Recently significant advances have been witnessed in the area of distributed word representations based on neural networks, which are also known as word embeddings. Among the new word embedding models, skip-gram negative sampling (SGNS) in the word2vec toolbox has attracted much attention due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, the principles of SGNS remain not well understood, except for a recent work that explains SGNS as an implicit matrix factorization of the pointwise mutual information (PMI) matrix. In this paper, we provide a new perspective for further understanding SGNS. We point out that SGNS is essentially a representation learning method, which learns to represent the co-occurrence vector for a word. Based on the representation learning view, SGNS is in fact an explicit matrix factorization (EMF) of the words’ co-occurrence matrix. Furthermore, extended supervised word embedding can be established based on our proposed representation learning view.

Exploiting the information from multiple views can improve clustering accuracy. However, most  existing multi-view clustering algorithms are non-convex and are thus prone to becoming stuck into bad local minima, especially when there are outliers and missing data. To overcome this problem, we present a new multi-view self-paced learning (MSPL) algorithm for clustering, that  learns the multi-view model by not only progressing from 'easy'  to 'complex' examples, but also from 'easy'  to 'complex' views. Instead of binarily separating the examples or views into 'easy' and 'complex', we design a novel probabilistic smoothed weighting scheme. Employing multiple views for clustering and  defining complexity  across both examples and views are shown theoretically  to be beneficial to optimal clustering. Experimental results on toy and real-world data demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

This dissertation develops the intelligent-Coalition Formation framework for Humans and Robots (i-CiFHaR), an intelligent decision making frameworkfor multi-agent coalition formation. i-CiFHaR is a first of its kind that incorporates a library of coalition formation algorithms; employs unsupervised learning to mine crucial patterns among these algorithms; and leverages probabilistic reasoning to derive the most appropriate algorithm(s) to apply in accordance with multiple mission criteria. The dissertation also contributes to the state-of-the-art in swarm intelligence by addressing the search stagnation limitation of existing ant colony optimization algorithms (ACO) by integrating the simulated annealing mechanism. The experimental results demonstrate that the presented hybrid ACO algorithms significantly outperformed the best existing ACO approaches, when applied to three NP-complete optimization problems (e.g., traveling salesman problem, maximal clique problem, multi-agent coalition formation problem).

The Laplacian matrix of a graph can be used in many areas of mathematical research and has a physical interpretation in various theories. However, there are a few open issues in the Laplacian graph construction: (i) Selecting the appropriate scale of analysis, (ii) Selecting the appropriate number of neighbors, (iii) Handling multiscale data, and, (iv) Dealing with noise and outliers. In this paper, we propose that the affinity between pairs of samples could be computed using sparse representation with proper constraints. This parameter free setting automatically produces the Laplacian graph, leads to significant reduction in computation cost and robustness to the outliers and noise. We further provide an efficient algorithm to solve the difficult optimization problem based on improvement of existing algorithms. To demonstrate our motivation, we conduct spectral clustering experiments with benchmark methods. Empirical experiments on 9 data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Multi-task clustering and multi-view clustering have severally found wide applications and received much attention in recent years. Nevertheless, there are many clustering problems that involve both multi-task clustering and multi-view clustering, i.e., the tasks are closely related and each task can be analyzed from multiple views. In this paper, for non-negative data (e.g., documents), we introduce a multi-task multi-view clustering (MTMVC) framework which integrates within-view-task clustering, multi-view relationship learning and multi-task relationship learning. We then propose a specific algorithm to optimize the MTMVC framework. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed algorithm over either multi-task clustering algorithms or multi-view clustering algorithms for multi-task clustering of multi-view data.

As an important machine learning topic, dimensionality reduction has been widely studied and utilized in various kinds of areas. A multitude of dimensionality reduction methods have been developed, among which unsupervised dimensionality reduction is more desirable when obtaining label information requires onerous work. However, most previous unsupervised dimensionality reduction methods call for an affinity graph constructed beforehand, with which the following dimensionality reduction steps can be then performed. Separation of graph construction and dimensionality reduction leads the dimensionality reduction process highly dependent on quality of the input graph. In this paper, we propose a novel graph embedding method for unsupervised dimensionality reduction. We simultaneously conduct dimensionality reduction along with graph construction by assigning adaptive and optimal neighbors according to the projected local distances. Our method doesn’t need an affinity graph constructed in advance, but instead learns the graph concurrently with dimensionality reduction. Thus, the learned graph is optimal for dimensionality reduction. Meanwhile, our learned graph has an explicit block diagonal structure, from which the clustering results could be directly revealed without any postprocessing steps. Extensive empirical results on dimensionality reduction as well as clustering are presented to corroborate the performance of our method.

We propose a Multi-task Multi-dimensional Hawkes Process (MMHP) for modeling event sequences where there exist multiple triggering patterns within sequences and structures across sequences.MMHP is able to model the dynamics of multiple sequences jointly by imposing structural constraints and thus systematically uncover clustering structure among sequences.We propose an effective and robust optimization algorithm to learn MMHP models, which takes advantage of alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), majorization minimization and Euler-Lagrange equations.Our experimental results demonstrate that MMHP performs well on both synthetic and real data

We address an ensemble clustering problem, where reliable clusters are locally embedded in given multiple partitions. We propose a new nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF)-based method, in which locally reliable clusters are explicitly considered by using instance-wise weights over clusters. Our method factorizes the input cluster assignment matrix into two matrices H and W, which are optimized by iteratively 1) updating H and W while keeping the weight matrix constant and 2) updating the weight matrix while keeping H and W constant, alternatively. The weights in the second step were updated by solving a convex problem, which makes our algorithm significantly faster than existing NMF-based ensemble clustering methods. We empirically proved that our method outperformed a lot of cutting-edge ensemble clustering methods by using a variety of datasets.

Transfer learning has attracted a lot of attention in the past decade. One crucial research issue in transfer learning is how to find a good representation for instances of different domains such that the divergence between domains can be reduced with the new representation. Recently, deep learning has been proposed to learn more robust or higher-level features for transfer learning. However, to the best of our knowledge, most of the previous approaches neither minimize the difference between domains explicitly nor encode label information in learning the representation. In this paper, we propose a supervised representation learning method based on deep autoencoders for transfer learning. The proposed deep autoencoder consists of two encoding layers: an embedding layer and a label encoding layer. In the embedding layer, the distance in distributions of the embedded instances between the source and target domains is minimized in terms of KL-Divergence. In the label encoding layer, label information of the source domain is encoded using a softmax regression model. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method compared with several state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Multi-view outlier detection is a challenging problem due to the inconsistent behaviors and complicated distributions of samples across different views. The existing approaches are designed to identify the outlier exhibiting inconsistent characteristics across different views. However, due to the inevitable system errors caused by data-captured sensors or others, there always exists another type of outlier, which consistently behaves abnormally in individual view. Unfortunately, this kind of outlier is neglected by all the existing multi-view outlier detection methods, consequently their outlier detection performances are dramatically harmed.In this paper, we propose a novel Dual-regularized Multi-view Outlier Detection method (DMOD) to detect both kinds of anomalies simultaneously. By representing the multi-view data with latent coefficients and sample-specific errors, we characterize each kind of outlier explicitly. Moreover, an outlier measurement criterion is well-designed to quantify the inconsistency. To solve the proposed non-smooth model, a novel optimization algorithm is proposed in an iterative manner. We evaluate our method on five datasets with different outlier settings. The consistent superior results to other state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.