Music generation has generally been focused on either creating scores or interpreting them. We discuss differences between these two problems and propose that, in fact, it may be valuable to work in the space of direct performance generation: jointly predicting the notes and also their expressive timing and dynamics. We consider the significance and qualities of the dataset needed for this. Having identified both a problem domain and characteristics of an appropriate dataset, we show an LSTM-based recurrent network model that subjectively performs quite well on this task. Critically, we provide generated examples. We also include feedback from professional composers and musicians about some of these examples.
@cite_15 , observe that many previous performance rendering systems often consist of many heuristic rules and tend to be complex. It makes [it] difficult to generate and select the useful rules, or perform the optimization of parameters in the rules.'' They thus present a method that uses Gaussian Processes to achieve this, where some parameters can be learned. In their ostensibly simpler system, for each single note, three outputs and corresponding thirteen input features are defined, and three functions each of which returns one of three outputs and receive the thirteen input features, are independently learned''. However, some of these features, too, depend on certain information, e.g. they compute the differences between successive pitches, and this only works in compositions where the voice leading is absolutely clear; in the majority of classical piano repertoire, this is not the case. In Laminae @cite_34 , systematize a set of context-dependent models, building a decision tree which allows rendering a performance by combining contextual information.
@cite_15 @cite_34
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So far, many of the computational models for rendering music performance have been proposed, but they often consist of many heuristic rules and tend to be complex. It makes difficult to generate and select the useful rules, or perform the optimization of parameters in the rules. In this study, we present a new approach that automatically learns a computational model for rendering music performance with score information as an input and the corresponding real performance data as an output. We use a Gaussian Process (GP) incorporated with a Bayesian Committee Machine to reduce naive GP's heavy computation cost, to learn those input-output relationships. We compared three normalized errors: dynamics, attack time and release time between the real and predicted performance by the trained GP to evaluate our proposed scheme. We evaluated the learning ability and the generalization ability. The results show that the trained GP has an acceptable learning ability for 'known' pieces, but show insufficient generalization ability for 'unknown' pieces, suggesting that the GP can learn the expressive music performance without setting many parameters manually, but the size of the current training dataset is not sufficiently large so as to generalize the training pieces to 'unknown' test pieces. Dirty data is a serious problem for businesses leading to incorrect decision making, inefficient daily operations, and ultimately wasting both time and money. Dirty data often arises when domain constraints and business rules, meant to preserve data consistency and accuracy, are enforced incompletely or not at all in application code. In this work, we propose a new data-driven tool that can be used within an organization's data quality management process to suggest possible rules, and to identify conformant and non-conformant records. Data quality rules are known to be contextual, so we focus on the discovery of context-dependent rules. Specifically, we search for conditional functional dependencies (CFDs), that is, functional dependencies that hold only over a portion of the data. The output of our tool is a set of functional dependencies together with the context in which they hold (for example, a rule that states for CS graduate courses, the course number and term functionally determines the room and instructor). Since the input to our tool will likely be a dirty database, we also search for CFDs that almost hold. We return these rules together with the non-conformant records (as these are potentially dirty records). We present effective algorithms for discovering CFDs and dirty values in a data instance. Our discovery algorithm searches for minimal CFDs among the data values and prunes redundant candidates. No universal objective measures of data quality or data quality rules are known. Hence, to avoid returning an unnecessarily large number of CFDs and only those that are most interesting, we evaluate a set of interest metrics and present comparative results using real datasets. We also present an experimental study showing the scalability of our techniques. A content selection component determines which information should be conveyed in the output of a natural language generation system. We present an efficient method for automatically learning content selection rules from a corpus and its related database. Our modeling framework treats content selection as a collective classification problem, thus allowing us to capture contextual dependencies between input items. Experiments in a sports domain demonstrate that this approach achieves a substantial improvement over context-agnostic methods. Spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) is a learning rule that modifies synaptic strength as a function of the relative timing of pre- and