categories
string
doi
string
id
string
year
float64
venue
string
link
string
updated
string
published
string
title
string
abstract
string
authors
list
cs.SD cs.LG
null
1602.05682
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05682v2
2016-04-27T02:32:38Z
2016-02-18T05:49:37Z
Audio Recording Device Identification Based on Deep Learning
In this paper we present a research on identification of audio recording devices from background noise, thus providing a method for forensics. The audio signal is the sum of speech signal and noise signal. Usually, people pay more attention to speech signal, because it carries the information to deliver. So a great amount of researches have been dedicated to getting higher Signal-Noise-Ratio (SNR). There are many speech enhancement algorithms to improve the quality of the speech, which can be seen as reducing the noise. However, noises can be regarded as the intrinsic fingerprint traces of an audio recording device. These digital traces can be characterized and identified by new machine learning techniques. Therefore, in our research, we use the noise as the intrinsic features. As for the identification, multiple classifiers of deep learning methods are used and compared. The identification result shows that the method of getting feature vector from the noise of each device and identifying them with deep learning techniques is viable, and well-preformed.
[ "['Simeng Qi' 'Zheng Huang' 'Yan Li' 'Shaopei Shi']", "Simeng Qi, Zheng Huang, Yan Li, Shaopei Shi" ]
cs.LG cs.SY
10.1109/TSIPN.2016.2613687
1602.05703
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.05703v3
2016-07-11T15:40:59Z
2016-02-18T07:34:04Z
Adaptive Least Mean Squares Estimation of Graph Signals
The aim of this paper is to propose a least mean squares (LMS) strategy for adaptive estimation of signals defined over graphs. Assuming the graph signal to be band-limited, over a known bandwidth, the method enables reconstruction, with guaranteed performance in terms of mean-square error, and tracking from a limited number of observations over a subset of vertices. A detailed mean square analysis provides the performance of the proposed method, and leads to several insights for designing useful sampling strategies for graph signals. Numerical results validate our theoretical findings, and illustrate the performance of the proposed method. Furthermore, to cope with the case where the bandwidth is not known beforehand, we propose a method that performs a sparse online estimation of the signal support in the (graph) frequency domain, which enables online adaptation of the graph sampling strategy. Finally, we apply the proposed method to build the power spatial density cartography of a given operational region in a cognitive network environment.
[ "['Paolo Di Lorenzo' 'Sergio Barbarossa' 'Paolo Banelli'\n 'Stefania Sardellitti']", "Paolo Di Lorenzo, Sergio Barbarossa, Paolo Banelli, and Stefania\n Sardellitti" ]
cs.LG cs.DS cs.IT math.IT math.PR
null
1602.05719
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05719v1
2016-02-18T08:51:08Z
2016-02-18T08:51:08Z
An improved analysis of the ER-SpUD dictionary learning algorithm
In "dictionary learning" we observe $Y = AX + E$ for some $Y\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times p}$, $A \in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$, and $X\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times p}$. The matrix $Y$ is observed, and $A, X, E$ are unknown. Here $E$ is "noise" of small norm, and $X$ is column-wise sparse. The matrix $A$ is referred to as a {\em dictionary}, and its columns as {\em atoms}. Then, given some small number $p$ of samples, i.e.\ columns of $Y$, the goal is to learn the dictionary $A$ up to small error, as well as $X$. The motivation is that in many applications data is expected to sparse when represented by atoms in the "right" dictionary $A$ (e.g.\ images in the Haar wavelet basis), and the goal is to learn $A$ from the data to then use it for other applications. Recently, [SWW12] proposed the dictionary learning algorithm ER-SpUD with provable guarantees when $E = 0$ and $m = n$. They showed if $X$ has independent entries with an expected $s$ non-zeroes per column for $1 \lesssim s \lesssim \sqrt{n}$, and with non-zero entries being subgaussian, then for $p\gtrsim n^2\log^2 n$ with high probability ER-SpUD outputs matrices $A', X'$ which equal $A, X$ up to permuting and scaling columns (resp.\ rows) of $A$ (resp.\ $X$). They conjectured $p\gtrsim n\log n$ suffices, which they showed was information theoretically necessary for {\em any} algorithm to succeed when $s \simeq 1$. Significant progress was later obtained in [LV15]. We show that for a slight variant of ER-SpUD, $p\gtrsim n\log(n/\delta)$ samples suffice for successful recovery with probability $1-\delta$. We also show that for the unmodified ER-SpUD, $p\gtrsim n^{1.99}$ samples are required even to learn $A, X$ with polynomially small success probability. This resolves the main conjecture of [SWW12], and contradicts the main result of [LV15], which claimed that $p\gtrsim n\log^4 n$ guarantees success whp.
[ "['Jarosław Błasiok' 'Jelani Nelson']", "Jaros{\\l}aw B{\\l}asiok, Jelani Nelson" ]
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CC cs.DS stat.ML
null
1602.05897
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05897v2
2017-05-19T18:39:00Z
2016-02-18T18:14:19Z
Toward Deeper Understanding of Neural Networks: The Power of Initialization and a Dual View on Expressivity
We develop a general duality between neural networks and compositional kernels, striving towards a better understanding of deep learning. We show that initial representations generated by common random initializations are sufficiently rich to express all functions in the dual kernel space. Hence, though the training objective is hard to optimize in the worst case, the initial weights form a good starting point for optimization. Our dual view also reveals a pragmatic and aesthetic perspective of neural networks and underscores their expressive power.
[ "Amit Daniely and Roy Frostig and Yoram Singer", "['Amit Daniely' 'Roy Frostig' 'Yoram Singer']" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.05908
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05908v1
2016-02-18T18:52:15Z
2016-02-18T18:52:15Z
Efficient approaches for escaping higher order saddle points in non-convex optimization
Local search heuristics for non-convex optimizations are popular in applied machine learning. However, in general it is hard to guarantee that such algorithms even converge to a local minimum, due to the existence of complicated saddle point structures in high dimensions. Many functions have degenerate saddle points such that the first and second order derivatives cannot distinguish them with local optima. In this paper we use higher order derivatives to escape these saddle points: we design the first efficient algorithm guaranteed to converge to a third order local optimum (while existing techniques are at most second order). We also show that it is NP-hard to extend this further to finding fourth order local optima.
[ "['Anima Anandkumar' 'Rong Ge']", "Anima Anandkumar, Rong Ge" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.05916
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05916v2
2017-02-09T22:48:06Z
2016-02-18T19:13:23Z
Local Rademacher Complexity-based Learning Guarantees for Multi-Task Learning
We show a Talagrand-type concentration inequality for Multi-Task Learning (MTL), using which we establish sharp excess risk bounds for MTL in terms of distribution- and data-dependent versions of the Local Rademacher Complexity (LRC). We also give a new bound on the LRC for norm regularized as well as strongly convex hypothesis classes, which applies not only to MTL but also to the standard i.i.d. setting. Combining both results, one can now easily derive fast-rate bounds on the excess risk for many prominent MTL methods, including---as we demonstrate---Schatten-norm, group-norm, and graph-regularized MTL. The derived bounds reflect a relationship akeen to a conservation law of asymptotic convergence rates. This very relationship allows for trading off slower rates w.r.t. the number of tasks for faster rates with respect to the number of available samples per task, when compared to the rates obtained via a traditional, global Rademacher analysis.
[ "['Niloofar Yousefi' 'Yunwen Lei' 'Marius Kloft' 'Mansooreh Mollaghasemi'\n 'Georgios Anagnostopoulos']", "Niloofar Yousefi, Yunwen Lei, Marius Kloft, Mansooreh Mollaghasemi and\n Georgios Anagnostopoulos" ]
cs.CV cs.GR cs.LG cs.MM cs.RO
10.14569/IJACSA.2016.070180
1602.05920
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.05920v2
2018-06-04T23:51:27Z
2016-02-18T19:40:26Z
Weighted Unsupervised Learning for 3D Object Detection
This paper introduces a novel weighted unsupervised learning for object detection using an RGB-D camera. This technique is feasible for detecting the moving objects in the noisy environments that are captured by an RGB-D camera. The main contribution of this paper is a real-time algorithm for detecting each object using weighted clustering as a separate cluster. In a preprocessing step, the algorithm calculates the pose 3D position X, Y, Z and RGB color of each data point and then it calculates each data point's normal vector using the point's neighbor. After preprocessing, our algorithm calculates k-weights for each data point; each weight indicates membership. Resulting in clustered objects of the scene.
[ "['Kamran Kowsari' 'Manal H. Alassaf']", "Kamran Kowsari, Manal H. Alassaf" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.05980
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05980v2
2016-05-02T08:56:19Z
2016-02-18T21:26:53Z
Revise Saturated Activation Functions
In this paper, we revise two commonly used saturated functions, the logistic sigmoid and the hyperbolic tangent (tanh). We point out that, besides the well-known non-zero centered property, slope of the activation function near the origin is another possible reason making training deep networks with the logistic function difficult to train. We demonstrate that, with proper rescaling, the logistic sigmoid achieves comparable results with tanh. Then following the same argument, we improve tahn by penalizing in the negative part. We show that "penalized tanh" is comparable and even outperforms the state-of-the-art non-saturated functions including ReLU and leaky ReLU on deep convolution neural networks. Our results contradict to the conclusion of previous works that the saturation property causes the slow convergence. It suggests further investigation is necessary to better understand activation functions in deep architectures.
[ "['Bing Xu' 'Ruitong Huang' 'Mu Li']", "Bing Xu, Ruitong Huang, Mu Li" ]
cs.LG cs.CL cs.IR stat.ML
null
1602.06025
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06025v1
2016-02-19T02:07:20Z
2016-02-19T02:07:20Z
Spectral Learning for Supervised Topic Models
Supervised topic models simultaneously model the latent topic structure of large collections of documents and a response variable associated with each document. Existing inference methods are based on variational approximation or Monte Carlo sampling, which often suffers from the local minimum defect. Spectral methods have been applied to learn unsupervised topic models, such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), with provable guarantees. This paper investigates the possibility of applying spectral methods to recover the parameters of supervised LDA (sLDA). We first present a two-stage spectral method, which recovers the parameters of LDA followed by a power update method to recover the regression model parameters. Then, we further present a single-phase spectral algorithm to jointly recover the topic distribution matrix as well as the regression weights. Our spectral algorithms are provably correct and computationally efficient. We prove a sample complexity bound for each algorithm and subsequently derive a sufficient condition for the identifiability of sLDA. Thorough experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets verify the theory and demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the spectral algorithms. In fact, our results on a large-scale review rating dataset demonstrate that our single-phase spectral algorithm alone gets comparable or even better performance than state-of-the-art methods, while previous work on spectral methods has rarely reported such promising performance.
[ "['Yong Ren' 'Yining Wang' 'Jun Zhu']", "Yong Ren, Yining Wang, Jun Zhu" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.06042
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06042v2
2016-05-27T04:47:38Z
2016-02-19T04:28:50Z
Structured Sparse Regression via Greedy Hard-Thresholding
Several learning applications require solving high-dimensional regression problems where the relevant features belong to a small number of (overlapping) groups. For very large datasets and under standard sparsity constraints, hard thresholding methods have proven to be extremely efficient, but such methods require NP hard projections when dealing with overlapping groups. In this paper, we show that such NP-hard projections can not only be avoided by appealing to submodular optimization, but such methods come with strong theoretical guarantees even in the presence of poorly conditioned data (i.e. say when two features have correlation $\geq 0.99$), which existing analyses cannot handle. These methods exhibit an interesting computation-accuracy trade-off and can be extended to significantly harder problems such as sparse overlapping groups. Experiments on both real and synthetic data validate our claims and demonstrate that the proposed methods are orders of magnitude faster than other greedy and convex relaxation techniques for learning with group-structured sparsity.
[ "Prateek Jain, Nikhil Rao, Inderjit Dhillon", "['Prateek Jain' 'Nikhil Rao' 'Inderjit Dhillon']" ]
math.OC cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.06053
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06053v1
2016-02-19T06:56:50Z
2016-02-19T06:56:50Z
First-order Methods for Geodesically Convex Optimization
Geodesic convexity generalizes the notion of (vector space) convexity to nonlinear metric spaces. But unlike convex optimization, geodesically convex (g-convex) optimization is much less developed. In this paper we contribute to the understanding of g-convex optimization by developing iteration complexity analysis for several first-order algorithms on Hadamard manifolds. Specifically, we prove upper bounds for the global complexity of deterministic and stochastic (sub)gradient methods for optimizing smooth and nonsmooth g-convex functions, both with and without strong g-convexity. Our analysis also reveals how the manifold geometry, especially \emph{sectional curvature}, impacts convergence rates. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to provide global complexity analysis for first-order algorithms for general g-convex optimization.
[ "['Hongyi Zhang' 'Suvrit Sra']", "Hongyi Zhang, Suvrit Sra" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.06183
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06183v1
2016-02-19T15:36:38Z
2016-02-19T15:36:38Z
Node-By-Node Greedy Deep Learning for Interpretable Features
Multilayer networks have seen a resurgence under the umbrella of deep learning. Current deep learning algorithms train the layers of the network sequentially, improving algorithmic performance as well as providing some regularization. We present a new training algorithm for deep networks which trains \emph{each node in the network} sequentially. Our algorithm is orders of magnitude faster, creates more interpretable internal representations at the node level, while not sacrificing on the ultimate out-of-sample performance.
[ "['Ke Wu' 'Malik Magdon-Ismail']", "Ke Wu and Malik Magdon-Ismail" ]
stat.ML cs.LG math.OC stat.CO
null
1602.06225
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06225v1
2016-02-19T17:08:34Z
2016-02-19T17:08:34Z
GAP Safe Screening Rules for Sparse-Group-Lasso
In high dimensional settings, sparse structures are crucial for efficiency, either in term of memory, computation or performance. In some contexts, it is natural to handle more refined structures than pure sparsity, such as for instance group sparsity. Sparse-Group Lasso has recently been introduced in the context of linear regression to enforce sparsity both at the feature level and at the group level. We adapt to the case of Sparse-Group Lasso recent safe screening rules that discard early in the solver irrelevant features/groups. Such rules have led to important speed-ups for a wide range of iterative methods. Thanks to dual gap computations, we provide new safe screening rules for Sparse-Group Lasso and show significant gains in term of computing time for a coordinate descent implementation.
