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 Statistical Learning


Adaptive Regularization for Transductive Support Vector Machine

Neural Information Processing Systems

We discuss the framework of Transductive Support Vector Machine (TSVM) from the perspective of the regularization strength induced by the unlabeled data. In this framework, SVM and TSVM can be regarded as a learning machine without regularization and one with full regularization from the unlabeled data, respectively. Therefore, to supplement this framework of the regularization strength, it is necessary to introduce data-dependant partial regularization. To this end, we reformulate TSVM into a form with controllable regularization strength, which includes SVM and TSVM as special cases. Furthermore, we introduce a method of adaptive regularization that is data dependant and is based on the smoothness assumption.


Periodic Step Size Adaptation for Single Pass On-line Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

It has been established that the second-order stochastic gradient descent (2SGD) method can potentially achieve generalization performance as well as empirical optimum in a single pass (i.e., epoch) through the training examples. However, 2SGD requires computing the inverse of the Hessian matrix of the loss function, which is prohibitively expensive. This paper presents Periodic Step-size Adaptation (PSA), which approximates the Jacobian matrix of the mapping function and explores a linear relation between the Jacobian and Hessian to approximate the Hessian periodically and achieve near-optimal results in experiments on a wide variety of models and tasks.


Optimization in Machine Learning and Data Science

#artificialintelligence

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have burst into public consciousness in the last several years. While large language and multimodal models like GPT-4 have recently taken the excitement to a new level, developments in voice recognition software, novel recommendation systems for online retailers and streaming services, superhuman-level play by computers in Chess and Go, and unfulfilled promises in technologies like self-driving cars have been generating interest for more than a decade. Many research disciplines are feeling the profound effects of AI. For example, scientists can now utilize neural networks (NNs) to predict a protein's structure based on its amino acid sequence [3] -- a problem that was identified decades ago as a grand challenge for computational science. ML, AI, data science, data analysis, data mining, and statistical inference all have different but overlapping meanings; the term "data science" is perhaps the most general.


A Game-Theoretic Approach to Hypergraph Clustering

Neural Information Processing Systems

Hypergraph clustering refers to the process of extracting maximally coherent groups from a set of objects using high-order (rather than pairwise) similarities. Traditional approaches to this problem are based on the idea of partitioning the input data into a user-defined number of classes, thereby obtaining the clusters as a by-product of the partitioning process. In this paper, we provide a radically different perspective to the problem. In contrast to the classical approach, we attempt to provide a meaningful formalization of the very notion of a cluster and we show that game theory offers an attractive and unexplored perspective that serves well our purpose. Specifically, we show that the hypergraph clustering problem can be naturally cast into a non-cooperative multi-player clustering game, whereby the notion of a cluster is equivalent to a classical game-theoretic equilibrium concept.


Probabilistic Relational PCA

Neural Information Processing Systems

One crucial assumption made by both principal component analysis (PCA) and probabilistic PCA (PPCA) is that the instances are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). In this paper, by explicitly modeling covariance between instances as derived from the relational information, we propose a novel probabilistic dimensionality reduction method, called probabilistic relational PCA (PRPCA), for relational data analysis. Experiments on real-world data sets show that PRPCA can effectively utilize the relational information to dramatically outperform PCA and achieve state-of-the-art performance.


Perceptual Multistability as Markov Chain Monte Carlo Inference

Neural Information Processing Systems

While many perceptual and cognitive phenomena are well described in terms of Bayesian inference, the necessary computations are intractable at the scale of real-world tasks, and it remains unclear how the human mind approximates Bayesian inference algorithmically. We explore the proposal that for some tasks, humans use a form of Markov Chain Monte Carlo to approximate the posterior distribution over hidden variables. As a case study, we show how several phenomena of perceptual multistability can be explained as MCMC inference in simple graphical models for low-level vision.


Heterogeneous multitask learning with joint sparsity constraints

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multitask learning addressed the problem of learning related tasks whose information can be shared each other. In this paper we consider the problem learning multiple related tasks where tasks consist of both continuous and discrete outputs from a common set of input variables that lie in a high-dimensional space. All of the tasks are related in the sense that they share the same set of relevant input variables, but the amount of influence of each input on different outputs may vary. We formulate this problem as a combination of linear regression and logistic regression and model the joint sparsity as L1/Linf and L1/L2-norm of the model parameters. Among several possible applications, our approach addresses an important open problem in genetic association mapping, where we are interested in discovering genetic markers that influence multiple correlated traits jointly.


Kernel Methods for Deep Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce a new family of positive-definite kernel functions that mimic the computation in large, multilayer neural nets. These kernel functions can be used in shallow architectures, such as support vector machines (SVMs), or in deep kernel-based architectures that we call multilayer kernel machines (MKMs). We evaluate SVMs and MKMs with these kernel functions on problems designed to illustrate the advantages of deep architectures. On several problems, we obtain better results than previous, leading benchmarks from both SVMs with Gaussian kernels as well as deep belief nets.


Modelling Relational Data using Bayesian Clustered Tensor Factorization

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the problem of learning probabilistic models for complex relational structures between various types of objects. A model can help us understand a dataset of relational facts in at least two ways, by finding interpretable structure in the data, and by supporting predictions, or inferences about whether particular unobserved relations are likely to be true. Often there is a tradeoff between these two aims: cluster-based models yield more easily interpretable representations, while factorization-based approaches have better predictive performance on large data sets. We introduce the Bayesian Clustered Tensor Factorization (BCTF) model, which embeds a factorized representation of relations in a nonparametric Bayesian clustering framework. Inference is fully Bayesian but scales well to large data sets.


Streaming k-means approximation

Neural Information Processing Systems

We provide a clustering algorithm that approximately optimizes the k-means objective, in the one-pass streaming setting. We make no assumptions about the data, and our algorithm is very light-weight in terms of memory, and computation. This setting is applicable to unsupervised learning on massive data sets, or resource-constrained devices. The two main ingredients of our theoretical work are: a derivation of an extremely simple pseudo-approximation batch algorithm for k-means, in which the algorithm is allowed to output more than k centers (based on the recent k-means "), and a streaming clustering algorithm in which batch clustering algorithms are performed on small inputs (fitting in memory) and combined in a hierarchical manner. Empirical evaluations on real and simulated data reveal the practical utility of our method."