Consider a domain-adaptive supervised learning setting, where a classifier learns from labeled data in a source domain and unlabeled data in a target domain to predict the corresponding target labels. If the classifier’s assumption on the relationship between domains (e.g. covariate shift, common subspace, etc.) is valid, then it will usually outperform a non-adaptive source classifier. If its assumption is invalid, it can perform substantially worse. Validating assumptions on domain relationships is not possible without target labels. We argue that, in order to make domain-adaptive classifiers more practical, it is necessary to focus on robustness; robust in the sense that an adaptive classifier will still perform at least as well as a non-adaptive classifier without having to rely on the validity of strong assumptions. With this objective in mind, we derive a conservative parameter estimation technique, which is transductive in the sense of Vapnik and Chervonenkis, and show for discriminant analysis that the new estimator is guaranteed to achieve a lower risk on the given target samples compared to the source classifier. Experiments on problems with geographical sampling bias indicate that our parameter estimator performs well.@en

Generalization of voxelwise classifiers is hampered by differences between MRI-scanners, e.g. different acquisition protocols and field strengths. To address this limitation, we propose a Siamese neural network (MRAI-net) that extracts acquisition-invariant feature vectors. These can consequently be used by task-specific methods, such as voxelwise classifiers for tissue segmentation. MRAI-net is tested on both simulated and real patient data. Experiments show that MRAI-net outperforms voxelwise classifiers trained on the source or target scanner data when a small number of labeled samples is available.@en

Cross-validation under sample selection bias can, in principle, be done by importance-weighting the empirical risk. However, the importance-weighted risk estimator produces suboptimal hyperparameter estimates in problem settings where large weights arise with high probability. We study its sampling variance as a function of the training data distribution and introduce a control variate to increase its robustness to problematically large weights.

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Background: The most tedious and time-consuming task in medical additive manufacturing (AM) is image segmentation. The aim of the present study was to develop and train a convolutional neural network (CNN) for bone segmentation in computed tomography (CT) scans.

Method: The CNN was trained with CT scans acquired using six different scanners. Standard tessellation language (STL) models of 20 patients who had previously undergone craniotomy and cranioplasty using additively manufactured skull implants served as “gold standard” models during CNN training. The CNN segmented all patient CT scans using a leave-2-out scheme. All segmented CT scans were converted into STL models and geometrically compared with the gold standard STL models.

Results: The CT scans segmented using the CNN demonstrated a large overlap with the gold standard segmentation and resulted in a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.92 ± 0.04. The CNN-based STL models demonstrated mean surface deviations ranging between −0.19 mm ± 0.86 mm and 1.22 mm ± 1.75 mm, when compared to the gold standard STL models. No major differences were observed between the mean deviations of the CNN-based STL models acquired using six different CT scanners. Conclusions: The fully-automated CNN was able to accurately segment the skull. CNNs thus offer the opportunity of removing the current prohibitive barriers of time and effort during CT image segmentation, making patient-specific AM constructs more accesible.

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Importance-weighting is a popular and well-researched technique for dealing with sample selection bias and covariate shift. It has desirable characteristics such as unbiasedness, consistency and low computational complexity. However, weighting can have a detrimental effect on an estimator as well. In this work, we empirically show that the sampling distribution of an importance-weighted estimator can be skewed. For sample selection bias settings, and for small sample sizes, the importance-weighted risk estimator produces overestimates for data sets in the body of the sampling distribution, i.e. the majority of cases, and large underestimates for data sets in the tail of the sampling distribution. These over- and underestimates of the risk lead to sub-optimal regularization parameters when used for importance-weighted validation.@en

Artificial intelligence, and in particular machine learning, is concerned with teaching computer systems to perform tasks. Tasks such as autonomous driving, recognizing tumors in medical images, or detecting suspicious packages in airports. Such systems learn by observing examples, i.e. data, and forming a mathematical description of what types of variations occur, i.e. a statistical model. For new input, the system computes the most likely output and makes a decision accordingly. As a scientific field, it is situated between statistics and and algorithmics. As a technology, it has become a very powerful tool due to the massive amounts of data being collected and the drop in the cost of computation. However, obtaining enough data is still very difficult. There are often substantial financial, operational or ethical considerations in collecting data. The majority of research in machine learning deals with constraints on the amount, the labeling and the types of data that are available. One such constraint is that it is only possible to collect labeled data from one population, or domain, but the goal is to make decisions for another domain. It is unclear under which conditions this will be possible, which inspires the research question of this thesis: when and how can a classification algorithm generalize from a source domain to a target domain? My research has looked at different approaches to domain adaptation. Firstly, we have asked some critical questions on whether the standard approaches to model validation still hold in the context of different domains. As a result, we have proposed a means to reduce uncertainty in the validation risk estimator, but that does not solve the problem completely. Secondly, we modeled the transfer from source to target domain using parametric families of distributions, which works well in simple contexts such as feature dropout at test time. Thirdly, we looked at a more practical problem: tissue classifiers trained on data from one MRI scanner degrade when applied to data from another scanner due to acquisition-based variations. We tackled this problem by learning a representation for which detrimental variations are minimized while maintaining tissue contrast. Finally, considering that many approaches fail in practice because their assumptions are not met, we designed a parameter estimator that never performs worse than the naive non-adaptive classifier. Overall, research into domain-adaptive machine learning is still in its infancy, with many interesting challenges ahead. I hope that this work contributes to a better understanding of the problem and will inspire more researchers to tackle it.@en

Domain adaptation is the supervised learning setting in which the training and test data are sampled from different distributions: training data is sampled from a source domain, whilst test data is sampled from a target domain. This paper proposes and studies an approach, called feature-level domain adaptation (FLDA), that models the dependence between the two domains by means of a feature-level transfer model that is trained to describe the transfer from source to target domain. Subsequently, we train a domain-adapted classifier by minimizing the expected loss under the resulting transfer model. For linear classifiers and a large family of loss functions and transfer models, this expected loss can be computed or approximated analytically, and minimized efficiently. Our empirical evaluation of FLDA focuses on problems comprising binary and count data in which the transfer can be naturally modeled via a dropout distribution, which allows the classifier to adapt to differences in the marginal probability of features in the source and the target domain. Our experiments on several real- world problems show that FLDA performs on par with state- of- the-art domain-adaptation techniques.@en

This paper identifies a problem with the usual procedure for L2-regularization parameter estimation in a domain adaptation setting. In such a setting, there are differences between the distributions generating the training data (source domain) and the test data (target domain). The usual cross-validation
procedure requires validation data, which can not be obtained from the unlabeled target data. The problem is that if one decides to use source validation data, the regularization parameter is underestimated. One possible solution is to scale the source validation data through importance weighting, but we show that
this correction is not sufficient. We conclude the paper with an empirical analysis of the effect of several importance weight estimators on the estimation of the regularization parameter.@en