[ "Eugene Ndiaye, Olivier Fercoq, Alexandre Gramfort, Joseph Salmon", "['Eugene Ndiaye' 'Olivier Fercoq' 'Alexandre Gramfort' 'Joseph Salmon']" ]
astro-ph.IM astro-ph.CO cs.LG
10.1093/mnras/stw1454
1602.06294
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.06294v2
2016-06-16T17:36:34Z
2016-02-19T11:29:10Z
Stacking for machine learning redshifts applied to SDSS galaxies
We present an analysis of a general machine learning technique called 'stacking' for the estimation of photometric redshifts. Stacking techniques can feed the photometric redshift estimate, as output by a base algorithm, back into the same algorithm as an additional input feature in a subsequent learning round. We shown how all tested base algorithms benefit from at least one additional stacking round (or layer). To demonstrate the benefit of stacking, we apply the method to both unsupervised machine learning techniques based on self-organising maps (SOMs), and supervised machine learning methods based on decision trees. We explore a range of stacking architectures, such as the number of layers and the number of base learners per layer. Finally we explore the effectiveness of stacking even when using a successful algorithm such as AdaBoost. We observe a significant improvement of between 1.9% and 21% on all computed metrics when stacking is applied to weak learners (such as SOMs and decision trees). When applied to strong learning algorithms (such as AdaBoost) the ratio of improvement shrinks, but still remains positive and is between 0.4% and 2.5% for the explored metrics and comes at almost no additional computational cost.
[ "['Roman Zitlau' 'Ben Hoyle' 'Kerstin Paech' 'Jochen Weller'\n 'Markus Michael Rau' 'Stella Seitz']", "Roman Zitlau, Ben Hoyle, Kerstin Paech, Jochen Weller, Markus Michael\n Rau, Stella Seitz" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.06346
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06346v2
2016-09-20T23:36:02Z
2016-02-19T23:46:11Z
Policy Error Bounds for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Factored Linear Models
In this paper we study a model-based approach to calculating approximately optimal policies in Markovian Decision Processes. In particular, we derive novel bounds on the loss of using a policy derived from a factored linear model, a class of models which generalize numerous previous models out of those that come with strong computational guarantees. For the first time in the literature, we derive performance bounds for model-based techniques where the model inaccuracy is measured in weighted norms. Moreover, our bounds show a decreased sensitivity to the discount factor and, unlike similar bounds derived for other approaches, they are insensitive to measure mismatch. Similarly to previous works, our proofs are also based on contraction arguments, but with the main differences that we use carefully constructed norms building on Banach lattices, and the contraction property is only assumed for operators acting on "compressed" spaces, thus weakening previous assumptions, while strengthening previous results.
[ "Bernardo \\'Avila Pires and Csaba Szepesv\\'ari", "['Bernardo Ávila Pires' 'Csaba Szepesvári']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.06468
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06468v3
2016-06-24T01:28:23Z
2016-02-20T21:56:49Z
FLASH: Fast Bayesian Optimization for Data Analytic Pipelines
Modern data science relies on data analytic pipelines to organize interdependent computational steps. Such analytic pipelines often involve different algorithms across multiple steps, each with its own hyperparameters. To achieve the best performance, it is often critical to select optimal algorithms and to set appropriate hyperparameters, which requires large computational efforts. Bayesian optimization provides a principled way for searching optimal hyperparameters for a single algorithm. However, many challenges remain in solving pipeline optimization problems with high-dimensional and highly conditional search space. In this work, we propose Fast LineAr SearcH (FLASH), an efficient method for tuning analytic pipelines. FLASH is a two-layer Bayesian optimization framework, which firstly uses a parametric model to select promising algorithms, then computes a nonparametric model to fine-tune hyperparameters of the promising algorithms. FLASH also includes an effective caching algorithm which can further accelerate the search process. Extensive experiments on a number of benchmark datasets have demonstrated that FLASH significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in both search speed and accuracy. Using 50% of the time budget, FLASH achieves up to 20% improvement on test error rate compared to the baselines. FLASH also yields state-of-the-art performance on a real-world application for healthcare predictive modeling.
[ "Yuyu Zhang, Mohammad Taha Bahadori, Hang Su, Jimeng Sun", "['Yuyu Zhang' 'Mohammad Taha Bahadori' 'Hang Su' 'Jimeng Sun']" ]
cs.DC cs.LG cs.SI
null
1602.06489
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06489v1
2016-02-21T02:32:25Z
2016-02-21T02:32:25Z
Distributed Private Online Learning for Social Big Data Computing over Data Center Networks
With the rapid growth of Internet technologies, cloud computing and social networks have become ubiquitous. An increasing number of people participate in social networks and massive online social data are obtained. In order to exploit knowledge from copious amounts of data obtained and predict social behavior of users, we urge to realize data mining in social networks. Almost all online websites use cloud services to effectively process the large scale of social data, which are gathered from distributed data centers. These data are so large-scale, high-dimension and widely distributed that we propose a distributed sparse online algorithm to handle them. Additionally, privacy-protection is an important point in social networks. We should not compromise the privacy of individuals in networks, while these social data are being learned for data mining. Thus we also consider the privacy problem in this article. Our simulations shows that the appropriate sparsity of data would enhance the performance of our algorithm and the privacy-preserving method does not significantly hurt the performance of the proposed algorithm.
[ "['Chencheng Li' 'Pan Zhou' 'Yingxue Zhou' 'Kaigui Bian' 'Tao Jiang'\n 'Susanto Rahardja']", "Chencheng Li and Pan Zhou and Yingxue Zhou and Kaigui Bian and Tao\n Jiang and Susanto Rahardja" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.06516
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06516v4
2017-05-17T07:26:18Z
2016-02-21T10:52:42Z
Uniform Hypergraph Partitioning: Provable Tensor Methods and Sampling Techniques
In a series of recent works, we have generalised the consistency results in the stochastic block model literature to the case of uniform and non-uniform hypergraphs. The present paper continues the same line of study, where we focus on partitioning weighted uniform hypergraphs---a problem often encountered in computer vision. This work is motivated by two issues that arise when a hypergraph partitioning approach is used to tackle computer vision problems: (i) The uniform hypergraphs constructed for higher-order learning contain all edges, but most have negligible weights. Thus, the adjacency tensor is nearly sparse, and yet, not binary. (ii) A more serious concern is that standard partitioning algorithms need to compute all edge weights, which is computationally expensive for hypergraphs. This is usually resolved in practice by merging the clustering algorithm with a tensor sampling strategy---an approach that is yet to be analysed rigorously. We build on our earlier work on partitioning dense unweighted uniform hypergraphs (Ghoshdastidar and Dukkipati, ICML, 2015), and address the aforementioned issues by proposing provable and efficient partitioning algorithms. Our analysis justifies the empirical success of practical sampling techniques. We also complement our theoretical findings by elaborate empirical comparison of various hypergraph partitioning schemes.
[ "['Debarghya Ghoshdastidar' 'Ambedkar Dukkipati']", "Debarghya Ghoshdastidar, Ambedkar Dukkipati" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.06518
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06518v4
2017-06-08T09:14:03Z
2016-02-21T11:18:10Z
Multi-Task Learning with Labeled and Unlabeled Tasks
In multi-task learning, a learner is given a collection of prediction tasks and needs to solve all of them. In contrast to previous work, which required that annotated training data is available for all tasks, we consider a new setting, in which for some tasks, potentially most of them, only unlabeled training data is provided. Consequently, to solve all tasks, information must be transferred between tasks with labels and tasks without labels. Focusing on an instance-based transfer method we analyze two variants of this setting: when the set of labeled tasks is fixed, and when it can be actively selected by the learner. We state and prove a generalization bound that covers both scenarios and derive from it an algorithm for making the choice of labeled tasks (in the active case) and for transferring information between the tasks in a principled way. We also illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm by experiments on synthetic and real data.
[ "Anastasia Pentina and Christoph H. Lampert", "['Anastasia Pentina' 'Christoph H. Lampert']" ]
cond-mat.dis-nn cs.AI cs.LG
10.1038/s41467-017-01825-5
1602.06522
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.06522v1
2016-02-21T12:39:58Z
2016-02-21T12:39:58Z
Machine learning meets network science: dimensionality reduction for fast and efficient embedding of networks in the hyperbolic space
Complex network topologies and hyperbolic geometry seem specularly connected, and one of the most fascinating and challenging problems of recent complex network theory is to map a given network to its hyperbolic space. The Popularity Similarity Optimization (PSO) model represents - at the moment - the climax of this theory. It suggests that the trade-off between node popularity and similarity is a mechanism to explain how complex network topologies emerge - as discrete samples - from the continuous world of hyperbolic geometry. The hyperbolic space seems appropriate to represent real complex networks. In fact, it preserves many of their fundamental topological properties, and can be exploited for real applications such as, among others, link prediction and community detection. Here, we observe for the first time that a topological-based machine learning class of algorithms - for nonlinear unsupervised dimensionality reduction - can directly approximate the network's node angular coordinates of the hyperbolic model into a two-dimensional space, according to a similar topological organization that we named angular coalescence. On the basis of this phenomenon, we propose a new class of algorithms that offers fast and accurate coalescent embedding of networks in the hyperbolic space even for graphs with thousands of nodes.
[ "Josephine Maria Thomas, Alessandro Muscoloni, Sara Ciucci, Ginestra\n Bianconi and Carlo Vittorio Cannistraci", "['Josephine Maria Thomas' 'Alessandro Muscoloni' 'Sara Ciucci'\n 'Ginestra Bianconi' 'Carlo Vittorio Cannistraci']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.06531
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06531v2
2016-08-18T11:35:32Z
2016-02-21T14:05:48Z
Multi-task and Lifelong Learning of Kernels
We consider a problem of learning kernels for use in SVM classification in the multi-task and lifelong scenarios and provide generalization bounds on the error of a large margin classifier. Our results show that, under mild conditions on the family of kernels used for learning, solving several related tasks simultaneously is beneficial over single task learning. In particular, as the number of observed tasks grows, assuming that in the considered family of kernels there exists one that yields low approximation error on all tasks, the overhead associated with learning such a kernel vanishes and the complexity converges to that of learning when this good kernel is given to the learner.
[ "Anastasia Pentina and Shai Ben-David", "['Anastasia Pentina' 'Shai Ben-David']" ]
cs.LG cs.AI
null
1602.06539
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06539v1
2016-02-21T15:08:51Z
2016-02-21T15:08:51Z
Determining the best attributes for surveillance video keywords generation
Automatic video keyword generation is one of the key ingredients in reducing the burden of security officers in analyzing surveillance videos. Keywords or attributes are generally chosen manually based on expert knowledge of surveillance. Most existing works primarily aim at either supervised learning approaches relying on extensive manual labelling or hierarchical probabilistic models that assume the features are extracted using the bag-of-words approach; thus limiting the utilization of the other features. To address this, we turn our attention to automatic attribute discovery approaches. However, it is not clear which automatic discovery approach can discover the most meaningful attributes. Furthermore, little research has been done on how to compare and choose the best automatic attribute discovery methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, based on the shared structure exhibited amongst meaningful attributes, that enables us to compare between different automatic attribute discovery approaches.We then validate our approach by comparing various attribute discovery methods such as PiCoDeS on two attribute datasets. The evaluation shows that our approach is able to select the automatic discovery approach that discovers the most meaningful attributes. We then employ the best discovery approach to generate keywords for videos recorded from a surveillance system. This work shows it is possible to massively reduce the amount of manual work in generating video keywords without limiting ourselves to a particular video feature descriptor.
[ "['Liangchen Liu' 'Arnold Wiliem' 'Shaokang Chen' 'Kun Zhao'\n 'Brian C. Lovell']", "Liangchen Liu and Arnold Wiliem and Shaokang Chen and Kun Zhao and\n Brian C. Lovell" ]
cs.LG stat.AP stat.ML
null
1602.06550
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06550v2
2016-02-28T23:12:31Z
2016-02-21T16:55:36Z
Semi-Markov Switching Vector Autoregressive Model-based Anomaly Detection in Aviation Systems
In this work we consider the problem of anomaly detection in heterogeneous, multivariate, variable-length time series datasets. Our focus is on the aviation safety domain, where data objects are flights and time series are sensor readings and pilot switches. In this context the goal is to detect anomalous flight segments, due to mechanical, environmental, or human factors in order to identifying operationally significant events and provide insights into the flight operations and highlight otherwise unavailable potential safety risks and precursors to accidents. For this purpose, we propose a framework which represents each flight using a semi-Markov switching vector autoregressive (SMS-VAR) model. Detection of anomalies is then based on measuring dissimilarities between the model's prediction and data observation. The framework is scalable, due to the inherent parallel nature of most computations, and can be used to perform online anomaly detection. Extensive experimental results on simulated and real datasets illustrate that the framework can detect various types of anomalies along with the key parameters involved.
[ "['Igor Melnyk' 'Arindam Banerjee' 'Bryan Matthews' 'Nikunj Oza']", "Igor Melnyk, Arindam Banerjee, Bryan Matthews, and Nikunj Oza" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.06561
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06561v3
2018-01-14T13:19:20Z
2016-02-21T18:19:56Z
Deep Learning in Finance
We explore the use of deep learning hierarchical models for problems in financial prediction and classification. Financial prediction problems -- such as those presented in designing and pricing securities, constructing portfolios, and risk management -- often involve large data sets with complex data interactions that currently are difficult or impossible to specify in a full economic model. Applying deep learning methods to these problems can produce more useful results than standard methods in finance. In particular, deep learning can detect and exploit interactions in the data that are, at least currently, invisible to any existing financial economic theory.
