The founding fathers of philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, created two competing foundations for knowledge: the ideas and the categories. According to Plato reality is constituted by the non-materialistic ideas: they are the true objects of the world. In his view ideas can be grouped into more and more universal ideas. According to Aristotle there is…
The ten Aristotelian categories, features and dissimilarities
Thursday, August 14th, 2014 at
16:49
Surprisingly good results in flow-cytometry classification
Sunday, July 20th, 2014 at
17:31
Are the evaluation results of the new procedure you worked on for months, worse or at most marginally better than the baseline procedure? Don’t worry, it happens all the time. Are they surprisingly good? Congratulations! You may write an interesting paper. But can you really understand why they are so good? Check, check, and double-check….
Are football results random?
Thursday, July 3rd, 2014 at
21:41
The recent results in the round of 16 of the football world championship in Brazil showed a remarkable statistic. The eight group winners all had to play against a runner-up of another group. All group winners won. Is that significant? Does this show that the result of a match is not random? Watching them strongly…
The Eurovision Song Contest Analyzed
Wednesday, May 14th, 2014 at
18:07
The results of the 2014 Eurovision Song Festival may be of interest from a number of perspectives, e.g. artistic, political and cultural. Here I will focus on the last point and show how by simple pattern recognition tools the cultural similarities between the participating countries can be analyzed. At the end it will be discussed…
Regularization and invariants
Thursday, March 20th, 2014 at
15:21
Regularization is frequently used in statistics and machine learning to stabilize sensitive procedures in case of insufficient data.. It will be argued here that it is specifically of interest in pattern recognition applications if it can be related to invariants of the specific problem at hand. It is thereby a means to incorporate prior knowledge…
Who invented the nearest neighbor rule?
Tuesday, January 28th, 2014 at
13:58
The Nearest Neighbor (NN) rule is a classic in pattern recognition. It is intuitive and there is no need to describe an algorithm. Everybody who programs it obtains the same results. It is thereby very suitable as a base routine in comparative studies. But who invented it? Marcello Pelillo looked back in history and tried…
Random Representations
Wednesday, January 8th, 2014 at
11:35
The goal of representation is in pattern recognition to map objects into a domain in which they can be compared. Usually, this domain is a vector space. It might also be a graph or a symbolic sequence or any other modality that allows the computation of distances between the represented objects. The quality of a…
Hume’s fork in pattern recognition
Sunday, November 24th, 2013 at
17:04
Some things are necessarily true, there is no escape: bachelors are unmarried, the set of prime numbers is infinitely large, the Pythagorean theorem. Other things just happen to be true: stones fall down to earth, birds fly, men are mortal. It could have been otherwise. These are manifestations of Hume’s fork. Are there examples of…
Choosing or learning a representation?
Monday, November 4th, 2013 at
00:00
The field of pattern recognition studies automatic tools for the integration of existing knowledge and given observations to enriched knowledge applicable to future observations. In particular general techniques that are useful for a set of applications are of interest. In order to relate objects, they have to be considered in a common representation. Should this…
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