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 proximity matrix


RFX-Fuse: Breiman and Cutler's Unified ML Engine + Native Explainable Similarity

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Breiman and Cutler's original Random Forest was designed as a unified ML engine -- not merely an ensemble predictor. Their implementation included classification, regression, unsupervised learning, proximity-based similarity, outlier detection, missing value imputation, and visualization -- capabilities that modern libraries like scikit-learn never implemented. RFX-Fuse (Random Forests X [X=compression] -- Forest Unified Learning and Similarity Engine) delivers Breiman and Cutler's complete vision with native GPU/CPU support. Modern ML pipelines require 5+ separate tools -- XGBoost for prediction, FAISS for similarity, SHAP for explanations, Isolation Forest for outliers, custom code for importance. RFX-Fuse provides a 1 to 2 model object alternative -- a single set of trees grown once. Novel Contributions: (1) Proximity Importance -- native explainable similarity: proximity measures that samples are similar; proximity importance explains why. (2) Dataset-specific imputation validation for general tabular data -- ranking imputation methods by how real the imputed data looks, without ground truth labels.


RFX: High-Performance Random Forests with GPU Acceleration and QLORA Compression

arXiv.org Machine Learning

RFX (Random Forests X), where X stands for compression or quantization, presents a production-ready implementation of Breiman and Cutler's Random Forest classification methodology in Python. RFX v1.0 provides complete classification: out-of-bag error estimation, overall and local importance measures, proximity matrices with QLORA compression, case-wise analysis, and interactive visualization (rfviz)--all with CPU and GPU acceleration. Regression, unsupervised learning, CLIQUE importance, and RF-GAP proximity are planned for v2.0. This work introduces four solutions addressing the proximity matrix memory bottleneck limiting Random Forest analysis to ~60,000 samples: (1) QLORA (Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation) compression for GPU proximity matrices, reducing memory from 80GB to 6.4MB for 100k samples (12,500x compression with INT8 quantization) while maintaining 99% geometric structure preservation, (2) CPU TriBlock proximity--combining upper-triangle storage with block-sparse thresholding--achieving 2.7x memory reduction with lossless quality, (3) SM-aware GPU batch sizing achieving 95% GPU utilization, and (4) GPU-accelerated 3D MDS visualization computing embeddings directly from low-rank factors using power iteration. Validation across four implementation modes (GPU/CPU x case-wise/non-case-wise) demonstrates correct implementation. GPU achieves 1.4x speedup over CPU for overall importance with 500+ trees. Proximity computation scales from 1,000 to 200,000+ samples (requiring GPU QLORA), with CPU TriBlock filling the gap for medium-scale datasets (10K-50K samples). RFX v1.0 eliminates the proximity memory bottleneck, enabling proximity-based Random Forest analysis on datasets orders of magnitude larger than previously feasible. Open-source production-ready classification following Breiman and Cutler's original methodology.


Forest-Guided Clustering -- Shedding Light into the Random Forest Black Box

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As machine learning models are increasingly deployed in sensitive application areas, the demand for interpretable and trustworthy decision-making has increased. Random Forests (RF), despite their widespread use and strong performance on tabular data, remain difficult to interpret due to their ensemble nature. We present Forest-Guided Clustering (FGC), a model-specific explainability method that reveals both local and global structure in RFs by grouping instances according to shared decision paths. FGC produces human-interpretable clusters aligned with the model's internal logic and computes cluster-specific and global feature importance scores to derive decision rules underlying RF predictions. FGC accurately recovered latent subclass structure on a benchmark dataset and outperformed classical clustering and post-hoc explanation methods. Applied to an AML transcriptomic dataset, FGC uncovered biologically coherent subpopulations, disentangled disease-relevant signals from confounders, and recovered known and novel gene expression patterns. FGC bridges the gap between performance and interpretability by providing structure-aware insights that go beyond feature-level attribution.


Towards Deeper Understanding of PPR-based Embedding Approaches: A Topological Perspective

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Node embedding learns low-dimensional vectors for nodes in the graph. Recent state-of-the-art embedding approaches take Personalized PageRank (PPR) as the proximity measure and factorize the PPR matrix or its adaptation to generate embeddings. However, little previous work analyzes what information is encoded by these approaches, and how the information correlates with their superb performance in downstream tasks. In this work, we first show that state-of-the-art embedding approaches that factorize a PPR-related matrix can be unified into a closed-form framework. Then, we study whether the embeddings generated by this strategy can be inverted to better recover the graph topology information than random-walk based embeddings. To achieve this, we propose two methods for recovering graph topology via PPR-based embeddings, including the analytical method and the optimization method. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the embeddings generated by factorizing a PPR-related matrix maintain more topological information, such as common edges and community structures, than that generated by random walks, paving a new way to systematically comprehend why PPR-based node embedding approaches outperform random walk-based alternatives in various downstream tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that focuses on the interpretability of PPR-based node embedding approaches.


