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13,102
On the Difficulty of Selecting Ising Models with Approximate Recovery
cs.IT
In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the underlying graph associated with an Ising model given a number of independent and identically distributed samples. We adopt an \emph{approximate recovery} criterion that allows for a number of missed edges or incorrectly-included edges, in contrast with the widel...
computer science
13,103
Adversarial Top-$K$ Ranking
cs.IR
We study the top-$K$ ranking problem where the goal is to recover the set of top-$K$ ranked items out of a large collection of items based on partially revealed preferences. We consider an adversarial crowdsourced setting where there are two population sets, and pairwise comparison samples drawn from one of the populat...
computer science
13,104
Anomaly Detection in Clutter using Spectrally Enhanced Ladar
cs.LG
Discrete return (DR) Laser Detection and Ranging (Ladar) systems provide a series of echoes that reflect from objects in a scene. These can be first, last or multi-echo returns. In contrast, Full-Waveform (FW)-Ladar systems measure the intensity of light reflected from objects continuously over a period of time. In a c...
computer science
13,105
Online optimization and regret guarantees for non-additive long-term constraints
stat.ML
We consider online optimization in the 1-lookahead setting, where the objective does not decompose additively over the rounds of the online game. The resulting formulation enables us to deal with non-stationary and/or long-term constraints , which arise, for example, in online display advertising problems. We propose a...
computer science
13,106
Top-$K$ Ranking from Pairwise Comparisons: When Spectral Ranking is Optimal
cs.LG
We explore the top-$K$ rank aggregation problem. Suppose a collection of items is compared in pairs repeatedly, and we aim to recover a consistent ordering that focuses on the top-$K$ ranked items based on partially revealed preference information. We investigate the Bradley-Terry-Luce model in which one ranks items ac...
computer science
13,107
Trading-off variance and complexity in stochastic gradient descent
stat.ML
Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large-scale machine learning problems, by virtue of its light complexity per iteration. However, it lags behind its non-stochastic counterparts with respect to the convergence rate, due to high variance introduced by the stochastic updates. The popular Stochastic ...
computer science
13,108
Algorithms for Learning Sparse Additive Models with Interactions in High Dimensions
cs.LG
A function $f: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is a Sparse Additive Model (SPAM), if it is of the form $f(\mathbf{x}) = \sum_{l \in \mathcal{S}}\phi_{l}(x_l)$ where $\mathcal{S} \subset [d]$, $|\mathcal{S}| \ll d$. Assuming $\phi$'s, $\mathcal{S}$ to be unknown, there exists extensive work for estimating $f$ from ...
computer science
13,109
A Bayesian Approach to Policy Recognition and State Representation Learning
stat.ML
Learning from demonstration (LfD) is the process of building behavioral models of a task from demonstrations provided by an expert. These models can be used e.g. for system control by generalizing the expert demonstrations to previously unencountered situations. Most LfD methods, however, make strong assumptions about ...
computer science
13,110
Competitive analysis of the top-K ranking problem
cs.DS
Motivated by applications in recommender systems, web search, social choice and crowdsourcing, we consider the problem of identifying the set of top $K$ items from noisy pairwise comparisons. In our setting, we are non-actively given $r$ pairwise comparisons between each pair of $n$ items, where each comparison has noi...
computer science
13,111
Fast Randomized Semi-Supervised Clustering
cs.LG
We consider the problem of clustering partially labeled data from a minimal number of randomly chosen pairwise comparisons between the items. We introduce an efficient local algorithm based on a power iteration of the non-backtracking operator and study its performance on a simple model. For the case of two clusters, w...
computer science
13,112
A note on the expected minimum error probability in equientropic channels
cs.IT
While the channel capacity reflects a theoretical upper bound on the achievable information transmission rate in the limit of infinitely many bits, it does not characterise the information transfer of a given encoding routine with finitely many bits. In this note, we characterise the quality of a code (i. e. a given en...
computer science
13,113
Average-case Hardness of RIP Certification
cs.LG
The restricted isometry property (RIP) for design matrices gives guarantees for optimal recovery in sparse linear models. It is of high interest in compressed sensing and statistical learning. This property is particularly important for computationally efficient recovery methods. As a consequence, even though it is in ...
