Conditional random fields, which model the distribution of a multivariate response conditioned on a set of covariates using undirected graphs, are widely used in a variety of multivariate prediction applications. Popular instances of this class of models such as categorical-discrete CRFs, Ising CRFs, and conditional Gaussian based CRFs, are not however best suited to the varied types of response variables in many applications, including count-valued responses. We thus introduce a “novel subclass of CRFs”, derived by imposing node-wise conditional distributions of response variables conditioned on the rest of the responses and the covariates as arising from univariate exponential families. This allows us to derive novel multivariate CRFs given any univariate exponential distribution, including the Poisson, negative binomial, and exponential distributions. Also in particular, it addresses the common CRF problem of specifying feature'' functions determining the interactions between response variables and covariates. We develop a class of tractable penalized $M$-estimators to learn these CRF distributions from data, as well as a unified sparsistency analysis for this general class of CRFs showing exact structure recovery can be achieved with high probability."

In this paper, we theoretically study the problem of binary classification in the presence of random classification noise --- the learner, instead of seeing the true labels, sees labels that have independently been flipped with some small probability. Moreover, random label noise is \emph{class-conditional} --- the flip probability depends on the class. We provide two approaches to suitably modify any given surrogate loss function. First, we provide a simple unbiased estimator of any loss, and obtain performance bounds for empirical risk minimization in the presence of iid data with noisy labels. If the loss function satisfies a simple symmetry condition, we show that the method leads to an efficient algorithm for empirical minimization. Second, by leveraging a reduction of risk minimization under noisy labels to classification with weighted 0-1 loss, we suggest the use of a simple weighted surrogate loss, for which we are able to obtain strong empirical risk bounds. This approach has a very remarkable consequence --- methods used in practice such as biased SVM and weighted logistic regression are provably noise-tolerant. On a synthetic non-separable dataset, our methods achieve over 88\% accuracy even when 40\% of the labels are corrupted, and are competitive with respect to recently proposed methods for dealing with label noise in several benchmark datasets.

Undirected graphical models, or Markov networks, such as Gaussian graphical models and Ising models enjoy popularity in a variety of applications. In many settings, however, data may not follow a Gaussian or binomial distribution assumed by these models. We introduce a new class of graphical models based on generalized linear models (GLM) by assuming that node-wise conditional distributions arise from exponential families. Our models allow one to estimate networks for a wide class of exponential distributions, such as the Poisson, negative binomial, and exponential, by fitting penalized GLMs to select the neighborhood for each node. A major contribution of this paper is the rigorous statistical analysis showing that with high probability, the neighborhood of our graphical models can be recovered exactly. We provide examples of high-throughput genomic networks learned via our GLM graphical models for multinomial and Poisson distributed data.

In this paper, we consider the $\ell_1$ regularized sparse inverse covariance matrix estimation problem with a very large number of variables. Even in the face of this high dimensionality, and with limited number of samples, recent work has shown this estimator to have strong statistical guarantees in recovering the true structure of the sparse inverse covariance matrix, or alternatively the underlying graph structure of the corresponding Gaussian Markov Random Field. Our proposed algorithm divides the problem into smaller sub-problems, and uses the solutions of the sub-problems to build a good approximation for the original problem. We derive a bound on the distance of the approximate solution to the true solution. Based on this bound, we propose a clustering algorithm that attempts to minimize this bound, and in practice, is able to find effective partitions of the variables. We further use the approximate solution, i.e., solution resulting from solving the sub-problems, as an initial point to solve the original problem, and achieve a much faster computational procedure. As an example, a recent state-of-the-art method, QUIC requires 10 hours to solve a problem (with 10,000 nodes) that arises from a climate application, while our proposed algorithm, Divide and Conquer QUIC (DC-QUIC) only requires one hour to solve the problem.

Increasingly, optimization problems in machine learning, especially those arising from high-dimensional statistical estimation, have a large number of variables. Modern statistical estimators developed over the past decade have statistical or sample complexity that depends only weakly on the number of parameters when there is some structure to the problem, such as sparsity. A central question is whether similar advances can be made in their computational complexity as well. In this paper, we propose strategies that indicate that such advances can indeed be made. In particular, we investigate the greedy coordinate descent algorithm, and note that performing the greedy step efficiently weakens the costly dependence on the problem size provided the solution is sparse. We then propose a suite of methods that perform these greedy steps efficiently by a reduction to nearest neighbor search. We also devise a more amenable form of greedy descent for composite non-smooth objectives; as well as several approximate variants of such greedy descent. We develop a practical implementation of our algorithm that combines greedy coordinate descent with locality sensitive hashing. Without tuning the latter data structure, we are not only able to significantly speed up the vanilla greedy method, but also outperform cyclic descent when the problem size becomes large. Our results indicate the effectiveness of our nearest neighbor strategies, and also point to many open questions regarding the development of computational geometric techniques tailored towards first-order optimization methods.

