The Mixtures of Experts (ME) Family

I have attempted to create a single libarary of code that can be used for a set of ME programs. I call the programs which are derived from this libarary, the "ME family". The ME family of programs consists of the following training programs:

• Regression programs:
  • me-ese-r-1 trains a committee of mixtures-of-experts trained by early stopping;
  • hme-ese-r-1 trains a committee of hierarchical mixtures-of-experts trained by early stopping;
  • me-el-r-1 trains a committee of mixtures-of-experts trained by ensemble learning;
  • hme-el-r-1 trains a committee of hierarchical mixtures-of-experts trained by ensemble learning;
  • hme-grow-r-1 trains a committee of hierarchical mixtures-of-experts grown via early stopping;
• Classification programs:
  • me-ese-c-1 trains a committee of mixtures-of-experts trained by early stopping;
  • hme-ese-c-1 trains a committee of hierarchical mixtures-of-experts trained by early stopping;
  • me-el-c-1 trains a committee of mixtures-of-experts trained by ensemble learning;
  • hme-el-c-1 trains a committee of hierarchical mixtures-of-experts trained by ensemble learning;
  • hme-grow-c-1 trains a committee of hierarchical mixtures-of-experts grown via early stopping;

• hme-predict-r-1 makes predictions using parameters saved by one of the ME regression programs;
• hme-predict-c-1 makes predictions using parameters saved by one of the ME classification programs.

../bin/me-ese-r-1 \
-train_file ../data/toy.train \
-n_train 50 \
-n_input 1 \
-n_output 1 \
-out_file ../models/toy 


This will generate a set of files with the prefix "toy" in the directory 
"../models". Each of these is the set of parameters for a particular
member of the committee. To make predictions from this committee for a 
data set "toy.test", the following command would be used:


../bin/hme-predict-r-1 \
-test_file ../data/toy.test \
-n_test 100 \
-in_file ../models/toy \
-res_file toy.out



This reads from the files with the prefix "toy1" in the directory "../models"
and writes the output to "toy1.out".


 Gettting the software 

The code is written in C++ and works on most Unix platforms including
Solaris, Linux and HPUX. I will be working on a NT port sometime in
the future. I plan to work on updates to this code, so if you use it,
I'd appreciate it if you referenced the version number of the
software. The code is available as a zipped file:


 Version 1.0, 
hme-1.0-Source.tar.gz,
created 18th Sept 1997.


To install the code, unzip this file. This should create four
directories: bin, data, scripts and
src. In the src directory, type "make install" to
compile all the binaries and place them in the directory
bin. There is a sample program in scripts, and some
sample data in data.






Steve Waterhouse

Cambridge University Engineering Dept

Cambridge

CB2 1PZ





 Steve Waterhouse