postsynaptic spikes. When a neuron is repeatedly presented with similar inputs, STDP is known to have the effect of concentrating high synaptic weights on afferents that systematically fire early, while postsynaptic spike latencies decrease. Here we use this learning rule in an asynchronous feedforward spiking neural network that mimics the ventral visual pathway and shows that when the network is presented with natural images, selectivity to intermediate-complexity visual features emerges. Those features, which correspond to prototypical patterns that are both salient and consistently present in the images, are highly informative and enable robust object recognition, as demonstrated on various classification tasks. Taken together, these results show that temporal codes may be a key to understanding the phenomenal processing speed achieved by the visual system and that STDP can lead to fast and selective responses. This paper proposes a system for performance rendering of keyboard instruments. The goal is fully autonomous rendition of a performance with musical smoothness without losing any of the characteristics of the actual performer. The system is based on a method that systematizes combinations of constraints and thereby elucidates the rendering process of the performer’s performance by defining stochastic models that associate artistic deviations observed in a performance with the contextual information notated in its musical score. The proposed system can be used to search for a sequence of optimum cases from the combination of all existing cases of the existing performance observed to render an unseen performance efficiently. Evaluations conducted indicate that musical features expected in existing performances are transcribed appropriately in the performances rendered by the system. The evaluations also demonstrate that the system is able to render performances with natural expressions stably, even for compositions with unconventional styles. Consequently, performances rendered via the proposed system have won first prize in the autonomous section of a performance rendering contest for computer systems. In a physical neural system, where storage and processing are intimately intertwined, the rules for adjusting the synaptic weights can only depend on variables that are available locally, such as the activity of the pre- and post-synaptic neurons, resulting in local learning rules. A systematic framework for studying the space of local learning rules is obtained by first specifying the nature of the local variables, and then the functional form that ties them together into each learning rule. Such a framework enables also the systematic discovery of new learning rules and exploration of relationships between learning rules and group symmetries. We study polynomial local learning rules stratified by their degree and analyze their behavior and capabilities in both linear and non-linear units and networks. Stacking local learning rules in deep feedforward networks leads to deep local learning. While deep local learning can learn interesting representations, it cannot learn complex input-output functions, even when targets are available for the top layer. Learning complex input-output functions requires local deep learning where target information is communicated to the deep layers through a backward learning channel. The nature of the communicated information about the targets and the structure of the learning channel partition the space of learning algorithms. For any learning algorithm, the capacity of the learning channel can be defined as the number of bits provided about the error gradient per weight, divided by the number of required operations per weight. We estimate the capacity associated with several learning algorithms and show that backpropagation outperforms them by simultaneously maximizing the information rate and minimizing the computational cost. This result is also shown to be true for recurrent networks, by unfolding them in time. The theory clarifies the concept of Hebbian learning, establishes the power and limitations of local learning rules, introduces the learning channel which enables a formal analysis of the optimality of backpropagation, and explains the sparsity of the space of learning rules discovered so far. The system provides an automated and adaptive model selection process.The system predicts the stock price direction, rather than the forecasted level.Particle swarm optimization is used to reduce computation time.Denoising is used to deal with stock market volatility. Predicting the direction and movement of stock index prices is difficult, often leading to excessive trading, transaction costs, and missed opportunities. Often traders need a systematic method to not only spot trading opportunities, but to also provide a consistent approach, thereby minimizing trading errors and costs. While mechanical trading systems exist, they are usually designed for a specific stock, stock index, or other financial asset, and are often highly dependent on preselected inputs and model parameters that are expected to continue providing trading information well after the initial training or back-tested model development period. The following research leads to a detailed trading model that provides a more effective and intelligent way for recognizing trading signals and assisting investors with trading decisions by utilizing a system that adapts both the inputs and the prediction model based on the desired output. To illustrate the adaptive approach, multiple inputs and modeling techniques are utilized, including neural networks, particle