Online communities provide a unique way for individuals to access information from those in similar circumstances, which can be critical for health conditions that require daily and personalized management. As these groups and topics often arise organically, identifying the types of topics discussed is necessary to understand their needs. As well, these communities and people in them can be quite diverse, and existing community detection methods have not been extended towards evaluating these heterogeneities. This has been limited as community detection methodologies have not focused on community detection based on semantic relations between textual features of the user-generated content. Thus here we develop an approach, NeuroCom, that optimally finds dense groups of users as communities in a latent space inferred by neural representation of published contents of users. By embedding of words and messages, we show that NeuroCom demonstrates improved clustering and identifies more nuanced discussion topics in contrast to other common unsupervised learning approaches.
Neural representation has been implemented for social media short messages albeit in different ways than we propose @cite_1 . Gaussian Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) have been used for modeling user's posts within a social network to identify their topics of interest, and finally construct communities @cite_1 . However, a parametric approach was used in which it was necessary to specify the number of clusters communities. In addition to not requiring such initialization, this approach is conceptually different than our proposed work in that it directly maps individuals to communities (instead of mapping the content of their posts, which may better capture heterogeneous community memberships). Further, content-based density approachefs as proposed, versus parametric ones could potentially learn a more organic number of communities. Given this gap, and the fact that content-based community detection (opposed to graph-based) may be more pertinent in health-related communities, here we explore content-based clustering of health communities.
@cite_1
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In this paper we present an original approach for community detection in complex networks. The approach belongs to the family of seed-centric algorithms. However, instead of expanding communities around selected seeds as most of existing approaches do, we explore here applying an ensemble clustering approach to different network partitions derived from ego-centered communities computed for each selected seed. Ego-centered communities are themselves computed applying a recently proposed ensemble ranking based approach that allow to efficiently combine various local modularities used to guide a greedy optimization process. Results of first experiments on real world networks for which a ground truth decomposition into communities are known, argue for the validity of our approach. We propose a series of Bayesian nonparametric statistical models for community detection in graphs. We model the probability of the presence or absence of edges within the graph. Using these models, we naturally incorporate uncertainty and variability and take advantage of nonparametric techniques, such as the Chinese restaurant process and the Dirichlet process. Some of the contributions include: (a) the community structure is directly modeled without specifying the number of communities a priori; (b) the probabilities of edges within or between communities may be modeled as varying by community or pairs of communities; (c) some nodes can be classified as not belonging to any community; and (d) Bayesian model diagnostics are used to compare models and help with appropriate model selection. We start by fitting an initial model to a well-known network dataset, and we develop a series of increasingly complex models. We propose Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms to carry out the estimation as well as an app... Despite substantial interest in applications of neural networks to information retrieval, neural ranking models have only been applied to standard ad hoc retrieval tasks over web pages and newswire documents. This paper proposes MP-HCNN (Multi-Perspective Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network) a novel neural ranking model specifically designed for ranking short social media posts. We identify document length, informal language, and heterogeneous relevance signals as features that distinguish documents in our domain, and present a model specifically designed with these characteristics in mind. Our model uses hierarchical convolutional layers to learn latent semantic soft-match relevance signals at the character, word, and phrase levels. A pooling-based similarity measurement layer integrates evidence from multiple types of matches between the query, the social media post, as well as URLs contained in the post. Extensive experiments using Twitter data from the TREC Microblog Tracks 2011--2014 show that our model significantly outperforms prior feature-based as well and existing neural ranking models. To our best knowledge, this paper presents the first substantial work tackling search over social media posts using neural ranking models. Detecting hidden communities from observed interactions is a classical problem. Theoretical analysis of community detection has so far been mostly limited to models with non-overlapping communities such as the stochastic block model. In this paper, we provide guaranteed community detection for a family of probabilistic network models with overlapping communities, termed as the mixed membership Dirichlet model, first introduced in (2008). This model allows for nodes to have fractional memberships in multiple communities and assumes that the community memberships are drawn from a Dirichlet distribution. Moreover, it contains the stochastic block model as a special case. We propose a unified approach to learning communities in these models via a tensor spectral decomposition approach. Our estimator uses low-order moment tensor of the observed network, consisting of 3-star counts. Our learning method is based on simple linear algebraic operations such as singular value decomposition and tensor power iterations. We provide guaranteed recovery of community memberships and model parameters, and present a careful finite sample analysis of our learning method. Additionally, our results match the best known scaling requirements for the special case of the (homogeneous) stochastic block model. Recently community detection has attracted much interest in social media to understand the collective behaviours of users and allow individuals to be modeled in the context of the group. Most existing approaches for community