computer science
13,114
CYCLADES: Conflict-free Asynchronous Machine Learning
stat.ML
We present CYCLADES, a general framework for parallelizing stochastic optimization algorithms in a shared memory setting. CYCLADES is asynchronous during shared model updates, and requires no memory locking mechanisms, similar to HOGWILD!-type algorithms. Unlike HOGWILD!, CYCLADES introduces no conflicts during the par...
computer science
13,115
Learning Power Spectrum Maps from Quantized Power Measurements
cs.IT
Power spectral density (PSD) maps providing the distribution of RF power across space and frequency are constructed using power measurements collected by a network of low-cost sensors. By introducing linear compression and quantization to a small number of bits, sensor measurements can be communicated to the fusion cen...
computer science
13,116
Inferring Sparsity: Compressed Sensing using Generalized Restricted Boltzmann Machines
cs.IT
In this work, we consider compressed sensing reconstruction from $M$ measurements of $K$-sparse structured signals which do not possess a writable correlation model. Assuming that a generative statistical model, such as a Boltzmann machine, can be trained in an unsupervised manner on example signals, we demonstrate how...
computer science
13,117
Lower Bounds on Active Learning for Graphical Model Selection
cs.IT
We consider the problem of estimating the underlying graph associated with a Markov random field, with the added twist that the decoding algorithm can iteratively choose which subsets of nodes to sample based on the previous samples, resulting in an active learning setting. Considering both Ising and Gaussian models, w...
computer science
13,118
LazySVD: Even Faster SVD Decomposition Yet Without Agonizing Pain
cs.NA
We study $k$-SVD that is to obtain the first $k$ singular vectors of a matrix $A$. Recently, a few breakthroughs have been discovered on $k$-SVD: Musco and Musco [1] proved the first gap-free convergence result using the block Krylov method, Shamir [2] discovered the first variance-reduction stochastic method, and Bhoj...
computer science
13,119
First Efficient Convergence for Streaming k-PCA: a Global, Gap-Free, and Near-Optimal Rate
math.OC
We study streaming principal component analysis (PCA), that is to find, in $O(dk)$ space, the top $k$ eigenvectors of a $d\times d$ hidden matrix $\bf \Sigma$ with online vectors drawn from covariance matrix $\bf \Sigma$. We provide $\textit{global}$ convergence for Oja's algorithm which is popularly used in practice...
computer science
13,120
Faster Principal Component Regression and Stable Matrix Chebyshev Approximation
stat.ML
We solve principal component regression (PCR), up to a multiplicative accuracy $1+\gamma$, by reducing the problem to $\tilde{O}(\gamma^{-1})$ black-box calls of ridge regression. Therefore, our algorithm does not require any explicit construction of the top principal components, and is suitable for large-scale PCR ins...
computer science
13,121
Global analysis of Expectation Maximization for mixtures of two Gaussians
math.ST
Expectation Maximization (EM) is among the most popular algorithms for estimating parameters of statistical models. However, EM, which is an iterative algorithm based on the maximum likelihood principle, is generally only guaranteed to find stationary points of the likelihood objective, and these points may be far from...
computer science
13,122
A Tutorial on Distributed (Non-Bayesian) Learning: Problem, Algorithms and Results
math.OC
We overview some results on distributed learning with focus on a family of recently proposed algorithms known as non-Bayesian social learning. We consider different approaches to the distributed learning problem and its algorithmic solutions for the case of finitely many hypotheses. The original centralized problem is ...
computer science
13,123
Linear Hypothesis Testing in Dense High-Dimensional Linear Models
stat.ME
We propose a methodology for testing linear hypothesis in high-dimensional linear models. The proposed test does not impose any restriction on the size of the model, i.e. model sparsity or the loading vector representing the hypothesis. Providing asymptotically valid methods for testing general linear functions of the ...
computer science
13,124
Single Pass PCA of Matrix Products
stat.ML
In this paper we present a new algorithm for computing a low rank approximation of the product $A^TB$ by taking only a single pass of the two matrices $A$ and $B$. The straightforward way to do this is to (a) first sketch $A$ and $B$ individually, and then (b) find the top components using PCA on the sketch. Our algori...
computer science
13,125
Cross: Efficient Low-rank Tensor Completion
stat.ME
The completion of tensors, or high-order arrays, attracts significant attention in recent research. Current literature on tensor completion primarily focuses on recovery from a set of uniformly randomly measured entries, and the required number of measurements to achieve recovery is not guaranteed to be optimal. In add...
