The two most extended density-based approaches to clustering are surely mixture model clustering and modal clustering. In the mixture model approach, the density is represented as a mixture and clusters are associated to the different mixture components. In modal clustering, clusters are understood as regions of high density separated from each other by zones of lower density, so that they are closely related to certain regions around the density modes. If the true density is indeed in the assumed class of mixture densities, then mixture model clustering allows to scrutinize more subtle situations than modal clustering. However, when mixture modeling is used in a nonparametric way, taking advantage of the denseness of the sieve of mixture densities to approximate any density, then the correspondence between clusters and mixture components may become questionable. In this paper we introduce two methods to adopt a modal clustering point of view after a mixture model fit. Numerous examples are provided to illustrate that mixture modeling can also be used for clustering in a nonparametric sense, as long as clusters are understood as the domains of attraction of the density modes.

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are ubiquitous in Bayesian computations. However, they need to access the full data set in order to evaluate the posterior density at every step of the algorithm. This results in a great computational burden in big data applications. In contrast to MCMC methods, Stochastic Gradient MCMC (SGMCMC) algorithms such as the Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) only require access to a batch of the data set at every step. This drastically improves the computational performance and scales well to large data sets. However, the difficulty with SGMCMC algorithms comes from the sensitivity to its parameters which are notoriously difficult to tune. Moreover, the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) scales as $\mathcal{O}(c^{-\frac{1}{3}})$ as opposed to standard MCMC $\mathcal{O}(c^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ where $c$ is the computational cost. We introduce a new class of Multilevel Stochastic Gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms that are able to mitigate the problem of tuning the step size and more importantly of recovering the $\mathcal{O}(c^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ convergence of standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods without the need to introduce Metropolis-Hasting steps. A further advantage of this new class of algorithms is that it can easily be parallelised over a heterogeneous computer architecture. We illustrate our methodology using Bayesian logistic regression and provide numerical evidence that for a prescribed relative RMSE the computational cost is sublinear in the number of data items.

Kernel and Multiple Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) are employed to classify schizophrenic and healthy patients based on their SNPs, DNA Methylation and fMRI data. Kernel and Multiple Kernel CCA are popular methods for finding nonlinear correlations between high-dimensional datasets. Data was gathered from 183 patients, 79 with schizophrenia and 104 healthy controls. Kernel and Multiple Kernel CCA represent new avenues for studying schizophrenia, because, to our knowledge, these methods have not been used on these data before. Classification is performed via k-means clustering on the kernel matrix outputs of the Kernel and Multiple Kernel CCA algorithm. Accuracies of the Kernel and Multiple Kernel CCA classification are compared to that of the regularized linear CCA algorithm classification, and are found to be significantly more accurate. Both algorithms demonstrate maximal accuracies when the combination of DNA methylation and fMRI data are used, and experience lower accuracies when the SNP data are incorporated.

We consider the estimation and inference of sparse graphical models that characterize the dependency structure of high-dimensional tensor-valued data. To facilitate the estimation of the precision matrix corresponding to each way of the tensor, we assume the data follow a tensor normal distribution whose covariance has a Kronecker product structure. A critical challenge in the estimation and inference of this model is the fact that its penalized maximum likelihood estimation involves minimizing a non-convex objective function. To address it, this paper makes two contributions: (i) In spite of the non-convexity of this estimation problem, we prove that an alternating minimization algorithm, which iteratively estimates each sparse precision matrix while fixing the others, attains an estimator with the optimal statistical rate of convergence. Notably, such an estimator achieves estimation consistency with only one tensor sample, which was not observed in the previous work. (ii) We propose a de-biased statistical inference procedure for testing hypotheses on the true support of the sparse precision matrices, and employ it for testing a growing number of hypothesis with false discovery rate (FDR) control. The asymptotic normality of our test statistic and the consistency of FDR control procedure are established. Our theoretical results are further backed up by thorough numerical studies. We implement the methods into a publicly available R package Tlasso.

This paper introduces matrix product state (MPS) decomposition as a new and systematic method to compress multidimensional data represented by higher-order tensors. It solves two major bottlenecks in tensor compression: computation and compression quality. Regardless of tensor order, MPS compresses tensors to matrices of moderate dimension which can be used for classification. Mainly based on a successive sequence of singular value decompositions (SVD), MPS is quite simple to implement and arrives at the global optimal matrix, bypassing local alternating optimization, which is not only computationally expensive but cannot yield the global solution. Benchmark results show that MPS can achieve better classification performance with favorable computation cost compared to other tensor compression methods.

Probabilities can be consistently estimated using random forests. It is, however, unclear how random forests should be updated to make predictions for other centers or at different time points. The first method has been proposed by Elkan and may be used for updating any machine learning approach yielding consistent probabilities, so-called probability machines. The second approach is a new strategy specifically developed for random forests. Using the terminal nodes, which represent conditional probabilities, the random forest is first translated to logistic regression models.

Spatio-temporal data is intrinsically high dimensional, so unsupervised modeling is only feasible if we can exploit structure in the process. When the dynamics are local in both space and time, this structure can be exploited by splitting the global field into many lower-dimensional "light cones". We review light cone decompositions for predictive state reconstruction, introducing three simple light cone algorithms. These methods allow for tractable inference of spatio-temporal data, such as full-frame video. The algorithms make few assumptions on the underlying process yet have good predictive performance and can provide distributions over spatio-temporal data, enabling sophisticated probabilistic inference.

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm that generates proposals for a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm by simulating the dynamics of a Hamiltonian system. However, HMC is sensitive to large time discretizations and performs poorly if there is a mismatch between the spatial geometry of the target distribution and the scales of the momentum distribution. In particular the mass matrix of HMC is hard to tune well. In order to alleviate these problems we propose relativistic Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, a version of HMC based on relativistic dynamics that introduce a maximum velocity on particles. We also derive stochastic gradient versions of the algorithm and show that the resulting algorithms bear interesting relationships to gradient clipping, RMSprop, Adagrad and Adam, popular optimisation methods in deep learning. Based on this, we develop relativistic stochastic gradient descent by taking the zero-temperature limit of relativistic stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. In experiments we show that the relativistic algorithms perform better than classical Newtonian variants and Adam.

Examples of algorithms to get you started with WEKA: logistic regression, decision tree, neural network and support vector machine.

This is a tough task, I was in this precarious situation trying to explain to my younger son. I had a curated list of top 10 frequently used Machine Learning algorithms, but the key was to do a backward mapping of these Machine Learning techniques to solve problems which are of interest and relevance to my son. As a starting point to the conversation I asked him, list down your decision making points, meaning there may be many situations when you had to make decisions but you may not have all the information. I took those and matched it to the machine learning algorithms while explaining the core concept behind the problem solving. A classifier is a machine learning technique that takes a bunch of data and attempts to predict which class the new data belongs to. Sure, remember sometime back you were asking me who you want to invite to your birthday party and whether they will accept your invitation or not! Now, assume that you have got a data set about all the other 29 kids in your class. The information contains their hobby, kind of books they read, do they share their tiffin or not, are they friendly, in your last birthday did they come and did they bring nice gifts, etc. Now, given these information, you want to predict whether your classmates will accept your invitation or not.