753 research outputs found
Efficient Discovery of Association Rules and Frequent Itemsets through Sampling with Tight Performance Guarantees
The tasks of extracting (top-) Frequent Itemsets (FI's) and Association
Rules (AR's) are fundamental primitives in data mining and database
applications. Exact algorithms for these problems exist and are widely used,
but their running time is hindered by the need of scanning the entire dataset,
possibly multiple times. High quality approximations of FI's and AR's are
sufficient for most practical uses, and a number of recent works explored the
application of sampling for fast discovery of approximate solutions to the
problems. However, these works do not provide satisfactory performance
guarantees on the quality of the approximation, due to the difficulty of
bounding the probability of under- or over-sampling any one of an unknown
number of frequent itemsets. In this work we circumvent this issue by applying
the statistical concept of \emph{Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension} to develop
a novel technique for providing tight bounds on the sample size that guarantees
approximation within user-specified parameters. Our technique applies both to
absolute and to relative approximations of (top-) FI's and AR's. The
resulting sample size is linearly dependent on the VC-dimension of a range
space associated with the dataset to be mined. The main theoretical
contribution of this work is a proof that the VC-dimension of this range space
is upper bounded by an easy-to-compute characteristic quantity of the dataset
which we call \emph{d-index}, and is the maximum integer such that the
dataset contains at least transactions of length at least such that no
one of them is a superset of or equal to another. We show that this bound is
strict for a large class of datasets.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures. A shorter version of this paper appeared in the
proceedings of ECML PKDD 201
Sum of squares lower bounds for refuting any CSP
Let be a nontrivial -ary predicate. Consider a
random instance of the constraint satisfaction problem on
variables with constraints, each being applied to randomly
chosen literals. Provided the constraint density satisfies , such
an instance is unsatisfiable with high probability. The \emph{refutation}
problem is to efficiently find a proof of unsatisfiability.
We show that whenever the predicate supports a -\emph{wise uniform}
probability distribution on its satisfying assignments, the sum of squares
(SOS) algorithm of degree
(which runs in time ) \emph{cannot} refute a random instance of
. In particular, the polynomial-time SOS algorithm requires
constraints to refute random instances of
CSP when supports a -wise uniform distribution on its satisfying
assignments. Together with recent work of Lee et al. [LRS15], our result also
implies that \emph{any} polynomial-size semidefinite programming relaxation for
refutation requires at least constraints.
Our results (which also extend with no change to CSPs over larger alphabets)
subsume all previously known lower bounds for semialgebraic refutation of
random CSPs. For every constraint predicate~, they give a three-way hardness
tradeoff between the density of constraints, the SOS degree (hence running
time), and the strength of the refutation. By recent algorithmic results of
Allen et al. [AOW15] and Raghavendra et al. [RRS16], this full three-way
tradeoff is \emph{tight}, up to lower-order factors.Comment: 39 pages, 1 figur
Reed-Muller codes for random erasures and errors
This paper studies the parameters for which Reed-Muller (RM) codes over
can correct random erasures and random errors with high probability,
and in particular when can they achieve capacity for these two classical
channels. Necessarily, the paper also studies properties of evaluations of
multi-variate polynomials on random sets of inputs.
For erasures, we prove that RM codes achieve capacity both for very high rate
and very low rate regimes. For errors, we prove that RM codes achieve capacity
for very low rate regimes, and for very high rates, we show that they can
uniquely decode at about square root of the number of errors at capacity.
The proofs of these four results are based on different techniques, which we
find interesting in their own right. In particular, we study the following
questions about , the matrix whose rows are truth tables of all
monomials of degree in variables. What is the most (resp. least)
number of random columns in that define a submatrix having full column
rank (resp. full row rank) with high probability? We obtain tight bounds for
very small (resp. very large) degrees , which we use to show that RM codes
achieve capacity for erasures in these regimes.
Our decoding from random errors follows from the following novel reduction.
For every linear code of sufficiently high rate we construct a new code
, also of very high rate, such that for every subset of coordinates, if
can recover from erasures in , then can recover from errors in .
Specializing this to RM codes and using our results for erasures imply our
result on unique decoding of RM codes at high rate.
Finally, two of our capacity achieving results require tight bounds on the
weight distribution of RM codes. We obtain such bounds extending the recent
\cite{KLP} bounds from constant degree to linear degree polynomials
Smoothed Analysis in Unsupervised Learning via Decoupling
Smoothed analysis is a powerful paradigm in overcoming worst-case
intractability in unsupervised learning and high-dimensional data analysis.
While polynomial time smoothed analysis guarantees have been obtained for
worst-case intractable problems like tensor decompositions and learning
mixtures of Gaussians, such guarantees have been hard to obtain for several
other important problems in unsupervised learning. A core technical challenge
in analyzing algorithms is obtaining lower bounds on the least singular value
for random matrix ensembles with dependent entries, that are given by
low-degree polynomials of a few base underlying random variables.
In this work, we address this challenge by obtaining high-confidence lower
bounds on the least singular value of new classes of structured random matrix
ensembles of the above kind. We then use these bounds to design algorithms with
polynomial time smoothed analysis guarantees for the following three important
problems in unsupervised learning:
1. Robust subspace recovery, when the fraction of inliers in the
d-dimensional subspace is at least for any constant integer . This contrasts with the known
worst-case intractability when , and the previous smoothed
analysis result which needed (Hardt and Moitra, 2013).
2. Learning overcomplete hidden markov models, where the size of the state
space is any polynomial in the dimension of the observations. This gives the
first polynomial time guarantees for learning overcomplete HMMs in a smoothed
analysis model.
3. Higher order tensor decompositions, where we generalize the so-called
FOOBI algorithm of Cardoso to find order- rank-one tensors in a subspace.
This allows us to obtain polynomially robust decomposition algorithms for
'th order tensors with rank .Comment: 44 page
The power of sum-of-squares for detecting hidden structures
We study planted problems---finding hidden structures in random noisy
inputs---through the lens of the sum-of-squares semidefinite programming
hierarchy (SoS). This family of powerful semidefinite programs has recently
yielded many new algorithms for planted problems, often achieving the best
known polynomial-time guarantees in terms of accuracy of recovered solutions
and robustness to noise. One theme in recent work is the design of spectral
algorithms which match the guarantees of SoS algorithms for planted problems.
Classical spectral algorithms are often unable to accomplish this: the twist in
these new spectral algorithms is the use of spectral structure of matrices
whose entries are low-degree polynomials of the input variables. We prove that
for a wide class of planted problems, including refuting random constraint
satisfaction problems, tensor and sparse PCA, densest-k-subgraph, community
detection in stochastic block models, planted clique, and others, eigenvalues
of degree-d matrix polynomials are as powerful as SoS semidefinite programs of
roughly degree d. For such problems it is therefore always possible to match
the guarantees of SoS without solving a large semidefinite program. Using
related ideas on SoS algorithms and low-degree matrix polynomials (and inspired
by recent work on SoS and the planted clique problem by Barak et al.), we prove
new nearly-tight SoS lower bounds for the tensor and sparse principal component
analysis problems. Our lower bounds for sparse principal component analysis are
the first to suggest that going beyond existing algorithms for this problem may
require sub-exponential time
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