computer science
13,126
Learning an Astronomical Catalog of the Visible Universe through Scalable Bayesian Inference
cs.DC
Celeste is a procedure for inferring astronomical catalogs that attains state-of-the-art scientific results. To date, Celeste has been scaled to at most hundreds of megabytes of astronomical images: Bayesian posterior inference is notoriously demanding computationally. In this paper, we report on a scalable, parallel v...
computer science
13,127
Efficient Policy Learning
math.ST
We consider the problem of using observational data to learn treatment assignment policies that satisfy certain constraints specified by a practitioner, such as budget, fairness, or functional form constraints. This problem has previously been studied in economics, statistics, and computer science, and several regret-c...
computer science
13,128
Approximations of the Restless Bandit Problem
math.ST
The multi-armed restless bandit problem is studied in the case where the pay-offs are not necessarily independent over time nor across the arms. Even though this version of the problem provides a more realistic model for most real-world applications, it cannot be optimally solved in practice since it is known to be PSP...
computer science
13,129
Scalable and Distributed Clustering via Lightweight Coresets
stat.ML
Coresets are compact representations of data sets such that models trained on a coreset are provably competitive with models trained on the full data set. As such, they have been successfully used to scale up clustering models to massive data sets. While existing approaches generally only allow for multiplicative appro...
computer science
13,130
Distributed Bayesian Matrix Factorization with Limited Communication
stat.ML
Bayesian matrix factorization (BMF) is a powerful tool for producing low-rank representations of matrices and for predicting missing values and their confidence intervals. Scaling up the posterior inference for massive-scale matrices is challenging and requires distributing both data and computation over many workers, ...
computer science
13,131
Being Robust (in High Dimensions) Can Be Practical
cs.LG
Robust estimation is much more challenging in high dimensions than it is in one dimension: Most techniques either lead to intractable optimization problems or estimators that can tolerate only a tiny fraction of errors. Recent work in theoretical computer science has shown that, in appropriate distributional models, it...
computer science
13,132
Exact MAP Inference by Avoiding Fractional Vertices
stat.ML
Given a graphical model, one essential problem is MAP inference, that is, finding the most likely configuration of states according to the model. Although this problem is NP-hard, large instances can be solved in practice. A major open question is to explain why this is true. We give a natural condition under which we ...
computer science
13,133
Leveraging Sparsity for Efficient Submodular Data Summarization
stat.ML
The facility location problem is widely used for summarizing large datasets and has additional applications in sensor placement, image retrieval, and clustering. One difficulty of this problem is that submodular optimization algorithms require the calculation of pairwise benefits for all items in the dataset. This is i...
computer science
13,134
Tensor SVD: Statistical and Computational Limits
math.ST
In this paper, we propose a general framework for tensor singular value decomposition (tensor SVD), which focuses on the methodology and theory for extracting the hidden low-rank structure from high-dimensional tensor data. Comprehensive results are developed on both the statistical and computational limits for tensor ...
computer science
13,135
Riemannian stochastic quasi-Newton algorithm with variance reduction and its convergence analysis
cs.LG
Stochastic variance reduction algorithms have recently become popular for minimizing the average of a large, but finite number of loss functions. The present paper proposes a Riemannian stochastic quasi-Newton algorithm with variance reduction (R-SQN-VR). The key challenges of averaging, adding, and subtracting multipl...
computer science
13,136
Characterization of Deterministic and Probabilistic Sampling Patterns for Finite Completability of Low Tensor-Train Rank Tensor
cs.LG
In this paper, we analyze the fundamental conditions for low-rank tensor completion given the separation or tensor-train (TT) rank, i.e., ranks of unfoldings. We exploit the algebraic structure of the TT decomposition to obtain the deterministic necessary and sufficient conditions on the locations of the samples to ens...
computer science
13,137
The Informativeness of $k$-Means and Dimensionality Reduction for Learning Mixture Models
stat.ML
The learning of mixture models can be viewed as a clustering problem. Indeed, given data samples independently generated from a mixture of distributions, we often would like to find the correct target clustering of the samples according to which component distribution they were generated from. For a clustering problem,...
computer science
13,138
Distributed Learning for Cooperative Inference
math.OC
We study the problem of cooperative inference where a group of agents interact over a network and seek to estimate a joint parameter that best explains a set of observations. Agents do not know the network topology or the observations of other agents. We explore a variational interpretation of the Bayesian posterior de...
