arXiv subjects

A. Stephen McGough

Publications and source records attributed to A. Stephen McGough.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

The Northumberland Dolphin Dataset: A Multimedia Individual Cetacean Dataset for Fine-Grained Categorisation

Methods for cetacean research include photo-identification (photo-id) and passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) which generate thousands of images per expedition that are currently hand categorised by researchers into the individual dolphins sighted. With the vast amount of data obtained it is crucially important to develop a system that is able to categorise this quickly. The Northumberland Dolphin Dataset (NDD) is an on-going novel dataset project made up of above and below water images of, and spectrograms of whistles from, white-beaked dolphins. These are produced by photo-id and PAM data collection methods applied off the coast of Northumberland, UK. This dataset will aid in building cetacean identification models, reducing the number of human-hours required to categorise images. Example use cases and areas identified for speed up are examined.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Black-Box Autoregressive Density Estimation for State-Space Models

State-space models (SSMs) provide a flexible framework for modelling time-series data. Consequently, SSMs are ubiquitously applied in areas such as engineering, econometrics and epidemiology. In this paper we provide a fast approach for approximate Bayesian inference in SSMs using the tools of deep learning and variational inference.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2018

An Exploration of Dropout with RNNs for Natural Language Inference

Dropout is a crucial regularization technique for the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models of Natural Language Inference (NLI). However, dropout has not been evaluated for the effectiveness at different layers and dropout rates in NLI models. In this paper, we propose a novel RNN model for NLI and empirically evaluate the effect of applying dropout at different layers in the model. We also investigate the impact of varying dropout rates at these layers. Our empirical evaluation on a large (Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI)) and a small (SciTail) dataset suggest that dropout at each feed-forward connection severely affects the model accuracy at increasing dropout rates. We also show that regularizing the embedding layer is efficient for SNLI whereas regularizing the recurrent layer improves the accuracy for SciTail. Our model achieved an accuracy 86.14% on the SNLI dataset and 77.05% on SciTail.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Using Machine Learning to reduce the energy wasted in Volunteer Computing Environments

High Throughput Computing (HTC) provides a convenient mechanism for running thousands of tasks. Many HTC systems exploit computers which are provisioned for other purposes by utilising their idle time - volunteer computing. This has great advantages as it gives access to vast quantities of computational power for little or no cost. The downside is that running tasks are sacrificed if the computer is needed for its primary use. Normally terminating the task which must be restarted on a different computer - leading to wasted energy and an increase in task completion time. We demonstrate, through the use of simulation, how we can reduce this wasted energy by targeting tasks at computers less likely to be needed for primary use, predicting this idle time through machine learning. By combining two machine learning approaches, namely Random Forest and MultiLayer Perceptron, we save 51.4% of the energy without significantly affecting the time to complete tasks.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2018

Black-box Variational Inference for Stochastic Differential Equations

Parameter inference for stochastic differential equations is challenging due to the presence of a latent diffusion process. Working with an Euler-Maruyama discretisation for the diffusion, we use variational inference to jointly learn the parameters and the diffusion paths. We use a standard mean-field variational approximation of the parameter posterior, and introduce a recurrent neural network to approximate the posterior for the diffusion paths conditional on the parameters. This neural network learns how to provide Gaussian state transitions which bridge between observations in a very similar way to the conditioned diffusion process. The resulting black-box inference method can be applied to any SDE system with light tuning requirements. We illustrate the method on a Lotka-Volterra system and an epidemic model, producing accurate parameter estimates in a few hours.

stat.CO↗

arXiv2016

SMS Spam Filtering using Probabilistic Topic Modelling and Stacked Denoising Autoencoder

In This paper we present a novel approach to spam filtering and demonstrate its applicability with respect to SMS messages. Our approach requires minimum features engineering and a small set of la- belled data samples. Features are extracted using topic modelling based on latent Dirichlet allocation, and then a comprehensive data model is created using a Stacked Denoising Autoencoder (SDA). Topic modelling summarises the data providing ease of use and high interpretability by visualising the topics using word clouds. Given that the SMS messages can be regarded as either spam (unwanted) or ham (wanted), the SDA is able to model the messages and accurately discriminate between the two classes without the need for a pre-labelled training set. The results are compared against the state-of-the-art spam detection algorithms with our proposed approach achieving over 97% accuracy which compares favourably to the best reported algorithms presented in the literature.

cs.CL↗