Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD Elsevier
Résumé : International audience
Voting rules relying on k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) are an effective tool in countless many machine learning techniques. Thanks to its simplicity, k-NN classification is very attractive to practitioners, as it enables very good performances in several practical applications. However, it suffers from various drawbacks, like sensitivity to "noisy" instances and poor generalization properties when dealing with sparse high-dimensional data. In this paper, we tackle the k-NN classification problem at its core by providing a novel k-NN boosting approach. Namely, we propose a supervised learning algorithm, called Universal Nearest Neighbors (UNN), that induces a leveraged k-NN rule by globally minimizing a surrogate risk upper bounding the empirical misclassification rate over training data. Interestingly, this surrogate risk can be arbitrary chosen from a class of Bregman loss functions, including the familiar exponential, logistic and squared losses. Furthermore, we show that UNN allows to efficiently filter a dataset of instances by keeping only a small fraction of data. Experimental results on the synthetic Ripley's dataset show that such a filtering strategy is able to reject "noisy" examples, and yields a classification error close to the optimal Bayes error. Experiments on standard UCI datasets show significant improvements over the current state of the art.
ISSN: 0925-2312

hal-00664462
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00664462

Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD
Résumé : International audience
The k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) classification rule is still an essential tool for computer vision applications, such as scene recognition. However, k-NN still features some major drawbacks, which mainly reside in the uniform voting among the nearest prototypes in the feature space. In this paper, we propose a new method that is able to learn the "relevance" of prototypes, thus classifying test data using a weighted k-NN rule. In particular, our algorithm, called Multi-class Leveraged k-nearest neighbor (MLNN), learns the prototype weights in a boosting framework, by minimizing a surrogate exponential risk over training data. We propose two main contributions for improving computational speed and accuracy. On the one hand, we implement learning in an inherently multiclass way, thus providing significant computation time reduction over one-versus-all approaches. Furthermore, the leveraging weights enable effective data selection, thus reducing the cost of k-NN search at classification time. On the other hand, we propose a kernel generalization of our approach to take into account real-valued similarities between data in the feature space, thus enabling more accurate estimation of the local class density. We tested MLNN on three datasets of natural images. Results show that MLNN significantly outperforms classic k-NN and weighted k-NN voting. Furthermore, using an adaptive Gaussian kernel provides significant performance improvement. Finally, the best results are obtained when using MLNN with an appropriate learned metric distance.
Proceedings of the 10th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, ACCV 2010, November 8-12, 2010, Queenstown, New Zealand
Queenstown, New Zealand

hal-00664606
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00664606
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00664606/document
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00664606/file/mlnn_accvfinal.pdf

Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD Landes Bioscience
Résumé : International audience
In 2008 we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, research on this topic has continued to accelerate, and many new scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Accordingly, it is important to update these guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Various reviews have described the range of assays that have been used for this purpose. Nevertheless, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to measure autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. A key point that needs to be emphasized is that there is a difference between measurements that monitor the numbers or volume of autophagic elements (e.g., autophagosomes or autolysosomes) at any stage of the autophagic process vs. those that measure flux through the autophagy pathway (i.e., the complete process); thus, a block in macroautophagy that results in autophagosome accumulation needs to be differentiated from stimuli that result in increased autophagic activity, defined as increased autophagy induction coupled with increased delivery to, and degradation within, lysosomes (in most higher eukaryotes and some protists such as Dictyostelium) or the vacuole (in plants and fungi). In other words, it is especially important that investigators new to the field understand that the appearance of more autophagosomes does not necessarily equate with more autophagy. In fact, in many cases, autophagosomes accumulate because of a block in trafficking to lysosomes without a concomitant change in autophagosome biogenesis, whereas an increase in autolysosomes may reflect a reduction in degradative activity. Here, we present a set of guidelines for the selection and interpretation of methods for use by investigators who aim to examine macroautophagy and related processes, as well as for reviewers who need to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of papers that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a formulaic set of rules, because the appropriate assays depend in part on the question being asked and the system being used. In addition, we emphasize that no individual assay is guaranteed to be the most appropriate one in every situation, and we strongly recommend the use of multiple assays to monitor autophagy. In these guidelines, we consider these various methods of assessing autophagy and what information can, or cannot, be obtained from them. Finally, by discussing the merits and limits of particular autophagy assays, we hope to encourage technical innovation in the field.
Autophagy

hal-00735751
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00735751
PUBMED : 22966490

Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD IEEE
Résumé : International audience
This paper proposes a novel automated approach for the categorization of cells in fluorescence microscopy images. Our supervised classification method aims at recognizing patterns of unlabeled cells based on an annotated dataset. First, the cell images need to be indexed by encoding them in a feature space. For this purpose, we propose tailored bio-inspired features relying on the distribution of contrast information. Then, a supervised learning algorithm is proposed for classifying the cells. We carried out experiments on cellular images related to the diagnosis of autoimmune diseases, testing our classification method on the HEp-2 Cells dataset of Foggia et al (CBMS 2010). Results show classification precision larger than 96% on average, thus confirming promising application of our approach to the challenging application of cellular image classification for computer-aided diagnosis.
ICPR 2012
Tsukuba, Japan

hal-00958856
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00958856
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00958856/document
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00958856/file/icpr_2012.pdf

Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD Springer Verlag
Résumé : under revision for IJCV
International audience
The k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) classification rule has proven extremely successful in countless many computer vision applications. For example, image categorization often relies on uniform voting among the nearest prototypes in the space of descriptors. In spite of its good properties, the classic k-NN rule suffers from high variance when dealing with sparse prototype datasets in high dimensions. A few techniques have been proposed to improve k-NN classification, which rely on either deforming the nearest neighborhood relationship or modifying the input space. In this paper, we propose a novel boosting algorithm, called UNN (Universal Nearest Neighbors), which induces leveraged k-NN, thus generalizing the classic k-NN rule. We redefine the voting rule as a strong classifier that linearly combines predictions from the k closest prototypes. Weak classifiers are learned by UNN so as to minimize a surrogate risk. A major feature of UNN is the ability to learn which prototypes are the most relevant for a given class, thus allowing one for effective data reduction. Experimental results on the synthetic two-class dataset of Ripley show that such a filtering strategy is able to reject "noisy" prototypes. We carried out image categorization experiments on a database containing eight classes of natural scenes. We show that our method outperforms significantly the classic k-NN classification, while enabling significant reduction of the computational cost by means of data filtering.
ISSN: 0920-5691

hal-00481712
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00481712
DOI : 10.1007/s11263-012-0539-2
ARXIV : 1001.1221

Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD IEEE
Résumé : Object classification is a challenging task in computer vision. Many approaches have been proposed to extract meaningful descriptors from images and classifying them in a supervised learning framework. In this paper, we revisit the classic k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) classification rule, which has shown to be very effective when dealing with local image descriptors. However, k-NN still features some major drawbacks, mainly due to the uniform voting among the nearest prototypes in the feature space. In this paper, we propose a generalization of the classic k-NN rule in a supervised learning (boosting) framework. Namely, we redefine the voting rule as a strong classifier that linearly combines predictions from the k closest prototypes. To induce this classifier, we propose a novel learning algorithm, MLNN (Multiclass Leveraged Nearest Neighbors), which gives a simple procedure for performing prototype selection very efficiently. We tested our method on 12 categories of objects, and observed significant improvement over classic k-NN in terms of classification performances.
International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services
Desenzano del Garda, Italy

hal-00481725
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00481725
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00481725/document
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00481725/file/pbnn_wiamis_10.pdf