Abstract: (Editorial for the Special Issue on Online pattern recognition and machine learning techniques)
In real life, visual learning is supposed to be a continuous process. This paradigm has found its way also in artificial vision systems. There is an increasing trend in pattern recognition represented by online learning approaches, which aims at continuously updating the data representation when new information arrives. Starting with a minimal dataset, the initial knowledge is expanded by incorporating incoming instances, which may have not been previously available or foreseen at the system’s design stage. An interesting characteristic of this strategy is that the train and test phases take place simultaneously. Given the increasing interest in this subject, the aim of this special issue is to be a landmark event in the development of online learning techniques and their applications with the hope that it will capture the interest of a wider audience and will attract even more researchers. We received 19 contributions, of which 9 have been accepted for publication, after having been subjected to usual peer review process.

Abstract: The problem of training classifiers only with target data arises in many applications where non-target data are too costly, difficult to obtain, or not available at all. Several one-class classification methods have been presented to solve this problem, but most of the methods are highly sensitive to the presence of outliers in the target class. Ensemble methods have therefore been proposed as a powerful way to improve the classification performance of binary/multi-class learning algorithms by introducing diversity into classifiers.
However, their application to one-class classification has been rather limited. In
this paper, we present a new ensemble method based on a non-parametric weighted bagging strategy for one-class classification, to improve accuracy in the presence of outliers. While the standard bagging strategy assumes a uniform data distribution, the method we propose here estimates a probability density based on a forest structure of the data. This assumption allows the estimation of data distribution from the computation of simple univariate and bivariate kernel densities. Experiments using original and noisy versions of 20 different datasets show that bagging ensemble methods applied to different one-class classifiers outperform base one-class classification methods. Moreover, we show that, in noisy versions of the datasets, the non-parametric weighted bagging strategy we propose outperforms the classical bagging strategy in a statistically significant way.