[ "['J. B. Heaton' 'N. G. Polson' 'J. H. Witte']", "J. B. Heaton, N. G. Polson, J. H. Witte" ]
cs.AI cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.06566
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06566v1
2016-02-21T18:46:35Z
2016-02-21T18:46:35Z
Interactive Storytelling over Document Collections
Storytelling algorithms aim to 'connect the dots' between disparate documents by linking starting and ending documents through a series of intermediate documents. Existing storytelling algorithms are based on notions of coherence and connectivity, and thus the primary way by which users can steer the story construction is via design of suitable similarity functions. We present an alternative approach to storytelling wherein the user can interactively and iteratively provide 'must use' constraints to preferentially support the construction of some stories over others. The three innovations in our approach are distance measures based on (inferred) topic distributions, the use of constraints to define sets of linear inequalities over paths, and the introduction of slack and surplus variables to condition the topic distribution to preferentially emphasize desired terms over others. We describe experimental results to illustrate the effectiveness of our interactive storytelling approach over multiple text datasets.
[ "Dipayan Maiti and Mohammad Raihanul Islam and Scotland Leman and Naren\n Ramakrishnan", "['Dipayan Maiti' 'Mohammad Raihanul Islam' 'Scotland Leman'\n 'Naren Ramakrishnan']" ]
stat.ML cs.DS cs.LG
null
1602.06577
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06577v1
2016-02-21T20:46:13Z
2016-02-21T20:46:13Z
2-Bit Random Projections, NonLinear Estimators, and Approximate Near Neighbor Search
The method of random projections has become a standard tool for machine learning, data mining, and search with massive data at Web scale. The effective use of random projections requires efficient coding schemes for quantizing (real-valued) projected data into integers. In this paper, we focus on a simple 2-bit coding scheme. In particular, we develop accurate nonlinear estimators of data similarity based on the 2-bit strategy. This work will have important practical applications. For example, in the task of near neighbor search, a crucial step (often called re-ranking) is to compute or estimate data similarities once a set of candidate data points have been identified by hash table techniques. This re-ranking step can take advantage of the proposed coding scheme and estimator. As a related task, in this paper, we also study a simple uniform quantization scheme for the purpose of building hash tables with projected data. Our analysis shows that typically only a small number of bits are needed. For example, when the target similarity level is high, 2 or 3 bits might be sufficient. When the target similarity level is not so high, it is preferable to use only 1 or 2 bits. Therefore, a 2-bit scheme appears to be overall a good choice for the task of sublinear time approximate near neighbor search via hash tables. Combining these results, we conclude that 2-bit random projections should be recommended for approximate near neighbor search and similarity estimation. Extensive experimental results are provided.
[ "Ping Li, Michael Mitzenmacher, Anshumali Shrivastava", "['Ping Li' 'Michael Mitzenmacher' 'Anshumali Shrivastava']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.06586
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06586v6
2018-02-06T02:25:08Z
2016-02-21T21:47:45Z
Recovering Structured Probability Matrices
We consider the problem of accurately recovering a matrix B of size M by M , which represents a probability distribution over M2 outcomes, given access to an observed matrix of "counts" generated by taking independent samples from the distribution B. How can structural properties of the underlying matrix B be leveraged to yield computationally efficient and information theoretically optimal reconstruction algorithms? When can accurate reconstruction be accomplished in the sparse data regime? This basic problem lies at the core of a number of questions that are currently being considered by different communities, including building recommendation systems and collaborative filtering in the sparse data regime, community detection in sparse random graphs, learning structured models such as topic models or hidden Markov models, and the efforts from the natural language processing community to compute "word embeddings". Our results apply to the setting where B has a low rank structure. For this setting, we propose an efficient algorithm that accurately recovers the underlying M by M matrix using Theta(M) samples. This result easily translates to Theta(M) sample algorithms for learning topic models and learning hidden Markov Models. These linear sample complexities are optimal, up to constant factors, in an extremely strong sense: even testing basic properties of the underlying matrix (such as whether it has rank 1 or 2) requires Omega(M) samples. We provide an even stronger lower bound where distinguishing whether a sequence of observations were drawn from the uniform distribution over M observations versus being generated by an HMM with two hidden states requires Omega(M) observations. This precludes sublinear-sample hypothesis tests for basic properties, such as identity or uniformity, as well as sublinear sample estimators for quantities such as the entropy rate of HMMs.
[ "['Qingqing Huang' 'Sham M. Kakade' 'Weihao Kong' 'Gregory Valiant']", "Qingqing Huang, Sham M. Kakade, Weihao Kong, Gregory Valiant" ]
stat.ML cs.DS cs.IT cs.LG math.IT math.ST stat.TH
null
1602.06612
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06612v2
2016-05-10T19:38:37Z
2016-02-22T00:19:20Z
Clustering subgaussian mixtures by semidefinite programming
We introduce a model-free relax-and-round algorithm for k-means clustering based on a semidefinite relaxation due to Peng and Wei. The algorithm interprets the SDP output as a denoised version of the original data and then rounds this output to a hard clustering. We provide a generic method for proving performance guarantees for this algorithm, and we analyze the algorithm in the context of subgaussian mixture models. We also study the fundamental limits of estimating Gaussian centers by k-means clustering in order to compare our approximation guarantee to the theoretically optimal k-means clustering solution.
[ "['Dustin G. Mixon' 'Soledad Villar' 'Rachel Ward']", "Dustin G. Mixon, Soledad Villar, Rachel Ward" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.06654
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06654v1
2016-02-22T06:02:25Z
2016-02-22T06:02:25Z
Structured Learning of Binary Codes with Column Generation
Hashing methods aim to learn a set of hash functions which map the original features to compact binary codes with similarity preserving in the Hamming space. Hashing has proven a valuable tool for large-scale information retrieval. We propose a column generation based binary code learning framework for data-dependent hash function learning. Given a set of triplets that encode the pairwise similarity comparison information, our column generation based method learns hash functions that preserve the relative comparison relations within the large-margin learning framework. Our method iteratively learns the best hash functions during the column generation procedure. Existing hashing methods optimize over simple objectives such as the reconstruction error or graph Laplacian related loss functions, instead of the performance evaluation criteria of interest---multivariate performance measures such as the AUC and NDCG. Our column generation based method can be further generalized from the triplet loss to a general structured learning based framework that allows one to directly optimize multivariate performance measures. For optimizing general ranking measures, the resulting optimization problem can involve exponentially or infinitely many variables and constraints, which is more challenging than standard structured output learning. We use a combination of column generation and cutting-plane techniques to solve the optimization problem. To speed-up the training we further explore stage-wise training and propose to use a simplified NDCG loss for efficient inference. We demonstrate the generality of our method by applying it to ranking prediction and image retrieval, and show that it outperforms a few state-of-the-art hashing methods.
[ "Guosheng Lin, Fayao Liu, Chunhua Shen, Jianxin Wu, Heng Tao Shen", "['Guosheng Lin' 'Fayao Liu' 'Chunhua Shen' 'Jianxin Wu' 'Heng Tao Shen']" ]
cs.NE cs.AI cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.06662
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06662v2
2017-03-15T17:45:08Z
2016-02-22T06:51:25Z
Recurrent Orthogonal Networks and Long-Memory Tasks
Although RNNs have been shown to be powerful tools for processing sequential data, finding architectures or optimization strategies that allow them to model very long term dependencies is still an active area of research. In this work, we carefully analyze two synthetic datasets originally outlined in (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1997) which are used to evaluate the ability of RNNs to store information over many time steps. We explicitly construct RNN solutions to these problems, and using these constructions, illuminate both the problems themselves and the way in which RNNs store different types of information in their hidden states. These constructions furthermore explain the success of recent methods that specify unitary initializations or constraints on the transition matrices.
[ "['Mikael Henaff' 'Arthur Szlam' 'Yann LeCun']", "Mikael Henaff, Arthur Szlam, Yann LeCun" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.06687
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06687v1
2016-02-22T09:01:10Z
2016-02-22T09:01:10Z
An Effective and Efficient Approach for Clusterability Evaluation
Clustering is an essential data mining tool that aims to discover inherent cluster structure in data. As such, the study of clusterability, which evaluates whether data possesses such structure, is an integral part of cluster analysis. Yet, despite their central role in the theory and application of clustering, current notions of clusterability fall short in two crucial aspects that render them impractical; most are computationally infeasible and others fail to classify the structure of real datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to clusterability evaluation that is both computationally efficient and successfully captures the structure of real data. Our method applies multimodality tests to the (one-dimensional) set of pairwise distances based on the original, potentially high-dimensional data. We present extensive analyses of our approach for both the Dip and Silverman multimodality tests on real data as well as 17,000 simulations, demonstrating the success of our approach as the first practical notion of clusterability.
[ "['Margareta Ackerman' 'Andreas Adolfsson' 'Naomi Brownstein']", "Margareta Ackerman, Andreas Adolfsson, and Naomi Brownstein" ]
cs.DC cs.LG
null
1602.06709
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06709v1
2016-02-22T10:31:24Z
2016-02-22T10:31:24Z
Distributed Deep Learning Using Synchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent
We design and implement a distributed multinode synchronous SGD algorithm, without altering hyper parameters, or compressing data, or altering algorithmic behavior. We perform a detailed analysis of scaling, and identify optimal design points for different networks. We demonstrate scaling of CNNs on 100s of nodes, and present what we believe to be record training throughputs. A 512 minibatch VGG-A CNN training run is scaled 90X on 128 nodes. Also 256 minibatch VGG-A and OverFeat-FAST networks are scaled 53X and 42X respectively on a 64 node cluster. We also demonstrate the generality of our approach via best-in-class 6.5X scaling for a 7-layer DNN on 16 nodes. Thereafter we attempt to democratize deep-learning by training on an Ethernet based AWS cluster and show ~14X scaling on 16 nodes.
[ "['Dipankar Das' 'Sasikanth Avancha' 'Dheevatsa Mudigere'\n 'Karthikeyan Vaidynathan' 'Srinivas Sridharan' 'Dhiraj Kalamkar'\n 'Bharat Kaul' 'Pradeep Dubey']", "Dipankar Das, Sasikanth Avancha, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Karthikeyan\n Vaidynathan, Srinivas Sridharan, Dhiraj Kalamkar, Bharat Kaul, Pradeep Dubey" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.06725
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06725v2
2016-06-01T16:36:06Z
2016-02-22T11:06:06Z
Variational inference for Monte Carlo objectives
Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood, using samples from the variational posterior to compute the required gradients. Recently, Burda et al. (2016) have derived a tighter lower bound using a multi-sample importance sampling estimate of the likelihood and showed that optimizing it yields models that use more of their capacity and achieve higher likelihoods. This development showed the importance of such multi-sample objectives and explained the success of several related approaches. We extend the multi-sample approach to discrete latent variables and analyze the difficulty encountered when estimating the gradients involved. We then develop the first unbiased gradient estimator designed for importance-sampled objectives and evaluate it at training generative and structured output prediction models. The resulting estimator, which is based on low-variance per-sample learning signals, is both simpler and more effective than the NVIL estimator proposed for the single-sample variational objective, and is competitive with the currently used biased estimators.
[ "['Andriy Mnih' 'Danilo J. Rezende']", "Andriy Mnih, Danilo J. Rezende" ]
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
null
1602.06746
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06746v1
2016-02-22T12:20:50Z
2016-02-22T12:20:50Z
Convexification of Learning from Constraints
Regularized empirical risk minimization with constrained labels (in contrast to fixed labels) is a remarkably general abstraction of learning. For common loss and regularization functions, this optimization problem assumes the form of a mixed integer program (MIP) whose objective function is non-convex. In this form, the problem is resistant to standard optimization techniques. We construct MIPs with the same solutions whose objective functions are convex. Specifically, we characterize the tightest convex extension of the objective function, given by the Legendre-Fenchel biconjugate. Computing values of this tightest convex extension is NP-hard. However, by applying our characterization to every function in an additive decomposition of the objective function, we obtain a class of looser convex extensions that can be computed efficiently. For some decompositions, common loss and regularization functions, we derive a closed form.
[ "Iaroslav Shcherbatyi and Bjoern Andres", "['Iaroslav Shcherbatyi' 'Bjoern Andres']" ]
cs.LG
10.1080/01431161.2016.1249302
1602.06818
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.06818v2
2016-03-07T16:03:39Z
2016-02-22T15:31:19Z
Graph Regularized Low Rank Representation for Aerosol Optical Depth Retrieval
In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven regression model for aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrieval. First, we adopt a low rank representation (LRR) model to learn a powerful representation of the spectral response. Then, graph regularization is incorporated into the LRR model to capture the local structure information and the nonlinear property of the remote-sensing data. Since it is easy to acquire the rich satellite-retrieval results, we use them as a baseline to construct the graph. Finally, the learned feature representation is feeded into support vector machine (SVM) to retrieve AOD. Experiments are conducted on two widely used data sets acquired by different sensors, and the experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve superior performance compared to the physical models and other state-of-the-art empirical models.
[ "Yubao Sun, Renlong Hang, Qingshan Liu, Fuping Zhu, Hucheng Pei", "['Yubao Sun' 'Renlong Hang' 'Qingshan Liu' 'Fuping Zhu' 'Hucheng Pei']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.06822
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06822v1
2016-02-22T15:38:59Z
2016-02-22T15:38:59Z
Understanding Visual Concepts with Continuation Learning
We introduce a neural network architecture and a learning algorithm to produce factorized symbolic representations. We propose to learn these concepts by observing consecutive frames, letting all the components of the hidden representation except a small discrete set (gating units) be predicted from the previous frame, and let the factors of variation in the next frame be represented entirely by these discrete gated units (corresponding to symbolic representations). We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on datasets of faces undergoing 3D transformations and Atari 2600 games.
[ "William F. Whitney, Michael Chang, Tejas Kulkarni, Joshua B. Tenenbaum", "['William F. Whitney' 'Michael Chang' 'Tejas Kulkarni'\n 'Joshua B. Tenenbaum']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.06863
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06863v1
2016-02-22T17:21:11Z
2016-02-22T17:21:11Z
Higher-Order Low-Rank Regression
This paper proposes an efficient algorithm (HOLRR) to handle regression tasks where the outputs have a tensor structure. We formulate the regression problem as the minimization of a least square criterion under a multilinear rank constraint, a difficult non convex problem. HOLRR computes efficiently an approximate solution of this problem, with solid theoretical guarantees. A kernel extension is also presented. Experiments on synthetic and real data show that HOLRR outperforms multivariate and multilinear regression methods and is considerably faster than existing tensor methods.