detection exploit either users' social links or their published content, aiming at discovering groups of densely connected or highly similar users. They often fail to find effective communities due to excessive noise in content, sparsity in links, and heterogenous behaviours of users in social media. Further, they are unable to provide insights and rationales behind the formation of the group and the collective behaviours of the users. To tackle these challenges, we propose to discover communities in a low- dimensional latent space in which we simultaneously learn the representation of users and communities. In particular, we integrated different social views of the network into a low-dimensional latent space in which we sought dense clusters of users as communities. By imposing a Laplacian regularizer into affiliation matrix, we further incorporated prior knowledge into the community discovery process. Finally community profiles were computed by a linear operator integrating the profiles of members. Taking the wellness domain as an example, we conducted experiments on a large scale real world dataset of users tweeting about diabetes and its related concepts, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in discovering and profiling user communities. Most existing content-based filtering approaches including Rocchio, Language Models, SVM, Logistic Regression, Neural Networks, etc. learn user profiles independently without capturing the similarity among users. The Bayesian hierarchical models learn user profiles jointly and have the advantage of being able to borrow information from other users through a Bayesian prior. The standard Bayesian hierarchical model assumes all user profiles are generated from the same prior. However, considering the diversity of user interests, this assumption might not be optimal. Besides, most existing content-based filtering approaches implicitly assume that each user profile corresponds to exactly one user interest and fail to capture a user's multiple interests (information needs). In this paper, we present a flexible Bayesian hierarchical modeling approach to model both commonality and diversity among users as well as individual users' multiple interests. We propose two models each with different assumptions, and the proposed models are called Discriminative Factored Prior Models (DFPM). In our models, each user profile is modeled as a discriminative classifier with a factored model as its prior, and different factors contribute in different levels to each user profile. Compared with existing content-based filtering models, DFPM are interesting because they can 1) borrow discriminative criteria of other users while learning a particular user profile through the factored prior; 2) trade off well between diversity and commonality among users; and 3) handle the challenging classification situation where each class contains multiple concepts. The experimental results on a dataset collected from real users on digg.com show that our models significantly outperform the baseline models of L-2 regularized logistic regression and the standard Bayesian hierarchical model with logistic regression Convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved the state-of-the-art performance in many different visual tasks. Learned from a large-scale training data set, CNN features are much more discriminative and accurate than the handcrafted features. Moreover, CNN features are also transferable among different domains. On the other hand, traditional dictionary-based features (such as BoW and spatial pyramid matching) contain much more local discriminative and structural information, which is implicitly embedded in the images. To further improve the performance, in this paper, we propose to combine CNN with dictionary-based models for scene recognition and visual domain adaptation (DA). Specifically, based on the well-tuned CNN models (e.g., AlexNet and VGG Net), two dictionary-based representations are further constructed, namely, mid-level local representation (MLR) and convolutional Fisher vector (CFV) representation. In MLR, an efficient two-stage clustering method, i.e., weighted spatial and feature space spectral clustering on the parts of a single image followed by clustering all representative parts of all images, is used to generate a class-mixture or a class-specific part dictionary. After that, the part dictionary is used to operate with the multiscale image inputs for generating mid-level representation. In CFV, a multiscale and scale-proportional Gaussian mixture model training strategy is utilized to generate Fisher vectors based on the last convolutional layer of CNN. By integrating the complementary information of MLR, CFV, and the CNN features of the fully connected layer, the state-of-the-art performance can be achieved on scene recognition and DA problems. An interested finding is that our proposed hybrid representation (from VGG net trained on ImageNet) is also complementary to GoogLeNet and or VGG-11 (trained on Place205) greatly. Deep belief nets have been successful in modeling handwritten characters, but it has proved more difficult to apply them to real images. The problem lies in the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) which is used as a module for learning deep belief nets one layer at a time. The Gaussian-Binary RBMs that have been used to model real-valued data are not a good way to model the covariance structure of natural images. We propose a factored 3-way RBM that uses the states of its hidden units to represent abnormalities in the local covariance structure of an image. This provides a probabilistic framework for the widely used simple complex cell architecture. Our model learns binary features that work very well for object recognition on the “tiny images” data set. Even better features are obtained by then using standard binary RBM’s to learn a deeper model. Recently, neuron activations extracted from a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) show promising performance in various visual tasks. However, due to the domain and task bias, using the features generated from the model pre-trained for image classification as image representations for instance retrieval is problematic. In this paper, we propose quartet-net learning to improve the discriminative power of CNN features for instance retrieval. The general idea is to map the features into a space where the image similarity can be better evaluated. Our network differs from the traditional Siamese-net in two ways. First, we adopt a double-margin contrastive loss with a dynamic margin tuning strategy to train the network which leads to more robust performance. Second, we introduce in the mimic learning regularization to improve the generalization ability of the network by