This paper presents an acceleration framework for packing linear programming problems where the amount of data available is limited, i.e., where the number of constraints m is small compared to the variable dimension n. The framework can be used as a black box to speed up linear programming solvers dramatically, by two orders of magnitude in our experiments. We present worst-case guarantees on the quality of the solution and the speedup provided by the algorithm, showing that the framework provides an approximately optimal solution while running the original solver on a much smaller problem. The framework can be used to accelerate exact solvers, approximate solvers, and parallel/distributed solvers. Further, it can be used for both linear programs and integer linear programs.

To capture the inherent geometric features of many community detection problems, we propose to use a new random graph model of communities that we call a Geometric Block Model. The geometric block model generalizes the random geometric graphs in the same way that the well-studied stochastic block model generalizes the Erdös-Renyi random graphs. It is also a natural extension of random community models inspired by the recent theoretical and practical advancement in community detection. While being a topic of fundamental theoretical interest, our main contribution is to show that many practical community structures are better explained by the geometric block model. We also show that a simple triangle-counting algorithm to detect communities in the geometric block model is near-optimal. Indeed, even in the regime where the average degree of the graph grows only logarithmically with the number of vertices (sparse-graph), we show that this algorithm performs extremely well, both theoretically and practically. In contrast, the triangle-counting algorithm is far from being optimum for the stochastic block model. We simulate our results on both real and synthetic datasets to show superior performance of both the new model as well as our algorithm.

Viewing a data set such as the clouds of Jupiter, coherence is readily apparent to human observers, especially the Great Red Spot, but also other great storms and persistent structures. There are now many different definitions and perspectives mathematically describing coherent structures, but we will take an image processing perspective here. We describe an image processing perspective inference of coherent sets from a fluidic system directly from image data, without attempting to first model underlying flow fields, related to a concept in image processing called motion tracking. In contrast to standard spectral methods for image processing which are generally related to a symmetric affinity matrix, leading to standard spectral graph theory, we need a not symmetric affinity which arises naturally from the underlying arrow of time. We develop an anisotropic, directed diffusion operator corresponding to flow on a directed graph, from a directed affinity matrix developed with coherence in mind, and corresponding spectral graph theory from the graph Laplacian. Our methodology is not offered as more accurate than other traditional methods of finding coherent sets, but rather our approach works with alternative kinds of data sets, in the absence of vector field. Our examples will include partitioning the weather and cloud structures of Jupiter, and a local to Potsdam, N.Y. lake-effect snow event on Earth, as well as the benchmark test double-gyre system.

Linear algebra is a field of mathematics that could be called the mathematics of data. It is undeniably a pillar of the field of machine learning, and many recommend it as a prerequisite subject to study prior to getting started in machine learning. This is misleading advice, as linear algebra makes more sense to a practitioner once they have a context of the applied machine learning process in which to interpret it. In this post, you will discover why machine learning practitioners should study linear algebra to improve their skills and capabilities as practitioners. Before we go through the reasons that you should learn linear algebra, let's start off by taking a small look at the reason why you should not.

Matrices are a foundational element of linear algebra. Matrices are used throughout the field of machine learning in the description of algorithms and processes such as the input data variable (X) when training an algorithm. In this tutorial, you will discover matrices in linear algebra and how to manipulate them in Python. A Gentle Introduction to Matrices for Machine Learning Photo by Maximiliano Kolus, some rights reserved. Take my free 7-day email crash course now (with sample code).

In the paper, we study the mini-batch stochastic ADMMs (alternating direction method of multipliers) for the nonconvex nonsmooth optimization. We prove that, given an appropriate mini-batch size, the mini-batch stochastic ADMM without variance reduction (VR) technique is convergent and reaches the convergence rate of $O(1/T)$ to obtain a stationary point of the nonconvex optimization, where $T$ denotes the number of iterations. Moreover, we extend the mini-batch stochastic gradient method to both the nonconvex SVRG-ADMM and SAGA-ADMM in our initial paper \citep{huang2016stochastic}, and also prove that these mini-batch stochastic ADMMs reach the convergence rate of $O(1/T)$ without the condition on the mini-batch size. In particular, we provide a specific parameter selection for step size $\eta$ of stochastic gradients and penalization parameter $\rho$ of the augmented Lagrangian function. Finally, some experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms.

The Wallenius distribution is a generalisation of the Hypergeometric distribution where weights are assigned to balls of different colours. This naturally defines a model for ranking categories which can be used for classification purposes. Since, in general, the resulting likelihood is not analytically available, we adopt an approximate Bayesian computational (ABC) approach for estimating the importance of the categories. We illustrate the performance of the estimation procedure on simulated datasets. Finally, we use the new model for analysing two datasets about movies ratings and Italian academic statisticians' journal preferences. The latter is a novel dataset collected by the authors.

This article covers far more than the title suggests. It is written in simple English and accessible to quantitative professionals from a variety of backgrounds. Deep mathematical and data science research (including a result about the randomness of Pi, which is just a particular case) are presented here, without using arcane terminology or complicated equations. The topic discussed here, under a unified framework, is at the intersection of mathematics, probability theory, chaotic systems, stochastic processes, data and computer science. Many exotic objects are investigated, such as an unusual version of the logistic map, nested square roots, and representation of a number in a fractional or irrational base system. The article is also useful to anyone interested in learning these topics, whether they have any interest in the randomness or Pi or not, because of the numerous potential applications. I hope the style is refreshing, and I believe that you will find plenty of material rarely if ever discussed in textbooks or in the classroom.

The Statsbot team has invited Peter Mills to tell you about data structures for machine learning approaches. So you've decided to move beyond canned algorithms and start to code your own machine learning methods. Maybe you've got an idea for a cool new way of clustering data, or maybe you are frustrated by the limitations in your favorite statistical classification package. In either case, the better your knowledge of data structures and algorithms, the easier time you'll have when it comes time to code up. I don't think the data structures used in machine learning are significantly different than those used in other areas of software development.

Here I discuss four interesting mathematical problems (mostly involving famous unsolved conjectures) of considerable interest, and that even high school kids can understand. For the data scientist, it gives an unique opportunity to test various techniques to either disprove or make progress on these problems. The field itself has been a source of constant innovation -- especially to develop distributed architectures, as well as HPC (high performance computing) and quantum computing to try to solve (to non avail so far) these very difficult yet basic problems. And the data sets involved in these problems are incredibly massive and entirely free: it consists of all the integers, and real numbers! The first two problems have been addressed on Data Science Central (DSC) before, the two other ones are presented here on DSC for the first time.