Hierarchical Clustering: A Practical Introduction of Agglomerative and Divisive Methods

#artificialintelligence

In this article, we are going to talk in detail about hierarchical clustering like Why we need hierarchical clustering?, How hierarchical clustering works?, Types of hierarchical clustering?, On which dataset it is applicable? . Before moving forward to hierarchal clustering, we should know why we are talking about hierarchical clustering? even when we have K Means clustering. If you have studied K Means then you know that this algorithm works on the distance to centroid method to create a cluster. Although it works well if you have well defined boundaries type dataset that has less outliers. In above picture, K Means is working well but when we move towards some complex datasets then the problem arises and K Means don't work properly. As you can see in below picture, K Means is failing in making clusters.


Rethinking Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning: Introducing a New Notion and Standard Benchmarks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Though successful, federated learning presents new challenges for machine learning, especially when the issue of data heterogeneity, also known as Non-IID data, arises. To cope with the statistical heterogeneity, previous works incorporated a proximal term in local optimization or modified the model aggregation scheme at the server side or advocated clustered federated learning approaches where the central server groups agent population into clusters with jointly trainable data distributions to take the advantage of a certain level of personalization. While effective, they lack a deep elaboration on what kind of data heterogeneity and how the data heterogeneity impacts the accuracy performance of the participating clients. In contrast to many of the prior federated learning approaches, we demonstrate not only the issue of data heterogeneity in current setups is not necessarily a problem but also in fact it can be beneficial for the FL participants. Our observations are intuitive: (1) Dissimilar labels of clients (label skew) are not necessarily considered data heterogeneity, and (2) the principal angle between the agents' data subspaces spanned by their corresponding principal vectors of data is a better estimate of the data heterogeneity.


Associative Learning for Network Embedding

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The network embedding task is to represent the node in the network as a low-dimensional vector while incorporating the topological and structural information. Most existing approaches solve this problem by factorizing a proximity matrix, either directly or implicitly. In this work, we introduce a network embedding method from a new perspective, which leverages Modern Hopfield Networks (MHN) for associative learning. Our network learns associations between the content of each node and that node's neighbors. These associations serve as memories in the MHN. The recurrent dynamics of the network make it possible to recover the masked node, given that node's neighbors. Our proposed method is evaluated on different downstream tasks such as node classification and linkage prediction. The results show competitive performance compared to the common matrix factorization techniques and deep learning based methods.


Edge but not Least: Cross-View Graph Pooling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Graph neural networks have emerged as a powerful model for graph representation learning to undertake graph-level prediction tasks. Various graph pooling methods have been developed to coarsen an input graph into a succinct graph-level representation through aggregating node embeddings obtained via graph convolution. However, most graph pooling methods are heavily node-centric and are unable to fully leverage the crucial information contained in global graph structure. This paper presents a cross-view graph pooling (Co-Pooling) method to better exploit crucial graph structure information. The proposed Co-Pooling fuses pooled representations learnt from both node view and edge view. Through cross-view interaction, edge-view pooling and node-view pooling seamlessly reinforce each other to learn more informative graph-level representations. Co-Pooling has the advantage of handling various graphs with different types of node attributes. Extensive experiments on a total of 15 graph benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, demonstrating its superior performance over state-of-the-art pooling methods on both graph classification and graph regression tasks.


RWNE: A Scalable Random-Walk based Network Embedding Framework with Personalized Higher-order Proximity Preserved

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

Higher-order proximity preserved network embedding has attracted increasing attention. In particular, due to the superior scalability, random-walk-based network embedding has also been well developed, which could efficiently explore higher-order neighborhoods via multi-hop random walks. However, despite the success of current random-walk-based methods, most of them are usually not expressive enough to preserve the personalized higher-order proximity and lack a straightforward objective to theoretically articulate what and how network proximity is preserved. In this paper, to address the above issues, we present a general scalable random-walk-based network embedding framework, in which random walk is explicitly incorporated into a sound objective designed theoretically to preserve arbitrary higher-order proximity. Further, we introduce the random walk with restart process into the framework to naturally and effectively achieve personalized-weighted preservation of proximities of different orders. We conduct extensive experiments on several real-world networks and demonstrate that our proposed method consistently and substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art network embedding methods.


Learning Interpretable Characteristic Kernels via Decision Forests

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Decision forests are popular tools for classification and regression. These forests naturally produce proximity matrices measuring how often each pair of observations lies in the same leaf node. It has been demonstrated that these proximity matrices can be thought of as kernels, connecting the decision forest literature to the extensive kernel machine literature. While other kernels are known to have strong theoretical properties such as being characteristic, no similar result is available for any decision forest based kernel. In this manuscript, we prove that the decision forest induced proximity can be made characteristic, which can be used to yield a universally consistent statistic for testing independence. We demonstrate the performance of the induced kernel on a suite of 20 high-dimensional independence test settings. We also show how this learning kernel offers insights into relative feature importance. The decision forest induced kernel typically achieves substantially higher testing power than existing popular methods in statistical tests.