[ "['Guillaume Rabusseau' 'Hachem Kadri']", "Guillaume Rabusseau and Hachem Kadri" ]
cs.DS cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.06872
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06872v2
2019-11-26T17:29:20Z
2016-02-22T17:52:02Z
Principal Component Projection Without Principal Component Analysis
We show how to efficiently project a vector onto the top principal components of a matrix, without explicitly computing these components. Specifically, we introduce an iterative algorithm that provably computes the projection using few calls to any black-box routine for ridge regression. By avoiding explicit principal component analysis (PCA), our algorithm is the first with no runtime dependence on the number of top principal components. We show that it can be used to give a fast iterative method for the popular principal component regression problem, giving the first major runtime improvement over the naive method of combining PCA with regression. To achieve our results, we first observe that ridge regression can be used to obtain a "smooth projection" onto the top principal components. We then sharpen this approximation to true projection using a low-degree polynomial approximation to the matrix step function. Step function approximation is a topic of long-term interest in scientific computing. We extend prior theory by constructing polynomials with simple iterative structure and rigorously analyzing their behavior under limited precision.
[ "Roy Frostig, Cameron Musco, Christopher Musco, Aaron Sidford", "['Roy Frostig' 'Cameron Musco' 'Christopher Musco' 'Aaron Sidford']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.06886
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06886v2
2016-06-08T14:15:58Z
2016-02-22T18:38:27Z
Clustering with a Reject Option: Interactive Clustering as Bayesian Prior Elicitation
A good clustering can help a data analyst to explore and understand a data set, but what constitutes a good clustering may depend on domain-specific and application-specific criteria. These criteria can be difficult to formalize, even when it is easy for an analyst to know a good clustering when she sees one. We present a new approach to interactive clustering for data exploration, called \ciif, based on a particularly simple feedback mechanism, in which an analyst can choose to reject individual clusters and request new ones. The new clusters should be different from previously rejected clusters while still fitting the data well. We formalize this interaction in a novel Bayesian prior elicitation framework. In each iteration, the prior is adapted to account for all the previous feedback, and a new clustering is then produced from the posterior distribution. To achieve the computational efficiency necessary for an interactive setting, we propose an incremental optimization method over data minibatches using Lagrangian relaxation. Experiments demonstrate that \ciif can produce accurate and diverse clusterings.
[ "Akash Srivastava, James Zou and Charles Sutton", "['Akash Srivastava' 'James Zou' 'Charles Sutton']" ]
stat.ML cs.IT cs.LG math.IT
null
1602.06916
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06916v2
2016-07-28T22:52:35Z
2016-02-22T19:55:01Z
Sparse Linear Regression via Generalized Orthogonal Least-Squares
Sparse linear regression, which entails finding a sparse solution to an underdetermined system of linear equations, can formally be expressed as an $l_0$-constrained least-squares problem. The Orthogonal Least-Squares (OLS) algorithm sequentially selects the features (i.e., columns of the coefficient matrix) to greedily find an approximate sparse solution. In this paper, a generalization of Orthogonal Least-Squares which relies on a recursive relation between the components of the optimal solution to select L features at each step and solve the resulting overdetermined system of equations is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that the generalized OLS algorithm is computationally efficient and achieves performance superior to that of existing greedy algorithms broadly used in the literature.
[ "Abolfazl Hashemi, Haris Vikalo", "['Abolfazl Hashemi' 'Haris Vikalo']" ]
cs.LG cs.DS cs.NE stat.ML
null
1602.06929
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06929v2
2016-03-28T17:45:51Z
2016-02-22T20:30:37Z
Streaming PCA: Matching Matrix Bernstein and Near-Optimal Finite Sample Guarantees for Oja's Algorithm
This work provides improved guarantees for streaming principle component analysis (PCA). Given $A_1, \ldots, A_n\in \mathbb{R}^{d\times d}$ sampled independently from distributions satisfying $\mathbb{E}[A_i] = \Sigma$ for $\Sigma \succeq \mathbf{0}$, this work provides an $O(d)$-space linear-time single-pass streaming algorithm for estimating the top eigenvector of $\Sigma$. The algorithm nearly matches (and in certain cases improves upon) the accuracy obtained by the standard batch method that computes top eigenvector of the empirical covariance $\frac{1}{n} \sum_{i \in [n]} A_i$ as analyzed by the matrix Bernstein inequality. Moreover, to achieve constant accuracy, our algorithm improves upon the best previous known sample complexities of streaming algorithms by either a multiplicative factor of $O(d)$ or $1/\mathrm{gap}$ where $\mathrm{gap}$ is the relative distance between the top two eigenvalues of $\Sigma$. These results are achieved through a novel analysis of the classic Oja's algorithm, one of the oldest and most popular algorithms for streaming PCA. In particular, this work shows that simply picking a random initial point $w_0$ and applying the update rule $w_{i + 1} = w_i + \eta_i A_i w_i$ suffices to accurately estimate the top eigenvector, with a suitable choice of $\eta_i$. We believe our result sheds light on how to efficiently perform streaming PCA both in theory and in practice and we hope that our analysis may serve as the basis for analyzing many variants and extensions of streaming PCA.
[ "['Prateek Jain' 'Chi Jin' 'Sham M. Kakade' 'Praneeth Netrapalli'\n 'Aaron Sidford']", "Prateek Jain and Chi Jin and Sham M. Kakade and Praneeth Netrapalli\n and Aaron Sidford" ]
cs.CL cs.LG cs.SD
null
1602.06967
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06967v1
2016-02-22T21:22:49Z
2016-02-22T21:22:49Z
Blind score normalization method for PLDA based speaker recognition
Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) has become state-of-the-art method for modeling $i$-vector space in speaker recognition task. However the performance degradation is observed if enrollment data size differs from one speaker to another. This paper presents a solution to such problem by introducing new PLDA scoring normalization technique. Normalization parameters are derived in a blind way, so that, unlike traditional \textit{ZT-norm}, no extra development data is required. Moreover, proposed method has shown to be optimal in terms of detection cost function. The experiments conducted on NIST SRE 2014 database demonstrate an improved accuracy in a mixed enrollment number condition.
[ "Danila Doroshin, Nikolay Lubimov, Marina Nastasenko and Mikhail Kotov", "['Danila Doroshin' 'Nikolay Lubimov' 'Marina Nastasenko' 'Mikhail Kotov']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
10.1016/j.ins.2015.06.039
1602.06989
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.06989v1
2016-02-22T22:40:00Z
2016-02-22T22:40:00Z
Recovering the number of clusters in data sets with noise features using feature rescaling factors
In this paper we introduce three methods for re-scaling data sets aiming at improving the likelihood of clustering validity indexes to return the true number of spherical Gaussian clusters with additional noise features. Our method obtains feature re-scaling factors taking into account the structure of a given data set and the intuitive idea that different features may have different degrees of relevance at different clusters. We experiment with the Silhouette (using squared Euclidean, Manhattan, and the p$^{th}$ power of the Minkowski distance), Dunn's, Calinski-Harabasz and Hartigan indexes on data sets with spherical Gaussian clusters with and without noise features. We conclude that our methods indeed increase the chances of estimating the true number of clusters in a data set.
[ "['Renato Cordeiro de Amorim' 'Christian Hennig']", "Renato Cordeiro de Amorim and Christian Hennig" ]
cs.CV cs.LG
10.1109/ACCESS.2015.2430359
1602.07017
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07017v1
2016-02-23T02:44:53Z
2016-02-23T02:44:53Z
A survey of sparse representation: algorithms and applications
Sparse representation has attracted much attention from researchers in fields of signal processing, image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition. Sparse representation also has a good reputation in both theoretical research and practical applications. Many different algorithms have been proposed for sparse representation. The main purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive study and an updated review on sparse representation and to supply a guidance for researchers. The taxonomy of sparse representation methods can be studied from various viewpoints. For example, in terms of different norm minimizations used in sparsity constraints, the methods can be roughly categorized into five groups: sparse representation with $l_0$-norm minimization, sparse representation with $l_p$-norm (0$<$p$<$1) minimization, sparse representation with $l_1$-norm minimization and sparse representation with $l_{2,1}$-norm minimization. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of sparse representation is provided. The available sparse representation algorithms can also be empirically categorized into four groups: greedy strategy approximation, constrained optimization, proximity algorithm-based optimization, and homotopy algorithm-based sparse representation. The rationales of different algorithms in each category are analyzed and a wide range of sparse representation applications are summarized, which could sufficiently reveal the potential nature of the sparse representation theory. Specifically, an experimentally comparative study of these sparse representation algorithms was presented. The Matlab code used in this paper can be available at: http://www.yongxu.org/lunwen.html.
[ "['Zheng Zhang' 'Yong Xu' 'Jian Yang' 'Xuelong Li' 'David Zhang']", "Zheng Zhang, Yong Xu, Jian Yang, Xuelong Li, David Zhang" ]
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CY
null
1602.07029
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07029v1
2016-02-23T04:20:40Z
2016-02-23T04:20:40Z
Latent Skill Embedding for Personalized Lesson Sequence Recommendation
Students in online courses generate large amounts of data that can be used to personalize the learning process and improve quality of education. In this paper, we present the Latent Skill Embedding (LSE), a probabilistic model of students and educational content that can be used to recommend personalized sequences of lessons with the goal of helping students prepare for specific assessments. Akin to collaborative filtering for recommender systems, the algorithm does not require students or content to be described by features, but it learns a representation using access traces. We formulate this problem as a regularized maximum-likelihood embedding of students, lessons, and assessments from historical student-content interactions. An empirical evaluation on large-scale data from Knewton, an adaptive learning technology company, shows that this approach predicts assessment results competitively with benchmark models and is able to discriminate between lesson sequences that lead to mastery and failure.
[ "Siddharth Reddy, Igor Labutov, Thorsten Joachims", "['Siddharth Reddy' 'Igor Labutov' 'Thorsten Joachims']" ]
cs.DC cs.LG cs.NE
10.1109/MNET.2016.7474340
1602.07031
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07031v1
2016-02-23T04:32:02Z
2016-02-23T04:32:02Z
Mobile Big Data Analytics Using Deep Learning and Apache Spark
The proliferation of mobile devices, such as smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets, results in the recent mobile big data (MBD) era. Collecting MBD is unprofitable unless suitable analytics and learning methods are utilized for extracting meaningful information and hidden patterns from data. This article presents an overview and brief tutorial of deep learning in MBD analytics and discusses a scalable learning framework over Apache Spark. Specifically, a distributed deep learning is executed as an iterative MapReduce computing on many Spark workers. Each Spark worker learns a partial deep model on a partition of the overall MBD, and a master deep model is then built by averaging the parameters of all partial models. This Spark-based framework speeds up the learning of deep models consisting of many hidden layers and millions of parameters. We use a context-aware activity recognition application with a real-world dataset containing millions of samples to validate our framework and assess its speedup effectiveness.
[ "['Mohammad Abu Alsheikh' 'Dusit Niyato' 'Shaowei Lin' 'Hwee-Pink Tan'\n 'Zhu Han']", "Mohammad Abu Alsheikh, Dusit Niyato, Shaowei Lin, Hwee-Pink Tan, and\n Zhu Han" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.07043
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07043v2
2016-11-30T06:55:16Z
2016-02-23T04:52:28Z
Auditing Black-box Models for Indirect Influence
Data-trained predictive models see widespread use, but for the most part they are used as black boxes which output a prediction or score. It is therefore hard to acquire a deeper understanding of model behavior, and in particular how different features influence the model prediction. This is important when interpreting the behavior of complex models, or asserting that certain problematic attributes (like race or gender) are not unduly influencing decisions. In this paper, we present a technique for auditing black-box models, which lets us study the extent to which existing models take advantage of particular features in the dataset, without knowing how the models work. Our work focuses on the problem of indirect influence: how some features might indirectly influence outcomes via other, related features. As a result, we can find attribute influences even in cases where, upon further direct examination of the model, the attribute is not referred to by the model at all. Our approach does not require the black-box model to be retrained. This is important if (for example) the model is only accessible via an API, and contrasts our work with other methods that investigate feature influence like feature selection. We present experimental evidence for the effectiveness of our procedure using a variety of publicly available datasets and models. We also validate our procedure using techniques from interpretable learning and feature selection, as well as against other black-box auditing procedures.
[ "Philip Adler, Casey Falk, Sorelle A. Friedler, Gabriel Rybeck, Carlos\n Scheidegger, Brandon Smith and Suresh Venkatasubramanian", "['Philip Adler' 'Casey Falk' 'Sorelle A. Friedler' 'Gabriel Rybeck'\n 'Carlos Scheidegger' 'Brandon Smith' 'Suresh Venkatasubramanian']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG math.NA
null
1602.07046
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07046v1
2016-02-23T05:15:08Z
2016-02-23T05:15:08Z
An Improved Gap-Dependency Analysis of the Noisy Power Method
We consider the noisy power method algorithm, which has wide applications in machine learning and statistics, especially those related to principal component analysis (PCA) under resource (communication, memory or privacy) constraints. Existing analysis of the noisy power method shows an unsatisfactory dependency over the "consecutive" spectral gap $(\sigma_k-\sigma_{k+1})$ of an input data matrix, which could be very small and hence limits the algorithm's applicability. In this paper, we present a new analysis of the noisy power method that achieves improved gap dependency for both sample complexity and noise tolerance bounds. More specifically, we improve the dependency over $(\sigma_k-\sigma_{k+1})$ to dependency over $(\sigma_k-\sigma_{q+1})$, where $q$ is an intermediate algorithm parameter and could be much larger than the target rank $k$. Our proofs are built upon a novel characterization of proximity between two subspaces that differ from canonical angle characterizations analyzed in previous works. Finally, we apply our improved bounds to distributed private PCA and memory-efficient streaming PCA and obtain bounds that are superior to existing results in the literature.
