Prediction of the Facial Growth Direction is Challenging

Facial dysmorphology or malocclusion is frequently associated with abnormal growth of the face. The ability to predict facial growth (FG) direction would allow clinicians to prepare individualized therapy to increase the chance for successful treatment. Prediction of FG direction is a novel problem in the machine learning (ML) domain. In this paper, we perform feature selection and point the attribute that plays a central role in the abovementioned problem. Then we successfully apply data augmentation (DA) methods and improve the previously reported classification accuracy by 2.81%. Finally, we present the results of two experienced clinicians that were asked to solve a similar task to ours and show how tough is solving this problem for human experts.

Prediction of the facial growth direction with Machine Learning methods

First attempts of prediction of the facial growth (FG) direction were made over half of a century ago. Despite numerous attempts and elapsed time, a satisfactory method has not been established yet and the problem still poses a challenge for medical experts. To our knowledge, this paper is the first Machine Learning approach to the prediction of FG direction. Conducted data analysis reveals the inherent complexity of the problem and explains the reasons of difficulty in FG direction prediction based on 2D X-ray images. To perform growth forecasting, we employ a wide range of algorithms, from logistic regression, through tree ensembles to neural networks and consider three, slightly different, problem formulations. The resulting classification accuracy varies between 71% and 75%.

A Committee of Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Classication in the Concurrent Presence of Feature and Label Noise

Image classification has become a ubiquitous task. Models trained on good quality data achieve accuracy which in some application domains is already above human-level performance. Unfortunately, real-world data are quite often degenerated by the noise existing in features and/or labels. There are quite many papers that handle the problem of either feature or label noise, separately. However, to the best of our knowledge, this piece of research is the first attempt to address the problem of concurrent occurrence of both types of noise. Basing on the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, we experimentally proved that the difference by which committees beat single models increases along with noise level, no matter it is an attribute or label disruption. Thus, it makes ensembles legitimate to be applied to noisy images with noisy labels. The aforementioned committees' advantage over single models is positively correlated with dataset difficulty level as well. We propose three committee selection algorithms that outperform a strong baseline algorithm which relies on an ensemble of individual (nonassociated) best models.