Statistical Learning
TRex: A Tomography Reconstruction Proximal Framework for Robust Sparse View X-Ray Applications
Aly, Mohamed, Zang, Guangming, Heidrich, Wolfgang, Wonka, Peter
We provide an overview and perform an experimental comparison between the famous iterative reconstruction methods in terms of reconstruction quality in sparse view situations. We then derive the proximal operators for the four best methods. We show the flexibility of our framework by deriving solvers for two noise models: Gaussian and Poisson; and by plugging in three powerful regularizers. We compare our framework to state of the art methods, and show superior quality on both synthetic and real datasets.
communication-efficient distributed statistical learning
Michael Jordan, Jason Lee, and Yun Yang just arXived a paper with their proposal on handling large datasets through distributed computing, thus contributing to the currently very active research topic of approximate solutions in large Bayesian models. The core of the proposal is summarised by the screenshot above, where the approximate likelihood replaces the exact likelihood with a first order Taylor expansion. The first term is the likelihood computed for a given subsample (or a given thread) at a ratio of one to N and the difference of the gradients is only computed once at a good enough guess. While the paper also considers M-estimators and non-Bayesian settings, the Bayesian part thus consists in running a regular MCMC when the log-target is approximated by the above. I first thought this proposal amounted to a Gaussian approximation à la Simon Wood or to an INLA approach but this is not the case: the first term of the approximate likelihood is exact and hence can be of any form, while the scalar product is linear in?, providing a sort of first order approximation, albeit frozen at the chosen starting value.
Save and Load Machine Learning Models in Python with scikit-learn - Machine Learning Mastery
Finding an accurate machine learning model is not the end of the project. In this post you will discover how to save and load your machine learning model in Python using scikit-learn. This allows you to save your model to file and load it later in order to make predictions. Save and Load Machine Learning Models in Python with scikit-learn Photo by Christine, some rights reserved. Pickle is the standard way of serializing objects in Python.
Logistic Regression categorical data issues • /r/MachineLearning
I have created a model in R using data with a lot of categorical data and it works well enough (70% classification rate). I need to transfer the code to python for launching to production, however when i transfer the code the results decrease considerably (40% classification rate). I think it may be to do with how I encode the categorical data, any ideas?
Logistic Regression Vs Decision Trees Vs SVM: Part I - Edvancer Eduventures
Classification is one of the major problems that we solve while working on standard business problems across industries. In this article we'll be discussing the major three of the many techniques used for the same, Logistic Regression, Decision Trees and Support Vector Machines [SVM]. All of the above listed algorithms are used in classification [ SVM and Decision Trees are also used for regression, but we are not discussing that today!]. Time and again I have seen people asking which one to choose for their particular problem. Classical and the most correct but least satisfying response to that question is "it depends!".
Gaussian Processes for Music Audio Modelling and Content Analysis
Alvarado, Pablo A., Stowell, Dan
Real music signals are highly variable, yet they have strong statistical structure. Prior information about the underlying physical mechanisms by which sounds are generated and rules by which complex sound structure is constructed (notes, chords, a complete musical score), can be naturally unified using Bayesian modelling techniques. Typically algorithms for Automatic Music Transcription independently carry out individual tasks such as multiple-F0 detection and beat tracking. The challenge remains to perform joint estimation of all parameters. We present a Bayesian approach for modelling music audio, and content analysis. The proposed methodology based on Gaussian processes seeks joint estimation of multiple music concepts by incorporating into the kernel prior information about non-stationary behaviour, dynamics, and rich spectral content present in the modelled music signal. We illustrate the benefits of this approach via two tasks: pitch estimation, and inferring missing segments in a polyphonic audio recording.
Square Root Graphical Models: Multivariate Generalizations of Univariate Exponential Families that Permit Positive Dependencies
Inouye, David I., Ravikumar, Pradeep, Dhillon, Inderjit S.
We develop Square Root Graphical Models (SQR), a novel class of parametric graphical models that provides multivariate generalizations of univariate exponential family distributions. Previous multivariate graphical models [Yang et al. 2015] did not allow positive dependencies for the exponential and Poisson generalizations. However, in many real-world datasets, variables clearly have positive dependencies. For example, the airport delay time in New York---modeled as an exponential distribution---is positively related to the delay time in Boston. With this motivation, we give an example of our model class derived from the univariate exponential distribution that allows for almost arbitrary positive and negative dependencies with only a mild condition on the parameter matrix---a condition akin to the positive definiteness of the Gaussian covariance matrix. Our Poisson generalization allows for both positive and negative dependencies without any constraints on the parameter values. We also develop parameter estimation methods using node-wise regressions with $\ell_1$ regularization and likelihood approximation methods using sampling. Finally, we demonstrate our exponential generalization on a synthetic dataset and a real-world dataset of airport delay times.
Kalman-based Stochastic Gradient Method with Stop Condition and Insensitivity to Conditioning
Modern proximal and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) methods are believed to efficiently minimize large composite objective functions, but such methods have two algorithmic challenges: (1) a lack of fast or justified stop conditions, and (2) sensitivity to the objective function's conditioning. In response to the first challenge, modern proximal and SGD methods guarantee convergence only after multiple epochs, but such a guarantee renders proximal and SGD methods infeasible when the number of component functions is very large or infinite. In response to the second challenge, second order SGD methods have been developed, but they are marred by the complexity of their analysis. In this work, we address these challenges on the limited, but important, linear regression problem by introducing and analyzing a second order proximal/SGD method based on Kalman Filtering (kSGD). Through our analysis, we show kSGD is asymptotically optimal, develop a fast algorithm for very large, infinite or streaming data sources with a justified stop condition, prove that kSGD is insensitive to the problem's conditioning, and develop a unique approach for analyzing the complex second order dynamics. Our theoretical results are supported by numerical experiments on three regression problems (linear, nonparametric wavelet, and logistic) using three large publicly available datasets. Moreover, our analysis and experiments lay a foundation for embedding kSGD in multiple epoch algorithms, extending kSGD to other problem classes, and developing parallel and low memory kSGD implementations.