[ "Maria Florina Balcan, Simon S. Du, Yining Wang, Adams Wei Yu", "['Maria Florina Balcan' 'Simon S. Du' 'Yining Wang' 'Adams Wei Yu']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.07107
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07107v1
2016-02-23T10:21:58Z
2016-02-23T10:21:58Z
A Streaming Algorithm for Crowdsourced Data Classification
We propose a streaming algorithm for the binary classification of data based on crowdsourcing. The algorithm learns the competence of each labeller by comparing her labels to those of other labellers on the same tasks and uses this information to minimize the prediction error rate on each task. We provide performance guarantees of our algorithm for a fixed population of independent labellers. In particular, we show that our algorithm is optimal in the sense that the cumulative regret compared to the optimal decision with known labeller error probabilities is finite, independently of the number of tasks to label. The complexity of the algorithm is linear in the number of labellers and the number of tasks, up to some logarithmic factors. Numerical experiments illustrate the performance of our algorithm compared to existing algorithms, including simple majority voting and expectation-maximization algorithms, on both synthetic and real datasets.
[ "['Thomas Bonald' 'Richard Combes']", "Thomas Bonald and Richard Combes" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.07109
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07109v5
2016-06-14T10:01:00Z
2016-02-23T10:31:51Z
Variational Inference for On-line Anomaly Detection in High-Dimensional Time Series
Approximate variational inference has shown to be a powerful tool for modeling unknown complex probability distributions. Recent advances in the field allow us to learn probabilistic models of sequences that actively exploit spatial and temporal structure. We apply a Stochastic Recurrent Network (STORN) to learn robot time series data. Our evaluation demonstrates that we can robustly detect anomalies both off- and on-line.
[ "['Maximilian Soelch' 'Justin Bayer' 'Marvin Ludersdorfer'\n 'Patrick van der Smagt']", "Maximilian Soelch, Justin Bayer, Marvin Ludersdorfer, Patrick van der\n Smagt" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.07120
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07120v3
2018-11-18T12:25:25Z
2016-02-23T11:20:37Z
Submodular Learning and Covering with Response-Dependent Costs
We consider interactive learning and covering problems, in a setting where actions may incur different costs, depending on the response to the action. We propose a natural greedy algorithm for response-dependent costs. We bound the approximation factor of this greedy algorithm in active learning settings as well as in the general setting. We show that a different property of the cost function controls the approximation factor in each of these scenarios. We further show that in both settings, the approximation factor of this greedy algorithm is near-optimal among all greedy algorithms. Experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm in the response-dependent cost setting.
[ "['Sivan Sabato']", "Sivan Sabato" ]
math.ST cs.LG stat.TH
null
1602.07182
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07182v3
2018-10-13T12:25:47Z
2016-02-23T15:04:13Z
Explore First, Exploit Next: The True Shape of Regret in Bandit Problems
We revisit lower bounds on the regret in the case of multi-armed bandit problems. We obtain non-asymptotic, distribution-dependent bounds and provide straightforward proofs based only on well-known properties of Kullback-Leibler divergences. These bounds show in particular that in an initial phase the regret grows almost linearly, and that the well-known logarithmic growth of the regret only holds in a final phase. The proof techniques come to the essence of the information-theoretic arguments used and they are deprived of all unnecessary complications.
[ "['Aurélien Garivier' 'Pierre Ménard' 'Gilles Stoltz']", "Aur\\'elien Garivier (IMT), Pierre M\\'enard (IMT), Gilles Stoltz\n (GREGH)" ]
stat.ML cs.DS cs.LG
null
1602.07194
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07194v2
2017-07-24T11:52:01Z
2016-02-23T15:30:46Z
Lens depth function and k-relative neighborhood graph: versatile tools for ordinal data analysis
In recent years it has become popular to study machine learning problems in a setting of ordinal distance information rather than numerical distance measurements. By ordinal distance information we refer to binary answers to distance comparisons such as $d(A,B)<d(C,D)$. For many problems in machine learning and statistics it is unclear how to solve them in such a scenario. Up to now, the main approach is to explicitly construct an ordinal embedding of the data points in the Euclidean space, an approach that has a number of drawbacks. In this paper, we propose algorithms for the problems of medoid estimation, outlier identification, classification, and clustering when given only ordinal data. They are based on estimating the lens depth function and the $k$-relative neighborhood graph on a data set. Our algorithms are simple, are much faster than an ordinal embedding approach and avoid some of its drawbacks, and can easily be parallelized.
[ "Matth\\\"aus Kleindessner and Ulrike von Luxburg", "['Matthäus Kleindessner' 'Ulrike von Luxburg']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.07264
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07264v1
2015-05-15T00:55:17Z
2015-05-15T00:55:17Z
A Multivariate Biomarker for Parkinson's Disease
In this study, we executed a genomic analysis with the objective of selecting a set of genes (possibly small) that would help in the detection and classification of samples from patients affected by Parkinson Disease. We performed a complete data analysis and during the exploratory phase, we selected a list of differentially expressed genes. Despite their association with the diseased state, we could not use them as a biomarker tool. Therefore, our research was extended to include a multivariate analysis approach resulting in the identification and selection of a group of 20 genes that showed a clear potential in detecting and correctly classify Parkinson Disease samples even in the presence of other neurodegenerative disorders.
[ "Giancarlo Crocetti, Michael Coakley, Phil Dressner, Wanda Kellum,\n Tamba Lamin", "['Giancarlo Crocetti' 'Michael Coakley' 'Phil Dressner' 'Wanda Kellum'\n 'Tamba Lamin']" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.07265
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07265v2
2016-10-24T06:29:08Z
2016-02-23T19:05:09Z
Search Improves Label for Active Learning
We investigate active learning with access to two distinct oracles: Label (which is standard) and Search (which is not). The Search oracle models the situation where a human searches a database to seed or counterexample an existing solution. Search is stronger than Label while being natural to implement in many situations. We show that an algorithm using both oracles can provide exponentially large problem-dependent improvements over Label alone.
[ "['Alina Beygelzimer' 'Daniel Hsu' 'John Langford' 'Chicheng Zhang']", "Alina Beygelzimer, Daniel Hsu, John Langford, Chicheng Zhang" ]
stat.AP cs.LG
null
1602.07280
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07280v1
2016-02-22T12:51:39Z
2016-02-22T12:51:39Z
A Statistical Model for Stroke Outcome Prediction and Treatment Planning
Stroke is a major cause of mortality and long--term disability in the world. Predictive outcome models in stroke are valuable for personalized treatment, rehabilitation planning and in controlled clinical trials. In this paper we design a new model to predict outcome in the short-term, the putative therapeutic window for several treatments. Our regression-based model has a parametric form that is designed to address many challenges common in medical datasets like highly correlated variables and class imbalance. Empirically our model outperforms the best--known previous models in predicting short--term outcomes and in inferring the most effective treatments that improve outcome.
[ "Abhishek Sengupta, Vaibhav Rajan, Sakyajit Bhattacharya, G R K Sarma", "['Abhishek Sengupta' 'Vaibhav Rajan' 'Sakyajit Bhattacharya' 'G R K Sarma']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.07320
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07320v1
2016-02-23T21:23:24Z
2016-02-23T21:23:24Z
Stuck in a What? Adventures in Weight Space
Deep learning researchers commonly suggest that converged models are stuck in local minima. More recently, some researchers observed that under reasonable assumptions, the vast majority of critical points are saddle points, not true minima. Both descriptions suggest that weights converge around a point in weight space, be it a local optima or merely a critical point. However, it's possible that neither interpretation is accurate. As neural networks are typically over-complete, it's easy to show the existence of vast continuous regions through weight space with equal loss. In this paper, we build on recent work empirically characterizing the error surfaces of neural networks. We analyze training paths through weight space, presenting evidence that apparent convergence of loss does not correspond to weights arriving at critical points, but instead to large movements through flat regions of weight space. While it's trivial to show that neural network error surfaces are globally non-convex, we show that error surfaces are also locally non-convex, even after breaking symmetry with a random initialization and also after partial training.
[ "Zachary C. Lipton", "['Zachary C. Lipton']" ]
stat.ME cs.LG
null
1602.07337
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07337v3
2016-08-12T18:33:46Z
2016-02-22T01:27:08Z
Sparse Estimation of Multivariate Poisson Log-Normal Models from Count Data
Modeling data with multivariate count responses is a challenging problem due to the discrete nature of the responses. Existing methods for univariate count responses cannot be easily extended to the multivariate case since the dependency among multiple responses needs to be properly accommodated. In this paper, we propose a multivariate Poisson log-normal regression model for multivariate data with count responses. By simultaneously estimating the regression coefficients and inverse covariance matrix over the latent variables with an efficient Monte Carlo EM algorithm, the proposed regression model takes advantages of association among multiple count responses to improve the model prediction performance. Simulation studies and applications to real world data are conducted to systematically evaluate the performance of the proposed method in comparison with conventional methods.
[ "Hao Wu, Xinwei Deng and Naren Ramakrishnan", "['Hao Wu' 'Xinwei Deng' 'Naren Ramakrishnan']" ]
cs.NE cs.CV cs.LG
null
1602.07373
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07373v1
2016-02-24T02:39:47Z
2016-02-24T02:39:47Z
On Study of the Binarized Deep Neural Network for Image Classification
Recently, the deep neural network (derived from the artificial neural network) has attracted many researchers' attention by its outstanding performance. However, since this network requires high-performance GPUs and large storage, it is very hard to use it on individual devices. In order to improve the deep neural network, many trials have been made by refining the network structure or training strategy. Unlike those trials, in this paper, we focused on the basic propagation function of the artificial neural network and proposed the binarized deep neural network. This network is a pure binary system, in which all the values and calculations are binarized. As a result, our network can save a lot of computational resource and storage. Therefore, it is possible to use it on various devices. Moreover, the experimental results proved the feasibility of the proposed network.
[ "['Song Wang' 'Dongchun Ren' 'Li Chen' 'Wei Fan' 'Jun Sun' 'Satoshi Naoi']", "Song Wang, Dongchun Ren, Li Chen, Wei Fan, Jun Sun, Satoshi Naoi" ]
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE
null
1602.07383
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07383v1
2016-02-24T03:35:42Z
2016-02-24T03:35:42Z
Automatic Moth Detection from Trap Images for Pest Management
Monitoring the number of insect pests is a crucial component in pheromone-based pest management systems. In this paper, we propose an automatic detection pipeline based on deep learning for identifying and counting pests in images taken inside field traps. Applied to a commercial codling moth dataset, our method shows promising performance both qualitatively and quantitatively. Compared to previous attempts at pest detection, our approach uses no pest-specific engineering which enables it to adapt to other species and environments with minimal human effort. It is amenable to implementation on parallel hardware and therefore capable of deployment in settings where real-time performance is required.
[ "['Weiguang Ding' 'Graham Taylor']", "Weiguang Ding, Graham Taylor" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.07387
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07387v3
2016-06-15T18:26:31Z
2016-02-24T03:48:19Z
Discrete Distribution Estimation under Local Privacy
The collection and analysis of user data drives improvements in the app and web ecosystems, but comes with risks to privacy. This paper examines discrete distribution estimation under local privacy, a setting wherein service providers can learn the distribution of a categorical statistic of interest without collecting the underlying data. We present new mechanisms, including hashed K-ary Randomized Response (KRR), that empirically meet or exceed the utility of existing mechanisms at all privacy levels. New theoretical results demonstrate the order-optimality of KRR and the existing RAPPOR mechanism at different privacy regimes.
[ "Peter Kairouz and Keith Bonawitz and Daniel Ramage", "['Peter Kairouz' 'Keith Bonawitz' 'Daniel Ramage']" ]
cs.HC cs.CY cs.LG physics.soc-ph
10.1371/journal.pone.0173610
1602.07388
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07388v1
2016-02-24T03:55:15Z
2016-02-24T03:55:15Z
The Myopia of Crowds: A Study of Collective Evaluation on Stack Exchange
Crowds can often make better decisions than individuals or small groups of experts by leveraging their ability to aggregate diverse information. Question answering sites, such as Stack Exchange, rely on the "wisdom of crowds" effect to identify the best answers to questions asked by users. We analyze data from 250 communities on the Stack Exchange network to pinpoint factors affecting which answers are chosen as the best answers. Our results suggest that, rather than evaluate all available answers to a question, users rely on simple cognitive heuristics to choose an answer to vote for or accept. These cognitive heuristics are linked to an answer's salience, such as the order in which it is listed and how much screen space it occupies. While askers appear to depend more on heuristics, compared to voting users, when choosing an answer to accept as the most helpful one, voters use acceptance itself as a heuristic: they are more likely to choose the answer after it is accepted than before that very same answer was accepted. These heuristics become more important in explaining and predicting behavior as the number of available answers increases. Our findings suggest that crowd judgments may become less reliable as the number of answers grow.
[ "Keith Burghardt, Emanuel F. Alsina, Michelle Girvan, William Rand, and\n Kristina Lerman", "['Keith Burghardt' 'Emanuel F. Alsina' 'Michelle Girvan' 'William Rand'\n 'Kristina Lerman']" ]
cs.CL cs.LG cs.NE
null
1602.07393
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07393v1
2016-02-24T04:32:34Z
2016-02-24T04:32:34Z
Domain Specific Author Attribution Based on Feedforward Neural Network Language Models
Authorship attribution refers to the task of automatically determining the author based on a given sample of text. It is a problem with a long history and has a wide range of application. Building author profiles using language models is one of the most successful methods to automate this task. New language modeling methods based on neural networks alleviate the curse of dimensionality and usually outperform conventional N-gram methods. However, there have not been much research applying them to authorship attribution. In this paper, we present a novel setup of a Neural Network Language Model (NNLM) and apply it to a database of text samples from different authors. We investigate how the NNLM performs on a task with moderate author set size and relatively limited training and test data, and how the topics of the text samples affect the accuracy. NNLM achieves nearly 2.5% reduction in perplexity, a measurement of fitness of a trained language model to the test data. Given 5 random test sentences, it also increases the author classification accuracy by 3.43% on average, compared with the N-gram methods using SRILM tools. An open source implementation of our methodology is freely available at https://github.com/zge/authorship-attribution/.
[ "['Zhenhao Ge' 'Yufang Sun']", "Zhenhao Ge and Yufang Sun" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.07415
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07415v3
2016-06-16T20:55:19Z
2016-02-24T06:54:43Z
Ensuring Rapid Mixing and Low Bias for Asynchronous Gibbs Sampling
Gibbs sampling is a Markov chain Monte Carlo technique commonly used for estimating marginal distributions. To speed up Gibbs sampling, there has recently been interest in parallelizing it by executing asynchronously. While empirical results suggest that many models can be efficiently sampled asynchronously, traditional Markov chain analysis does not apply to the asynchronous case, and thus asynchronous Gibbs sampling is poorly understood. In this paper, we derive a better understanding of the two main challenges of asynchronous Gibbs: bias and mixing time. We show experimentally that our theoretical results match practical outcomes.
