We consider worker skill estimation for the single-coin Dawid-Skene crowdsourcing model. In practice, skill-estimation is challenging because worker assignments are sparse and irregular due to the arbitrary and uncontrolled availability of workers. We formulate skill estimation as a rank-one correlation-matrix completion problem, where the observed components correspond to observed label correlations between workers. We show that the correlation matrix can be successfully recovered and skills are identifiable if and only if the sampling matrix (observed components) does not have a bipartite connected component. We then propose a projected gradient descent scheme and show that skill estimates converge to the desired global optima for such sampling matrices. Our proof is original and the results are surprising in light of the fact that even the weighted rank-one matrix factorization problem is NP-hard in general. Next, we derive sample complexity bounds in terms of spectral properties of the signless Laplacian of the sampling matrix. Our proposed scheme achieves state-of-art performance on a number of real-world datasets.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction has been one of the most central problems in computational advertising. Lately, embedding techniques that produce low-dimensional representations of ad IDs drastically improve CTR prediction accuracies. However, such learning techniques are data demanding and work poorly on new ads with little logging data, which is known as the cold-start problem. In this paper, we aim to improve CTR predictions during both the cold-start phase and the warm-up phase when a new ad is added to the candidate pool. We propose Meta-Embedding, a meta-learning-based approach that learns to generate desirable initial embeddings for new ad IDs. The proposed method trains an embedding generator for new ad IDs by making use of previously learned ads through gradient-based meta-learning. In other words, our method learns how to learn better embeddings. When a new ad comes, the trained generator initializes the embedding of its ID by feeding its contents and attributes. Next, the generated embedding can speed up the model fitting during the warm-up phase when a few labeled examples are available, compared to the existing initialization methods. Experimental results on three real-world datasets showed that Meta-Embedding can significantly improve both the cold-start and warm-up performances for six existing CTR prediction models, ranging from lightweight models such as Factorization Machines to complicated deep models such as PNN and DeepFM. All of the above apply to conversion rate (CVR) predictions as well.

Machine learning (ML) is probably the first and foremost used technique to deal with the size and complexity of the new generation of data. In this paper, we analyze one of the means to increase the performances of ML algorithms which is exploiting data locality. Data locality and access patterns are often at the heart of performance issues in computing systems due to the use of certain hardware techniques to improve performance. Altering the access patterns to increase locality can dramatically increase performance of a given algorithm. Besides, repeated data access can be seen as redundancy in data movement. Similarly, there can also be redundancy in the repetition of calculations. This work also identifies some of the opportunities for avoiding these redundancies by directly reusing computation results. We document the possibilities of such reuse in some selected machine learning algorithms and give initial indicative results from our first experiments on data access improvement and algorithm redesign.

Recent years have witnessed the world-wide emergence of mega-metropolises with incredibly huge populations. Understanding residents mobility patterns, or urban dynamics, thus becomes crucial for building modern smart cities. In this paper, we propose a Neighbor-Regularized and context-aware Non-negative Tensor Factorization model (NR-cNTF) to discover interpretable urban dynamics from urban heterogeneous data. Different from many existing studies concerned with prediction tasks via tensor completion, NR-cNTF focuses on gaining urban managerial insights from spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal patterns. This is enabled by high-quality Tucker factorizations regularized by both POI-based urban contexts and geographically neighboring relations. NR-cNTF is also capable of unveiling long-term evolutions of urban dynamics via a pipeline initialization approach. We apply NR-cNTF to a real-life data set containing rich taxi GPS trajectories and POI records of Beijing. The results indicate: 1) NR-cNTF accurately captures four kinds of city rhythms and seventeen spatial communities; 2) the rapid development of Beijing, epitomized by the CBD area, indeed intensifies the job-housing imbalance; 3) the southern areas with recent government investments have shown more healthy development tendency. Finally, NR-cNTF is compared with some baselines on traffic prediction, which further justifies the importance of urban contexts awareness and neighboring regulations.

Image partitioning, or segmentation without semantics, is the task of decomposing an image into distinct segments, or equivalently to detect closed contours. Most prior work either requires seeds, one per segment; or a threshold; or formulates the task as multicut / correlation clustering, an NP-hard problem. Here, we propose a greedy algorithm for signed graph partitioning, the "Mutex Watershed". Unlike seeded watershed, the algorithm can accommodate not only attractive but also repulsive cues, allowing it to find a previously unspecified number of segments without the need for explicit seeds or a tunable threshold. We also prove that this simple algorithm solves to global optimality an objective function that is intimately related to the multicut / correlation clustering integer linear programming formulation. The algorithm is deterministic, very simple to implement, and has empirically linearithmic complexity. When presented with short-range attractive and long-range repulsive cues from a deep neural network, the Mutex Watershed gives the best results currently known for the competitive ISBI 2012 EM segmentation benchmark.

