It is also useful for scientific discovery like in neuroscience, like correlation of X, Y only test for (univariate) to see if a stimulus X (say an image) is independent linear independence, natural alternatives like of the brain activity Y (say fMRI) in a relevant part of mutual information of X, Y are hard to estimate the brain. Since detecting nonlinear correlations is much easier due to a serious curse of dimensionality. A recent than estimating a nonparametric regression function (of approach, avoiding both issues, estimates norms of Y onto X), it can be done at smaller sample sizes, with further an operator in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces samples collected for estimation only if an effect is detected (RKHSs). Our main contribution is strong empirical by the hypothesis test. For such situations, correlation evidence that by employing shrunk operators only tests for univariate linear independence, while other when the sample size is small, one can attain an improvement statistics like mutual information that do characterize multivariate in power at low false positive rates. We independence are hard to estimate from data, suffering analyze the effects of Stein shrinkage on a popular from a serious curse of dimensionality. A recent popular test statistic called HSIC (Hilbert-Schmidt Independence approach for this problem (and a related two-sample testing Criterion). Our observations provide insights problem) involve the use of quantities defined in reproducing into two recently proposed shrinkage estimators, kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs) - see [Gretton et al., 2006; SCOSE and FCOSE - we prove that SCOSE Harchaoui et al., 2007; Gretton et al., 2005b; 2005a].

The goal of subspace segmentation is to partition a set of data drawn from a union of subspace into their underlying subspaces. The performance of  spectral clustering based approaches heavily depends on learned data affinity matrices, which are usually constructed either directly from the raw data or from their computed representations. In this paper, we propose a novel method to simultaneously learn the representations of data and the affinity matrix of representation in a unified optimization framework. A novel Augmented Lagrangian Multiplier based algorithm is designed to effectively and efficiently seek the optimal solution of the problem. The experimental results on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method and its superior performance over the state-of-the-art alternatives.

In this paper, we propose a stratified topic model (STM). Instead of directly modeling and inferring flat topics or hierarchically structured topics, we use the stratified relationships in topic hierarchies to regularize the flat topics. The topic structures are captured by a hierarchical clustering method and play as constraints during the learning process. We propose two theoretically sound and practical inference methods to solve the model. Experimental results with two real world data sets and various evaluation metrics demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Multi-label classification is a challenging and appealing supervised learning problem where a subset of labels, rather than a single label seen in traditional classification problems, is assigned to a single test instance. Classifier chains based methods are a promising strategy to tackle multi-label classification problems as they model label correlations at acceptable complexity. However, these methods are difficult to approximate the underlying dependency in the label space, and suffer from the problems of poorly ordered chain and error propagation. In this paper, we propose a novel polytree-augmented classifier chains method to remedy these problems. A polytree is used to model reasonable conditional dependence between labels over attributes, under which the directional relationship between labels within causal basins could be appropriately determined. In addition, based on the max-sum algorithm, exact inference would be performed on polytrees at reasonable cost, preventing from error propagation. The experiments performed on both artificial and benchmark multi-label data sets demonstrated that the proposed method is competitive with the state-of-the-art multi-label classification methods.

In partial label learning, each training example is associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one is valid. An intuitive strategy to learn from partial label examples is to treat all candidate labels equally and make prediction by averaging their modeling outputs. Nonetheless, this strategy may suffer from the problem that the modeling output from the valid label is overwhelmed by those from the false positive labels. In this paper, an instance-based approach named IPAL is proposed by directly disambiguating the candidate label set. Briefly, IPAL tries to identify the valid label of each partial label example via an iterative label propagation procedure, and then classifies the unseen instance based on minimum error reconstruction from its nearest neighbors. Extensive experiments show that IPAL compares favorably against the existing instance-based as well as other state-of-the-art partial label learning approaches.