computer science
13,139
Group Importance Sampling for Particle Filtering and MCMC
stat.CO
Importance Sampling (IS) is a well-known Monte Carlo technique that approximates integrals involving a posterior distribution by means of weighted samples. In this work, we study the assignation of a single weighted sample which compresses the information contained in a population of weighted samples. Part of the theor...
computer science
13,140
Energy Propagation in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
cs.IT
Many practical machine learning tasks employ very deep convolutional neural networks. Such large depths pose formidable computational challenges in training and operating the network. It is therefore important to understand how fast the energy contained in the propagated signals (a.k.a. feature maps) decays across laye...
computer science
13,141
A decentralized proximal-gradient method with network independent step-sizes and separated convergence rates
math.OC
This paper considers the problem of decentralized optimization with a composite objective containing smooth and non-smooth terms. To solve the problem, a proximal-gradient scheme is studied. Specifically, the smooth and nonsmooth terms are dealt with by gradient update and proximal update, respectively. The studied alg...
computer science
13,142
Accelerating Stochastic Gradient Descent
stat.ML
There is widespread sentiment that it is not possible to effectively utilize fast gradient methods (e.g. Nesterov's acceleration, conjugate gradient, heavy ball) for the purposes of stochastic optimization due to their instability and error accumulation, a notion made precise in d'Aspremont 2008 and Devolder, Glineur, ...
computer science
13,143
Geometry and Dynamics for Markov Chain Monte Carlo
stat.CO
Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods have revolutionised mathematical computation and enabled statistical inference within many previously intractable models. In this context, Hamiltonian dynamics have been proposed as an efficient way of building chains which can explore probability densities efficiently. The method emerg...
computer science
13,144
Learning ReLUs via Gradient Descent
cs.LG
In this paper we study the problem of learning Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) which are functions of the form $max(0,<w,x>)$ with $w$ denoting the weight vector. We study this problem in the high-dimensional regime where the number of observations are fewer than the dimension of the weight vector. We assume that the we...
computer science
13,145
Learning Feature Nonlinearities with Non-Convex Regularized Binned Regression
cs.LG
For various applications, the relations between the dependent and independent variables are highly nonlinear. Consequently, for large scale complex problems, neural networks and regression trees are commonly preferred over linear models such as Lasso. This work proposes learning the feature nonlinearities by binning fe...
computer science
13,146
Personalized and Private Peer-to-Peer Machine Learning
cs.LG
The rise of connected personal devices together with privacy concerns call for machine learning algorithms capable of leveraging the data of a large number of agents to learn personalized models under strong privacy requirements. In this paper, we introduce an efficient algorithm to address the above problem in a fully...
computer science
13,147
Learning Whenever Learning is Possible: Universal Learning under General Stochastic Processes
stat.ML
This work initiates a general study of learning and generalization without the i.i.d. assumption, starting from first principles. While the standard approach to statistical learning theory is based on assumptions chosen largely for their convenience (e.g., i.i.d. or stationary ergodic), in this work we are interested i...
computer science
13,148
On the Optimization Landscape of Tensor Decompositions
cs.LG
Non-convex optimization with local search heuristics has been widely used in machine learning, achieving many state-of-art results. It becomes increasingly important to understand why they can work for these NP-hard problems on typical data. The landscape of many objective functions in learning has been conjectured to ...
computer science
13,149
Clustering with Noisy Queries
stat.ML
In this paper, we initiate a rigorous theoretical study of clustering with noisy queries (or a faulty oracle). Given a set of $n$ elements, our goal is to recover the true clustering by asking minimum number of pairwise queries to an oracle. Oracle can answer queries of the form : "do elements $u$ and $v$ belong to the...
computer science
13,150
Query Complexity of Clustering with Side Information
stat.ML
Suppose, we are given a set of $n$ elements to be clustered into $k$ (unknown) clusters, and an oracle/expert labeler that can interactively answer pair-wise queries of the form, "do two elements $u$ and $v$ belong to the same cluster?". The goal is to recover the optimum clustering by asking the minimum number of quer...
computer science
13,151
Accelerated Stochastic Power Iteration
math.OC
Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most powerful tools in machine learning. The simplest method for PCA, the power iteration, requires $\mathcal O(1/\Delta)$ full-data passes to recover the principal component of a matrix with eigen-gap $\Delta$. Lanczos, a significantly more complex method, achieves an a...