A hallmark of modern machine learning is its ability to deal with high dimensional problems by exploiting structural assumptions that limit the degrees of freedom in the underlying model. A deep understanding of the capabilities and limits of high dimensional learning methods under specific assumptions such as sparsity, group sparsity, and low rank has been attained. Efforts (Negahban et al., 2010, Chandrasekaran et al., 2010} are now underway to distill this valuable experience by proposing general unified frameworks that can achieve the twin goals of summarizing previous analyses and enabling their application to notions of structure hitherto unexplored. Inspired by these developments, we propose and analyze a general computational scheme based on a greedy strategy to solve convex optimization problems that arise when dealing with structurally constrained high-dimensional problems. Our framework not only unifies existing greedy algorithms by recovering them as special cases but also yields novel ones. Finally, we extend our results to infinite dimensional problems by using interesting connections between smoothness of norms and behavior of martingales in Banach spaces.

In this paper, we address the problem of learning the structure of a pairwise graphical model from samples in a high-dimensional setting. Our first main result studies the sparsistency, or consistency in sparsity pattern recovery, properties of a forward-backward greedy algorithm as applied to general statistical models. As a special case, we then apply this algorithm to learn the structure of a discrete graphical model via neighborhood estimation. As a corollary of our general result, we derive sufficient conditions on the number of samples n, the maximum node-degree d and the problem size p, as well as other conditions on the model parameters, so that the algorithm recovers all the edges with high probability. Our result guarantees graph selection for samples scaling as n = Omega(d log(p)), in contrast to existing convex-optimization based algorithms that require a sample complexity of Omega(d^2 log(p)). Further, the greedy algorithm only requires a restricted strong convexity condition which is typically milder than irrepresentability assumptions. We corroborate these results using numerical simulations at the end.

The L_1 regularized Gaussian maximum likelihood estimator has been shown to have strong statistical guarantees in recovering a sparse inverse covariance matrix, or alternatively the underlying graph structure of a Gaussian Markov Random Field, from very limited samples. We propose a novel algorithm for solving the resulting optimization problem which is a regularized log-determinant program. In contrast to other state-of-the-art methods that largely use first order gradient information, our algorithm is based on Newton's method and employs a quadratic approximation, but with some modifications that leverage the structure of the sparse Gaussian MLE problem. We show that our method is superlinearly convergent, and also present experimental results using synthetic and real application data that demonstrate the considerable improvements in performance of our method when compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

We consider the multiple linear regression problem, in a setting where some of the set of relevant features could be shared across the tasks. A lot of recent research has studied the use of $\ell_1/\ell_q$ norm block-regularizations with $q > 1$ for such (possibly) block-structured problems, establishing strong guarantees on recovery even under high-dimensional scaling where the number of features scale with the number of observations. However, these papers also caution that the performance of such block-regularized methods are very dependent on the {\em extent} to which the features are shared across tasks. Indeed they show~\citep{NWJoint} that if the extent of overlap is less than a threshold, or even if parameter {\em values} in the shared features are highly uneven, then block $\ell_1/\ell_q$ regularization could actually perform {\em worse} than simple separate elementwise $\ell_1$ regularization. We are far away from a realistic multi-task setting: not only do the set of relevant features have to be exactly the same across tasks, but their values have to as well. Here, we ask the question: can we leverage support and parameter overlap when it exists, but not pay a penalty when it does not? Indeed, this falls under a more general question of whether we can model such \emph{dirty data} which may not fall into a single neat structural bracket (all block-sparse, or all low-rank and so on). Here, we take a first step, focusing on developing a dirty model for the multiple regression problem. Our method uses a very simple idea: we decompose the parameters into two components and {\em regularize these differently.} We show both theoretically and empirically, our method strictly and noticeably outperforms both $\ell_1$ and $\ell_1/\ell_q$ methods, over the entire range of possible overlaps. We also provide theoretical guarantees that the method performs well under high-dimensional scaling.

Despite the large amount of literature on upper bounds on complexity of convex analysis, surprisingly little is known about the fundamental hardness of these problems. The extensive use of convex optimization in machine learning and statistics makes such an understanding critical to understand fundamental computational limits of learning and estimation. In this paper, we study the complexity of stochastic convex optimization in an oracle model of computation. We improve upon known results and obtain tight minimax complexity estimates for some function classes. We also discuss implications of these results to the understanding the inherent complexity of large-scale learning and estimation problems.