Support Vector Machines (SVM’s) with various kernels have become very successful in pattern classification and regression. However, single kernels do not lead to optimal data models. Replacing the input space by a kernel-based feature space in which the linear discrimination problem with margin maximization is solved is a general method that allows for mixing various kernels and adding new type...

This paper presents a new algorithm for classifying distributions. The algorithm combines the principle of margin maximization and a kernel trick, applied to distributions. Thus, it combines the discriminative power of support vector machines and the well-developed framework of generative models. It can be applied to a number of real-life tasks which include data represented as distributions. T...

Due to its wide applicability, the problem of semi-supervised classification is attracting increasing attention in machine learning. Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machines (S3VMs) are based on applying the margin maximization principle to both labeled and unlabeled examples. Unlike SVMs, their formulation leads to a non-convex optimization problem. A suite of algorithms have recently been prop...

This chapter presents a novel approach to markerless real-time 3D pose estimation in a multi-camera setup. We explain how foreground-background segmentation and 3D reconstruction are used to extract a 3D hull of the user.This is done in real time using voxel carving and a fixed lookup table.The body pose is then retrieved using an example-based classifier that uses 3D Haar-like wavelet features...

Influence maximization is a well-studied problem that asks for a small set of influential users from a social network, such that by targeting them as early adopters, the expected total adoption through influence cascades over the network is maximized. However, almost all prior work focuses on cascades of a single propagating entity or purely-competitive entities. In this work, we propose the Co...

Bit error rate (BER) minimization and SNR-gap maximization, two robustness optimization problems, are solved, under average power and bit-rate constraints, according to the waterfilling policy. Under peak-power constraint the solutions differ and this paper gives bit-loading solutions of both robustness optimization problems over independent parallel channels. The study is based on analytical a...

Finding linear classifiers that maximize AUC scores is important in ranking research. This is naturally formulated as a 1-norm hard/soft margin optimization problem over pn pairs of p positive and n negative instances. However, directly solving the optimization problems is impractical since the problem size (pn) is quadratically larger than the given sample size (p + n). In this paper, we give ...

In this paper we study boosting methods from a new perspective. We build on recent work by Efron et al. to show that boosting approximately (and in some cases exactly) minimizes its loss criterion with an l1 constraint on the coefficient vector. This helps understand the success of boosting with early stopping as regularized fitting of the loss criterion. For the two most commonly used criteria...

An algorithm for learning fast multiclass object detection cascades is introduced. It produces multi-resolution (MRes) cascades, whose early stages are binary target vs. non-target detectors that eliminate false positives, late stages multiclass classifiers that finely discriminate target classes, and middle stages have intermediate numbers of classes, determined in a data-driven manner. This M...

Article history: Received 3 December 2007 Received in revised form 20 April 2009 Accepted 22 April 2009