Abstract
As the Watson distribution is frequently used for modeling axial data, it is important to investigate the existence of possible outliers in samples from this distribution. Then, we develop for the bipolar Watson distribution defined on the hypersphere, some tests of discordancy of an outlier or several outliers en bloc based on the likelihood ratio, supposing an alternative model of contamination of slippage type. We evaluate the performance of these tests of discordancy of an outlier and we also compare some tests of discordancy of an outlier available for this distribution.

Abstract

Abstract
This paper concerns the problem of predicting the relative performance of classification algorithms. Our approach requires that experiments are conducted on small samples. The information gathered is used to identify the nearest learning curve for which the sampling procedure was fully carried out. This allows the generation of a prediction regarding the relative performance of the algorithms. The method automatically establishes how many samples are needed and their sizes. This is done iteratively by taking into account the results of all previous experiments - both on other datasets and on the new dataset obtained so far. Experimental evaluation has shown that the method achieves better performance than previous approaches.

Abstract
Statistical relational learning (SRL) algorithms learn statistical models from relational data, such as that stored in a relational database. We previously introduced view learning for SRL, in which the view of a relational database can be automatically modified, yielding more accurate statistical models. The present paper presents SAYU-VISTA, an algorithm which advances beyond the initial view learning approach in three ways. First, it learns views that introduce new relational tables, rather than merely new fields for an existing table of the database. Second, new tables or new fields are not limited to being approximations to some target concept; instead, the new approach performs a type of predicate invention. The new approach avoids the classical problem with predicate invention, of learning many useless predicates, by keeping only new fields or tables (i.e., new predicates) that immediately improve the performance of the statistical model. Third, retained fields or tables can then be used in the definitions of further new fields or tables. We evaluate the new view learning approach on three relational classification tasks.

Abstract
Background: Assessing the outcome of motif mining algorithms is an essential task, as the number of reported motifs can be very large. Significance measures play a central role in automatically ranking those motifs, and therefore alleviating the analysis work. Spotting the most interesting and relevant motifs is then dependent on the choice of the right measures. The combined use of several measures may provide more robust results. However caution has to be taken in order to avoid spurious evaluations. Results: From the set of conducted experiments, it was verified that several of the selected significance measures show a very similar behavior in a wide range of situations therefore providing redundant information. Some measures have proved to be more appropriate to rank highly conserved motifs, while others are more appropriate for weakly conserved ones. Support appears as a very important feature to be considered for correct motif ranking. We observed that not all the measures are suitable for situations with poorly balanced class information, like for instance, when positive data is significantly less than negative data. Finally, a visualization scheme was proposed that, when several measures are applied, enables an easy identification of high scoring motifs. Conclusion: In this work we have surveyed and categorized 14 significance measures for pattern evaluation. Their ability to rank three types of deterministic motifs was evaluated. Measures were applied in different testing conditions, where relations were identified. This study provides some pertinent insights on the choice of the right set of significance measures for the evaluation of deterministic motifs extracted from protein databases.

Abstract
We are concerned with the problem of learning classification rules in text categorization where many authors presented Support Vector Machines (SVM) as leading classification method. Number of studies, however, repeatedly pointed out that in some situations SVM is outperformed by simpler methods such as naive Bayes or nearest-neighbor rule. In this paper, we aim at developing better understanding of SVM behaviour in typical text categorization problems represented by sparse bag of words feature spaces. We study in details the performance and the number of support vectors when varying the training set size, the number of features and, unlike existing studies, also SVM free parameter C, which is the Lagrange multipliers upper bound in SVM dual. We show that SVM solutions with small C are high performers. However, most training documents are then bounded support vectors sharing a same weight C. Thus, SVM reduce to a nearest mean classifier-, this raises an interesting question on SVM merits in sparse bag of words feature spaces. Additionally, SVM suffer from performance deterioration for particular training set size/number of features combinations.