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Learning label noise is gaining increasing attention from a variety of disciplines, particularly in supervised machine learning for classification tasks. The k nearest neighbors (kNN) classifier is often used as a natural way to edit the training sets due to its sensitivity to label noise. However, the kNN-based editor may remove too many instances if not designed to take care of the label noise. In addition, the one-sided nearest neighbor (NN) rule is unconvincing, as it just considers the nearest neighbors from the perspective of the query sample. In this paper, we propose an ensemble and iterative recovery strategy-based kGNN method (EIRS-kGNN) to edit data with label noise. EIRS-kGNN first uses the general nearest neighbors (GNN) to expand the one-sided NN rule to a binary-sided NN rule, taking the neighborhood of the queried samples into account. Then, it ensembles the prediction results of a finite set of ks in the kGNN to prudently judge the noise levels for each sample. Finally, two loops, i.e., the inner loop and the outer loop, are leveraged to iteratively detect label noise. A frequency indicator is derived from the iterative processes to guide the mixture approaches, including relabeling and removing, to deal with the detected label noise. The goal of EIRS-kGNN is to recover the distribution of the data set as if it were not corrupted. Experimental results on both synthetic data sets and UCI benchmarks, including binary data sets and multi-class data sets, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EIRS-kGNN method.

The deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) require large number of training data to avoid overfitting, which makes it unsuitable for processing small-scale image datasets. The transfer learning using DCNN (TCNN) reuses pre-trained layers to generate a mid-level image representation so that the optimization of more than millions CNN parameters can be avoided. By this way, overfitting problem in small-scale data can be alleviated. However, although now many public DCNNs have been trained and can be reused, the existing TCNNs are formed by only a single pre-trained DCNN structure and cannot make full use of multiple structures of pre-trained DCNNs. At the same time, the existing ensemble CNNs have not enough good representation ability. To address this problem, we combine the conventional ideas of ensemble CNNs and propose three ensemble TCNNs (TECNN). They are the voting method based on the combination of all TCNNs, the PickOver method by finding the optimal combination, and weighted method by finding weighted combination. Different from the existing ensemble CNNs, the proposed methods do not need to retrain the component CNNs and generate ensemble transferring representations by transferring the pre-trained mid-level parameters. The mathematical models of those three methods are also provided. Their versions of using fine-tuning are also compared in the experiments. In addition, we replace the Softmax classifier with ensemble linear classifiers in the full-connection layer. They outperform the current state of the art algorithms on Caltech ImageNet and some internet image data. All this research has released as an open source library called Transferring Image Ensemble Representations using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (TECNN). The source codes and relevant datasets in different versions are available from: http://www.cquptshuyinxia.com/TECNN.html.