[ "Christopher De Sa, Kunle Olukotun, and Christopher R\\'e", "['Christopher De Sa' 'Kunle Olukotun' 'Christopher Ré']" ]
cs.LG cs.CV
null
1602.07416
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07416v2
2016-05-28T03:41:27Z
2016-02-24T06:57:14Z
Learning to Generate with Memory
Memory units have been widely used to enrich the capabilities of deep networks on capturing long-term dependencies in reasoning and prediction tasks, but little investigation exists on deep generative models (DGMs) which are good at inferring high-level invariant representations from unlabeled data. This paper presents a deep generative model with a possibly large external memory and an attention mechanism to capture the local detail information that is often lost in the bottom-up abstraction process in representation learning. By adopting a smooth attention model, the whole network is trained end-to-end by optimizing a variational bound of data likelihood via auto-encoding variational Bayesian methods, where an asymmetric recognition network is learnt jointly to infer high-level invariant representations. The asymmetric architecture can reduce the competition between bottom-up invariant feature extraction and top-down generation of instance details. Our experiments on several datasets demonstrate that memory can significantly boost the performance of DGMs and even achieve state-of-the-art results on various tasks, including density estimation, image generation, and missing value imputation.
[ "Chongxuan Li, Jun Zhu and Bo Zhang", "['Chongxuan Li' 'Jun Zhu' 'Bo Zhang']" ]
null
null
1602.07428
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07428v1
2016-02-24T08:08:05Z
2016-02-24T08:08:05Z
Max-Margin Nonparametric Latent Feature Models for Link Prediction
Link prediction is a fundamental task in statistical network analysis. Recent advances have been made on learning flexible nonparametric Bayesian latent feature models for link prediction. In this paper, we present a max-margin learning method for such nonparametric latent feature relational models. Our approach attempts to unite the ideas of max-margin learning and Bayesian nonparametrics to discover discriminative latent features for link prediction. It inherits the advances of nonparametric Bayesian methods to infer the unknown latent social dimension, while for discriminative link prediction, it adopts the max-margin learning principle by minimizing a hinge-loss using the linear expectation operator, without dealing with a highly nonlinear link likelihood function. For posterior inference, we develop an efficient stochastic variational inference algorithm under a truncated mean-field assumption. Our methods can scale up to large-scale real networks with millions of entities and tens of millions of positive links. We also provide a full Bayesian formulation, which can avoid tuning regularization hyper-parameters. Experimental results on a diverse range of real datasets demonstrate the benefits inherited from max-margin learning and Bayesian nonparametric inference.
[ "['Jun Zhu' 'Jiaming Song' 'Bei Chen']" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.07464
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07464v1
2016-02-24T11:11:10Z
2016-02-24T11:11:10Z
Feature ranking for multi-label classification using Markov Networks
We propose a simple and efficient method for ranking features in multi-label classification. The method produces a ranking of features showing their relevance in predicting labels, which in turn allows to choose a final subset of features. The procedure is based on Markov Networks and allows to model the dependencies between labels and features in a direct way. In the first step we build a simple network using only labels and then we test how much adding a single feature affects the initial network. More specifically, in the first step we use the Ising model whereas the second step is based on the score statistic, which allows to test a significance of added features very quickly. The proposed approach does not require transformation of label space, gives interpretable results and allows for attractive visualization of dependency structure. We give a theoretical justification of the procedure by discussing some theoretical properties of the Ising model and the score statistic. We also discuss feature ranking procedure based on fitting Ising model using $l_1$ regularized logistic regressions. Numerical experiments show that the proposed methods outperform the conventional approaches on the considered artificial and real datasets.
[ "['Paweł Teisseyre']", "Pawe{\\l} Teisseyre" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.07466
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07466v1
2016-02-24T11:15:03Z
2016-02-24T11:15:03Z
Asymptotic consistency and order specification for logistic classifier chains in multi-label learning
Classifier chains are popular and effective method to tackle a multi-label classification problem. The aim of this paper is to study the asymptotic properties of the chain model in which the conditional probabilities are of the logistic form. In particular we find conditions on the number of labels and the distribution of feature vector under which the estimated mode of the joint distribution of labels converges to the true mode. Best of our knowledge, this important issue has not yet been studied in the context of multi-label learning. We also investigate how the order of model building in a chain influences the estimation of the joint distribution of labels. We establish the link between the problem of incorrect ordering in the chain and incorrect model specification. We propose a procedure of determining the optimal ordering of labels in the chain, which is based on using measures of correct specification and allows to find the ordering such that the consecutive logistic models are best possibly specified. The other important question raised in this paper is how accurately can we estimate the joint posterior probability when the ordering of labels is wrong or the logistic models in the chain are incorrectly specified. The numerical experiments illustrate the theoretical results.
[ "['Paweł Teisseyre']", "Pawe{\\l} Teisseyre" ]
cs.LG
10.1109/ICDMW.2011.20
1602.07495
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07495v1
2016-02-24T13:32:36Z
2016-02-24T13:32:36Z
Active Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data
During recent years, active learning has evolved into a popular paradigm for utilizing user's feedback to improve accuracy of learning algorithms. Active learning works by selecting the most informative sample among unlabeled data and querying the label of that point from user. Many different methods such as uncertainty sampling and minimum risk sampling have been utilized to select the most informative sample in active learning. Although many active learning algorithms have been proposed so far, most of them work with binary or multi-class classification problems and therefore can not be applied to problems in which only samples from one class as well as a set of unlabeled data are available. Such problems arise in many real-world situations and are known as the problem of learning from positive and unlabeled data. In this paper we propose an active learning algorithm that can work when only samples of one class as well as a set of unlabelled data are available. Our method works by separately estimating probability desnity of positive and unlabeled points and then computing expected value of informativeness to get rid of a hyper-parameter and have a better measure of informativeness./ Experiments and empirical analysis show promising results compared to other similar methods.
[ "['Alireza Ghasemi' 'Hamid R. Rabiee' 'Mohsen Fadaee' 'Mohammad T. Manzuri'\n 'Mohammad H. Rohban']", "Alireza Ghasemi, Hamid R. Rabiee, Mohsen Fadaee, Mohammad T. Manzuri\n and Mohammad H. Rohban" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.07507
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07507v1
2016-02-24T13:52:52Z
2016-02-24T13:52:52Z
A Bayesian Approach to the Data Description Problem
In this paper, we address the problem of data description using a Bayesian framework. The goal of data description is to draw a boundary around objects of a certain class of interest to discriminate that class from the rest of the feature space. Data description is also known as one-class learning and has a wide range of applications. The proposed approach uses a Bayesian framework to precisely compute the class boundary and therefore can utilize domain information in form of prior knowledge in the framework. It can also operate in the kernel space and therefore recognize arbitrary boundary shapes. Moreover, the proposed method can utilize unlabeled data in order to improve accuracy of discrimination. We evaluate our method using various real-world datasets and compare it with other state of the art approaches of data description. Experiments show promising results and improved performance over other data description and one-class learning algorithms.
[ "Alireza Ghasemi, Hamid R. Rabiee, Mohammad T. Manzuri, M. H. Rohban", "['Alireza Ghasemi' 'Hamid R. Rabiee' 'Mohammad T. Manzuri' 'M. H. Rohban']" ]
cs.GT cs.DS cs.LG
null
1602.07570
null
null
null
null
null
Bayesian Exploration: Incentivizing Exploration in Bayesian Games
We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way tradeoff between exploration (trying out insufficiently explored alternatives to help others in the future), exploitation (making optimal decisions given the information discovered by other agents), and incentives of the agents (who are myopically interested in exploitation, while preferring the others to explore). We posit a principal who controls the flow of information from agents that came before, and strives to coordinate the agents towards a socially optimal balance between exploration and exploitation, not using any monetary transfers. The goal is to design a recommendation policy for the principal which respects agents' incentives and minimizes a suitable notion of regret. We extend prior work in this direction to allow the agents to interact with one another in a shared environment: at each time step, multiple agents arrive to play a Bayesian game, receive recommendations, choose their actions, receive their payoffs, and then leave the game forever. The agents now face two sources of uncertainty: the actions of the other agents and the parameters of the uncertain game environment. Our main contribution is to show that the principal can achieve constant regret when the utilities are deterministic (where the constant depends on the prior distribution, but not on the time horizon), and logarithmic regret when the utilities are stochastic. As a key technical tool, we introduce the concept of explorable actions, the actions which some incentive-compatible policy can recommend with non-zero probability. We show how the principal can identify (and explore) all explorable actions, and use the revealed information to perform optimally.
[ "Yishay Mansour, Aleksandrs Slivkins, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Zhiwei Steven\n Wu" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.07576
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07576v3
2016-06-03T10:54:16Z
2016-02-24T16:17:15Z
Group Equivariant Convolutional Networks
We introduce Group equivariant Convolutional Neural Networks (G-CNNs), a natural generalization of convolutional neural networks that reduces sample complexity by exploiting symmetries. G-CNNs use G-convolutions, a new type of layer that enjoys a substantially higher degree of weight sharing than regular convolution layers. G-convolutions increase the expressive capacity of the network without increasing the number of parameters. Group convolution layers are easy to use and can be implemented with negligible computational overhead for discrete groups generated by translations, reflections and rotations. G-CNNs achieve state of the art results on CIFAR10 and rotated MNIST.
[ "['Taco S. Cohen' 'Max Welling']", "Taco S. Cohen, Max Welling" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.07614
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07614v1
2016-02-15T16:33:39Z
2016-02-15T16:33:39Z
A Model of Selective Advantage for the Efficient Inference of Cancer Clonal Evolution
Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in rigorous algorithms for the inference of cancer progression from genomic data. The motivations are manifold: (i) growing NGS and single cell data from cancer patients, (ii) need for novel Data Science and Machine Learning algorithms to infer models of cancer progression, and (iii) a desire to understand the temporal and heterogeneous structure of tumor to tame its progression by efficacious therapeutic intervention. This thesis presents a multi-disciplinary effort to model tumor progression involving successive accumulation of genetic alterations, each resulting populations manifesting themselves in a cancer phenotype. The framework presented in this work along with algorithms derived from it, represents a novel approach for inferring cancer progression, whose accuracy and convergence rates surpass the existing techniques. The approach derives its power from several fields including algorithms in machine learning, theory of causality and cancer biology. Furthermore, a modular pipeline to extract ensemble-level progression models from sequenced cancer genomes is proposed. The pipeline combines state-of-the-art techniques for sample stratification, driver selection, identification of fitness-equivalent exclusive alterations and progression model inference. Furthermore, the results are validated by synthetic data with realistic generative models, and empirically interpreted in the context of real cancer datasets; in the later case, biologically significant conclusions are also highlighted. Specifically, it demonstrates the pipeline's ability to reproduce much of the knowledge on colorectal cancer, as well as to suggest novel hypotheses. Lastly, it also proves that the proposed framework can be applied to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer clones in single patients, as illustrated by an example from clear cell renal carcinomas.
[ "['Daniele Ramazzotti']", "Daniele Ramazzotti" ]
cs.CC cs.DS cs.LG
null
1602.07616
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07616v1
2016-02-24T17:46:30Z
2016-02-24T17:46:30Z
Noisy population recovery in polynomial time
In the noisy population recovery problem of Dvir et al., the goal is to learn an unknown distribution $f$ on binary strings of length $n$ from noisy samples. For some parameter $\mu \in [0,1]$, a noisy sample is generated by flipping each coordinate of a sample from $f$ independently with probability $(1-\mu)/2$. We assume an upper bound $k$ on the size of the support of the distribution, and the goal is to estimate the probability of any string to within some given error $\varepsilon$. It is known that the algorithmic complexity and sample complexity of this problem are polynomially related to each other. We show that for $\mu > 0$, the sample complexity (and hence the algorithmic complexity) is bounded by a polynomial in $k$, $n$ and $1/\varepsilon$ improving upon the previous best result of $\mathsf{poly}(k^{\log\log k},n,1/\varepsilon)$ due to Lovett and Zhang. Our proof combines ideas from Lovett and Zhang with a \emph{noise attenuated} version of M\"{o}bius inversion. In turn, the latter crucially uses the construction of \emph{robust local inverse} due to Moitra and Saks.
[ "['Anindya De' 'Michael Saks' 'Sijian Tang']", "Anindya De and Michael Saks and Sijian Tang" ]
math.OC cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.07630
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07630v1
2016-02-24T18:26:35Z
2016-02-24T18:26:35Z
Online Dual Coordinate Ascent Learning
The stochastic dual coordinate-ascent (S-DCA) technique is a useful alternative to the traditional stochastic gradient-descent algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems due to its scalability to large data sets and strong theoretical guarantees. However, the available S-DCA formulation is limited to finite sample sizes and relies on performing multiple passes over the same data. This formulation is not well-suited for online implementations where data keep streaming in. In this work, we develop an {\em online} dual coordinate-ascent (O-DCA) algorithm that is able to respond to streaming data and does not need to revisit the past data. This feature embeds the resulting construction with continuous adaptation, learning, and tracking abilities, which are particularly attractive for online learning scenarios.
[ "Bicheng Ying, Kun Yuan, Ali H. Sayed", "['Bicheng Ying' 'Kun Yuan' 'Ali H. Sayed']" ]
cs.LG cs.AI cs.NE stat.ML
null
1602.07714
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07714v2
2016-08-16T05:27:17Z
2016-02-24T21:14:52Z
Learning values across many orders of magnitude
Most learning algorithms are not invariant to the scale of the function that is being approximated. We propose to adaptively normalize the targets used in learning. This is useful in value-based reinforcement learning, where the magnitude of appropriate value approximations can change over time when we update the policy of behavior. Our main motivation is prior work on learning to play Atari games, where the rewards were all clipped to a predetermined range. This clipping facilitates learning across many different games with a single learning algorithm, but a clipped reward function can result in qualitatively different behavior. Using the adaptive normalization we can remove this domain-specific heuristic without diminishing overall performance.
