Models, code, and papers for "Charles E":

##### Dual Proxy Gaussian Process Stack: Integrating Benthic $δ^{18}{\rm{O}}$ and Radiocarbon Proxies for Inferring Ages on Ocean Sediment Cores

Ages in ocean sediment cores are often inferred using either benthic ${\delta}^{18}{\rm{O}}$ or planktonic ${}^{14}{\rm{C}}$ of foraminiferal calcite. Existing probabilistic dating methods infer ages in two distinct approaches: ages are either inferred directly using radionuclides, e.g. Bacon [Blaauw and Christen (2011)]; or indirectly based on the alignment of records, e.g. HMM-Match [Lin et al. (2014)]. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm for integrating these two approaches by constructing Dual Proxy Gaussian Process (DPGP) stacks, which represent a probabilistic model of benthic ${\delta}^{18}{\rm{O}}$ change (and its timing) based on a set of cores. While a previous stack construction algorithm, HMM-Match, uses a discrete age inference model based on Hidden Markov models (HMMs) [Durbin et al. (1998)] and requires a number of records enough to sufficiently cover all its ages, DPGP stacks with time-varying variances are constructed with continuous ages obtained by particle smoothing [Doucet et al. (2001); Klaas et al. (2006)] and Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) [Peters (2008)] algorithms, and can be derived from a small number of records by applying the Gaussian process regression [Rasmussen and Williams (2005)]. As an example of the stacking method, we construct a local stack from 6 cores in the deep northeastern Atlantic Ocean and compare it to a deterministically constructed ${\delta}^{18}{\rm{O}}$ stack of 58 cores from the deep North Atlantic [Lisiecki and Stern (2016)]. We also provide two examples of how dual proxy alignment ages can be inferred by aligning additional cores to the stack.

* 21 pages, 11 figures, two supplementary notes
##### Heteroscedastic Gaussian Process Regression on the Alkenone over Sea Surface Temperatures

Dec 18, 2019
Taehee Lee, Charles E. Lawrence

To restore the historical sea surface temperatures (SSTs) better, it is important to construct a good calibration model for the associated proxies. In this paper, we introduce a new model for alkenone (${\rm{U}}_{37}^{\rm{K}'}$) based on the heteroscedastic Gaussian process (GP) regression method. Our nonparametric approach not only deals with the variable pattern of noises over SSTs but also contains a Bayesian method of classifying potential outliers.

* This article has been submitted to "Dec 2019, Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Climate Informatics: CI 2019. NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN-561+PROC"
##### Facial Expression Representation Learning by Synthesizing Expression Images

Nov 30, 2019
Kamran Ali, Charles E. Hughes

Representations used for Facial Expression Recognition (FER) usually contain expression information along with identity features. In this paper, we propose a novel Disentangled Expression learning-Generative Adversarial Network (DE-GAN) which combines the concept of disentangled representation learning with residue learning to explicitly disentangle facial expression representation from identity information. In this method the facial expression representation is learned by reconstructing an expression image employing an encoder-decoder based generator. Unlike previous works using only expression residual learning for facial expression recognition, our method learns the disentangled expression representation along with the expressive component recorded by the encoder of DE-GAN. In order to improve the quality of synthesized expression images and the effectiveness of the learned disentangled expression representation, expression and identity classification is performed by the discriminator of DE-GAN. Experiments performed on widely used datasets (CK+, MMI, Oulu-CASIA) show that the proposed technique produces comparable or better results than state-of-the-art methods.

* 7 pages, 3 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1909.13135
##### All-In-One: Facial Expression Transfer, Editing and Recognition Using A Single Network

Nov 16, 2019
Kamran Ali, Charles E. Hughes

In this paper, we present a unified architecture known as Transfer-Editing and Recognition Generative Adversarial Network (TER-GAN) which can be used: 1. to transfer facial expressions from one identity to another identity, known as Facial Expression Transfer (FET), 2. to transform the expression of a given image to a target expression, while preserving the identity of the image, known as Facial Expression Editing (FEE), and 3. to recognize the facial expression of a face image, known as Facial Expression Recognition (FER). In TER-GAN, we combine the capabilities of generative models to generate synthetic images, while learning important information about the input images during the reconstruction process. More specifically, two encoders are used in TER-GAN to encode identity and expression information from two input images, and a synthetic expression image is generated by the decoder part of TER-GAN. To improve the feature disentanglement and extraction process, we also introduce a novel expression consistency loss and an identity consistency loss which exploit extra expression and identity information from generated images. Experimental results show that the proposed method can be used for efficient facial expression transfer, facial expression editing and facial expression recognition. In order to evaluate the proposed technique and to compare our results with state-of-the-art methods, we have used the Oulu-CASIA dataset for our experiments.

