Classifying the land surface according to different climate zones is often a prerequisite for global diagnostic or predictive modelling studies. Classical classifications such as the prominent Köppen–Geiger (KG) approach rely on heuristic decision rules. Although these heuristics may transport some process understanding, such a discretization may appear “arbitrary” from a data oriented perspect...

Supervised and unsupervised categorization have been studied in separate research traditions. A handful of studies have attempted to explore a possible convergence between the two. The present research builds on these studies, by comparing the unsupervised categorization results of Pothos et al. ( 2011 ; Pothos et al., 2008 ) with the results from two procedures of supervised categorization. In...

The task of matching co-referent records is known among other names as record linkage. For large record-linkage problems, often there is little or no labeled data available, but unlabeled data shows a reasonably clear structure. For such problems, unsupervised or semi-supervised methods are preferable to supervised methods. In this paper, we describe a hierarchical graphical model framework for...

We describe a simple scheme that allows an agent to learn about its environment in an unsupervised manner. Our scheme pits two versions of the same agent, Alice and Bob, against one another. Alice proposes a task for Bob to complete; and then Bob attempts to complete the task. In this work we will focus on two kinds of environments: (nearly) reversible environments and environments that can be ...

This paper adopts an unsupervised subclass discovery approach to automatically improve the taxonomy of Wikipedia vandalism. Wikipedia vandalism, defined as malicious editing intended to compromise the integrity of the content of articles, exhibits heterogeneous characteristics, making it hard to detect automatically. The categorization of vandalism provides insights on the detection of vandalis...

This work introduces a self-supervised architecture for robust classification of moving obstacles in urban environments. Our approach presents a hierarchical scheme that relies on the stability of a subset of features given by a sensor to perform an initial robust classification based on unsupervised techniques. The obtained results are used as labels to train a set of supervised classifiers. T...

In this study, a survey of land cover mapping and their classification techniques is done. Land cover mapping plays a very important role in making land policy, land management and land analysis. In this survey different approaches are studied that were applied for land cover mapping such as an Artificial Neural Network (ANNs), Fuzzy Logic, Supervised, Unsupervised and Maximum Likelihood. The o...

The classification of time series from photometric large scale surveys into variability types and the description of their properties is difficult for various reasons including but not limited to the irregular sampling, the usually few available photometric bands, and the diversity of variable objects. Furthermore, it can be seen that different physical processes may sometimes produce similar b...