swarm optimization, and denoising. Simulations with stock indexes illustrate how traders can generate higher returns using the developed adaptive decision support system model. The benefits of adding adaptive and intelligent decision making to forecasts are also discussed. Abstract The "secretary problem" models a class of optimal stopping decision tasks in which the binary decision to either stop or continue the search only depends on relative ranks. We present this problem in a computer-controlled experiment designed to investigate sequential observation and selection behavior in the context of employer hiring decisions. Our principal objectives are to test the descriptive power of the optimal decision policy; characterize and competitively test simple decision rules, or heuristics, that individuals might use in optimal stopping decision tasks; and examine the sensitivity of the various decision rules by computer simulation. Our simulation results show that the optimal policy is insensitive to moderate deviations from the optimal cutoff value, and that a simple, non-optimal decision rule that counts the number of successive non-candidates performs remarkably well. Model comparisons show that simple cutoff decision rules account for the decisions of the majority of the subjects. The observed tendency to stop the search too early is accounted for by postulating an endogenous cost of time spent in the search. A methodology for learning behaviors in mobile robotics has been developed. It consists of a technique to automatically generate input–output data plus a genetic fuzzy system that obtains cooperative weighted rules. The advantages of our methodology over other approaches are that the designer has to choose the values of only a few parameters, the obtained controllers are general (the quality of the controller does not depend on the environment), and the learning process takes place in simulation, but the controllers work also on the real robot with good performance. The methodology has been used to learn the wall-following behavior, and the obtained controller has been tested using a Nomad 200 robot in both simulated and real environments. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Traditional natural language parsers are based on rewrite rule systems developed in an arduous, time-consuming manner by grammarians. A majority of the grammarian's efforts are devoted to the disambiguation process, first hypothesizing rules which dictate constituent categories and relationships among words in ambiguous sentences, and then seeking exceptions and corrections to these rules. In this work, I propose an automatic method for acquiring a statistical parser from a set of parsed sentences which takes advantage of some initial linguistic input, but avoids the pitfalls of the iterative and seemingly endless grammar development process. Based on distributionally-derived and linguistically-based features of language, this parser acquires a set of statistical decision trees which assign a probability distribution on the space of parse trees given the input sentence. These decision trees take advantage of significant amount of contextual information, potentially including all of the lexical information in the sentence, to produce highly accurate statistical models of the disambiguation process. By basing the disambiguation criteria selection on entropy reduction rather than human intuition, this parser development method is able to consider more sentences than a human grammarian can when making individual disambiguation rules. In experiments between a parser, acquired using this statistical framework, and a grammarian's rule-based parser, developed over a ten-year period, both using the same training material and test sentences, the decision tree parser significantly outperformed the grammar-based parser on the accuracy measure which the grammarian was trying to maximize, achieving an accuracy of 78 compared to the grammar-based parser's 69 . Convex sparsity-promoting regularizations are ubiquitous in modern statistical learning. By construction, they yield solutions with few non-zero coefficients, which correspond to saturated constraints in the dual optimization formulation. Working set (WS) strategies are generic optimization techniques that consist in solving simpler problems that only consider a subset of constraints, whose indices form the WS. Working set methods therefore involve two nested iterations: the outer loop corresponds to the definition of the WS and the inner loop calls a solver for the subproblems. For the Lasso estimator a WS is a set of features, while for a Group Lasso it refers to a set of groups. In practice, WS are generally small in this context so the associated feature Gram matrix can fit in memory. Here we show that the Gauss-Southwell rule (a greedy strategy for block coordinate descent techniques) leads to fast solvers in this case. Combined with a working set strategy based on an aggressive use of so-called Gap Safe screening rules, we propose a solver achieving state-of-the-art performance on sparse learning problems. Results are presented on Lasso and multi-task Lasso estimators. Shape-from-shading (SFS) methods tend to rely on models with few parameters because these parameters need to be hand-tuned. This limits the number of different cues that the SFS problem can exploit. In this paper, we show how machine learning can be applied to an SFS model with a large number of parameters. Our system learns a set of weighting parameters that use the intensity of each pixel in the image to gauge the importance of that pixel in the