This paper proposes a novel approach to connected digit recognition by the use of inductive inference "decision trees". To develop the production rules, the expert is bypassed and instead the classification models are generated inductively by examining a large speech database and then generalising the pattern from the specific examples. This approach has already been successfully used for isola...

In this paper we describe a method for automatically discovering subsets of contextual factors which, taken together, axe useful for predicting the realizations, or pronunciations, of English words for continuous speech recognition. A decision tree is used for organizing contextual descriptions of phonological variation. This representation enables us to categorize different realizations accord...

1 Introduction We propose an extension of an entropy-based heuristic of Quinlan [Q93] for constructing a decision tree from a large database with many numeric attributes. Quin-lan pointed out that his original method (as well as other existing methods) may be inefficient if any numeric attributes are strongly correlated. Our approach offers one solution to this problem. For each pair of numeric...

We discuss the implications of Holte’s recentlypublished article, which demonstrated that on the most commonly used data very simple classification rules are almost as accurate as decision trees produced by Quinlan’s C4.5. We consider, in particular, what is the significance of Holte’s results for the future of top-down induction of decision trees. To an extent, Holte questioned the sense of fu...

Changes in the permanent upper central incisors (Hutchinsonian teeth) and in the permanent first molars (Moon, 1877, 1884; Pfluger, 1924) are two of the most important stigmata of late congenital syphilis. These stigmata are not seen until the second dentition, in the incisors after about 7 years of age and in the molars after the 6th year. In radiographs however, Stokes and Gardner (1923) demo...

We present a new method for top-down induction of decision trees (TDIDT) with multivariate binary splits at the nodes. The primary contribution of this work is a new splitting criterion called soft entropy, which is continuous and differentiable with respect to the parameters of the splitting function. Using simple gradient descent to find multivariate splits and a novel pruning technique, our ...

Occam's razor, attributed to the fourteenth century English philosopher William of Occam, states: “plurality should not be assumed without necessity.” The machine learning interpretation of Occam’s razor is that if two models have the same performance on the training set, choose the simpler. Decision tree learning widely uses Occam’s razor. Popular decision tree generating algorithms are based ...

We describe several improvements to Freund and Schapire's AdaBoost boosting algorithm, particularly in a setting in which hypotheses may assign confidences to each of their predictions. We give a simplified analysis of AdaBoost in this setting, and we show how this analysis can be used to find improved parameter settings as well as a refined criterion for training weak hypotheses. We give a spe...