often involve an unsupervised learning component, usually in an unsupervised pre-training phase. The main question investigated here is the following: why does unsupervised pre-training work so well? Through extensive experimentation, we explore several possible explanations discussed in the literature

Many supervised machine learning algorithms require a discrete feature space. In this paper, we review previous work on continuous feature discretization, identify de n-ing characteristics of the methods, and conduct an empirical evaluation of several methods. We compare binning, an unsupervised

We propose a novel approach to learn and recognize natural scene categories. Unlike previous work [9, 17], it does not require experts to annotate the training set. We represent the image of a scene by a collection of local regions, denoted as codewords obtained by unsupervised learning. Each

Whereas theoretical work suggests that deep architectures might be more efficient at representing highly-varying functions, training deep architectures was unsuccessful until the recent advent of algorithms based on unsupervised pretraining. Even though these new algorithms have enabled training

a class is represented by a joint probability density function (pdf) on the shape of the constellation and the output of part detectors. In a first stage, the method automatically identifies distinctive parts in the training set by applying a clustering algorithm to patterns selected by an interest

Consumers are often forced to wade through many on-line reviews in order to make an informed product choice. This paper introduces OPINE, an unsupervised informationextraction system which mines reviews in order to build a model of important product features, their evaluation by reviewers

A new method for unsupervised segmentation of color-texture regions in images and video is presented. This method, which we refer to as JSEG, consists of two independent steps: color quantization and spatial segmentation. In the first step, colors in the image are quantized to several

be used to analyze high dimensional data that lies on or near a low dimensional manifold. It overcomes certain limitations of previous work in manifold learning, such as Isomap and locally linear embedding. We illustrate the algorithm on easily visualized examples of curves and surfaces, as well

Abstract. Much recent research highlighted the critical role of unsuper-vised pre-training to improve the performance of neural network models. However, extensions of those architectures to the temporal domain intro-duce additional issues, which often prevent to obtain good performance in a

, the Million Song Dataset (MSD), for classifica-tion tasks on other datasets, by reusing models trained on the MSD for feature extraction. This transfer learning ap-proach, which we refer to as supervised pre-training, was previously shown to be very effective for computer vision problems. We show