walk, we cant
collect data or program a robot which can walk perfectly in any
situation. There we can use RL with input image as the state and
the movements of the Limbs as actions, if the robot is walking as
we need or without falling then we give positive rewards else we
feed negative rewards. The Goal of any RL agent is to maximize
its reward [34]- [37].
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