Imbalanced learning in relevance feedback with biased minimax probability machine for image retrieval tasks

Abstract

In recent years, Minimax Probability Machine (MPM) have demonstrated excellent performance in a variety of pattern recognition problems. At the same time various machine learning methods have been used on relevance feedback tasks in Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR). One of the problems in typical techniques for relevance feedback is that they treat the relevant feedback and irrelevant feedback equally. In other words, the negative instances largely outnumber the positive instances. Hence, the assumption that they are balanced is incorrect. In this paper we study how MPM can be applied to image retrieval, more precisely, Biased MPM during the relevance feedback iterations. We formulate the relevance feedback based on a modified MPM called Biased Minimax Probability Machine (BMPM). Different from previous methods, this model directly controls the accuracy of classification of the future data to build up biased classifiers. Hence, it provides a rigorous treatment on imbalanced data. Mathematical formulation and explanations are provided for showing the advantages. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposed framework, in which encouraging and promising experimental results are obtained. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.