In this paper, we present the application of Kernel Fisher Discriminant in the statistical analysis of shape deformations that indicate the hemispheric location of an epileptic focus. The scans of two classes of patients with epilepsy, those with a right and those with a left medial temporal lobe focus (RATL and LATL), as validated by clinical consensus and subsequent surgery, were compared to a set of age and sex matched healthy volunteers using both volume and shape based features. Shapebased features are derived from the displacement field characterizing the non-rigid deformation between the left and right hippocampi of a control or a patient as the case may be. Using the shapebased features, the results show a significant improvement in distinguishing between the controls and the rest (RATL and LATL) vis-a-vis volume-based features. Using a novel feature, namely, the normalized histogram of the 3D displacement field, we also achieved significant improvement over the volume-based feature in classifying the patients as belonging to either of the two classes LATL or RATL respectively. It should be noted that automated identification of hemispherical foci of epilepsy has not been previously reported.

Abstract

Search engines derive revenue by displaying sponsored results along with organic results in response to user queries. In general, search engines run a per-query, on-line auction amongst interested advertisers to select sponsored results to display. In doing so, they must carefully balance the revenue derived from sponsored results against potential degradation in user experience due to less-relevant results. Hence, major search engines attempt to analyze the relevance of potential sponsored results to the user's query using supervised learning algorithms. Past work has employed a bag-of-words approach using features extracted from both the query and potential sponsored result to train the ranker.We show that using features that capture the advertiser's intent can significantly improve the performance of relevance ranking. In particular, we consider the ad keyword the advertiser submits as part of the auction process as a direct expression of intent. We leverage the search engine itself to interpret the ad keyword by submitting the ad keyword as an independent query and incorporating the results as features when determining the relevance of the advertiser's sponsored result to the user's original query. We achieve 43.2% improvement in precision-recall AUC over the best previously published baseline and 2.7% improvement in the production system of a large search engine.

Learning a discriminant becomes substantially more difficult when the datasets are high-dimensional and the available samples are few. This is often the case in computer vision and medical diagnosis applications. A novel Conic Section classifier (CSC) was recently introduced in the literature to handle such datasets, wherein each class was represented by a conic section parameterized by its focus, directrix and eccentricity. The discriminant boundary was the locus of all points that are equieccentric relative to each class-representative conic section. Simpler boundaries were preferred for the sake of generalizability.In this paper, we improve the performance of the two-class classifier via a large margin pursuit. When formulated as a non-linear optimization problem, the margin computation is demonstrated to be hard, especially due to the high dimensionality of the data. Instead, we present a geometric algorithm to compute the distance of a point to the nonlinear discriminant boundary generated by the CSC in the input space. We then introduce a large margin pursuit in the learning phase so as to enhance the generalization capacity of the classifier. We validate the algorithm on real datasets and show favorable classification rates in comparison to many existing state-of-the-art binary classifiers as well as the CSC without margin pursuit.