43,040 research outputs found
Similarity Learning for High-Dimensional Sparse Data
A good measure of similarity between data points is crucial to many tasks in
machine learning. Similarity and metric learning methods learn such measures
automatically from data, but they do not scale well respect to the
dimensionality of the data. In this paper, we propose a method that can learn
efficiently similarity measure from high-dimensional sparse data. The core idea
is to parameterize the similarity measure as a convex combination of rank-one
matrices with specific sparsity structures. The parameters are then optimized
with an approximate Frank-Wolfe procedure to maximally satisfy relative
similarity constraints on the training data. Our algorithm greedily
incorporates one pair of features at a time into the similarity measure,
providing an efficient way to control the number of active features and thus
reduce overfitting. It enjoys very appealing convergence guarantees and its
time and memory complexity depends on the sparsity of the data instead of the
dimension of the feature space. Our experiments on real-world high-dimensional
datasets demonstrate its potential for classification, dimensionality reduction
and data exploration.Comment: 14 pages. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2015). Matlab code:
https://github.com/bellet/HDS
HD-Index: Pushing the Scalability-Accuracy Boundary for Approximate kNN Search in High-Dimensional Spaces
Nearest neighbor searching of large databases in high-dimensional spaces is
inherently difficult due to the curse of dimensionality. A flavor of
approximation is, therefore, necessary to practically solve the problem of
nearest neighbor search. In this paper, we propose a novel yet simple indexing
scheme, HD-Index, to solve the problem of approximate k-nearest neighbor
queries in massive high-dimensional databases. HD-Index consists of a set of
novel hierarchical structures called RDB-trees built on Hilbert keys of
database objects. The leaves of the RDB-trees store distances of database
objects to reference objects, thereby allowing efficient pruning using distance
filters. In addition to triangular inequality, we also use Ptolemaic inequality
to produce better lower bounds. Experiments on massive (up to billion scale)
high-dimensional (up to 1000+) datasets show that HD-Index is effective,
efficient, and scalable.Comment: PVLDB 11(8):906-919, 201
Compositional Model based Fisher Vector Coding for Image Classification
Deriving from the gradient vector of a generative model of local features,
Fisher vector coding (FVC) has been identified as an effective coding method
for image classification. Most, if not all, FVC implementations employ the
Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to depict the generation process of local
features. However, the representative power of the GMM could be limited because
it essentially assumes that local features can be characterized by a fixed
number of feature prototypes and the number of prototypes is usually small in
FVC. To handle this limitation, in this paper we break the convention which
assumes that a local feature is drawn from one of few Gaussian distributions.
Instead, we adopt a compositional mechanism which assumes that a local feature
is drawn from a Gaussian distribution whose mean vector is composed as the
linear combination of multiple key components and the combination weight is a
latent random variable. In this way, we can greatly enhance the representative
power of the generative model of FVC. To implement our idea, we designed two
particular generative models with such a compositional mechanism.Comment: Fixed typos. 16 pages. Appearing in IEEE T. Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence (TPAMI
Unsupervised User Stance Detection on Twitter
We present a highly effective unsupervised framework for detecting the stance
of prolific Twitter users with respect to controversial topics. In particular,
we use dimensionality reduction to project users onto a low-dimensional space,
followed by clustering, which allows us to find core users that are
representative of the different stances. Our framework has three major
advantages over pre-existing methods, which are based on supervised or
semi-supervised classification. First, we do not require any prior labeling of
users: instead, we create clusters, which are much easier to label manually
afterwards, e.g., in a matter of seconds or minutes instead of hours. Second,
there is no need for domain- or topic-level knowledge either to specify the
relevant stances (labels) or to conduct the actual labeling. Third, our
framework is robust in the face of data skewness, e.g., when some users or some
stances have greater representation in the data. We experiment with different
combinations of user similarity features, dataset sizes, dimensionality
reduction methods, and clustering algorithms to ascertain the most effective
and most computationally efficient combinations across three different datasets
(in English and Turkish). We further verified our results on additional tweet
sets covering six different controversial topics. Our best combination in terms
of effectiveness and efficiency uses retweeted accounts as features, UMAP for
dimensionality reduction, and Mean Shift for clustering, and yields a small
number of high-quality user clusters, typically just 2--3, with more than 98\%
purity. The resulting user clusters can be used to train downstream
classifiers. Moreover, our framework is robust to variations in the
hyper-parameter values and also with respect to random initialization
Taming Wild High Dimensional Text Data with a Fuzzy Lash
The bag of words (BOW) represents a corpus in a matrix whose elements are the
frequency of words. However, each row in the matrix is a very high-dimensional
sparse vector. Dimension reduction (DR) is a popular method to address sparsity
and high-dimensionality issues. Among different strategies to develop DR
method, Unsupervised Feature Transformation (UFT) is a popular strategy to map
all words on a new basis to represent BOW. The recent increase of text data and
its challenges imply that DR area still needs new perspectives. Although a wide
range of methods based on the UFT strategy has been developed, the fuzzy
approach has not been considered for DR based on this strategy. This research
investigates the application of fuzzy clustering as a DR method based on the
UFT strategy to collapse BOW matrix to provide a lower-dimensional
representation of documents instead of the words in a corpus. The quantitative
evaluation shows that fuzzy clustering produces superior performance and
features to Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Singular Value
Decomposition (SVD), two popular DR methods based on the UFT strategy
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