When used to guide decisions, linear regression analysis typically involves estimation of regression coefficients via ordinary least squares and their subsequent use to make decisions. When there are multiple response variables and features do not perfectly capture their relationships, it is beneficial to account for the decision objective when computing regression coefficients. Empirical optimization does so but sacrifices performance when features are well-chosen or training data are insufficient. We propose directed regression, an efficient algorithm that combines merits of ordinary least squares and empirical optimization. We demonstrate through a computational study that directed regression can generate significant performance gains over either alternative. We also develop a theory that motivates the algorithm.

Consider linear prediction models where the target function is a sparse linear combination of a set of basis functions. We are interested in the problem of identifying those basis functions with non-zero coefficients and reconstructing the target function from noisy observations. Two heuristics that are widely used in practice are forward and backward greedy algorithms. First, we show that neither idea is adequate. Second, we propose a novel combination that is based on the forward greedy algorithm but takes backward steps adaptively whenever beneficial. We prove strong theoretical results showing that this procedure is effective in learning sparse representations. Experimental results support our theory.

Object detection and multi-class image segmentation are two closely related tasks that can be greatly improved when solved jointly by feeding information from one task to the other [10, 11]. However, current state-of-the-art models use a separate representation for each task making joint inference clumsy and leaving the classification of many parts of the scene ambiguous. In this work, we propose a hierarchical region-based approach to joint object detection and image segmentation. Our approach simultaneously reasons about pixels, regions and objects in a coherent probabilistic model. Pixel appearance features allow us to perform well on classifying amorphous background classes, while the explicit representation of regions facilitate the computation of more sophisticated featuresnecessary for object detection. Importantly, our model gives a single unified description of the scene--we explain every pixel in the image and enforce global consistency between all random variables in our model. We run experiments on the challenging Street Scene dataset [2] and show significant improvementover state-of-the-art results for object detection accuracy.

We propose to use Rademacher complexity, originally developed in computational learning theory, as a measure of human learning capacity. Rademacher complexity measuresa learner's ability to fit random labels, and can be used to bound the learner's true error based on the observed training sample error. We first review thedefinition of Rademacher complexity and its generalization bound. We then describe a "learning the noise" procedure to experimentally measure human Rademacher complexities. The results from empirical studies showed that: (i) human Rademacher complexity can be successfully measured, (ii) the complexity dependson the domain and training sample size in intuitive ways, (iii) human learningrespects the generalization bounds, (iv) the bounds can be useful in predicting the danger of overfitting in human learning. Finally, we discuss the potential applications of human Rademacher complexity in cognitive science.

In solving complex visual learning tasks, adopting multiple descriptors to more precisely characterize the data has been a feasible way for improving performance. These representations are typically high dimensional and assume diverse forms. Thus finding a way to transform them into a unified space of lower dimension generally facilitates the underlying tasks, such as object recognition or clustering. We describe an approach that incorporates multiple kernel learning with dimensionality reduction (MKL-DR). While the proposed framework is flexible in simultaneously tackling data in various feature representations, the formulation itself is general in that it is established upon graph embedding. It follows that any dimensionality reduction techniques explainable by graph embedding can be generalized by our method to consider data in multiple feature representations.

This paper addresses the important tradeoff between privacy and learnability, when designing algorithms for learning from private databases. First we apply an idea of Dwork et al. to design a specific privacy-preserving machine learning algorithm, logistic regression. This involves bounding the sensitivity of logistic regression, and perturbing the learned classifier with noise proportional to the sensitivity. Noting that the approach of Dwork et al. has limitations when applied to other machine learning algorithms, we then present another privacy-preserving logistic regression algorithm. The algorithm is based on solving a perturbed objective, and does not depend on the sensitivity. We prove that our algorithm preserves privacy in the model due to Dwork et al., and we provide a learning performance guarantee. Our work also reveals an interesting connection between regularization and privacy.

We consider the problem of zero-shot learning, where the goal is to learn a classifier $f: X \rightarrow Y$ that must predict novel values of $Y$ that were omitted from the training set. To achieve this, we define the notion of a semantic output code classifier (SOC) which utilizes a knowledge base of semantic properties of $Y$ to extrapolate to novel classes. We provide a formalism for this type of classifier and study its theoretical properties in a PAC framework, showing conditions under which the classifier can accurately predict novel classes. As a case study, we build a SOC classifier for a neural decoding task and show that it can often predict words that people are thinking about from functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) of their neural activity, even without training examples for those words.

In this paper we propose a new incremental spike sorting model that automatically eliminates refractory period violations, accounts for action potential waveform drift, and can handle appearance" and "disappearance" of neurons. Our approach is to augment a known time-varying Dirichlet process that ties together a sequence of infinite Gaussian mixture models, one per action potential waveform observation, with an interspike-interval-dependent likelihood that prohibits refractory period violations. We demonstrate this model by showing results from sorting two publicly available neural data recordings for which the a partial ground truth labeling is known."

Metric learning algorithms can provide useful distance functions for a variety of domains, and recent work has shown good accuracy for problems where the learner can access all distance constraints at once. However, in many real applications, constraintsare only available incrementally, thus necessitating methods that can perform online updates to the learned metric. Existing online algorithms offer bounds on worst-case performance, but typically do not perform well in practice as compared to their offline counterparts. We present a new online metric learning algorithm that updates a learned Mahalanobis metric based on LogDet regularization and gradient descent. We prove theoretical worst-case performance bounds, and empirically compare the proposed method against existing online metric learning algorithms. To further boost the practicality of our approach, we develop an online locality-sensitive hashing scheme which leads to efficient updates todata structures used for fast approximate similarity search. We demonstrate ouralgorithm on multiple datasets and show that it outperforms relevant baselines.

The odor transduction process has a large time constant and is susceptible to various types of noise. Therefore, the olfactory code at the sensor/receptor level is in general a slow and highly variable indicator of the input odor in both natural and artificial situations. Insects overcome this problem by using a neuronal device in their Antennal Lobe (AL), which transforms the identity code of olfactory receptors to a spatio-temporal code. This transformation improves the decision of the Mushroom Bodies (MBs), the subsequent classifier, in both speed and accuracy.Here we propose a rate model based on two intrinsic mechanisms in the insect AL, namely integration and inhibition. Then we present a MB classifier model that resembles the sparse and random structure of insect MB. A local Hebbian learning procedure governs the plasticity in the model. These formulations not only help to understand the signal conditioning and classification methods of insect olfactory systems, but also can be leveraged in synthetic problems. Among them, we consider here the discrimination of odor mixtures from pure odors. We show on a set of records from metal-oxide gas sensors that the cascade of these two new models facilitates fast and accurate discrimination of even highly imbalanced mixtures from pure odors.