preventing it from overfitting to the training data. Catering for the network learning, we collect a large-scale dataset, namely GeoPair, which consists of 68k matching image pairs and 63k non-matching pairs. Experiments on several standard instance retrieval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Recent works have shown that exploiting multi-scale representations deeply learned via convolutional neural networks (CNN) is of tremendous importance for accurate contour detection. This paper presents a novel approach for predicting contours which advances the state of the art in two fundamental aspects, i.e. multi-scale feature generation and fusion. Different from previous works directly considering multi-scale feature maps obtained from the inner layers of a primary CNN architecture, we introduce a hierarchical deep model which produces more rich and complementary representations. Furthermore, to refine and robustly fuse the representations learned at different scales, the novel Attention-Gated Conditional Random Fields (AG-CRFs) are proposed. The experiments ran on two publicly available datasets (BSDS500 and NYUDv2) demonstrate the effectiveness of the latent AG-CRF model and of the overall hierarchical framework. In this paper, we generate two computational models in order to estimate two dominant global properties (naturalness and openness) for representing a scene based on its global spatial structure. Naturalness and openness are two dominant perceptual properties within a multidimensional space in which semantically similar scenes (e.g., corridor and hallway) are assigned to nearby points. In this model space, the representation of a real-world scene is based on the overall shape of a scene but not on local object information. We introduce the use of a deep convolutional neural network for generating features that are well-suited for estimating the two global properties of a visual scene. The extracted features are integrated in an efficient way and fed into a linear support vector machine (SVM) to classify naturalness versus man-madeness and openness versus closedness. These two global properties (naturalness and openness) of an input image can be predicted from activations in the lowest layer of the convolutional neural network which has been trained for a scene recognition task. The consistent results of computational models in full and restricted spatial frequency ranges suggest that the representation of an image in the lowest layer of the deep scene CNN contains holistic information of the images as it leads to highest accuracy in modelling the global shape of the scene. We adopt Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) as our parametric model to learn discriminative features and classifiers for local patch classification. As visually similar pixels are indistinguishable from local context, we alleviate such ambiguity by introducing a global scene constraint. We estimate the global potential in a non-parametric framework. Furthermore, a large margin based CNN metric learning method is proposed for better global potential estimation. The final pixel class prediction is performed by integrating local and global beliefs. Even without any post-processing, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on SiftFlow and competitive results on Stanford Background benchmark. Community detection is the task of detecting hidden communities from observed interactions. Guaranteed community detection has so far been mostly limited to models with non-overlapping communities such as the stochastic block model. In this paper, we remove this restriction, and provide guaranteed community detection for a family of probabilistic network models with overlapping communities, termed as the mixed membership Dirichlet model, first introduced by (2008). This model allows for nodes to have fractional memberships in multiple communities and assumes that the community memberships are drawn from a Dirichlet distribution. Moreover, it contains the stochastic block model as a special case. We propose a unified approach to learning these models via a tensor spectral decomposition method. Our estimator is based on low-order moment tensor of the observed network, consisting of 3-star counts. Our learning method is fast and is based on simple linear algebraic operations, e.g., singular value decomposition and tensor power iterations. We provide guaranteed recovery of community memberships and model parameters and present a careful finite sample analysis of our learning method. As an important special case, our results match the best known scaling requirements for the (homogeneous) stochastic block model. Since convolutional neural network (CNN) lacks an inherent mechanism to handle large scale variations, we always need to compute feature maps multiple times for multiscale object detection, which has the bottleneck of computational cost in practice. To address this, we devise a recurrent scale approximation (RSA) to compute feature map once only, and only through this map can we approximate the rest maps on other levels. At the core of RSA is the recursive rolling out mechanism: given an initial map on a particular scale, it generates the prediction on a smaller scale that is half the size of input. To further increase efficiency and accuracy, we (a): design a scale-forecast network to globally predict potential scales in the image since there is no need to compute maps on all levels of the pyramid. (b): propose a landmark retracing network (LRN) to retrace back locations of the regressed landmarks and generate a confidence score for each landmark; LRN can effectively alleviate false positives due to the accumulated error in RSA. The whole system could be trained end-to-end in a unified CNN framework. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is superior against state-of-the-arts on face detection benchmarks and achieves comparable results for generic proposal generation. The source code of our system is available. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated their ability object detection of very high resolution remote sensing images. However, CNNs have obvious limitations for modeling geometric variations in remote sensing targets. In this paper, we introduced a CNN structure, namely deformable ConvNet, to address geometric modeling in object recognition. By adding offsets to the convolution layers, feature mapping of CNN can be applied to unfixed locations, enhancing CNNs’ visual appearance understanding. In our work, a deformable region-based fully convolutional networks (R-FCN) was constructed by substituting the regular convolution layer with a deformable convolution layer. To efficiently use this deformable convolutional neural network (ConvNet), a training mechanism is developed in our work. We first set the pre-trained R-FCN natural image model as the default network parameters in deformable R-FCN. Then, this deformable ConvNet was fine-tuned on very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. To remedy the increase in lines like false region proposals, we developed aspect ratio constrained non maximum suppression (arcNMS). The precision of deformable ConvNet for detecting objects was then improved. An end-to-end approach was then developed by combining deformable R-FCN, a smart fine-tuning strategy and aspect ratio constrained NMS. The developed method was better than a state-of-the-art benchmark in object detection without data augmentation. