The mean-shift algorithm is a popular algorithm in computer vision and image processing. It can also be cast as a minimum gamma-divergence estimation. In this paper we focus on the "blurring" mean shift algorithm, which is one version of the mean-shift process that successively blurs the dataset. The analysis of the blurring mean-shift is relatively more complicated compared to the nonblurring version, yet the algorithm convergence and the estimation consistency have not been well studied in the literature. In this paper we prove both the convergence and the consistency of the blurring mean-shift. We also perform simulation studies to compare the efficiency of the blurring and the nonblurring versions of the mean-shift algorithms. Our results show that the blurring mean-shift has more efficiency.

We define the notion of rational closure in the context of Description Logics extended with a tipicality operator. We start from ALC+T, an extension of ALC with a typicality operator T: intuitively allowing to express concepts of the form T(C), meant to select the "most normal" instances of a concept C. The semantics we consider is based on rational model. But we further restrict the semantics to minimal models, that is to say, to models that minimise the rank of domain elements. We show that this semantics captures exactly a notion of rational closure which is a natural extension to Description Logics of Lehmann and Magidor's original one. We also extend the notion of rational closure to the Abox component. We provide an ExpTime algorithm for computing the rational closure of an Abox and we show that it is sound and complete with respect to the minimal model semantics.

I introduce Forecastable Component Analysis (ForeCA), a novel dimension reduction technique for temporally dependent signals. Based on a new forecastability measure, ForeCA finds an optimal transformation to separate a multivariate time series into a forecastable and an orthogonal white noise space. I present a converging algorithm with a fast eigenvector solution. Applications to financial and macroeconomic time series show that ForeCA can successfully discover informative structure, which can be used for forecasting as well as classification. The R package ForeCA accompanies this work and is publicly available on CRAN.

March 22, 2018 Abstract We propose a new algorithm to do posterior sampling of Kingman's coalescent, based upon the Particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo methodology. Specifically, the algorithm is an instantiation of the Particle Gibbs Sampling method, which alternately samples coalescent times conditioned on coalescent tree structures, and tree structures conditioned on coalescent times via the conditional Sequential Monte Carlo procedure. We implement our algorithm as a C package, and demonstrate its utility via a parameter estimation task in population genetics on both single-and multiple-locus data. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm performs comparable to or better than several well-developed methods. 1 Introduction Data shows hierarchical structure in many domains. For example, computer vision problems often involve hierarchical representation of images [Lee et al., 2009]. In text mining, documents can be modeled as hierarchical generative processes [Blei et al., 2003, Teh et al., 2006]. Algorithms that can effectively deal with hierarchical structure play an important role in uncovering the intrinsic structures of data.

Much work has been done on feature selection. Existing methods are based on document frequency, such as Chi-Square Statistic, Information Gain etc. However, these methods have two shortcomings: one is that they are not reliable for low-frequency terms, and the other is that they only count whether one term occurs in a document and ignore the term frequency. Actually, high-frequency terms within a specific category are often regards as discriminators. This paper focuses on how to construct the feature selection function based on term frequency, and proposes a new approach based on $t$-test, which is used to measure the diversity of the distributions of a term between the specific category and the entire corpus. Extensive comparative experiments on two text corpora using three classifiers show that our new approach is comparable to or or slightly better than the state-of-the-art feature selection methods (i.e., $\chi^2$, and IG) in terms of macro-$F_1$ and micro-$F_1$.

There are many methods developed to approximate a cloud of vectors embedded in high-dimensional space by simpler objects: starting from principal points and linear manifolds to self-organizing maps, neural gas, elastic maps, various types of principal curves and principal trees, and so on. For each type of approximators the measure of the approximator complexity was developed too. These measures are necessary to find the balance between accuracy and complexity and to define the optimal approximations of a given type. We propose a measure of complexity (geometrical complexity) which is applicable to approximators of several types and which allows comparing data approximations of different types.

In this paper, we firstly give a brief introduction of expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, and then discuss the initial value sensitivity of expectation maximization algorithm. Subsequently, we give a short proof of EM's convergence. Then, we implement experiments with the expectation maximization algorithm (We implement all the experiments on Gaussion mixture model (GMM)). Our experiment with expectation maximization is performed in the following three cases: initialize randomly; initialize with result of K-means; initialize with result of K-medoids. The experiment result shows that expectation maximization algorithm depend on its initial state or parameters. And we found that EM initialized with K-medoids performed better than both the one initialized with K-means and the one initialized randomly.

We introduce a class of quadratic support (QS) functions, many of which play a crucial role in a variety of applications, including machine learning, robust statistical inference, sparsity promotion, and Kalman smoothing. Well known examples include the l2, Huber, l1 and Vapnik losses. We build on a dual representation for QS functions using convex analysis, revealing the structure necessary for a QS function to be interpreted as the negative log of a probability density, and providing the foundation for statistical interpretation and analysis of QS loss functions. For a subclass of QS functions called piecewise linear quadratic (PLQ) penalties, we also develop efficient numerical estimation schemes. These components form a flexible statistical modeling framework for a variety of learning applications, together with a toolbox of efficient numerical methods for inference. In particular, for PLQ densities, interior point (IP) methods can be used. IP methods solve nonsmooth optimization problems by working directly with smooth systems of equations characterizing their optimality. The efficiency of the IP approach depends on the structure of particular applications. We consider the class of dynamic inverse problems using Kalman smoothing, where the aim is to reconstruct the state of a dynamical system with known process and measurement models starting from noisy output samples. In the classical case, Gaussian errors are assumed in the process and measurement models. The extended framework allows arbitrary PLQ densities to be used, and the proposed IP approach solves the generalized Kalman smoothing problem while maintaining the linear complexity in the size of the time series, just as in the Gaussian case. This extends the computational efficiency of classic algorithms to a much broader nonsmooth setting, and includes many recently proposed robust and sparse smoothers as special cases.

In the high-dimensional regression model a response variable is linearly related to $p$ covariates, but the sample size $n$ is smaller than $p$. We assume that only a small subset of covariates is `active' (i.e., the corresponding coefficients are non-zero), and consider the model-selection problem of identifying the active covariates. A popular approach is to estimate the regression coefficients through the Lasso ($\ell_1$-regularized least squares). This is known to correctly identify the active set only if the irrelevant covariates are roughly orthogonal to the relevant ones, as quantified through the so called `irrepresentability' condition. In this paper we study the `Gauss-Lasso' selector, a simple two-stage method that first solves the Lasso, and then performs ordinary least squares restricted to the Lasso active set. We formulate `generalized irrepresentability condition' (GIC), an assumption that is substantially weaker than irrepresentability. We prove that, under GIC, the Gauss-Lasso correctly recovers the active set.

We introduce 'mixed LICORS', an algorithm for learning nonlinear, high-dimensional dynamics from spatio-temporal data, suitable for both prediction and simulation. Mixed LICORS extends the recent LICORS algorithm (Goerg and Shalizi, 2012) from hard clustering of predictive distributions to a non-parametric, EM-like soft clustering. This retains the asymptotic predictive optimality of LICORS, but, as we show in simulations, greatly improves out-of-sample forecasts with limited data. The new method is implemented in the publicly-available R package "LICORS" (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/LICORS/).