EDLT: Enabling Deep Learning for Generic Data Classification

This paper proposes to enable deep learning for generic machine learning tasks. Our goal is to allow deep learning to be applied to data which are already represented in instance-feature tabular format for a better classification accuracy. Because deep learning relies on spatial/temporal correlation to learn new feature representation, our theme is to convert each instance of the original dataset into a synthetic matrix format to take the full advantage of the feature learning power of deep learning methods. To maximize the correlation of the matrix, we use 0/1 optimization to reorder features such that the ones with strong correlations are adjacent to each other. By using a two dimensional feature reordering, we are able to create a synthetic matrix, as an image, to represent each instance. Because the synthetic image preserves the original feature values and data correlation, existing deep learning algorithms, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), can be applied to learn effective features for classification. Our experiments on 20 generic datasets, using CNN as the deep learning classifier, confirm that enabling deep learning to generic datasets has clear performance gain, compared to generic machine learning methods. In addition, the proposed method consistently outperforms simple baselines of using CNN for generic dataset. As a result, our research allows deep learning to be broadly applied to generic datasets for learning and classification (Algorithm source code is available at http://github.com/hhmzwc/EDLT).