* 10 pages, 5 figures
##### Facial Expression Recognition Using Disentangled Adversarial Learning

Sep 28, 2019
Kamran Ali, Charles E. Hughes

The representation used for Facial Expression Recognition (FER) usually contain expression information along with other variations such as identity and illumination. In this paper, we propose a novel Disentangled Expression learning-Generative Adversarial Network (DE-GAN) to explicitly disentangle facial expression representation from identity information. In this learning by reconstruction method, facial expression representation is learned by reconstructing an expression image employing an encoder-decoder based generator. This expression representation is disentangled from identity component by explicitly providing the identity code to the decoder part of DE-GAN. The process of expression image reconstruction and disentangled expression representation learning is improved by performing expression and identity classification in the discriminator of DE-GAN. The disentangled facial expression representation is then used for facial expression recognition employing simple classifiers like SVM or MLP. The experiments are performed on publicly available and widely used face expression databases (CK+, MMI, Oulu-CASIA). The experimental results show that the proposed technique produces comparable results with state-of-the-art methods.

##### Finding Anomalous Periodic Time Series: An Application to Catalogs of Periodic Variable Stars

Catalogs of periodic variable stars contain large numbers of periodic light-curves (photometric time series data from the astrophysics domain). Separating anomalous objects from well-known classes is an important step towards the discovery of new classes of astronomical objects. Most anomaly detection methods for time series data assume either a single continuous time series or a set of time series whose periods are aligned. Light-curve data precludes the use of these methods as the periods of any given pair of light-curves may be out of sync. One may use an existing anomaly detection method if, prior to similarity calculation, one performs the costly act of aligning two light-curves, an operation that scales poorly to massive data sets. This paper presents PCAD, an unsupervised anomaly detection method for large sets of unsynchronized periodic time-series data, that outputs a ranked list of both global and local anomalies. It calculates its anomaly score for each light-curve in relation to a set of centroids produced by a modified k-means clustering algorithm. Our method is able to scale to large data sets through the use of sampling. We validate our method on both light-curve data and other time series data sets. We demonstrate its effectiveness at finding known anomalies, and discuss the effect of sample size and number of centroids on our results. We compare our method to naive solutions and existing time series anomaly detection methods for unphased data, and show that PCAD's reported anomalies are comparable to or better than all other methods. Finally, astrophysicists on our team have verified that PCAD finds true anomalies that might be indicative of novel astrophysical phenomena.

* Machine Learning 74:281,2009
##### Sliced-Wasserstein Autoencoder: An Embarrassingly Simple Generative Model

In this paper we study generative modeling via autoencoders while using the elegant geometric properties of the optimal transport (OT) problem and the Wasserstein distances. We introduce Sliced-Wasserstein Autoencoders (SWAE), which are generative models that enable one to shape the distribution of the latent space into any samplable probability distribution without the need for training an adversarial network or defining a closed-form for the distribution. In short, we regularize the autoencoder loss with the sliced-Wasserstein distance between the distribution of the encoded training samples and a predefined samplable distribution. We show that the proposed formulation has an efficient numerical solution that provides similar capabilities to Wasserstein Autoencoders (WAE) and Variational Autoencoders (VAE), while benefiting from an embarrassingly simple implementation.