computer science
13,152
Subdeterminant Maximization via Nonconvex Relaxations and Anti-concentration
cs.DS
Several fundamental problems that arise in optimization and computer science can be cast as follows: Given vectors $v_1,\ldots,v_m \in \mathbb{R}^d$ and a constraint family ${\cal B}\subseteq 2^{[m]}$, find a set $S \in \cal{B}$ that maximizes the squared volume of the simplex spanned by the vectors in $S$. A motivatin...
computer science
13,153
Theoretical insights into the optimization landscape of over-parameterized shallow neural networks
cs.LG
In this paper we study the problem of learning a shallow artificial neural network that best fits a training data set. We study this problem in the over-parameterized regime where the number of observations are fewer than the number of parameters in the model. We show that with quadratic activations the optimization la...
computer science
13,154
Differentially Private Identity and Closeness Testing of Discrete Distributions
cs.LG
We investigate the problems of identity and closeness testing over a discrete population from random samples. Our goal is to develop efficient testers while guaranteeing Differential Privacy to the individuals of the population. We describe an approach that yields sample-efficient differentially private testers for the...
computer science
13,155
Comparison of Decision Tree Based Classification Strategies to Detect External Chemical Stimuli from Raw and Filtered Plant Electrical Response
cs.LG
Plants monitor their surrounding environment and control their physiological functions by producing an electrical response. We recorded electrical signals from different plants by exposing them to Sodium Chloride (NaCl), Ozone (O3) and Sulfuric Acid (H2SO4) under laboratory conditions. After applying pre-processing tec...
computer science
13,156
Belief Propagation, Bethe Approximation and Polynomials
cs.LG
Factor graphs are important models for succinctly representing probability distributions in machine learning, coding theory, and statistical physics. Several computational problems, such as computing marginals and partition functions, arise naturally when working with factor graphs. Belief propagation is a widely deplo...
computer science
13,157
Fixed effects testing in high-dimensional linear mixed models
stat.ME
Many scientific and engineering challenges -- ranging from pharmacokinetic drug dosage allocation and personalized medicine to marketing mix (4Ps) recommendations -- require an understanding of the unobserved heterogeneity in order to develop the best decision making-processes. In this paper, we develop a hypothesis te...
computer science
13,158
Mixing time estimation in reversible Markov chains from a single sample path
math.ST
The spectral gap $\gamma$ of a finite, ergodic, and reversible Markov chain is an important parameter measuring the asymptotic rate of convergence. In applications, the transition matrix $P$ may be unknown, yet one sample of the chain up to a fixed time $n$ may be observed. We consider here the problem of estimating $\...
computer science
13,159
Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Speech Enhancement and Noise-Robust Speaker Verification
eess.AS
Improving speech system performance in noisy environments remains a challenging task, and speech enhancement (SE) is one of the effective techniques to solve the problem. Motivated by the promising results of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in a variety of image processing tasks, we explore the potential of cond...
computer science
13,160
Rates of Convergence of Spectral Methods for Graphon Estimation
stat.ML
This paper studies the problem of estimating the grahpon model - the underlying generating mechanism of a network. Graphon estimation arises in many applications such as predicting missing links in networks and learning user preferences in recommender systems. The graphon model deals with a random graph of $n$ vertices...
computer science
13,161
DAGGER: A sequential algorithm for FDR control on DAGs
stat.ME
We propose a top-down algorithm for multiple testing on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where nodes represent hypotheses and edges specify a partial ordering in which hypotheses must be tested. The procedure is guaranteed to reject a sub-DAG with bounded false discovery rate (FDR) while satisfying the logical constrain...
computer science
13,162
Bayesian estimation from few samples: community detection and related problems
cs.DS
We propose an efficient meta-algorithm for Bayesian estimation problems that is based on low-degree polynomials, semidefinite programming, and tensor decomposition. The algorithm is inspired by recent lower bound constructions for sum-of-squares and related to the method of moments. Our focus is on sample complexity bo...
computer science
13,163
Online control of the false discovery rate with decaying memory
stat.ME
In the online multiple testing problem, p-values corresponding to different null hypotheses are observed one by one, and the decision of whether or not to reject the current hypothesis must be made immediately, after which the next p-value is observed. Alpha-investing algorithms to control the false discovery rate (FDR...
computer science
13,164
Forecasting Across Time Series Databases using Long Short-Term Memory Networks on Groups of Similar Series
cs.LG
With the advent of Big Data, nowadays in many applications databases containing large quantities of similar time series are available. Forecasting time series in these domains with traditional univariate forecasting procedures leaves great potentials for producing accurate forecasts untapped. Recurrent neural networks,...