[ "['Hado van Hasselt' 'Arthur Guez' 'Matteo Hessel' 'Volodymyr Mnih'\n 'David Silver']", "Hado van Hasselt and Arthur Guez and Matteo Hessel and Volodymyr Mnih\n and David Silver" ]
cs.DS cs.LG
null
1602.07726
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07726v2
2016-06-02T00:07:01Z
2016-02-24T21:59:30Z
Adaptive Learning with Robust Generalization Guarantees
The traditional notion of generalization---i.e., learning a hypothesis whose empirical error is close to its true error---is surprisingly brittle. As has recently been noted in [DFH+15b], even if several algorithms have this guarantee in isolation, the guarantee need not hold if the algorithms are composed adaptively. In this paper, we study three notions of generalization---increasing in strength---that are robust to postprocessing and amenable to adaptive composition, and examine the relationships between them. We call the weakest such notion Robust Generalization. A second, intermediate, notion is the stability guarantee known as differential privacy. The strongest guarantee we consider we call Perfect Generalization. We prove that every hypothesis class that is PAC learnable is also PAC learnable in a robustly generalizing fashion, with almost the same sample complexity. It was previously known that differentially private algorithms satisfy robust generalization. In this paper, we show that robust generalization is a strictly weaker concept, and that there is a learning task that can be carried out subject to robust generalization guarantees, yet cannot be carried out subject to differential privacy. We also show that perfect generalization is a strictly stronger guarantee than differential privacy, but that, nevertheless, many learning tasks can be carried out subject to the guarantees of perfect generalization.
[ "Rachel Cummings, Katrina Ligett, Kobbi Nissim, Aaron Roth, Zhiwei\n Steven Wu", "['Rachel Cummings' 'Katrina Ligett' 'Kobbi Nissim' 'Aaron Roth'\n 'Zhiwei Steven Wu']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG stat.AP
10.1109/TBME.2016.2632523
1602.07754
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07754v2
2017-01-26T21:03:57Z
2016-02-24T23:52:07Z
A Compressed Sensing Based Decomposition of Electrodermal Activity Signals
The measurement and analysis of Electrodermal Activity (EDA) offers applications in diverse areas ranging from market research, to seizure detection, to human stress analysis. Unfortunately, the analysis of EDA signals is made difficult by the superposition of numerous components which can obscure the signal information related to a user's response to a stimulus. We show how simple pre-processing followed by a novel compressed sensing based decomposition can mitigate the effects of the undesired noise components and help reveal the underlying physiological signal. The proposed framework allows for decomposition of EDA signals with provable bounds on the recovery of user responses. We test our procedure on both synthetic and real-world EDA signals from wearable sensors and demonstrate that our approach allows for more accurate recovery of user responses as compared to the existing techniques.
[ "['Swayambhoo Jain' 'Urvashi Oswal' 'Kevin S. Xu' 'Brian Eriksson'\n 'Jarvis Haupt']", "Swayambhoo Jain, Urvashi Oswal, Kevin S. Xu, Brian Eriksson, Jarvis\n Haupt" ]
cs.AI cs.LG cs.NA math.OC stat.ML
null
1602.07764
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07764v2
2016-05-29T07:15:21Z
2016-02-25T01:25:36Z
Reinforcement Learning of POMDPs using Spectral Methods
We propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) based on spectral decomposition methods. While spectral methods have been previously employed for consistent learning of (passive) latent variable models such as hidden Markov models, POMDPs are more challenging since the learner interacts with the environment and possibly changes the future observations in the process. We devise a learning algorithm running through episodes, in each episode we employ spectral techniques to learn the POMDP parameters from a trajectory generated by a fixed policy. At the end of the episode, an optimization oracle returns the optimal memoryless planning policy which maximizes the expected reward based on the estimated POMDP model. We prove an order-optimal regret bound with respect to the optimal memoryless policy and efficient scaling with respect to the dimensionality of observation and action spaces.
[ "Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, Alessandro Lazaric, Animashree Anandkumar", "['Kamyar Azizzadenesheli' 'Alessandro Lazaric' 'Animashree Anandkumar']" ]
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
null
1602.07844
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07844v1
2016-02-25T08:34:59Z
2016-02-25T08:34:59Z
Fast Nonsmooth Regularized Risk Minimization with Continuation
In regularized risk minimization, the associated optimization problem becomes particularly difficult when both the loss and regularizer are nonsmooth. Existing approaches either have slow or unclear convergence properties, are restricted to limited problem subclasses, or require careful setting of a smoothing parameter. In this paper, we propose a continuation algorithm that is applicable to a large class of nonsmooth regularized risk minimization problems, can be flexibly used with a number of existing solvers for the underlying smoothed subproblem, and with convergence results on the whole algorithm rather than just one of its subproblems. In particular, when accelerated solvers are used, the proposed algorithm achieves the fastest known rates of $O(1/T^2)$ on strongly convex problems, and $O(1/T)$ on general convex problems. Experiments on nonsmooth classification and regression tasks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art.
[ "Shuai Zheng and Ruiliang Zhang and James T. Kwok", "['Shuai Zheng' 'Ruiliang Zhang' 'James T. Kwok']" ]
cs.AI cs.LG
10.1177/1176934318785167
1602.07857
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07857v4
2018-07-05T02:17:49Z
2016-02-25T09:23:58Z
Modeling cumulative biological phenomena with Suppes-Bayes Causal Networks
Several diseases related to cell proliferation are characterized by the accumulation of somatic DNA changes, with respect to wildtype conditions. Cancer and HIV are two common examples of such diseases, where the mutational load in the cancerous/viral population increases over time. In these cases, selective pressures are often observed along with competition, cooperation and parasitism among distinct cellular clones. Recently, we presented a mathematical framework to model these phenomena, based on a combination of Bayesian inference and Suppes' theory of probabilistic causation, depicted in graphical structures dubbed Suppes-Bayes Causal Networks (SBCNs). SBCNs are generative probabilistic graphical models that recapitulate the potential ordering of accumulation of such DNA changes during the progression of the disease. Such models can be inferred from data by exploiting likelihood-based model-selection strategies with regularization. In this paper we discuss the theoretical foundations of our approach and we investigate in depth the influence on the model-selection task of: (i) the poset based on Suppes' theory and (ii) different regularization strategies. Furthermore, we provide an example of application of our framework to HIV genetic data highlighting the valuable insights provided by the inferred.
[ "Daniele Ramazzotti and Alex Graudenzi and Giulio Caravagna and Marco\n Antoniotti", "['Daniele Ramazzotti' 'Alex Graudenzi' 'Giulio Caravagna'\n 'Marco Antoniotti']" ]
cs.AI cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.07860
null
null
null
null
null
Probably Approximately Correct Greedy Maximization with Efficient Bounds on Information Gain for Sensor Selection
Submodular function maximization finds application in a variety of real-world decision-making problems. However, most existing methods, based on greedy maximization, assume it is computationally feasible to evaluate F, the function being maximized. Unfortunately, in many realistic settings F is too expensive to evaluate exactly even once. We present probably approximately correct greedy maximization, which requires access only to cheap anytime confidence bounds on F and uses them to prune elements. We show that, with high probability, our method returns an approximately optimal set. We propose novel, cheap confidence bounds for conditional entropy, which appears in many common choices of F and for which it is difficult to find unbiased or bounded estimates. Finally, results on a real-world dataset from a multi-camera tracking system in a shopping mall demonstrate that our approach performs comparably to existing methods, but at a fraction of the computational cost.
[ "Yash Satsangi, Shimon Whiteson, Frans A. Oliehoek" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
10.1016/j.ijar.2017.01.001
1602.07863
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07863v1
2016-02-25T09:42:46Z
2016-02-25T09:42:46Z
Learning Gaussian Graphical Models With Fractional Marginal Pseudo-likelihood
We propose a Bayesian approximate inference method for learning the dependence structure of a Gaussian graphical model. Using pseudo-likelihood, we derive an analytical expression to approximate the marginal likelihood for an arbitrary graph structure without invoking any assumptions about decomposability. The majority of the existing methods for learning Gaussian graphical models are either restricted to decomposable graphs or require specification of a tuning parameter that may have a substantial impact on learned structures. By combining a simple sparsity inducing prior for the graph structures with a default reference prior for the model parameters, we obtain a fast and easily applicable scoring function that works well for even high-dimensional data. We demonstrate the favourable performance of our approach by large-scale comparisons against the leading methods for learning non-decomposable Gaussian graphical models. A theoretical justification for our method is provided by showing that it yields a consistent estimator of the graph structure.
[ "['Janne Leppä-aho' 'Johan Pensar' 'Teemu Roos' 'Jukka Corander']", "Janne Lepp\\\"a-aho, Johan Pensar, Teemu Roos, Jukka Corander" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.07865
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07865v1
2016-02-25T09:57:42Z
2016-02-25T09:57:42Z
Projected Estimators for Robust Semi-supervised Classification
For semi-supervised techniques to be applied safely in practice we at least want methods to outperform their supervised counterparts. We study this question for classification using the well-known quadratic surrogate loss function. Using a projection of the supervised estimate onto a set of constraints imposed by the unlabeled data, we find we can safely improve over the supervised solution in terms of this quadratic loss. Unlike other approaches to semi-supervised learning, the procedure does not rely on assumptions that are not intrinsic to the classifier at hand. It is theoretically demonstrated that, measured on the labeled and unlabeled training data, this semi-supervised procedure never gives a lower quadratic loss than the supervised alternative. To our knowledge this is the first approach that offers such strong, albeit conservative, guarantees for improvement over the supervised solution. The characteristics of our approach are explicated using benchmark datasets to further understand the similarities and differences between the quadratic loss criterion used in the theoretical results and the classification accuracy often considered in practice.
[ "Jesse H. Krijthe and Marco Loog", "['Jesse H. Krijthe' 'Marco Loog']" ]
cs.LG cs.AI cs.NE
null
1602.07868
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07868v3
2016-06-04T01:21:52Z
2016-02-25T10:13:45Z
Weight Normalization: A Simple Reparameterization to Accelerate Training of Deep Neural Networks
We present weight normalization: a reparameterization of the weight vectors in a neural network that decouples the length of those weight vectors from their direction. By reparameterizing the weights in this way we improve the conditioning of the optimization problem and we speed up convergence of stochastic gradient descent. Our reparameterization is inspired by batch normalization but does not introduce any dependencies between the examples in a minibatch. This means that our method can also be applied successfully to recurrent models such as LSTMs and to noise-sensitive applications such as deep reinforcement learning or generative models, for which batch normalization is less well suited. Although our method is much simpler, it still provides much of the speed-up of full batch normalization. In addition, the computational overhead of our method is lower, permitting more optimization steps to be taken in the same amount of time. We demonstrate the usefulness of our method on applications in supervised image recognition, generative modelling, and deep reinforcement learning.
[ "['Tim Salimans' 'Diederik P. Kingma']", "Tim Salimans and Diederik P. Kingma" ]
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
null
1602.07905
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07905v2
2016-06-03T10:59:36Z
2016-02-25T12:37:21Z
Thompson Sampling is Asymptotically Optimal in General Environments
We discuss a variant of Thompson sampling for nonparametric reinforcement learning in a countable classes of general stochastic environments. These environments can be non-Markov, non-ergodic, and partially observable. We show that Thompson sampling learns the environment class in the sense that (1) asymptotically its value converges to the optimal value in mean and (2) given a recoverability assumption regret is sublinear.
[ "['Jan Leike' 'Tor Lattimore' 'Laurent Orseau' 'Marcus Hutter']", "Jan Leike and Tor Lattimore and Laurent Orseau and Marcus Hutter" ]
cs.AI cs.DS cs.LG
null
1602.07985
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07985v2
2020-04-08T16:23:56Z
2016-02-25T16:37:57Z
How effective can simple ordinal peer grading be?
Ordinal peer grading has been proposed as a simple and scalable solution for computing reliable information about student performance in massive open online courses. The idea is to outsource the grading task to the students themselves as follows. After the end of an exam, each student is asked to rank -- in terms of quality -- a bundle of exam papers by fellow students. An aggregation rule then combines the individual rankings into a global one that contains all students. We define a broad class of simple aggregation rules, which we call type-ordering aggregation rules, and present a theoretical framework for assessing their effectiveness. When statistical information about the grading behaviour of students is available (in terms of a noise matrix that characterizes the grading behaviour of the average student from a student population), the framework can be used to compute the optimal rule from this class with respect to a series of performance objectives that compare the ranking returned by the aggregation rule to the underlying ground truth ranking. For example, a natural rule known as Borda is proved to be optimal when students grade correctly. In addition, we present extensive simulations that validate our theory and prove it to be extremely accurate in predicting the performance of aggregation rules even when only rough information about grading behaviour (i.e., an approximation of the noise matrix) is available. Both in the application of our theoretical framework and in our simulations, we exploit data about grading behaviour of students that have been extracted from two field experiments in the University of Patras.
[ "['Ioannis Caragiannis' 'George A. Krimpas' 'Alexandros A. Voudouris']", "Ioannis Caragiannis, George A. Krimpas, Alexandros A. Voudouris" ]
cs.NE cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.08007
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.08007v1
2016-02-25T17:37:28Z
2016-02-25T17:37:28Z
Practical Riemannian Neural Networks
We provide the first experimental results on non-synthetic datasets for the quasi-diagonal Riemannian gradient descents for neural networks introduced in [Ollivier, 2015]. These include the MNIST, SVHN, and FACE datasets as well as a previously unpublished electroencephalogram dataset. The quasi-diagonal Riemannian algorithms consistently beat simple stochastic gradient gradient descents by a varying margin. The computational overhead with respect to simple backpropagation is around a factor $2$. Perhaps more interestingly, these methods also reach their final performance quickly, thus requiring fewer training epochs and a smaller total computation time. We also present an implementation guide to these Riemannian gradient descents for neural networks, showing how the quasi-diagonal versions can be implemented with minimal effort on top of existing routines which compute gradients.
