Self Distillation
Convolutional neural networks have been widely deployed in various application scenarios. In order to extend the applications’ boundaries to some accuracy-crucial domains, researchers have been investigating approaches to boost accuracy through either deeper or wider network structures, which brings with them the exponential increment of the computational and storage cost, delaying the responding time. In this paper, we propose a general training framework named self distillation, which notably enhances the performance (accuracy) of convolutional neural networks through shrinking the size of the network rather than aggrandizing it. Different from traditional knowledge distillation – a knowledge transformation methodology among networks, which forces student neural networks to approximate the softmax layer outputs of pre-trained teacher neural networks, the proposed self distillation framework distills knowledge within network itself. The networks are firstly divided into several sections. Then the knowledge in the deeper portion of the networks is squeezed into the shallow ones. Experiments further prove the generalization of the proposed self distillation framework: enhancement of accuracy at average level is 2.65%, varying from 0.61% in ResNeXt as minimum to 4.07% in VGG19 as maximum. In addition, it can also provide flexibility of depth-wise scalable inference on resource-limited edge devices.Our codes will be released on github soon. …

Kelly Criterion
In probability theory and intertemporal portfolio choice, the Kelly criterion, Kelly strategy, Kelly formula, or Kelly bet is a formula for bet sizing that leads almost surely to higher wealth compared to any other strategy in the long run (i.e. the limit as the number of bets goes to infinity). The Kelly bet size is found by maximizing the expected logarithm of wealth which is equivalent to maximizing the expected geometric growth rate. …

Term Frequency Difference and Category Ratio Based Feature Selection (TFDCR)
Communication through e-mails remains to be highly formalized, conventional and indispensable method for the exchange of information over the Internet. An ever-increasing ratio and adversary nature of spam e-mails have posed a great many challenges such as uneven class distribution, unequal error cost, frequent change of content and personalized context-sensitive discrimination. In this research, we propose a novel and distinctive approach to develop an incremental personalized e-mail spam filter. The proposed work is described using three significant contributions. First, we applied a novel term frequency difference and category ratio based feature selection function TFDCR to select the most discriminating features irrespective of the number of samples in each class. Second, an incremental learning model is used which enables the classifier to update the discriminant function dynamically. Third, a heuristic function called selectionRankWeight is introduced to upgrade the existing feature set that determines new features carrying strong discriminating ability from an incoming set of e-mails. Three public e-mail datasets possessing different characteristics are used to evaluate the filter performance. Experiments are conducted to compare the feature selection efficiency of TFDCR and to observe the filter performance under both the batch and the incremental learning mode. The results demonstrate the superiority of TFDCR as the most effective f eature selection function. The incremental learning model incorporating dynamic feature update function overcomes the problem of drifting concepts. The proposed filter validates its efficiency and feasibility by substantially improving the classification accuracy and reducing the false positive error of misclassifying legitimate e-mail as spam. …

CNN In Convolution (CNNIC)
Currently, increasingly deeper neural networks have been applied to improve their accuracy. In contrast, We propose a novel wider Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architecture, motivated by the Multi-column Deep Neural Networks and the Network In Network(NIN), aiming for higher accuracy without input data transmutation. In our architecture, namely ‘CNN In Convolution'(CNNIC), a small CNN, instead of the original generalized liner model(GLM) based filters, is convoluted as kernel on the original image, serving as feature extracting layer of this networks. And further classifications are then carried out by a global average pooling layer and a softmax layer. Dropout and orthonormal initialization are applied to overcome training difficulties including slow convergence and over-fitting. Persuasive classification performance is demonstrated on MNIST. …