Kernel sparse coding is an effective strategy to capturethe non-linear structure of data samples. However,how to learn a robust kernel dictionary remainsan open problem. In this paper, we propose a new optimization model to learn the robust kernel dictionary while isolating outliers in the training samples. This model is essentially based on the decomposition of the reconstruction error into small dense noises and large sparse outliers. The outliererror term is formulated as the product of the sample matrix in the feature space and a diagonal coefficient matrix. This facilitates the kernelized dictionary learning. To solve the non-convex optimization problem, we develop a whole sequence convergent algorithm which guarantees the obtained solution sequence is a Cauchy sequence. The experimental results show that the proposed robust kernel dictionary learning method provides significant performance improvement.

We introduce a semi-supervised boosting approach (SSDBoost), which directly minimizes the classification errors and maximizes the margins on both labeled and unlabeled samples, without resorting to any upper bounds or approximations. A two-step algorithm based on coordinate descent/ascent is proposed to implement SSDBoost. Experiments on a number of UCI datasets and synthetic data show that SSDBoost gives competitive or superior results over the state-of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised boosting algorithms in the cases that the labeled data is limited, and it is very robust in noisy cases.

Clustering ensemble has emerged as an important extension of the classical clustering problem. It provides a framework for combining multiple base clusterings of a data set to generate a final consensus result. Most existing clustering methods simply combine clustering results without taking into account the noises, which may degrade the clustering performance. In this paper, we propose a novel robust clustering ensemble method. To improve the robustness, we capture the sparse and symmetric errors and integrate them into our robust and consensus framework to learn a low-rank matrix. Since the optimization of the objective function is difficult to solve, we develop a block coordinate descent algorithm which is theoretically guaranteed to converge. Experimental results on real world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Clustering has been one of the most critical unsupervised learning techniques that has been widely applied in data mining problems. As one of its branches, graph clustering enjoys its popularity due to its appealing performance and strong theoretical supports. However, the eigen-decomposition problems involved are computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a deep structure with a linear coder as the building block for fast graph clustering, called Deep Linear Coding (DLC). Different from conventional coding schemes, we jointly learn the feature transform function and discriminative codings, and guarantee that the learned codes are robust in spite of local distortions. In addition, we use the proposed linear coders as the building blocks to formulate a deep structure to further refine features in a layerwise fashion. Extensive experiments on clustering tasks demonstrate that our method performs well in terms of both time complexity and clustering accuracy. On a large-scale benchmark dataset (580K), our method runs 1500 times faster than the original spectral clustering.

SVM in advance, and this limits their applications to largescale problems. To address this issue, several methods for Support vector machines (SVMs) play a very dominant selecting a set of basis vectors are proposed. They include role in data classification due to their good sampling from the training set in the Nystrom method generalization performance. However, they suffer [Williams and Seeger, 2001] and variants of the Incomplete from the high computational complexity in the Cholesky factorization [Bach and Jordan, 2005], core vector classification phase when there are a considerable machine (CVM) [Tsang et al., 2005], relevance vector machine number of support vectors (SVs). Then it is desirable (RVM)[Tipping, 2001], and relevance units machine to design efficient algorithms in the classification (RUM)[Gao and Zhang, 2009]. Wu et al. [Wu et al., 2006] phase to deal with the datasets of realtime add one constraint on the number of basis vectors to the standard pattern recognition systems. To this end, we SVM optimization problem, and then solve this modified propose a novel classifier called HMLSVMs (Hierarchical nonconvex problem to build sparse kernel learning algorithms Mixing Linear Support Vector Machines) (SKLA). Joachims and Yu [Joachims and Yu, 2009] in this paper, which has a hierarchical structure explore a new sparse kernel SVMs via cutting plane training, with a mixing linear SVMs classifier at each node called cutting-plane subspace pursuit (CPSP).Although and predicts the label of a sample using only a the above methods prunes the SVs and reduces computational few hyperplanes. We also give a generalization complexity in classification phase, when a new test sample is error bound for the class of locally linear SVMs introduced, they still need to compare it with these pruned (LLSVMs) based on the Rademacher theory, which SVs via kernel calculations to predict the label of the test ensures that overfitting can be effectively avoided.