Mohammadreza Soltani

Anna K. Yanchenko, Mohammadreza Soltani, Robert J. Ravier et al.

Understanding the features learned by deep models is important from a model trust perspective, especially as deep systems are deployed in the real world. Most recent approaches for deep feature understanding or model explanation focus on highlighting input data features that are relevant for classification decisions. In this work, we instead take the perspective of relating deep features to well-studied, hand-crafted features that are meaningful for the application of interest. We propose a methodology and set of systematic experiments for exploring deep features in this setting, where input feature importance approaches for deep feature understanding do not apply. Our experiments focus on understanding which hand-crafted and deep features are useful for the classification task of interest, how robust these features are for related tasks and how similar the deep features are to the meaningful hand-crafted features. Our proposed method is general to many application areas and we demonstrate its utility on orchestral music audio data.

Robert J. Ravier, Mohammadreza Soltani, Miguel Simões et al.

Recent advances in time series classification have largely focused on methods that either employ deep learning or utilize other machine learning models for feature extraction. Though successful, their power often comes at the requirement of computational complexity. In this paper, we introduce GeoStat representations for time series. GeoStat representations are based off of a generalization of recent methods for trajectory classification, and summarize the information of a time series in terms of comprehensive statistics of (possibly windowed) distributions of easy to compute differential geometric quantities, requiring no dynamic time warping. The features used are intuitive and require minimal parameter tuning. We perform an exhaustive evaluation of GeoStat on a number of real datasets, showing that simple KNN and SVM classifiers trained on these representations exhibit surprising performance relative to modern single model methods requiring significant computational power, achieving state of the art results in many cases. In particular, we show that this methodology achieves good performance on a challenging dataset involving the classification of fishing vessels, where our methods achieve good performance relative to the state of the art despite only having access to approximately two percent of the dataset used in training and evaluating this state of the art.