computer science
13,165
An introduction to Topological Data Analysis: fundamental and practical aspects for data scientists
math.ST
Topological Data Analysis (tda) is a recent and fast growing eld providing a set of new topological and geometric tools to infer relevant features for possibly complex data. This paper is a brief introduction, through a few selected topics, to basic fundamental and practical aspects of tda for non experts. 1 Introducti...
computer science
13,166
Convergence diagnostics for stochastic gradient descent with constant step size
stat.ML
Many iterative procedures in stochastic optimization exhibit a transient phase followed by a stationary phase. During the transient phase the procedure converges towards a region of interest, and during the stationary phase the procedure oscillates in that region, commonly around a single point. In this paper, we devel...
computer science
13,167
Stability and Generalization of Learning Algorithms that Converge to Global Optima
stat.ML
We establish novel generalization bounds for learning algorithms that converge to global minima. We do so by deriving black-box stability results that only depend on the convergence of a learning algorithm and the geometry around the minimizers of the loss function. The results are shown for nonconvex loss functions sa...
computer science
13,168
Contextual Regression: An Accurate and Conveniently Interpretable Nonlinear Model for Mining Discovery from Scientific Data
cs.LG
Machine learning algorithms such as linear regression, SVM and neural network have played an increasingly important role in the process of scientific discovery. However, none of them is both interpretable and accurate on nonlinear datasets. Here we present contextual regression, a method that joins these two desirable ...
computer science
13,169
Implicit Causal Models for Genome-wide Association Studies
stat.ML
Progress in probabilistic generative models has accelerated, developing richer models with neural architectures, implicit densities, and with scalable algorithms for their Bayesian inference. However, there has been limited progress in models that capture causal relationships, for example, how individual genetic factor...
computer science
13,170
Orthogonal Machine Learning: Power and Limitations
cs.LG
Double machine learning provides $\sqrt{n}$-consistent estimates of parameters of interest even when high-dimensional or nonparametric nuisance parameters are estimated at an $n^{-1/4}$ rate. The key is to employ Neyman-orthogonal moment equations which are first-order insensitive to perturbations in the nuisance param...
computer science
13,171
Medoids in almost linear time via multi-armed bandits
stat.ML
Computing the medoid of a large number of points in high-dimensional space is an increasingly common operation in many data science problems. We present an algorithm Med-dit which uses O(n log n) distance evaluations to compute the medoid with high probability. Med-dit is based on a connection with the multi-armed band...
computer science
13,172
Simultaneous Block-Sparse Signal Recovery Using Pattern-Coupled Sparse Bayesian Learning
cs.LG
In this paper, we consider the block-sparse signals recovery problem in the context of multiple measurement vectors (MMV) with common row sparsity patterns. We develop a new method for recovery of common row sparsity MMV signals, where a pattern-coupled hierarchical Gaussian prior model is introduced to characterize bo...
computer science
13,173
Convex Optimization with Nonconvex Oracles
cs.DS
In machine learning and optimization, one often wants to minimize a convex objective function $F$ but can only evaluate a noisy approximation $\hat{F}$ to it. Even though $F$ is convex, the noise may render $\hat{F}$ nonconvex, making the task of minimizing $F$ intractable in general. As a consequence, several works in...
computer science
13,174
Crafting Adversarial Examples For Speech Paralinguistics Applications
cs.LG
Computational paralinguistic analysis is increasingly being used in a wide range of applications, including security-sensitive applications such as speaker verification, deceptive speech detection, and medical diagnosis. While state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, such as deep neural networks, can provide robus...
computer science
13,175
Straggler Mitigation in Distributed Optimization Through Data Encoding
stat.ML
Slow running or straggler tasks can significantly reduce computation speed in distributed computation. Recently, coding-theory-inspired approaches have been applied to mitigate the effect of straggling, through embedding redundancy in certain linear computational steps of the optimization algorithm, thus completing the...
computer science
13,176
Predictive Independence Testing, Predictive Conditional Independence Testing, and Predictive Graphical Modelling
stat.ML
Testing (conditional) independence of multivariate random variables is a task central to statistical inference and modelling in general - though unfortunately one for which to date there does not exist a practicable workflow. State-of-art workflows suffer from the need for heuristic or subjective manual choices, high c...
