text: With the spreading prevalence of Big Data, many advances have recently been made in this field. Frameworks such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark have gained a lot of traction over the past decades and have become massively popular, especially in industries. It is becoming increasingly evident that effective big data analysis is key to solving artificial intelligence problems. Thus, a multi-algorithm library was implemented in the Spark framework, called MLlib. While this library supports multiple machine learning algorithms, there is still scope to use the Spark setup efficiently for highly time-intensive and computationally expensive procedures like deep learning. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that combines the distributive computational abilities of Apache Spark and the advanced machine learning architecture of a deep multi-layer perceptron (MLP), using the popular concept of Cascade Learning. We conduct empirical analysis of our framework on two real world datasets. The results are encouraging and corroborate our proposed framework, in turn proving that it is an improvement over traditional big data analysis methods that use either Spark or Deep learning as individual elements.
  @cite_2: Automatic segmentation of the liver and its lesion is an important step towards deriving quantitative biomarkers for accurate clinical diagnosis and computer-aided decision support systems. This paper presents a method to automatically segment liver and lesions in CT abdomen images using cascaded fully convolutional neural networks (CFCNs) and dense 3D conditional random fields (CRFs). We train and cascade two FCNs for a combined segmentation of the liver and its lesions. In the first step, we train a FCN to segment the liver as ROI input for a second FCN. The second FCN solely segments lesions from the predicted liver ROIs of step 1. We refine the segmentations of the CFCN using a dense 3D CRF that accounts for both spatial coherence and appearance. CFCN models were trained in a 2-fold cross-validation on the abdominal CT dataset 3DIRCAD comprising 15 hepatic tumor volumes. Our results show that CFCN-based semantic liver and lesion segmentation achieves Dice scores over (94 , ) for liver with computation times below 100 s per volume. We experimentally demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method as a decision support system with a high accuracy and speed for usage in daily clinical routine.
  @cite_13: In this paper we describe our machine learning solution for the RecSys Challenge, 2015. We have proposed a time efficient two-stage cascaded classifier for the prediction of buy sessions and purchased items within such sessions. Based on the model, several interesting features found, and formation of our own test bed, we have achieved a reasonable score. Usage of Random Forests helps us to cope with the effect of the multiplicity of good models depending on varying subsets of features in the purchased items prediction and, in its turn, boosting is used as a suitable technique to overcome severe class imbalance of the buy-session prediction.
  @cite_12: Convolutional networks are powerful visual models that yield hierarchies of features. We show that convolutional networks by themselves, trained end-to-end, pixels-to-pixels, exceed the state-of-the-art in semantic segmentation. Our key insight is to build "fully convolutional" networks that take input of arbitrary size and produce correspondingly-sized output with efficient inference and learning. We define and detail the space of fully convolutional networks, explain their application to spatially dense prediction tasks, and draw connections to prior models. We adapt contemporary classification networks (AlexNet, the VGG net, and GoogLeNet) into fully convolutional networks and transfer their learned representations by fine-tuning to the segmentation task. We then define a novel architecture that combines semantic information from a deep, coarse layer with appearance information from a shallow, fine layer to produce accurate and detailed segmentations. Our fully convolutional network achieves state-of-the-art segmentation of PASCAL VOC (20 relative improvement to 62.2 mean IU on 2012), NYUDv2, and SIFT Flow, while inference takes one third of a second for a typical image.
  @cite_17: The focus of our work is speeding up evaluation of deep neural networks in retrieval scenarios, where conventional architectures may spend too much time on negative examples. We propose to replace a monolithic network with our novel cascade of feature-sharing deep classifiers, called OnionNet, where subsequent stages may add both new layers as well as new feature channels to the previous ones. Importantly, intermediate feature maps are shared among classifiers, preventing them from the necessity of being recomputed. To accomplish this, the model is trained end-to-end in a principled way under a joint loss. We validate our approach in theory and on a synthetic benchmark. As a result demonstrated in three applications (patch matching, object detection, and image retrieval), our cascade can operate significantly faster than both monolithic networks and traditional cascades without sharing at the cost of marginal decrease in precision.
summary: The two stages of the framework mentioned in this paper, namely analysis using Spark and multi-layer perceptron, is connected via cascading. Cascading or Cascade Learning is typically used for cases where the classes are heavily imbalanced and a suitable inference cannot be gathered from the data. This approach has been previosuly applied in diverse fields such as Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision etc. and has proven to be quite effective. @cite_13 proposed a time efficient two-stage cascaded classifier for the prediction of buy sessions and purchased items within such sessions. @cite_17 proposed a cascade of feature-sharing deep classifiers, called OnionNet, where subsequent stages added both new layers as well as new feature channels to the previous ones. Recently, @cite_2 cascaded two fully convolutional neural networks @cite_12 for a combined image segmentation of the liver and its lesion and produced state-of-the-art results on the task.