Under the heading of "Addressing the big data challenge", the European 7th Framework Programme sees the issue thus (see INFSO, 2012): "Recent industry reports detail how data volumes are growing at a faster rate than our ability to interpret and exploit them for innovative ICT applications, for decision support, planning, monitoring, control and interaction. This includes unstructured data types such as video, audio, images and free text as well as structured data types such as database records, sensor readings and 3D. While each of these types requires some specific form of processing and analytics, many of the general principles for managing and storing them at extreme scales are common across all of them." Analytics tool capability is called for, to address these burgeoning issues in the data intensive industries, to support "effective policy making and implementation" of public bodies resulting in "significant annual savings from 1 Big Data applications", and also to exploit open, linked data - "foster the reuse of public sector information and strengthen other open data activities linked to commercial exploitation." The "big data" marketplace is stated to be potentially worth approximately USD 600 billion. To address the challenges of search and discovery in massive and complex data sets and data flows, it is our contention in this work that we must move to an appropriate topology - to an appropriate framework such that computation is greatly facilitated. Our work is all about empowering those who are involved in data analytics, through clustering and related algorithms, to face these new challenges. Scalability and interactivity are two of the performance issues that follow directly from clustering algorithms, for search, retrieval and discovery, that are of linear computational complexity or better (logarithmic, or constant).

The problem of active diagnosis arises in several applications such as disease diagnosis, and fault diagnosis in computer networks, where the goal is to rapidly identify the binary states of a set of objects (e.g., faulty or working) by sequentially selecting, and observing, (noisy) responses to binary valued queries. Current algorithms in this area rely on loopy belief propagation for active query selection. These algorithms have an exponential time complexity, making them slow and even intractable in large networks. We propose a rank-based greedy algorithm that sequentially chooses queries such that the area under the ROC curve of the rank-based output is maximized. The AUC criterion allows us to make a simplifying assumption that significantly reduces the complexity of active query selection (from exponential to near quadratic), with little or no compromise on the performance quality.

We address the problem of learning the parameters in graphical models when inference is intractable. A common strategy in this case is to replace the partition function with its Bethe approximation. We show that there exists a regime of empirical marginals where such Bethe learning will fail. By failure we mean that the empirical marginals cannot be recovered from the approximated maximum likelihood parameters (i.e., moment matching is not achieved). We provide several conditions on empirical marginals that yield outer and inner bounds on the set of Bethe learnable marginals. An interesting implication of our results is that there exists a large class of marginals that cannot be obtained as stable fixed points of belief propagation. Taken together our results provide a novel approach to analyzing learning with Bethe approximations and highlight when it can be expected to work or fail.

Fisher score is one of the most widely used supervised feature selection methods. However, it selects each feature independently according to their scores under the Fisher criterion, which leads to a suboptimal subset of features. In this paper, we present a generalized Fisher score to jointly select features. It aims at finding an subset of features, which maximize the lower bound of traditional Fisher score. The resulting feature selection problem is a mixed integer programming, which can be reformulated as a quadratically constrained linear programming (QCLP). It is solved by cutting plane algorithm, in each iteration of which a multiple kernel learning problem is solved alternatively by multivariate ridge regression and projected gradient descent. Experiments on benchmark data sets indicate that the proposed method outperforms Fisher score as well as many other state-of-the-art feature selection methods.

Such relaxations make STC amenable to: 1) directly control the sparsity of inferred representations by using sparsity-inducing regularizers; 2) be seamlessly integrated with a convex error function (e.g., SVM hinge loss) for supervised learning; and 3) be efficiently learned with a simply structured coordinate descent algorithm. Our results demonstrate the advantages of STC and supervised MedSTC on identifying topical meanings of words and improving classification accuracy and time efficiency.

We face network data from various sources, such as protein interactions and online social networks. A critical problem is to model network interactions and identify latent groups of network nodes. This problem is challenging due to many reasons. For example, the network nodes are interdependent instead of independent of each other, and the data are known to be very noisy (e.g., missing edges). To address these challenges, we propose a new relational model for network data, Sparse Matrix-variate Gaussian process Blockmodel (SMGB). Our model generalizes popular bilinear generative models and captures nonlinear network interactions using a matrix-variate Gaussian process with latent membership variables. We also assign sparse prior distributions on the latent membership variables to learn sparse group assignments for individual network nodes. To estimate the latent variables efficiently from data, we develop an efficient variational expectation maximization method. We compared our approaches with several state-of-the-art network models on both synthetic and real-world network datasets. Experimental results demonstrate SMGBs outperform the alternative approaches in terms of discovering latent classes or predicting unknown interactions.

Structure learning of Gaussian graphical models is an extensively studied problem in the classical multivariate setting where the sample size n is larger than the number of random variables p, as well as in the more challenging setting when p>>n. However, analogous approaches for learning the structure of graphical models with mixed discrete and continuous variables when p>>n remain largely unexplored. Here we describe a statistical learning procedure for this problem based on limited-order correlations and assess its performance with synthetic and real data.

Low-dimensional embedding, manifold learning, clustering, classification, and anomaly detection are among the most important problems in machine learning. The existing methods usually consider the case when each instance has a fixed, finite-dimensional feature representation. Here we consider a different setting. We assume that each instance corresponds to a continuous probability distribution. These distributions are unknown, but we are given some i.i.d. samples from each distribution. Our goal is to estimate the distances between these distributions and use these distances to perform low-dimensional embedding, clustering/classification, or anomaly detection for the distributions. We present estimation algorithms, describe how to apply them for machine learning tasks on distributions, and show empirical results on synthetic data, real word images, and astronomical data sets.

Models of bags of words typically assume topic mixing so that the words in a single bag come from a limited number of topics. We show here that many sets of bag of words exhibit a very different pattern of variation than the patterns that are efficiently captured by topic mixing. In many cases, from one bag of words to the next, the words disappear and new ones appear as if the theme slowly and smoothly shifted across documents (providing that the documents are somehow ordered). Examples of latent structure that describe such ordering are easily imagined. For example, the advancement of the date of the news stories is reflected in a smooth change over the theme of the day as certain evolving news stories fall out of favor and new events create new stories. Overlaps among the stories of consecutive days can be modeled by using windows over linearly arranged tight distributions over words. We show here that such strategy can be extended to multiple dimensions and cases where the ordering of data is not readily obvious. We demonstrate that this way of modeling covariation in word occurrences outperforms standard topic models in classification and prediction tasks in applications in biology, text modeling and computer vision.

A database of objects discovered in houses in the Roman city of Pompeii provides a unique view of ordinary life in an ancient city. Experts have used this collection to study the structure of Roman households, exploring the distribution and variability of tasks in architectural spaces, but such approaches are necessarily affected by modern cultural assumptions. In this study we present a data-driven approach to household archeology, treating it as an unsupervised labeling problem. This approach scales to large data sets and provides a more objective complement to human interpretation.