The question of aggregating pairwise comparisons to obtain a global ranking over a collection of objects has been of interest for a very long time: be it ranking of online gamers (e.g. MSR’s TrueSkill system) and chess players, aggregating social opinions, or deciding which product to sell based on transactions. In most settings, in addition to obtaining ranking, finding ‘scores’ for each object (e.g. player’s rating) is of interest to understanding the intensity of the preferences. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative rank aggregation algorithm for discovering scores for objects from pairwise comparisons. The algorithm has a natural random walk interpretation over the graph of objects with edges present between two objects if they are compared; the scores turn out to be the stationary probability of this random walk. The algorithm is model independent. To establish the efficacy of our method, however, we consider the popular Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model in which each object has an associated score which determines the probabilistic outcomes of pairwise comparisons between objects. We bound the finite sample error rates between the scores assumed by the BTL model and those estimated by our algorithm. This, in essence, leads to order-optimal dependence on the number of samples required to learn the scores well by our algorithm. Indeed, the experimental evaluation shows that our (model independent) algorithm performs as well as the Maximum Likelihood Estimator of the BTL model and outperforms a recently proposed algorithm by Ammar and Shah [1].

Positive definite operator-valued kernels generalize the well-known notion of reproducing kernels, and are naturally adapted to multi-output learning situations. This paper addresses the problem of learning a finite linear combination of infinite-dimensional operator-valued kernels which are suitable for extending functional data analysis methods to nonlinear contexts. We study this problem in the case of kernel ridge regression for functional responses with an lr-norm constraint on the combination coefficients. The resulting optimization problem is more involved than those of multiple scalar-valued kernel learning since operator-valued kernels pose more technical and theoretical issues. We propose a multiple operator-valued kernel learning algorithm based on solving a system of linear operator equations by using a block coordinate-descent procedure. We experimentally validate our approach on a functional regression task in the context of finger movement prediction in brain-computer interfaces.

Given their pervasive use, social media, such as Twitter, have become a leading source of breaking news. A key task in the automated identification of such news is the detection of novel documents from a voluminous stream of text documents in a scalable manner. Motivated by this challenge, we introduce the problem of online L1-dictionary learning where unlike traditional dictionary learning, which uses squared loss, the L1-penalty is used for measuring the reconstruction error. We present an efficient online algorithm for this problem based on alternating directions method of multipliers, and establish a sublinear regret bound for this algorithm. Empirical results on news-stream and Twitter data, shows that this online L1-dictionary learning algorithm for novel document detection gives more than an order of magnitude speedup over the previously known batch algorithm, without any significant loss in quality of results. Our algorithm for online L1-dictionary learning could be of independent interest.

We consider the problem of identifying patterns in a data set that exhibit anomalous behavior, often referred to as anomaly detection. In most anomaly detection algorithms, the dissimilarity between data samples is calculated by a single criterion, such as Euclidean distance. However, in many cases there may not exist a single dissimilarity measure that captures all possible anomalous patterns. In such a case, multiple criteria can be defined, and one can test for anomalies by scalarizing the multiple criteria by taking some linear combination of them. If the importance of the different criteria are not known in advance, the algorithm may need to be executed multiple times with different choices of weights in the linear combination. In this paper, we introduce a novel non-parametric multi-criteria anomaly detection method using Pareto depth analysis (PDA). PDA uses the concept of Pareto optimality to detect anomalies under multiple criteria without having to run an algorithm multiple times with different choices of weights. The proposed PDA approach scales linearly in the number of criteria and is provably better than linear combinations of the criteria.

We advocate the use of a new distribution family--the transelliptical--for robust inference of high dimensional graphical models. The transelliptical family is an extension of the nonparanormal family proposed by Liu et al. (2009). Just as the nonparanormal extends the normal by transforming the variables using univariate functions, the transelliptical extends the elliptical family in the same way. We propose a nonparametric rank-based regularization estimator which achieves the parametric rates of convergence for both graph recovery and parameter estimation. Sucha result suggests that the extra robustness and flexibility obtained by the semiparametric transelliptical modeling incurs almost no efficiency loss. We also discuss the relationship between this work with the transelliptical component analysis proposed by Han and Liu (2012).

