10 Compelling Machine Learning Dissertations from Ph.D. Students

This dissertation proposes efficient algorithms and provides theoretical analysis through the angle of spectral methods for some important non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. Specifically, the focus is on two types of non-convex optimization problems: learning the parameters of latent variable models and learning in deep neural networks. Learning latent variable models is traditionally framed as a non-convex optimization problem through Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). For some specific models such as multi-view model, it's possible to bypass the non-convexity by leveraging the special model structure and convert the problem into spectral decomposition through Methods of Moments (MM) estimator. In this research, a novel algorithm is proposed that can flexibly learn a multi-view model in a non-parametric fashion.