##### Hand2Face: Automatic Synthesis and Recognition of Hand Over Face Occlusions

A person's face discloses important information about their affective state. Although there has been extensive research on recognition of facial expressions, the performance of existing approaches is challenged by facial occlusions. Facial occlusions are often treated as noise and discarded in recognition of affective states. However, hand over face occlusions can provide additional information for recognition of some affective states such as curiosity, frustration and boredom. One of the reasons that this problem has not gained attention is the lack of naturalistic occluded faces that contain hand over face occlusions as well as other types of occlusions. Traditional approaches for obtaining affective data are time demanding and expensive, which limits researchers in affective computing to work on small datasets. This limitation affects the generalizability of models and deprives researchers from taking advantage of recent advances in deep learning that have shown great success in many fields but require large volumes of data. In this paper, we first introduce a novel framework for synthesizing naturalistic facial occlusions from an initial dataset of non-occluded faces and separate images of hands, reducing the costly process of data collection and annotation. We then propose a model for facial occlusion type recognition to differentiate between hand over face occlusions and other types of occlusions such as scarves, hair, glasses and objects. Finally, we present a model to localize hand over face occlusions and identify the occluded regions of the face.

* Accepted to International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2017
##### Experimental Analysis of Reinforcement Learning Techniques for Spectrum Sharing Radar

In this work, we first describe a framework for the application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) control to a radar system that operates in a congested spectral setting. We then compare the utility of several RL algorithms through a discussion of experiments performed on Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. Each RL technique is evaluated in terms of convergence, radar detection performance achieved in a congested spectral environment, and the ability to share 100MHz spectrum with an uncooperative communications system. We examine policy iteration, which solves an environment posed as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) by directly solving for a stochastic mapping between environmental states and radar waveforms, as well as Deep RL techniques, which utilize a form of Q-Learning to approximate a parameterized function that is used by the radar to select optimal actions. We show that RL techniques are beneficial over a Sense-and-Avoid (SAA) scheme and discuss the conditions under which each approach is most effective.

* Submitted to IEEE Intl. Radar Conference
##### Graph Neural Networks for Image Understanding Based on Multiple Cues: Group Emotion Recognition and Event Recognition as Use Cases

Sep 19, 2019
Xin Guo, Luisa F. Polania, Bin Zhu, Charles Boncelet, Kenneth E. Barner

A graph neural network (GNN) for image understanding based on multiple cues is proposed in this paper. Compared to traditional feature and decision fusion approaches that neglect the fact that features can interact and exchange information, the proposed GNN is able to pass information among features extracted from different models. Two image understanding tasks, namely group-level emotion recognition (GER) and event recognition, which are highly semantic and require the interaction of several deep models to synthesize multiple cues, were selected to validate the performance of the proposed method. It is shown through experiments that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the selected image understanding tasks. In addition, a new group-level emotion recognition database is introduced and shared in this paper.

* Paper accepted for publication at the 2020 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)
##### Numerically Recovering the Critical Points of a Deep Linear Autoencoder

Numerically locating the critical points of non-convex surfaces is a long-standing problem central to many fields. Recently, the loss surfaces of deep neural networks have been explored to gain insight into outstanding questions in optimization, generalization, and network architecture design. However, the degree to which recently-proposed methods for numerically recovering critical points actually do so has not been thoroughly evaluated. In this paper, we examine this issue in a case for which the ground truth is known: the deep linear autoencoder. We investigate two sub-problems associated with numerical critical point identification: first, because of large parameter counts, it is infeasible to find all of the critical points for contemporary neural networks, necessitating sampling approaches whose characteristics are poorly understood; second, the numerical tolerance for accurately identifying a critical point is unknown, and conservative tolerances are difficult to satisfy. We first identify connections between recently-proposed methods and well-understood methods in other fields, including chemical physics, economics, and algebraic geometry. We find that several methods work well at recovering certain information about loss surfaces, but fail to take an unbiased sample of critical points. Furthermore, numerical tolerance must be very strict to ensure that numerically-identified critical points have similar properties to true analytical critical points. We also identify a recently-published Newton method for optimization that outperforms previous methods as a critical point-finding algorithm. We expect our results will guide future attempts to numerically study critical points in large nonlinear neural networks.