computer science
13,177
Scaling Limit: Exact and Tractable Analysis of Online Learning Algorithms with Applications to Regularized Regression and PCA
cs.LG
We present a framework for analyzing the exact dynamics of a class of online learning algorithms in the high-dimensional scaling limit. Our results are applied to two concrete examples: online regularized linear regression and principal component analysis. As the ambient dimension tends to infinity, and with proper tim...
computer science
13,178
Riemann-Theta Boltzmann Machine
stat.ML
A general Boltzmann machine with continuous visible and discrete integer valued hidden states is introduced. Under mild assumptions about the connection matrices, the probability density function of the visible units can be solved for analytically, yielding a novel parametric density function involving a ratio of Riema...
computer science
13,179
IHT dies hard: Provable accelerated Iterative Hard Thresholding
math.OC
We study --both in theory and practice-- the use of momentum motions in classic iterative hard thresholding (IHT) methods. By simply modifying plain IHT, we investigate its convergence behavior on convex optimization criteria with non-convex constraints, under standard assumptions. In diverse scenaria, we observe that ...
computer science
13,180
Momentum and Stochastic Momentum for Stochastic Gradient, Newton, Proximal Point and Subspace Descent Methods
math.OC
In this paper we study several classes of stochastic optimization algorithms enriched with heavy ball momentum. Among the methods studied are: stochastic gradient descent, stochastic Newton, stochastic proximal point and stochastic dual subspace ascent. This is the first time momentum variants of several of these metho...
computer science
13,181
Probabilistic supervised learning
stat.ML
Predictive modelling and supervised learning are central to modern data science. With predictions from an ever-expanding number of supervised black-box strategies - e.g., kernel methods, random forests, deep learning aka neural networks - being employed as a basis for decision making processes, it is crucial to underst...
computer science
13,182
Which Neural Net Architectures Give Rise To Exploding and Vanishing Gradients?
stat.ML
We give a rigorous analysis of the statistical behavior of gradients in randomly initialized feed-forward networks with ReLU activations. Our results show that a fully connected depth $d$ ReLU net with hidden layer widths $n_j$ will have exploding and vanishing gradients if and only if $\sum_{j=1}^{d-1} 1/n_j$ is large...
computer science
13,183
Estimating the Number of Connected Components in a Graph via Subgraph Sampling
math.ST
Learning properties of large graphs from samples has been an important problem in statistical network analysis since the early work of Goodman \cite{Goodman1949} and Frank \cite{Frank1978}. We revisit a problem formulated by Frank \cite{Frank1978} of estimating the number of connected components in a large graph based ...
computer science
13,184
Learning Compact Neural Networks with Regularization
cs.LG
We study the impact of regularization for learning neural networks. Our goal is speeding up training, improving generalization performance, and training compact models that are cost efficient. Our results apply to weight-sharing (e.g.~convolutional), sparsity (i.e.~pruning), and low-rank constraints among others. We fi...
computer science
13,185
Communication-Computation Efficient Gradient Coding
stat.ML
This paper develops coding techniques to reduce the running time of distributed learning tasks. It characterizes the fundamental tradeoff to compute gradients (and more generally vector summations) in terms of three parameters: computation load, straggler tolerance and communication cost. It further gives an explicit c...
computer science
13,186
Learning to Gather without Communication
cs.DC
A standard belief on emerging collective behavior is that it emerges from simple individual rules. Most of the mathematical research on such collective behavior starts from imperative individual rules, like always go to the center. But how could an (optimal) individual rule emerge during a short period within the group...
computer science
13,187
Sampling as optimization in the space of measures: The Langevin dynamics as a composite optimization problem
math.OC
We study sampling as optimization in the space of measures. We focus on gradient flow-based optimization with the Langevin dynamics as a case study. We investigate the source of the bias of the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) in discrete time, and consider how to remove or reduce the bias. We point out the difficul...
computer science
13,188
Proportional Volume Sampling and Approximation Algorithms for A-Optimal Design
cs.DS
We study the $A$-optimal design problem where we are given vectors $v_1,\ldots,v_n\in\mathbb{R}^d$, an integer $k\geq d$, and the goal is to select a set $S$ of $k$ vectors that minimizes the trace of $(\sum_{i\in S}v_iv_i^\top)^{-1}$. Traditionally, the problem is an instance of optimal design of experiments in statis...