In this paper, we propose the use of a black-box optimization method called deterministic Mesh Adaptive Direct Search (MADS) algorithm with orthogonal directions (Ortho-MADS) for the selection of hyperparameters of Support Vector Machines with a Gaussian kernel. Different from most of the methods in the literature that exploit the properties of the data or attempt to minimize the accuracy of a validation dataset over the first quadrant of (C, gamma), the Ortho-MADS provides convergence proof. We present the MADS, followed by the Ortho-MADS, the dynamic stopping criterion defined by the MADS mesh size and two different search strategies (Nelder-Mead and Variable Neighborhood Search) that contribute to a competitive convergence rate as well as a mechanism to escape from undesired local minima. We have investigated the practical selection of hyperparameters for the Support Vector Machine with a Gaussian kernel, i.e., properly choose the hyperparameters gamma (bandwidth) and C (trade-off) on several benchmark datasets. The experimental results have shown that the proposed approach for hyperparameter tuning consistently finds comparable or better solutions, when using a common configuration, than other methods. We have also evaluated the accuracy and the number of function evaluations of the Ortho-MADS with the Nelder-Mead search strategy and the Variable Neighborhood Search strategy using the mesh size as a stopping criterion, and we have achieved accuracy that no other method for hyperparameters optimization could reach.

In this paper, we introduce a framework for solving finite-horizon multistage optimization problems under uncertainty in the presence of auxiliary data. We assume the joint distribution of the uncertain quantities is unknown, but noisy observations, along with observations of auxiliary covariates, are available. We utilize effective predictive methods from machine learning (ML), including $k$-nearest neighbors regression ($k$NN), classification and regression trees (CART), and random forests (RF), to develop specific methods that are applicable to a wide variety of problems. We demonstrate that our solution methods are asymptotically optimal under mild conditions. Additionally, we establish finite sample guarantees for the optimality of our method with $k$NN weight functions. Finally, we demonstrate the practicality of our approach with computational examples. We see a significant decrease in cost by taking into account the auxiliary data in the multistage setting.

Synchronous mini-batch SGD is state-of-the-art for large-scale distributed machine learning. However, in practice, its convergence is bottlenecked by slow communication rounds between worker nodes. A natural solution to reduce communication is to use the \emph{`local-SGD'} model in which the workers train their model independently and synchronize every once in a while. This algorithm improves the computation-communication trade-off but its convergence is not understood very well. We propose a non-asymptotic error analysis, which enables comparison to \emph{one-shot averaging} i.e., a single communication round among independent workers, and \emph{mini-batch averaging} i.e., communicating at every step. We also provide adaptive lower bounds on the communication frequency for large step-sizes ($ t^{-\alpha} $, $ \alpha\in (1/2 , 1 ) $) and show that \emph{Local-SGD} reduces communication by a factor of $O\Big(\frac{\sqrt{T}}{P^{3/2}}\Big)$, with $T$ the total number of gradients and $P$ machines.

While the prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is increasing, research towards the definition of a common etiology is still ongoing. In this regard, modern machine learning and network science pave the way for a better understanding of the pathology and the development of diagnosis aid systems. At the same time, the culture of data sharing heads favorably in that direction, with the availability of large datasets such as the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) one. The present work addresses the classification of neurotypical and ASD subjects by combining knowledge about both the anatomy and the functional activity of the brain. In particular, we model the brain structure as a graph, and the time-varying resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) signals as values that live on the nodes of that graph. We then borrow tools from the emerging field of Graph Signal Processing (GSP) to build features related to the frequency content of these signals. In order to make these features highly discriminative, we apply an extension of the Fukunaga-Koontz transform. Finally, we use these new markers to train a decision tree, an interpretable classification scheme, which results in a final diagnosis aid model. Interestingly, the resulting decision tree outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the ABIDE dataset. Moreover, the analysis of the predictive markers reveals the influence of the frontal and temporal lobes in the diagnosis of the disorder, which is in line with previous findings in the literature of neuroscience. Our results indicate that exploiting jointly structural and functional information of the brain can reveal important information about the complexity of the neuropathology.

Graph based clustering is one of the major clustering methods. Most of it work in three separate steps: similarity graph construction, clustering label relaxing and label discretization with k-means. Such common practice has three disadvantages: 1) the predefined similarity graph is often fixed and may not be optimal for the subsequent clustering. 2) the relaxing process of cluster labels may cause significant information loss. 3) label discretization may deviate from the real clustering result since k-means is sensitive to the initialization of cluster centroids. To tackle these problems, in this paper, we propose an effective discrete optimal graph clustering (DOGC) framework. A structured similarity graph that is theoretically optimal for clustering performance is adaptively learned with a guidance of reasonable rank constraint. Besides, to avoid the information loss, we explicitly enforce a discrete transformation on the intermediate continuous label, which derives a tractable optimization problem with discrete solution. Further, to compensate the unreliability of the learned labels and enhance the clustering accuracy, we design an adaptive robust module that learns prediction function for the unseen data based on the learned discrete cluster labels. Finally, an iterative optimization strategy guaranteed with convergence is developed to directly solve the clustering results. Extensive experiments conducted on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods compared with several state-of-the-art clustering approaches.