Record linkage involves merging records in large, noisy databases to remove duplicate entities. It has become an important area because of its widespread occurrence in bibliometrics, public health, official statistics production, political science, and beyond. Traditional linkage methods directly linking records to one another are computationally infeasible as the number of records grows. As a result, it is increasingly common for researchers to treat record linkage as a clustering task, in which each latent entity is associated with one or more noisy database records. We critically assess performance bounds using the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence under a Bayesian record linkage framework, making connections to Kolchin partition models. We provide an upper bound using the KL divergence and a lower bound on the minimum probability of misclassifying a latent entity. We give insights for when our bounds hold using simulated data and provide practical user guidance.

This paper presents a novel method for structural data recognition using a large number of graph models. In general, prevalent methods for structural data recognition have two shortcomings: 1) Only a single model is used to capture structural variation. 2) Naive recognition methods are used, such as the nearest neighbor method. In this paper, we propose strengthening the recognition performance of these models as well as their ability to capture structural variation. The proposed method constructs a large number of graph models and trains decision trees using the models. This paper makes two main contributions. The first is a novel graph model that can quickly perform calculations, which allows us to construct several models in a feasible amount of time. The second contribution is a novel approach to structural data recognition: graph model boosting. Comprehensive structural variations can be captured with a large number of graph models constructed in a boosting framework, and a sophisticated classifier can be formed by aggregating the decision trees. Consequently, we can carry out structural data recognition with powerful recognition capability in the face of comprehensive structural variation. The experiments shows that the proposed method achieves impressive results and outperforms existing methods on datasets of IAM graph database repository.

We consider the problem of learning a causal graph over a set of variables with interventions. We study the cost-optimal causal graph learning problem: For a given skeleton (undirected version of the causal graph), design the set of interventions with minimum total cost, that can uniquely identify any causal graph with the given skeleton. We show that this problem is solvable in polynomial time. Later, we consider the case when the number of interventions is limited. For this case, we provide polynomial time algorithms when the skeleton is a tree or a clique tree. For a general chordal skeleton, we develop an efficient greedy algorithm, which can be improved when the causal graph skeleton is an interval graph.

After being trained, classifiers must often operate on data that has been corrupted by noise. In this paper, we consider the impact of such noise on the features of binary classifiers. Inspired by tools for classifier robustness, we introduce the same classification probability (SCP) to measure the resulting distortion on the classifier outputs. We introduce a low-complexity estimate of the SCP based on quantization and polynomial multiplication. We also study channel coding techniques based on replication error-correcting codes. In contrast to the traditional channel coding approach, where error-correction is meant to preserve the data and is agnostic to the application, our schemes specifically aim to maximize the SCP (equivalently minimizing the distortion of the classifier output) for the same redundancy overhead.

We consider empirical risk minimization of linear predictors with convex loss functions. Such problems can be reformulated as convex-concave saddle point problems, and thus are well suitable for primal-dual first-order algorithms. However, primal-dual algorithms often require explicit strongly convex regularization in order to obtain fast linear convergence, and the required dual proximal mapping may not admit closed-form or efficient solution. In this paper, we develop both batch and randomized primal-dual algorithms that can exploit strong convexity from data adaptively and are capable of achieving linear convergence even without regularization. We also present dual-free variants of the adaptive primal-dual algorithms that do not require computing the dual proximal mapping, which are especially suitable for logistic regression.

We propose an online convex optimization algorithm (RescaledExp) that achieves optimal regret in the unconstrained setting without prior knowledge of any bounds on the loss functions. We prove a lower bound showing an exponential separation between the regret of existing algorithms that require a known bound on the loss functions and any algorithm that does not require such knowledge. RescaledExp matches this lower bound asymptotically in the number of iterations. RescaledExp is naturally hyperparameter-free and we demonstrate empirically that it matches prior optimization algorithms that require hyperparameter optimization.

Very often features come with their own vectorial descriptions which provide detailed information about their properties. We refer to these vectorial descriptions as feature side-information. In the standard learning scenario, input is represented as a vector of features and the feature side-information is most often ignored or used only for feature selection prior to model fitting. We believe that feature side-information which carries information about features intrinsic property will help improve model prediction if used in a proper way during learning process. In this paper, we propose a framework that allows for the incorporation of the feature side-information during the learning of very general model families to improve the prediction performance. We control the structures of the learned models so that they reflect features similarities as these are defined on the basis of the side-information. We perform experiments on a number of benchmark datasets which show significant predictive performance gains, over a number of baselines, as a result of the exploitation of the side-information.

While the costs of human violence have attracted a great deal of attention from the research community, the effects of the network-on-network (NoN) violence popularised by Generative Adversarial Networks have yet to be addressed. In this work, we quantify the financial, social, spiritual, cultural, grammatical and dermatological impact of this aggression and address the issue by proposing a more peaceful approach which we term Generative Unadversarial Networks (GUNs). Under this framework, we simultaneously train two models: a generator G that does its best to capture whichever data distribution it feels it can manage, and a motivator M that helps G to achieve its dream. Fighting is strictly verboten and both models evolve by learning to respect their differences. The framework is both theoretically and electrically grounded in game theory, and can be viewed as a winner-shares-all two-player game in which both players work as a team to achieve the best score. Experiments show that by working in harmony, the proposed model is able to claim both the moral and log-likelihood high ground. Our work builds on a rich history of carefully argued position-papers, published as anonymous YouTube comments, which prove that the optimal solution to NoN violence is more GUNs.

Coordinate descent methods employ random partial updates of decision variables in order to solve huge-scale convex optimization problems. In this work, we introduce new adaptive rules for the random selection of their updates. By adaptive, we mean that our selection rules are based on the dual residual or the primal-dual gap estimates and can change at each iteration. We theoretically characterize the performance of our selection rules and demonstrate improvements over the state-of-the-art, and extend our theory and algorithms to general convex objectives. Numerical evidence with hinge-loss support vector machines and Lasso confirm that the practice follows the theory.

Bird sounds possess distinctive spectral structure which may exhibit small shifts in spectrum depending on the bird species and environmental conditions. In this paper, we propose using convolutional recurrent neural networks on the task of automated bird audio detection in real-life environments. In the proposed method, convolutional layers extract high dimensional, local frequency shift invariant features, while recurrent layers capture longer term dependencies between the features extracted from short time frames. This method achieves 88.5% Area Under ROC Curve (AUC) score on the unseen evaluation data and obtains the second place in the Bird Audio Detection challenge.