##### Anti-Money Laundering in Bitcoin: Experimenting with Graph Convolutional Networks for Financial Forensics

Anti-money laundering (AML) regulations play a critical role in safeguarding financial systems, but bear high costs for institutions and drive financial exclusion for those on the socioeconomic and international margins. The advent of cryptocurrency has introduced an intriguing paradox: pseudonymity allows criminals to hide in plain sight, but open data gives more power to investigators and enables the crowdsourcing of forensic analysis. Meanwhile advances in learning algorithms show great promise for the AML toolkit. In this workshop tutorial, we motivate the opportunity to reconcile the cause of safety with that of financial inclusion. We contribute the Elliptic Data Set, a time series graph of over 200K Bitcoin transactions (nodes), 234K directed payment flows (edges), and 166 node features, including ones based on non-public data; to our knowledge, this is the largest labelled transaction data set publicly available in any cryptocurrency. We share results from a binary classification task predicting illicit transactions using variations of Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP), and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), with GCN being of special interest as an emergent new method for capturing relational information. The results show the superiority of Random Forest (RF), but also invite algorithmic work to combine the respective powers of RF and graph methods. Lastly, we consider visualization for analysis and explainability, which is difficult given the size and dynamism of real-world transaction graphs, and we offer a simple prototype capable of navigating the graph and observing model performance on illicit activity over time. With this tutorial and data set, we hope to a) invite feedback in support of our ongoing inquiry, and b) inspire others to work on this societally important challenge.

* 7 pages, Tutorial in the Anomaly Detection in Finance Workshop at the 25th SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
##### A Novel Deep Learning Pipeline for Retinal Vessel Detection in Fluorescein Angiography

While recent advances in deep learning have significantly advanced the state of the art for vessel detection in color fundus (CF) images, the success for detecting vessels in fluorescein angiography (FA) has been stymied due to the lack of labeled ground truth datasets. We propose a novel pipeline to detect retinal vessels in FA images using deep neural networks that reduces the effort required for generating labeled ground truth data by combining two key components: cross-modality transfer and human-in-the-loop learning. The cross-modality transfer exploits concurrently captured CF and fundus FA images. Binary vessels maps are first detected from CF images with a pre-trained neural network and then are geometrically registered with and transferred to FA images via robust parametric chamfer alignment to a preliminary FA vessel detection obtained with an unsupervised technique. Using the transferred vessels as initial ground truth labels for deep learning, the human-in-the-loop approach progressively improves the quality of the ground truth labeling by iterating between deep-learning and labeling. The approach significantly reduces manual labeling effort while increasing engagement. We highlight several important considerations for the proposed methodology and validate the performance on three datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline significantly reduces the annotation effort and the resulting deep learning methods outperform prior existing FA vessel detection methods by a significant margin. A new public dataset, RECOVERY-FA19, is introduced that includes high-resolution ultra-widefield images and accurately labeled ground truth binary vessel maps.

##### EvolveGCN: Evolving Graph Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Graphs

Graph representation learning resurges as a trending research subject owing to the widespread use of deep learning for Euclidean data, which inspire various creative designs of neural networks in the non-Euclidean domain, particularly graphs. With the success of these graph neural networks (GNN) in the static setting, we approach further practical scenarios where the graph dynamically evolves. For this case, combining the GNN with a recurrent neural network (RNN, broadly speaking) is a natural idea. Existing approaches typically learn one single graph model for all the graphs, by using the RNN to capture the dynamism of the output node embeddings and to implicitly regulate the graph model. In this work, we propose a different approach, coined EvolveGCN, that uses the RNN to evolve the graph model itself over time. This model adaptation approach is model oriented rather than node oriented, and hence is advantageous in the flexibility on the input. For example, in the extreme case, the model can handle at a new time step, a completely new set of nodes whose historical information is unknown, because the dynamism has been carried over to the GNN parameters. We evaluate the proposed approach on tasks including node classification, edge classification, and link prediction. The experimental results indicate a generally higher performance of EvolveGCN compared with related approaches.

##### Undersampling and Bagging of Decision Trees in the Analysis of Cardiorespiratory Behavior for the Prediction of Extubation Readiness in Extremely Preterm Infants

Extremely preterm infants often require endotracheal intubation and mechanical ventilation during the first days of life. Due to the detrimental effects of prolonged invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV), clinicians aim to extubate infants as soon as they deem them ready. Unfortunately, existing strategies for prediction of extubation readiness vary across clinicians and institutions, and lead to high reintubation rates. We present an approach using Random Forest classifiers for the analysis of cardiorespiratory variability to predict extubation readiness. We address the issue of data imbalance by employing random undersampling of examples from the majority class before training each Decision Tree in a bag. By incorporating clinical domain knowledge, we further demonstrate that our classifier could have identified 71% of infants who failed extubation, while maintaining a success detection rate of 78%.

