Enhancing Time Series Classification with Diversity-Driven Neural Network Ensembles

Ensemble methods have played a crucial role in achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across various machine learning tasks by leveraging the diversity of features learned by individual models. In Time Series Classification (TSC), ensembles have proven highly effective whether based on neural networks (NNs) or traditional methods like HIVE-COTE. However most existing NN-based ensemble methods for TSC train multiple models with identical architectures and configurations. These ensembles aggregate predictions without explicitly promoting diversity which often leads to redundant feature representations and limits the benefits of ensembling. In this work, we introduce a diversity-driven ensemble learning framework that explicitly encourages feature diversity among neural network ensemble members. Our approach employs a decorrelated learning strategy using a feature orthogonality loss applied directly to the learned feature representations. This ensures that each model in the ensemble captures complementary rather than redundant information. We evaluate our framework on 128 datasets from the UCR archive and show that it achieves SOTA performance with fewer models. This makes our method both efficient and scalable compared to conventional NN-based ensemble approaches.

Cerebrovascular Network Segmentation on MRA Images with Deep Learning

Deep learning has been shown to produce state of the art results in many tasks in biomedical imaging, especially in segmentation. Moreover, segmentation of the cerebrovascular structure from magnetic resonance angiography is a challenging problem because its complex geometry and topology have a large inter-patient variability. Therefore, in this work, we present a convolutional neural network approach for this problem. Particularly, a new network topology inspired by the U-net 3D and by the Inception modules, entitled Uception. In addition, a discussion about the best objective function for sparse data also guided most choices during the project. State of the art models are also implemented for a comparison purpose and final results show that the proposed architecture has the best performance in this particular context.