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully used for fast and accurate estimation of dense correspondences between images in computer vision applications. However, much of their success is based on the availability of large training datasets with dense ground truth correspondences, which are only rarely available in medical applications. In this paper, we, therefore, address the problem of CNNs learning from few training data for medical image registration. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We present a novel approach for learning highly expressive appearance models from few training samples, (2) we show that this approach can be used to synthesize huge amounts of realistic ground truth training data for CNN-based medical image registration, and (3) we adapt the FlowNet architecture for CNN-based optical flow estimation to the medical image registration problem. This pipeline is applied to two medical data sets with less than 40 training images. We show that CNNs learned from the proposed generative model outperform those trained on random deformations or displacement fields estimated via classical image registration. Many networks of scientific interest naturally decompose into clusters or communities with comparatively fewer external than internal links; however, current Bayesian models of network communities do not exert this intuitive notion of communities. We formulate a nonparametric Bayesian model for community detection consistent with an intuitive definition of communities and present a Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure for inferring the community structure. A Matlab toolbox with the proposed inference procedure is available for download. On synthetic and real networks, our model detects communities consistent with ground truth, and on real networks, it outperforms existing approaches in predicting missing links. This suggests that community structure is an important structural property of networks that should be explicitly modeled. Existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require a fixed-size (e.g., 224 @math 224) input image. This requirement is “artificial” and may reduce the recognition accuracy for the images or sub-images of an arbitrary size scale. In this work, we equip the networks with another pooling strategy, “spatial pyramid pooling”, to eliminate the above requirement. The new network structure, called SPP-net, can generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size scale. Pyramid pooling is also robust to object deformations. With these advantages, SPP-net should in general improve all CNN-based image classification methods. On the ImageNet 2012 dataset, we demonstrate that SPP-net boosts the accuracy of a variety of CNN architectures despite their different designs. On the Pascal VOC 2007 and Caltech101 datasets, SPP-net achieves state-of-the-art classification results using a single full-image representation and no fine-tuning. The power of SPP-net is also significant in object detection. Using SPP-net, we compute the feature maps from the entire image only once, and then pool features in arbitrary regions (sub-images) to generate fixed-length representations for training the detectors. This method avoids repeatedly computing the convolutional features. In processing test images, our method is 24-102 @math faster than the R-CNN method, while achieving better or comparable accuracy on Pascal VOC 2007. In ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) 2014, our methods rank #2 in object detection and #3 in image classification among all 38 teams. This manuscript also introduces the improvement made for this competition. We present a novel probabilistic approach for fitting a statistical model to an image. A 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) of faces is interpreted as a generative (Top-Down) Bayesian model. Random Forests are used as noisy detectors (Bottom-Up) for the face and facial landmark positions. The Top-Down and Bottom-Up parts are then combined using a Data-Driven Markov Chain Monte Carlo Method (DDMCMC). As core of the integration, we use the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm which has two main advantages. First, the algorithm can handle unreliable detections and therefore does not need the detectors to take an early and possible wrong hard decision before fitting. Second, it is open for integration of various cues to guide the fitting process. Based on the proposed approach, we implemented a completely automatic, pose and illumination invariant face recognition application. We are able to train and test the building blocks of our application on different databases. The system is evaluated on the Multi-PIE database and reaches state of the art performance. Existing deformable registration methods require exhaustively iterative optimization, along with careful parameter tuning, to estimate the deformation field between images. Although some learning-based methods have been proposed for initiating deformation estimation, they are often template-specific and not flexible in practical use. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) based regression model to directly learn the complex mapping from the input image pair (i.e., a pair of template and subject) to their corresponding deformation field. Specifically, our CNN architecture is designed in a patch-based manner to learn the complex mapping from the input patch pairs to their respective deformation field. First, the equalized active-points guided sampling strategy is introduced to facilitate accurate CNN model learning upon a limited image dataset. Then, the similarity-steered CNN architecture is designed, where we propose to add the auxiliary contextual cue, i.e., the similarity between input patches, to more directly guide the learning process. Experiments on different brain image datasets demonstrate promising registration performance based on our CNN model. Furthermore, it is found that the trained CNN model from one dataset can be successfully transferred to another dataset, although brain appearances across datasets are quite variable.