Graphical models are a very useful tool to describe and understand natural phenomena, from gene expression to climate change and social interactions. The topological structure of these graphs/networks is a fundamental part of the analysis, and in many cases the main goal of the study. However, little work has been done on incorporating prior topological knowledge onto the estimation of the underlying graphical models from sample data. In this work we propose extensions to the basic joint regression model for network estimation, which explicitly incorporate graph-topological constraints into the corresponding optimization approach. The first proposed extension includes an eigenvector centrality constraint, thereby promoting this important prior topological property. The second developed extension promotes the formation of certain motifs, triangle-shaped ones in particular, which are known to exist for example in genetic regulatory networks. The presentation of the underlying formulations, which serve as examples of the introduction of topological constraints in network estimation, is complemented with examples in diverse datasets demonstrating the importance of incorporating such critical prior knowledge.

We address the problem of estimating the difference between two probability densities. A naive approach is a two-step procedure of first estimating two densities separately and then computing their difference. However, such a two-step procedure does not necessarily work well because the first step is performed without regard to the second step and thus a small estimation error incurred in the first stage can cause a big error in the second stage. In this paper, we propose a single-shot procedure for directly estimating the density difference without separately estimating two densities. We derive a non-parametric finite-sample error bound for the proposed single-shot density-difference estimator and show that it achieves the optimal convergence rate. We then show how the proposed density-difference estimator can be utilized in L2-distance approximation. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method in robust distribution comparison such as class-prior estimation and change-point detection.

The problem of estimation of entropy functionals of probability densities has received much attention in the information theory, machine learning and statistics communities. Kernel density plug-in estimators are simple, easy to implement and widely used for estimation of entropy. However, kernel plug-in estimators suffer from the curse of dimensionality, wherein the MSE rate of convergence is glacially slow - of order $O(T^{-{\gamma}/{d}})$, where $T$ is the number of samples, and $\gamma>0$ is a rate parameter. In this paper, it is shown that for sufficiently smooth densities, an ensemble of kernel plug-in estimators can be combined via a weighted convex combination, such that the resulting weighted estimator has a superior parametric MSE rate of convergence of order $O(T^{-1})$. Furthermore, it is shown that these optimal weights can be determined by solving a convex optimization problem which does not require training data or knowledge of the underlying density, and therefore can be performed offline. This novel result is remarkable in that, while each of the individual kernel plug-in estimators belonging to the ensemble suffer from the curse of dimensionality, by appropriate ensemble averaging we can achieve parametric convergence rates.

A patient's risk for adverse events is affected by temporal processes including the nature and timing of diagnostic and therapeutic activities, and the overall evolution of the patient's pathophysiology over time. Yet many investigators ignore this temporal aspect when modeling patient risk, considering only the patient's current or aggregate state. We explore representing patient risk as a time series. In doing so, patient risk stratification becomes a time-series classification task. The task differs from most applications of time-series analysis, like speech processing, since the time series itself must first be extracted. Thus, we begin by defining and extracting approximate \textit{risk processes}, the evolving approximate daily risk of a patient. Once obtained, we use these signals to explore different approaches to time-series classification with the goal of identifying high-risk patterns. We apply the classification to the specific task of identifying patients at risk of testing positive for hospital acquired colonization with \textit{Clostridium Difficile}. We achieve an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.79 on a held-out set of several hundred patients. Our two-stage approach to risk stratification outperforms classifiers that consider only a patient's current state (p$<$0.05).

Structured output learning has been successfully applied to object localization, where the mapping between an image and an object bounding box can be well captured. Its extension to action localization in videos, however, is much more challenging, because one needs to predict the locations of the action patterns both spatially and temporally, i.e., identifying a sequence of bounding boxes that track the action in video. The problem becomes intractable due to the exponentially large size of the structured video space where actions could occur. We propose a novel structured learning approach for spatio-temporal action localization. The mapping between a video and a spatio-temporal action trajectory is learned. The intractable inference and learning problems are addressed by leveraging an efficient Max-Path search method, thus makes it feasible to optimize the model over the whole structured space. Experiments on two challenging benchmark datasets show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.