Learning binary classifiers only from positive and unlabeled (PU) data is an important and challenging task in many real-world applications, including web text classification, disease gene identification and fraud detection, where negative samples are difficult to verify experimentally. Most recent PU learning methods are developed based on the misclassification risk of the supervised learning type, and they may suffer from inaccurate estimates of class prior probabilities. In this paper, we introduce a variational principle for PU learning that allows us to quantitatively evaluate the modeling error of the Bayesian classifier directly from given data. This leads to a loss function which can be efficiently calculated without involving class prior estimation or any other intermediate estimation problems, and the variational learning method can then be employed to optimize the classifier under general conditions. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed variational method on a number of benchmark examples.

Due to their ability to model sequential data without making unnecessary independence assumptions, conditional random fields (CRFs) have become an increasingly popular discriminative model for human activity recognition. However, how to represent signal sensor data to achieve the best classification performance within a CRF model is not obvious. This paper presents a framework for extracting motif features for CRF-based classification of IMU (inertial measurement unit) data. To do this, we convert the signal data into a set of motifs, approximately repeated symbolic sub sequences, for each dimension of IMU data. These motifs leverage structure in the data and serve as the basis to generate a large candidate set of features from the multi-dimensional raw data. By measuring reductions in the conditional log-likelihood error of the training samples, we can select features and train a CRF classifier to recognize human activities. An evaluation of our classifier on the CMU Multi-Modal Activity Database reveals that it outperforms the CRF-classifier trained on the raw features as well as other standard classifiers used in prior work.

Human activity datasets collected under natural conditions are an important source of data. Since these contain multiple activities in unscripted sequence, temporal segmentation of multimodal datasets is an important precursor to recognition and analysis. Manual segmentation is prohibitively time consuming and unsupervised approaches for segmentation are unreliable since they fail to exploit the semantic context of the data. Gathering labels for supervised learning places a large workload on the human user since it is relatively easy to gather a mass of unlabeled data but expensive to annotate. This paper proposes an active learning approach for segmenting large motion capture datasets with both small training sets and working sets. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are learned using an active learning paradigm; after the classifiers are initialized with a small set of labeled data, the users are iteratively queried for labels as needed. We propose a novel method for initializing the classifiers, based on unsupervised segmentation and clustering of the dataset. By identifying and training the SVM with points from pure clusters, we can improve upon a random sampling strategy for creating the query set. Our active learning approach improves upon the initial unsupervised segmentation used to initialize the classifier, while requiring substantially less data than a fully supervised method; the resulting segmentation is comparable to the latter while requiring significantly less effort from the user.