This paper reviews three recent books on data mining written from three different perspectives, i.e., databases, machine learning, and statistics. Although the exploration in this paper is suggestive instead of conclusive, it reveals that besides some common properties, different perspectives lay strong emphases on different aspects of data mining. The emphasis of the database perspective is on efficiency because this perspective strongly concerns the whole discovery process and huge data volume. The emphasis of the machine learning perspective is on effectiveness because this perspective is heavily attracted by substantive heuristics working well in data analysis although they may not always be useful. As for the statistics perspective, its emphasis is on alidity because this perspective cares much for mathematical soundness behind mining methods.

Decision tree is with good comprehensibility while neural network ensemble is with strong generalization ability. In this paper, these merits are integrated into a novel decision tree algorithm NeC4.5. This algorithm trains a neural network ensemble at first. Then, the trained ensemble is employed to generate a new training set through replacing the desired class labels of the original training examples with those output from the trained ensemble. Some extra training examples are also generated from the trained ensemble and added to the new training set. Finally, a C4.5 decision tree is grown from the new training set. Since its learning results are decision trees, the comprehensibility of NeC4.5 is better than that of neural network ensemble. Moreover, experiments show that the generalization ability of NeC4.5 decision trees can be better than that of C4.5 decision trees.

In this paper, the generalized projection function (GPF) is de4ned. Both the integral projection unction (IPF) and the variance projection function (VPF) can be viewed as special cases of GPF. Another special case of GPF, i. e. the hybrid projection function (HPF), is developed through experimentally determining the optimal parameters of GPF. Experiments on three face databases show that IPF, VPF, and HPF are all e: ective in eye detection. Nevertheless, HPF is better than VPF, while VPF is better than IPF. Moreover, IPF is found to be more e: ective on occidental than on oriental faces, and VPF is more e: ective on oriental than on occidental faces. Analysis of the detections shows that this e: ect may be owed to the shadow of the noses and eyeholes of di:erent races of people.

In this paper, the Ssair (Semi-Supervised Active Image Retrieval) approach, which attempts to exploit unlabeled data to improve the performance of content-based image retrieval (Cbir), is proposed. This approach combines the merits of semi-supervised learning and active learning. In detail, in each round of relevance feedback, two simple learners are trained from the labeled data, i.e. images from user query and user feedback. Each learner then classifies the unlabeled images in the database and passes the most relevant/irrelevant images to the other learner. After re-training with the additional labeled data, the learners classify the images in the database again and then their classifications are merged. Images judged to be relevant with high confidence are returned as the retrieval result, while these judged with low confidence are put into the pool which is used in the next round of relevance feedback. Experiments show that semi-supervised learning and active learning mechanisms are both beneficial to Cbir.

Comprehensibility is very important for any machine learning technique to be used in computer-aided medical diagnosis. Since an artificial neural network ensemble is composed of multiple artificial neural networks, its comprehensibility is worse than that of a single artificial neural network. In this paper, C4.5 Rule-PANE which combines artificial neural network ensemble with rule induction by regarding the former as a preprocess of the latter, is proposed. At first, an artificial neural network ensemble is trained. Then, a new training data set is generated by feeding the feature vectors of the original training instances to the trained ensemble and replacing the expected class labels of the original training instances with the class labels output from the ensemble. Additional training data may also be appended by randomly generating feature vectors and combining them with their corresponding class labels output from the ensemble. Finally, a specific rule induction approach, i.e., C4.5 Rule, is used to learn rules from the new training data set. Case studies on diabetes, hepatitis, and breast cancer show that C4.5 Rule-PANE could generate rules with strong generalization ability, which profits from artificial neural network ensemble, and strong comprehensibility, which profits from rule induction.