shape reconstruction process. We show empirically that this leads to a significant increase in the accuracy of the recovered surfaces. Our learning approach is novel in that the parameters are optimized with respect to actual surface output by the system. In the first, offline phase, a hemisphere is rendered using a known illumination direction. The isophotes in the resulting reflectance map are then modelled using Gaussian mixtures to obtain a parametric representation of the isophotes. This Gaussian parameterization is then used in the second phase to learn intensity-based weights using a database of 3D shapes. The weights can also be optimized for a particular input image. This article presents a new rule discovery algorithm named PLCG that can find simple, robust partial rule models (sets of classification rules) in complex data where it is difficult or impossible to find models that completely account for all the phenomena of interest. Technically speaking, PLCG is an ensemble learning method that learns multiple models via some standard rule learning algorithm, and then combines these into one final rule set via clustering, generalization, and heuristic rule selection. The algorithm was developed in the context of an interdisciplinary research project that aims at discovering fundamental principles of expressive music performance from large amounts of complex real-world data (specifically, measurements of actual performances by concert pianists). It will be shown that PLCG succeeds in finding some surprisingly simple and robust performance principles, some of which represent truly novel and musically meaningful discoveries. A set of more systematic experiments shows that PLCG usually discovers significantly simpler theories than more direct approaches to rule learning (including the state-of-the-art learning algorithm RIPPER), while striking a compromise between coverage and precision. The experiments also show how easy it is to use PLCG as a meta-learning strategy to explore different parts of the space of rule models. Conventional fuzzy logic controller is applicable when there are only two fuzzy inputs with usually one output. Complexity increases when there are more than one inputs and outputs making the system unrealizable. The ordinal structure model of fuzzy reasoning has an advantage of managing high-dimensional problem with multiple input and output variables ensuring the interpretability of the rule set. This is achieved by giving an associated weight to each rule in the defuzzification process. In this work, a methodology to design an ordinal fuzzy logic controller with application for obstacle avoidance of Khepera mobile robot is presented. The implementation will show that ordinal structure fuzzy is easier to design with highly interpretable rules compared to conventional fuzzy controller. In order to achieve high accuracy, a specially tailored Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach for reinforcement learning has been proposed to optimize the ordinal structure fuzzy controller. Simulation results demonstrated improved obstacle avoidance performance in comparison with conventional fuzzy controllers. Comparison of direct and incremental GA for optimization of the controller is also presented. In this paper we tackle the problem of 3D modeling for urban environment using a modular, flexible and powerful approach driven from procedural generation. To this end, typologies of architectures are modeled through shape grammars that consist of a set of derivation rules and a set of shape dictionary elements. Appearance (from statistical point of view with respect to the individual pixel's properties) of the dictionary elements is then learned using a set of training images. Image classifiers are trained towards recovering image support with respect to the semantics. Then, given a new image and the corresponding footprint, the modeling problem is formulated as a search of the space of shapes, that can be generated on-the-fly by deriving the grammar on the input axiom. Defining an image-based score function for the produced instances using the trained classifiers, the best rules are selected, making sure that we keep exploring the space by allowing some rules to be randomly selected. New rules are then generated by resampling around the selected rules. At the finest level, these rules define the 3D model of the building. Promising results on complex and varying architectural styles demonstrate the potential of the presented method. There has been a growing interest in exploiting contextual information in addition to local features to detect and localize multiple object categories in an image. A context model can rule out some unlikely combinations or locations of objects and guide detectors to produce a semantically coherent interpretation of a scene. However, the performance benefit of context models has been limited because most of the previous methods were tested on data sets with only a few object categories, in which most images contain one or two object categories. In this paper, we introduce a new data set with images that contain many instances of different object categories, and propose an efficient model that captures the contextual information among more than a hundred object categories using a tree structure. Our model incorporates global image features, dependencies between object categories, and outputs of local detectors into one probabilistic framework. We demonstrate that our context model improves object recognition performance and provides a coherent interpretation of a scene, which enables a reliable image