computer science
13,189
An efficient $k$-means-type algorithm for clustering datasets with incomplete records
stat.ML
The $k$-means algorithm is the most popular nonparametric clustering method in use, but cannot generally be applied to data sets with missing observations. The usual practice with such data sets is to either impute the values under an assumption of a missing-at-random mechanism or to ignore the incomplete records, and ...
computer science
13,190
Harnessing Structures in Big Data via Guaranteed Low-Rank Matrix Estimation
stat.ML
Low-rank modeling plays a pivotal role in signal processing and machine learning, with applications ranging from collaborative filtering, video surveillance, medical imaging, to dimensionality reduction and adaptive filtering. Many modern high-dimensional data and interactions thereof can be modeled as lying approximat...
computer science
13,191
Dimensionally Tight Running Time Bounds for Second-Order Hamiltonian Monte Carlo
cs.DS
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a widely deployed method to sample from a given high-dimensional distribution in Statistics and Machine learning. HMC is known to run very efficiently in practice and its second-order variant was conjectured to run in $d^{1/4}$ steps in 1988. Here we show that this conjecture is true wh...
computer science
13,192
Random perturbation and matrix sparsification and completion
stat.ML
We discuss general perturbation inequalities when the perturbation is random. As applications, we obtain several new results concerning two important problems: matrix sparsification and matrix completion.
computer science
13,193
Learning to Recognize Musical Genre from Audio
cs.SD
We here summarize our experience running a challenge with open data for musical genre recognition. Those notes motivate the task and the challenge design, show some statistics about the submissions, and present the results.
computer science
13,194
Aggregating Strategies for Long-term Forecasting
cs.LG
The article is devoted to investigating the application of aggregating algorithms to the problem of the long-term forecasting. We examine the classic aggregating algorithms based on the exponential reweighing. For the general Vovk's aggregating algorithm we provide its generalization for the long-term forecasting. For ...
computer science
13,195
Numerical Integration on Graphs: where to sample and how to weigh
math.ST
Let $G=(V,E,w)$ be a finite, connected graph with weighted edges. We are interested in the problem of finding a subset $W \subset V$ of vertices and weights $a_w$ such that $$ \frac{1}{|V|}\sum_{v \in V}^{}{f(v)} \sim \sum_{w \in W}{a_w f(w)}$$ for functions $f:V \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ that are `smooth' with respect t...
computer science
13,196
Entropy estimation of symbol sequences
cs.CL
We discuss algorithms for estimating the Shannon entropy h of finite symbol sequences with long range correlations. In particular, we consider algorithms which estimate h from the code lengths produced by some compression algorithm. Our interest is in describing their convergence with sequence length, assuming no limit...
computer science
13,197
Statistical methods for tissue array images - algorithmic scoring and co-training
stat.ME
Recent advances in tissue microarray technology have allowed immunohistochemistry to become a powerful medium-to-high throughput analysis tool, particularly for the validation of diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers. However, as study size grows, the manual evaluation of these assays becomes a prohibitive limitation; i...
computer science
13,198
Getting Feasible Variable Estimates From Infeasible Ones: MRF Local Polytope Study
cs.NA
This paper proposes a method for construction of approximate feasible primal solutions from dual ones for large-scale optimization problems possessing certain separability properties. Whereas infeasible primal estimates can typically be produced from (sub-)gradients of the dual function, it is often not easy to project...
computer science
13,199
Quantum Energy Regression using Scattering Transforms
cs.LG
We present a novel approach to the regression of quantum mechanical energies based on a scattering transform of an intermediate electron density representation. A scattering transform is a deep convolution network computed with a cascade of multiscale wavelet transforms. It possesses appropriate invariant and stability...
computer science
13,200
The Ordered Weighted $\ell_1$ Norm: Atomic Formulation, Projections, and Algorithms
cs.DS
The ordered weighted $\ell_1$ norm (OWL) was recently proposed, with two different motivations: its good statistical properties as a sparsity promoting regularizer; the fact that it generalizes the so-called {\it octagonal shrinkage and clustering algorithm for regression} (OSCAR), which has the ability to cluster/grou...
computer science
13,201
Meta learning of bounds on the Bayes classifier error
cs.LG
Meta learning uses information from base learners (e.g. classifiers or estimators) as well as information about the learning problem to improve upon the performance of a single base learner. For example, the Bayes error rate of a given feature space, if known, can be used to aid in choosing a classifier, as well as in ...
computer science