Jiaul H. Paik

Atif Hassan, Jiaul H. Paik, Swanand Khare et al.

We propose Predictive Permutation Feature Selection (PPFS), a novel wrapper-based feature selection method based on the concept of Markov Blanket (MB). Unlike previous MB methods, PPFS is a universal feature selection technique as it can work for both classification as well as regression tasks on datasets containing categorical and/or continuous features. We propose Predictive Permutation Independence (PPI), a new Conditional Independence (CI) test, which enables PPFS to be categorised as a wrapper feature selection method. This is in contrast to current filter based MB feature selection techniques that are unable to harness the advancements in supervised algorithms such as Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM). The PPI test is based on the knockoff framework and utilizes supervised algorithms to measure the association between an individual or a set of features and the target variable. We also propose a novel MB aggregation step that addresses the issue of sample inefficiency. Empirical evaluations and comparisons on a large number of datasets demonstrate that PPFS outperforms state-of-the-art Markov blanket discovery algorithms as well as, well-known wrapper methods. We also provide a sketch of the proof of correctness of our method. Implementation of this work is available at \url{https://github.com/atif-hassan/PyImpetus}

Ronan Cummins, Jiaul Hoque Paik, Yuanhua Lv

The multinomial language model has been one of the most effective models of retrieval for over a decade. However, the multinomial distribution does not model one important linguistic phenomenon relating to term-dependency, that is the tendency of a term to repeat itself within a document (i.e. word burstiness). In this article, we model document generation as a random process with reinforcement (a multivariate Polya process) and develop a Dirichlet compound multinomial language model that captures word burstiness directly. We show that the new reinforced language model can be computed as efficiently as current retrieval models, and with experiments on an extensive set of TREC collections, we show that it significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art language model for a number of standard effectiveness metrics. Experiments also show that the tuning parameter in the proposed model is more robust than in the multinomial language model. Furthermore, we develop a constraint for the verbosity hypothesis and show that the proposed model adheres to the constraint. Finally, we show that the new language model essentially introduces a measure closely related to idf which gives theoretical justification for combining the term and document event spaces in tf-idf type schemes.