querying system by multiple object categories. In addition, our model can be applied to scene understanding tasks that local detectors alone cannot solve, such as detecting objects out of context or querying for the most typical and the least typical scenes in a data set. This paper describes an automatic calibration method for the class of cellular automata (CA) characterized by additive transition rules. CA can serve as instruments to support decision-making in spatial systems, since they are in effect dynamic maps representing geographic processes. However, the quality of CA based decision support models depends on the adequacy of the transition rules, which must be complex in realistic models, and these rules typically contain a number of parameters that must be calibrated. At present there is no general method to calibrate the transition rule set other than a manual tuning of the rules. Existing automatic techniques are applicable only to very simple CA. The method presented here draws on several standard optimization and search techniques, adapting them to the CA calibration problem. The procedure is developed first for application to the general class of unconstrained additive transition rules, and is then modified in order to deal with the case of constrained additive rules, where the number of cells in each state at each iteration is determined exogenously to the CA; this latter class is important in urban modeling applications. The calibration procedure is shown to be capable of systematically modifying arbitrary, randomly generated rule sets in order to produce a set of rules that is able to correctly replicate a series of test maps. Classification, which involves finding rules that partition a given da.ta set into disjoint groups, is one class of data mining problems. Approaches proposed so far for mining classification rules for large databases are mainly decision tree based symbolic learning methods. The connectionist approach based on neura.l networks has been thought not well suited for data mining. One of the major reasons cited is that knowledge generated by neural networks is not explicitly represented in the form of rules suitable for verification or interpretation by humans. This paper examines this issue. With our newly developed algorithms, rules which are similar to, or more concise than those generated by the symbolic methods can be extracted from the neural networks. The data mining process using neural networks with the emphasis on rule extraction is described. ExperimenM results and comparison with previously published works are presented. We present two novel methods to automatically learn spatio-temporal dependencies of moving agents in complex dynamic scenes. They allow to discover temporal rules, such as the right of way between different lanes or typical traffic light sequences. To extract them, sequences of activities need to be learned. While the first method extracts rules based on a learned topic model, the second model called DDP-HMM jointly learns co-occurring activities and their time dependencies. To this end we employ Dependent Dirichlet Processes to learn an arbitrary number of infinite Hidden Markov Models. In contrast to previous work, we build on state-of-the-art topic models that allow to automatically infer all parameters such as the optimal number of HMMs necessary to explain the rules governing a scene. The models are trained offline by Gibbs Sampling using unlabeled training data. There are several aspects that might influence the performance achieved by existing learning systems. It has been reported that one of these aspects is related to class imbalance in which examples in training data belonging to one class heavily outnumber the examples in the other class. In this situation, which is found in real world data describing an infrequent but important event, the learning system may have difficulties to learn the concept related to the minority class. In this work we perform a broad experimental evaluation involving ten methods, three of them proposed by the authors, to deal with the class imbalance problem in thirteen UCI data sets. Our experiments provide evidence that class imbalance does not systematically hinder the performance of learning systems. In fact, the problem seems to be related to learning with too few minority class examples in the presence of other complicating factors, such as class overlapping. Two of our proposed methods deal with these conditions directly, allying a known over-sampling method with data cleaning methods in order to produce better-defined class clusters. Our comparative experiments show that, in general, over-sampling methods provide more accurate results than under-sampling methods considering the area under the ROC curve (AUC). This result seems to contradict results previously published in the literature. Two of our proposed methods, Smote + Tomek and Smote + ENN, presented very good results for data sets with a small number of positive examples. Moreover, Random over-sampling, a very simple over-sampling method, is very competitive to more complex over-sampling methods. Since the over-sampling methods provided very good performance results, we also measured the syntactic complexity of the decision trees induced from over-sampled data. Our results show that these trees are usually more complex then the ones induced from original data. Random over-sampling usually produced the smallest increase in the mean number of induced rules and Smote + ENN the smallest increase in the mean number of conditions per rule, when compared among the investigated over-sampling methods.