[ "Ga\\'etan Marceau-Caron, Yann Ollivier", "['Gaétan Marceau-Caron' 'Yann Ollivier']" ]
cs.AI cs.LG stat.ML
10.1109/access.2016.2556579
1602.08017
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.08017v1
2016-02-25T18:07:53Z
2016-02-25T18:07:53Z
Meta-learning within Projective Simulation
Learning models of artificial intelligence can nowadays perform very well on a large variety of tasks. However, in practice different task environments are best handled by different learning models, rather than a single, universal, approach. Most non-trivial models thus require the adjustment of several to many learning parameters, which is often done on a case-by-case basis by an external party. Meta-learning refers to the ability of an agent to autonomously and dynamically adjust its own learning parameters, or meta-parameters. In this work we show how projective simulation, a recently developed model of artificial intelligence, can naturally be extended to account for meta-learning in reinforcement learning settings. The projective simulation approach is based on a random walk process over a network of clips. The suggested meta-learning scheme builds upon the same design and employs clip networks to monitor the agent's performance and to adjust its meta-parameters "on the fly". We distinguish between "reflexive adaptation" and "adaptation through learning", and show the utility of both approaches. In addition, a trade-off between flexibility and learning-time is addressed. The extended model is examined on three different kinds of reinforcement learning tasks, in which the agent has different optimal values of the meta-parameters, and is shown to perform well, reaching near-optimal to optimal success rates in all of them, without ever needing to manually adjust any meta-parameter.
[ "['Adi Makmal' 'Alexey A. Melnikov' 'Vedran Dunjko' 'Hans J. Briegel']", "Adi Makmal, Alexey A. Melnikov, Vedran Dunjko, Hans J. Briegel" ]
cs.SD cs.LG
10.1117/12.919235
1602.08045
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.08045v1
2016-02-25T19:18:06Z
2016-02-25T19:18:06Z
PCA/LDA Approach for Text-Independent Speaker Recognition
Various algorithms for text-independent speaker recognition have been developed through the decades, aiming to improve both accuracy and efficiency. This paper presents a novel PCA/LDA-based approach that is faster than traditional statistical model-based methods and achieves competitive results. First, the performance based on only PCA and only LDA is measured; then a mixed model, taking advantages of both methods, is introduced. A subset of the TIMIT corpus composed of 200 male speakers, is used for enrollment, validation and testing. The best results achieve 100%; 96% and 95% classification rate at population level 50; 100 and 200, using 39-dimensional MFCC features with delta and double delta. These results are based on 12-second text-independent speech for training and 4-second data for test. These are comparable to the conventional MFCC-GMM methods, but require significantly less time to train and operate.
[ "Zhenhao Ge, Sudhendu R. Sharma, Mark J. T. Smith", "['Zhenhao Ge' 'Sudhendu R. Sharma' 'Mark J. T. Smith']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.08118
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.08118v1
2016-02-25T21:12:25Z
2016-02-25T21:12:25Z
Hierarchical Conflict Propagation: Sequence Learning in a Recurrent Deep Neural Network
Recurrent neural networks (RNN) are capable of learning to encode and exploit activation history over an arbitrary timescale. However, in practice, state of the art gradient descent based training methods are known to suffer from difficulties in learning long term dependencies. Here, we describe a novel training method that involves concurrent parallel cloned networks, each sharing the same weights, each trained at different stimulus phase and each maintaining independent activation histories. Training proceeds by recursively performing batch-updates over the parallel clones as activation history is progressively increased. This allows conflicts to propagate hierarchically from short-term contexts towards longer-term contexts until they are resolved. We illustrate the parallel clones method and hierarchical conflict propagation with a character-level deep RNN tasked with memorizing a paragraph of Moby Dick (by Herman Melville).
[ "Andrew J.R. Simpson", "['Andrew J. R. Simpson']" ]
cs.DC cs.LG cs.NE
null
1602.08124
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.08124v3
2016-07-28T23:19:03Z
2016-02-25T21:31:55Z
vDNN: Virtualized Deep Neural Networks for Scalable, Memory-Efficient Neural Network Design
The most widely used machine learning frameworks require users to carefully tune their memory usage so that the deep neural network (DNN) fits into the DRAM capacity of a GPU. This restriction hampers a researcher's flexibility to study different machine learning algorithms, forcing them to either use a less desirable network architecture or parallelize the processing across multiple GPUs. We propose a runtime memory manager that virtualizes the memory usage of DNNs such that both GPU and CPU memory can simultaneously be utilized for training larger DNNs. Our virtualized DNN (vDNN) reduces the average GPU memory usage of AlexNet by up to 89%, OverFeat by 91%, and GoogLeNet by 95%, a significant reduction in memory requirements of DNNs. Similar experiments on VGG-16, one of the deepest and memory hungry DNNs to date, demonstrate the memory-efficiency of our proposal. vDNN enables VGG-16 with batch size 256 (requiring 28 GB of memory) to be trained on a single NVIDIA Titan X GPU card containing 12 GB of memory, with 18% performance loss compared to a hypothetical, oracular GPU with enough memory to hold the entire DNN.
[ "['Minsoo Rhu' 'Natalia Gimelshein' 'Jason Clemons' 'Arslan Zulfiqar'\n 'Stephen W. Keckler']", "Minsoo Rhu, Natalia Gimelshein, Jason Clemons, Arslan Zulfiqar,\n Stephen W. Keckler" ]
cs.CV cs.LG
null
1602.08127
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.08127v2
2016-03-01T06:22:28Z
2016-02-25T21:47:16Z
Auto-JacoBin: Auto-encoder Jacobian Binary Hashing
Binary codes can be used to speed up nearest neighbor search tasks in large scale data sets as they are efficient for both storage and retrieval. In this paper, we propose a robust auto-encoder model that preserves the geometric relationships of high-dimensional data sets in Hamming space. This is done by considering a noise-removing function in a region surrounding the manifold where the training data points lie. This function is defined with the property that it projects the data points near the manifold into the manifold wisely, and we approximate this function by its first order approximation. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better than state-of-the-art results on three large scale high dimensional data sets.
[ "Xiping Fu, Brendan McCane, Steven Mills, Michael Albert and Lech\n Szymanski", "['Xiping Fu' 'Brendan McCane' 'Steven Mills' 'Michael Albert'\n 'Lech Szymanski']" ]
cs.SD cs.CL cs.LG
10.1117/12.884155
1602.08128
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.08128v1
2016-02-25T21:48:56Z
2016-02-25T21:48:56Z
PCA Method for Automated Detection of Mispronounced Words
This paper presents a method for detecting mispronunciations with the aim of improving Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) tools used by foreign language learners. The algorithm is based on Principle Component Analysis (PCA). It is hierarchical with each successive step refining the estimate to classify the test word as being either mispronounced or correct. Preprocessing before detection, like normalization and time-scale modification, is implemented to guarantee uniformity of the feature vectors input to the detection system. The performance using various features including spectrograms and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) are compared and evaluated. Best results were obtained using MFCCs, achieving up to 99% accuracy in word verification and 93% in native/non-native classification. Compared with Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) which are used pervasively in recognition application, this particular approach is computational efficient and effective when training data is limited.
[ "Zhenhao Ge, Sudhendu R. Sharma, Mark J. T. Smith", "['Zhenhao Ge' 'Sudhendu R. Sharma' 'Mark J. T. Smith']" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.08151
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.08151v2
2016-11-29T17:05:38Z
2016-02-25T23:46:57Z
Learning to Abstain from Binary Prediction
A binary classifier capable of abstaining from making a label prediction has two goals in tension: minimizing errors, and avoiding abstaining unnecessarily often. In this work, we exactly characterize the best achievable tradeoff between these two goals in a general semi-supervised setting, given an ensemble of predictors of varying competence as well as unlabeled data on which we wish to predict or abstain. We give an algorithm for learning a classifier in this setting which trades off its errors with abstentions in a minimax optimal manner, is as efficient as linear learning and prediction, and is demonstrably practical. Our analysis extends to a large class of loss functions and other scenarios, including ensembles comprised of specialists that can themselves abstain.
[ "Akshay Balsubramani", "['Akshay Balsubramani']" ]
quant-ph cs.AI cs.LG cs.NE nlin.CD
10.1103/PhysRevApplied.8.024030
1602.08159
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.08159v2
2016-11-09T16:05:22Z
2016-02-26T00:57:59Z
Harnessing disordered quantum dynamics for machine learning
Quantum computer has an amazing potential of fast information processing. However, realisation of a digital quantum computer is still a challenging problem requiring highly accurate controls and key application strategies. Here we propose a novel platform, quantum reservoir computing, to solve these issues successfully by exploiting natural quantum dynamics, which is ubiquitous in laboratories nowadays, for machine learning. In this framework, nonlinear dynamics including classical chaos can be universally emulated in quantum systems. A number of numerical experiments show that quantum systems consisting of at most seven qubits possess computational capabilities comparable to conventional recurrent neural networks of 500 nodes. This discovery opens up a new paradigm for information processing with artificial intelligence powered by quantum physics.
[ "Keisuke Fujii and Kohei Nakajima", "['Keisuke Fujii' 'Kohei Nakajima']" ]
cs.IR cs.LG
10.1145/2872518.2890549
1602.08186
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.08186v1
2016-02-26T03:22:40Z
2016-02-26T03:22:40Z
Search by Ideal Candidates: Next Generation of Talent Search at LinkedIn
One key challenge in talent search is how to translate complex criteria of a hiring position into a search query. This typically requires deep knowledge on which skills are typically needed for the position, what are their alternatives, which companies are likely to have such candidates, etc. However, listing examples of suitable candidates for a given position is a relatively easy job. Therefore, in order to help searchers overcome this challenge, we design a next generation of talent search paradigm at LinkedIn: Search by Ideal Candidates. This new system only needs the searcher to input one or several examples of suitable candidates for the position. The system will generate a query based on the input candidates and then retrieve and rank results based on the query as well as the input candidates. The query is also shown to the searcher to make the system transparent and to allow the searcher to interact with it. As the searcher modifies the initial query and makes it deviate from the ideal candidates, the search ranking function dynamically adjusts an refreshes the ranking results balancing between the roles of query and ideal candidates. As of writing this paper, the new system is being launched to our customers.
[ "['Viet Ha-Thuc' 'Ye Xu' 'Satya Pradeep Kanduri' 'Xianren Wu'\n 'Vijay Dialani' 'Yan Yan' 'Abhishek Gupta' 'Shakti Sinha']", "Viet Ha-Thuc, Ye Xu, Satya Pradeep Kanduri, Xianren Wu, Vijay Dialani,\n Yan Yan, Abhishek Gupta, Shakti Sinha" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.08191
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.08191v3
2016-10-01T02:44:07Z
2016-02-26T04:18:21Z
DeepSpark: A Spark-Based Distributed Deep Learning Framework for Commodity Clusters
The increasing complexity of deep neural networks (DNNs) has made it challenging to exploit existing large-scale data processing pipelines for handling massive data and parameters involved in DNN training. Distributed computing platforms and GPGPU-based acceleration provide a mainstream solution to this computational challenge. In this paper, we propose DeepSpark, a distributed and parallel deep learning framework that exploits Apache Spark on commodity clusters. To support parallel operations, DeepSpark automatically distributes workloads and parameters to Caffe/Tensorflow-running nodes using Spark, and iteratively aggregates training results by a novel lock-free asynchronous variant of the popular elastic averaging stochastic gradient descent based update scheme, effectively complementing the synchronized processing capabilities of Spark. DeepSpark is an on-going project, and the current release is available at http://deepspark.snu.ac.kr.
[ "['Hanjoo Kim' 'Jaehong Park' 'Jaehee Jang' 'Sungroh Yoon']", "Hanjoo Kim, Jaehong Park, Jaehee Jang, and Sungroh Yoon" ]
stat.ML cs.LG cs.NE
null
1602.08194
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.08194v2
2016-12-05T04:52:36Z
2016-02-26T05:07:23Z
Scalable and Sustainable Deep Learning via Randomized Hashing
Current deep learning architectures are growing larger in order to learn from complex datasets. These architectures require giant matrix multiplication operations to train millions of parameters. Conversely, there is another growing trend to bring deep learning to low-power, embedded devices. The matrix operations, associated with both training and testing of deep networks, are very expensive from a computational and energy standpoint. We present a novel hashing based technique to drastically reduce the amount of computation needed to train and test deep networks. Our approach combines recent ideas from adaptive dropouts and randomized hashing for maximum inner product search to select the nodes with the highest activation efficiently. Our new algorithm for deep learning reduces the overall computational cost of forward and back-propagation by operating on significantly fewer (sparse) nodes. As a consequence, our algorithm uses only 5% of the total multiplications, while keeping on average within 1% of the accuracy of the original model. A unique property of the proposed hashing based back-propagation is that the updates are always sparse. Due to the sparse gradient updates, our algorithm is ideally suited for asynchronous and parallel training leading to near linear speedup with increasing number of cores. We demonstrate the scalability and sustainability (energy efficiency) of our proposed algorithm via rigorous experimental evaluations on several real datasets.
[ "Ryan Spring, Anshumali Shrivastava", "['Ryan Spring' 'Anshumali Shrivastava']" ]
cs.LG cs.NE
null
1602.08210
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.08210v3
2016-11-12T19:38:43Z
2016-02-26T06:16:27Z
Architectural Complexity Measures of Recurrent Neural Networks
In this paper, we systematically analyze the connecting architectures of recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Our main contribution is twofold: first, we present a rigorous graph-theoretic framework describing the connecting architectures of RNNs in general. Second, we propose three architecture complexity measures of RNNs: (a) the recurrent depth, which captures the RNN's over-time nonlinear complexity, (b) the feedforward depth, which captures the local input-output nonlinearity (similar to the "depth" in feedforward neural networks (FNNs)), and (c) the recurrent skip coefficient which captures how rapidly the information propagates over time. We rigorously prove each measure's existence and computability. Our experimental results show that RNNs might benefit from larger recurrent depth and feedforward depth. We further demonstrate that increasing recurrent skip coefficient offers performance boosts on long term dependency problems.
[ "['Saizheng Zhang' 'Yuhuai Wu' 'Tong Che' 'Zhouhan Lin' 'Roland Memisevic'\n 'Ruslan Salakhutdinov' 'Yoshua Bengio']", "Saizheng Zhang, Yuhuai Wu, Tong Che, Zhouhan Lin, Roland Memisevic,\n Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Yoshua Bengio" ]