An Introduction to Conditional Random Fields provides a comprehensive tutorial aimed at application-oriented practitioners seeking to apply CRFs. The monograph does not assume previous knowledge of graphical modeling, and so is intended to be useful to practitioners in a wide variety of fields.

Gaussian Markov Random Field (GMRF) models are most widely used in spatial statistics - a very active area of research in which few up-to-date reference works are available. This is the first book on the subject that provides a unified framework of GMRFs with particular emphasis on the computational aspects. This book includes extensive case-studie

This thesis investigates using a new graphical model, hidden conditional random fields (HCRFs), for speech recognition. Conditional random fields (CRFs) are discriminative sequence models that have been successfully applied to several tasks in text processing, such as named entity recognition. Recently, there has been increasing interest in applying CRFs to speech recognition due to the similarity between speech and text processing. HCRFs are CRFs augmented with hidden variables that are capable of representing the dynamic changes and variations in speech signals. HCRFs also have the ability to incorporate correlated features from both speech signals and text without making strong independence assumptions among them. This thesis presents my current research on applying HCRFs to speech recognition and HCRFs' potential to replace the current hidden Markov model (HMM) for acoustic modeling. Experimental results of phone classification, phone recognition, and speaker adaptation are presented and discussed. Our monophone HCRFs outperform both maximum mutual information estimation (MMIE) and minimum phone error (MPE) trained HMMs and achieve the-start-of-the-art performance in TIMIT phone classification and recognition tasks. We also show how to jointly train acoustic models and language models in HCRFs, which shows improvement in the results. Maximum a posterior (MAP) and maximum conditional likelihood linear regression (MCLLR) successfully adapt speaker-independent models to speaker-dependent models with a small amount of adaptation data for HCRF speaker adaptation. Finally, we explore adding gender and dialect features for phone recognition, and experimental results are presented.

Markov random field (MRF) theory provides a basis for modeling contextual constraints in visual processing and interpretation. It enables us to develop optimal vision algorithms systematically when used with optimization principles. This book presents a comprehensive study on the use of MRFs for solving computer vision problems. Various vision models are presented in a unified framework, including image restoration and reconstruction, edge and region segmentation, texture, stereo and motion, object matching and recognition, and pose estimation. This third edition includes the most recent advances and has new and expanded sections on topics such as: Bayesian Network; Discriminative Random Fields; Strong Random Fields; Spatial-Temporal Models; Learning MRF for Classification. This book is an excellent reference for researchers working in computer vision, image processing, statistical pattern recognition and applications of MRFs. It is also suitable as a text for advanced courses in these areas.

This book presents high-quality research on the concepts and developments in the field of information and communication technologies, and their applications. It features 134 rigorously selected papers (including 10 poster papers) from the Future of Information and Communication Conference 2020 (FICC 2020), held in San Francisco, USA, from March 5 to 6, 2020, addressing state-of-the-art intelligent methods and techniques for solving real-world problems along with a vision of future research. Discussing various aspects of communication, data science, ambient intelligence, networking, computing, security and Internet of Things, the book offers researchers, scientists, industrial engineers and students valuable insights into the current research and next generation information science and communication technologies.

The study of Markov random fields has brought exciting new problems to probability theory which are being developed in parallel with basic investigation in other disciplines, most notably physics. The mathematical and physical literature is often quite technical. This book aims at a more gentle introduction to these new areas of research.

This book presents outstanding theoretical and practical findings in data science and associated interdisciplinary areas. Its main goal is to explore how data science research can revolutionize society and industries in a positive way, drawing on pure research to do so. The topics covered range from pure data science to fake news detection, as well as Internet of Things in the context of Industry 4.0. Data science is a rapidly growing field and, as a profession, incorporates a wide variety of areas, from statistics, mathematics and machine learning, to applied big data analytics. According to Forbes magazine, “Data Science” was listed as LinkedIn’s fastest-growing job in 2017. This book presents selected papers from the International Conference on Contemporary Issues in Data Science (CiDaS 2019), a professional data science event that provided a real workshop (not “listen-shop”) where scientists and scholars had the chance to share ideas, form new collaborations, and brainstorm on major challenges; and where industry experts could catch up on emerging solutions to help solve their concrete data science problems. Given its scope, the book will benefit not only data scientists and scientists from other domains, but also industry experts, policymakers and politicians.