Soft Locality Preserving Map (SLPM)
For image recognition, an extensive number of methods have been proposed to overcome the high-dimensionality problem of feature vectors being used. These methods vary from unsupervised to supervised, and from statistics to graph-theory based. In this paper, the most popular and the state-of-the-art methods for dimensionality reduction are firstly reviewed, and then a new and more efficient manifold-learning method, named Soft Locality Preserving Map (SLPM), is presented. Furthermore, feature generation and sample selection are proposed to achieve better manifold learning. SLPM is a graph-based subspace-learning method, with the use of k-neighbourhood information and the class information. The key feature of SLPM is that it aims to control the level of spread of the different classes, because the spread of the classes in the underlying manifold is closely connected to the generalizability of the learned subspace. Our proposed manifold-learning method can be applied to various pattern recognition applications, and we evaluate its performances on facial expression recognition. Experiments on databases, such as the Bahcesehir University Multilingual Affective Face Database (BAUM-2), the Extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) Database, the Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) Database, and the Taiwanese Facial Expression Image Database (TFEID), show that SLPM can effectively reduce the dimensionality of the feature vectors and enhance the discriminative power of the extracted features for expression recognition. Furthermore, the proposed feature-generation method can improve the generalizability of the underlying manifolds for facial expression recognition. …

RMSProp
RMSProp is an adaptative learning rate method. Divide the learning rate for a weight by a running average of the magnitudes of recent gradients for that weight. This is the mini-batch version of just using the sign of the gradient.
http://…/lecture_slides_lec6.pdf
https://…/neuralnets
http://…/rmsprop.html#tieleman2012rmsprop

H2O
The Open Source In-Memory Prediction Engine for Big Data Science. H2O is an awesome machine learning framework. It is really great for data scientists and business analysts ‘who need scalable and fast machine learning’. H2O is completely open source and what makes it important is that works right of the box. There seems to be no easier way to start with scalable machine learning. It hast support for R, Python, Scala, Java and also has a REST API and a own WebUI. So you can use it perfectly for research but also in production environments. H2O is based on Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark which gives it enormous power with in-memory parallel processing.
Predict Social Network Influence with R and H2O Ensemble Learning

PR Product
In this paper, we analyze the inner product of weight vector and input vector in neural networks from the perspective of vector orthogonal decomposition and prove that the local direction gradient of weight vector decreases as the angle between them gets closer to 0 or $\pi$. We propose the PR Product, a substitute for the inner product, which makes the local direction gradient of weight vector independent of the angle and consistently larger than the one in the conventional inner product while keeping the forward propagation identical. As the basic operation in neural networks, the PR Product can be applied into many existing deep learning modules, so we develop the PR Product version of the fully connected layer, convolutional layer, and LSTM layer. In static image classification, the experiments on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets demonstrate that the PR Product can robustly enhance the ability of various state-of-the-art classification networks. On the task of image captioning, even without any bells and whistles, our PR Product version of captioning model can compete or outperform the state-of-the-art models on MS COCO dataset. …