* Published in: 2018 40th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)
##### Predicting Extubation Readiness in Extreme Preterm Infants based on Patterns of Breathing

Extremely preterm infants commonly require intubation and invasive mechanical ventilation after birth. While the duration of mechanical ventilation should be minimized in order to avoid complications, extubation failure is associated with increases in morbidities and mortality. As part of a prospective observational study aimed at developing an accurate predictor of extubation readiness, Markov and semi-Markov chain models were applied to gain insight into the respiratory patterns of these infants, with more robust time-series modeling using semi-Markov models. This model revealed interesting similarities and differences between newborns who succeeded extubation and those who failed. The parameters of the model were further applied to predict extubation readiness via generative (joint likelihood) and discriminative (support vector machine) approaches. Results showed that up to 84\% of infants who failed extubation could have been accurately identified prior to extubation.

* Published in: 2017 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI)
##### A Semi-Markov Chain Approach to Modeling Respiratory Patterns Prior to Extubation in Preterm Infants

After birth, extremely preterm infants often require specialized respiratory management in the form of invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV). Protracted IMV is associated with detrimental outcomes and morbidities. Premature extubation, on the other hand, would necessitate reintubation which is risky, technically challenging and could further lead to lung injury or disease. We present an approach to modeling respiratory patterns of infants who succeeded extubation and those who required reintubation which relies on Markov models. We compare the use of traditional Markov chains to semi-Markov models which emphasize cross-pattern transitions and timing information, and to multi-chain Markov models which can concisely represent non-stationarity in respiratory behavior over time. The models we developed expose specific, unique similarities as well as vital differences between the two populations.

* Published in: 2017 39th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)
##### Deconvolving convolution neural network for cell detection

Automatic cell detection in histology images is a challenging task due to varying size, shape and features of cells and stain variations across a large cohort. Conventional deep learning methods regress the probability of each pixel belonging to the centre of a cell followed by detection of local maxima. We present deconvolution as an alternate approach to local maxima detection. The ground truth points are convolved with a mapping filter to generate artifical labels. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is modified to convolve it's output with the same mapping filter and is trained for the mapped labels. Output of the trained CNN is then deconvolved to generate points as cell detection. We compare our method with state-of-the-art deep learning approaches where the results show that the proposed approach detects cells with comparatively high precision and F1-score.

##### Scalable Graph Learning for Anti-Money Laundering: A First Look

Organized crime inflicts human suffering on a genocidal scale: the Mexican drug cartels have murdered 150,000 people since 2006, upwards of 700,000 people per year are "exported" in a human trafficking industry enslaving an estimated 40 million people. These nefarious industries rely on sophisticated money laundering schemes to operate. Despite tremendous resources dedicated to anti-money laundering (AML) only a tiny fraction of illicit activity is prevented. The research community can help. In this brief paper, we map the structural and behavioral dynamics driving the technical challenge. We review AML methods, current and emergent. We provide a first look at scalable graph convolutional neural networks for forensic analysis of financial data, which is massive, dense, and dynamic. We report preliminary experimental results using a large synthetic graph (1M nodes, 9M edges) generated by a data simulator we created called AMLSim. We consider opportunities for high performance efficiency, in terms of computation and memory, and we share results from a simple graph compression experiment. Our results support our working hypothesis that graph deep learning for AML bears great promise in the fight against criminal financial activity.

* NeurIPS 2018 Workshop on Challenges and Opportunities for AI in Financial Services: the Impact of Fairness, Explainability, Accuracy, and Privacy, Montreal, Canada
##### Prediction of final infarct volume from native CT perfusion and treatment parameters using deep learning

CT Perfusion (CTP) imaging has gained importance in the diagnosis of acute stroke. Conventional perfusion analysis performs a deconvolution of the measurements and thresholds the perfusion parameters to determine the tissue status. We pursue a data-driven and deconvolution-free approach, where a deep neural network learns to predict the final infarct volume directly from the native CTP images and metadata such as the time parameters and treatment. This would allow clinicians to simulate various treatments and gain insight into predicted tissue status over time. We demonstrate on a multicenter dataset that our approach is able to predict the final infarct and effectively uses the metadata. An ablation study shows that using the native CTP measurements instead of the deconvolved measurements improves the prediction.

* Submitted to Medical Image Analysis