In the last decades the estimation of the intrinsic dimensionality of a dataset has gained considerable importance. Despite the great deal of research work devoted to this task, most of the proposed solutions prove to be unreliable when the intrinsic dimensionality of the input dataset is high and the manifold where the points lie is nonlinearly embedded in a higher dimensional space. In this paper we propose a novel robust intrinsic dimensionality estimator that exploits the twofold complementary information conveyed both by the normalized nearest neighbor distances and by the angles computed on couples of neighboring points, providing also closed-forms for the Kullback-Leibler divergences of the respective distributions. Experiments performed on both synthetic and real datasets highlight the robustness and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm when compared to state of the art methodologies.

We introduce a new spatial data structure for high dimensional data called the \emph{approximate principal direction tree} (APD tree) that adapts to the intrinsic dimension of the data. Our algorithm ensures vector-quantization accuracy similar to that of computationally-expensive PCA trees with similar time-complexity to that of lower-accuracy RP trees. APD trees use a small number of power-method iterations to find splitting planes for recursively partitioning the data. As such they provide a natural trade-off between the running-time and accuracy achieved by RP and PCA trees. Our theoretical results establish a) strong performance guarantees regardless of the convergence rate of the power-method and b) that $O(\log d)$ iterations suffice to establish the guarantee of PCA trees when the intrinsic dimension is $d$. We demonstrate this trade-off and the efficacy of our data structure on both the CPU and GPU.

In real supervised learning scenarios, it is not uncommon that the training and test sample follow different probability distributions, thus rendering the necessity to correct the sampling bias. Focusing on a particular covariate shift problem, we derive high probability confidence bounds for the kernel mean matching (KMM) estimator, whose convergence rate turns out to depend on some regularity measure of the regression function and also on some capacity measure of the kernel. By comparing KMM with the natural plug-in estimator, we establish the superiority of the former hence provide concrete evidence/understanding to the effectiveness of KMM under covariate shift.

The goal of temporal alignment is to establish time correspondence between two sequences, which has many applications in a variety of areas such as speech processing, bioinformatics, computer vision, and computer graphics. In this paper, we propose a novel temporal alignment method called least-squares dynamic time warping (LSDTW). LSDTW finds an alignment that maximizes statistical dependency between sequences, measured by a squared-loss variant of mutual information. The benefit of this novel information-theoretic formulation is that LSDTW can align sequences with different lengths, different dimensionality, high non-linearity, and non-Gaussianity in a computationally efficient manner. In addition, model parameters such as an initial alignment matrix can be systematically optimized by cross-validation. We demonstrate the usefulness of LSDTW through experiments on synthetic and real-world Kinect action recognition datasets.

We present a comprehensive framework for structured sparse coding and modeling extending the recent ideas of using learnable fast regressors to approximate exact sparse codes. For this purpose, we develop a novel block-coordinate proximal splitting method for the iterative solution of hierarchical sparse coding problems, and show an efficient feed forward architecture derived from its iteration. This architecture faithfully approximates the exact structured sparse codes with a fraction of the complexity of the standard optimization methods. We also show that by using different training objective functions, learnable sparse encoders are no longer restricted to be mere approximants of the exact sparse code for a pre-given dictionary, as in earlier formulations, but can be rather used as full-featured sparse encoders or even modelers. A simple implementation shows several orders of magnitude speedup compared to the state-of-the-art at minimal performance degradation, making the proposed framework suitable for real time and large-scale applications.

Item neighbourhood methods for collaborative filtering learn a weighted graph over the set of items, where each item is connected to those it is most similar to. The prediction of a user's rating on an item is then given by that rating of neighbouring items, weighted by their similarity. This paper presents a new neighbourhood approach which we call item fields, whereby an undirected graphical model is formed over the item graph. The resulting prediction rule is a simple generalization of the classical approaches, which takes into account non-local information in the graph, allowing its best results to be obtained when using drastically fewer edges than other neighbourhood approaches. A fast approximate maximum entropy training method based on the Bethe approximation is presented, which uses a simple gradient ascent procedure. When using precomputed sufficient statistics on the Movielens datasets, our method is faster than maximum likelihood approaches by two orders of magnitude.

Hyperplane hashing aims at rapidly searching nearest points to a hyperplane, and has shown practical impact in scaling up active learning with SVMs. Unfortunately, the existing randomized methods need long hash codes to achieve reasonable search accuracy and thus suffer from reduced search speed and large memory overhead. To this end, this paper proposes a novel hyperplane hashing technique which yields compact hash codes. The key idea is the bilinear form of the proposed hash functions, which leads to higher collision probability than the existing hyperplane hash functions when using random projections. To further increase the performance, we propose a learning based framework in which the bilinear functions are directly learned from the data. This results in short yet discriminative codes, and also boosts the search performance over the random projection based solutions. Large-scale active learning experiments carried out on two datasets with up to one million samples demonstrate the overall superiority of the proposed approach.

Sparse coding is a common approach to learning local features for object recognition. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in learning features from spatio-temporal, binocular, or other multi-observation data, where the goal is to encode the relationship between images rather than the content of a single image. We provide an analysis of multi-view feature learning, which shows that hidden variables encode transformations by detecting rotation angles in the eigenspaces shared among multiple image warps. Our analysis helps explain recent experimental results showing that transformation-specific features emerge when training complex cell models on videos. Our analysis also shows that transformation-invariant features can emerge as a by-product of learning representations of transformations.

Reconstruction based subspace clustering methods compute a self reconstruction matrix over the samples and use it for spectral clustering to obtain the final clustering result. Their success largely relies on the assumption that the underlying subspaces are independent, which, however, does not always hold in the applications with increasing number of subspaces. In this paper, we propose a novel reconstruction based subspace clustering model without making the subspace independence assumption. In our model, certain properties of the reconstruction matrix are explicitly characterized using the latent cluster indicators, and the affinity matrix used for spectral clustering can be directly built from the posterior of the latent cluster indicators instead of the reconstruction matrix. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed model can outperform the state-of-the-art methods.

We present a max-margin nonparametric latent feature model, which unites the ideas of max-margin learning and Bayesian nonparametrics to discover discriminative latent features for link prediction and automatically infer the unknown latent social dimension. By minimizing a hinge-loss using the linear expectation operator, we can perform posterior inference efficiently without dealing with a highly nonlinear link likelihood function; by using a fully-Bayesian formulation, we can avoid tuning regularization constants. Experimental results on real datasets appear to demonstrate the benefits inherited from max-margin learning and fully-Bayesian nonparametric inference.