Gaussian processes are attractive models for probabilistic classification but unfortunately exact inference is analytically intractable. We compare Laplace's method and Expectation Propagation (EP) focusing on marginal likelihood estimates and predictive performance. We explain theoretically and corroborate empirically that EP is superior to Laplace. We also compare to a sophisticated MCMC scheme and show that EP is surprisingly accurate. In recent years models based on Gaussian process (GP) priors have attracted much attention in the machine learning community.

We present a novel spectral clustering method that enables users to incorporate prior knowledge of the size of clusters into the clustering process. The cost function, which is named size regularized cut (SRcut), is defined as the sum of the inter-cluster similarity and a regularization term measuring the relative size of two clusters. Finding a partition of the data set to minimize SRcut is proved to be NP-complete. An approximation algorithm is proposed to solve a relaxed version of the optimization problem as an eigenvalue problem. Evaluations over different data sets demonstrate that the method is not sensitive to outliers and performs better than normalized cut.

Previous work has demonstrated that the image variations of many ob- jects (human faces in particular) under variable lighting can be effec- tively modeled by low dimensional linear spaces. The typical linear sub- space learning algorithms include Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Locality Preserving Projec- tion (LPP). All of these methods consider an n1 n2 image as a high dimensional vector in Rn1 n2, while an image represented in the plane is intrinsically a matrix. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm called Tensor Subspace Analysis (TSA). TSA considers an image as the sec- ond order tensor in Rn1 Rn2, where Rn1 and Rn2 are two vector spaces.

Clustering is a fundamental problem in machine learning and has been approached in many ways. Two general and quite different approaches include iteratively fitting a mixture model (e.g., using EM) and linking to- gether pairs of training cases that have high affinity (e.g., using spectral methods). Pair-wise clustering algorithms need not compute sufficient statistics and avoid poor solutions by directly placing similar examples in the same cluster. However, many applications require that each cluster of data be accurately described by a prototype or model, so affinity-based clustering – and its benefits – cannot be directly realized. We describe a technique called "affinity propagation", which combines the advantages of both approaches.

We propose a new linear method for dimension reduction to identify nonGaussian components in high dimensional data. Our method, NGCA (non-Gaussian component analysis), uses a very general semi-parametric framework. In contrast to existing projection methods we define what is uninteresting (Gaussian): by projecting out uninterestingness, we can estimate the relevant non-Gaussian subspace. We show that the estimation error of finding the non-Gaussian components tends to zero at a parametric rate. Once NGCA components are identified and extracted, various tasks can be applied in the data analysis process, like data visualization, clustering, denoising or classification.

This paper presents a non-asymptotic statistical analysis of Kernel-PCA with a focus different from the one proposed in previous work on this topic. Here instead of considering the reconstruction error of KPCA we are interested in approximation error bounds for the eigenspaces themselves. We prove an upper bound depending on the spacing between eigenvalues but not on the dimensionality of the eigenspace. As a consequence this allows to infer stability results for these estimated spaces.

This paper presents a diffusion based probabilistic interpretation of spectral clustering and dimensionality reduction algorithms that use the eigenvectors of the normalized graph Laplacian. Given the pairwise adjacency matrix of all points, we define a diffusion distance between any two data points and show that the low dimensional representation of the data by the first few eigenvectors of the corresponding Markov matrix is optimal under a certain mean squared error criterion. Furthermore, assuming that data points are random samples from a density p(x) e-U (x) we identify these eigenvectors as discrete approximations of eigenfunctions of a Fokker-Planck operator in a potential 2U (x) with reflecting boundary conditions. Finally, applying known results regarding the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the continuous Fokker-Planck operator, we provide a mathematical justification for the success of spectral clustering and dimensional reduction algorithms based on these first few eigenvectors. This analysis elucidates, in terms of the characteristics of diffusion processes, many empirical findings regarding spectral clustering algorithms.

We consider criteria for variational representations of non-Gaussian latent variables, and derive variational EM algorithms in general form. We establish a general equivalence among convex bounding methods, evidence based methods, and ensemble learning/Variational Bayes methods, which has previously been demonstrated only for particular cases.

Spectral clustering enjoys its success in both data clustering and semisupervised learning. But, most spectral clustering algorithms cannot handle multi-class clustering problems directly. Additional strategies are needed to extend spectral clustering algorithms to multi-class clustering problems. Furthermore, most spectral clustering algorithms employ hard cluster membership, which is likely to be trapped by the local optimum. In this paper, we present a new spectral clustering algorithm, named "Soft Cut".

Fisher linear discriminant analysis (LDA) can be sensitive to the problem data. Robust Fisher LDA can systematically alleviate the sensitivity problem by explicitly incorporating a model of data uncertainty in a classification problem and optimizing for the worst-case scenario under this model. The main contribution of this paper is show that with general convex uncertainty models on the problem data, robust Fisher LDA can be carried out using convex optimization. For a certain type of product form uncertainty model, robust Fisher LDA can be carried out at a cost comparable to standard Fisher LDA. The method is demonstrated with some numerical examples.