A Survey From Distributed Machine Learning to Distributed Deep Learning

Artificial intelligence has achieved significant success in handling complex tasks in recent years. This success is due to advances in machine learning algorithms and hardware acceleration. In order to obtain more accurate results and solve more complex problems, algorithms must be trained with more data. This huge amount of data could be time-consuming to process and require a great deal of computation. This solution could be achieved by distributing the data and algorithm across several machines, which is known as distributed machine learning. There has been considerable effort put into distributed machine learning algorithms, and different methods have been proposed so far. In this article, we present a comprehensive summary of the current state-of-the-art in the field through the review of these algorithms. We divide this algorithms in classification and clustering (traditional machine learning), deep learning and deep reinforcement learning groups. Distributed deep learning has gained more attention in recent years and most of studies worked on this algorithms. As a result, most of the articles we discussed here belong to this category. Based on our investigation of algorithms, we highlight limitations that should be addressed in future research

A Resource Aware MapReduce Based Parallel SVM for Large Scale Image Classifications

Machine learning techniques have facilitated image retrieval by automatically classifying and annotating images with keywords. Among them support vector machines (SVMs) are used extensively due to their generalization properties. However, SVM training is notably a computationally intensive process especially when the training dataset is large. This paper presents RASMO, a resource aware MapReduce based parallel SVM algorithm for large scale image classifications which partitions the training data set into smaller subsets and optimizes SVM training in parallel using a cluster of computers. A genetic algorithm based load balancing scheme is designed to optimize the performance of RASMO in heterogeneous computing environments. RASMO is evaluated in both experimental and simulation environments. The results show that the parallel SVM algorithm reduces the training time significantly compared with the sequential SMO algorithm while maintaining a high level of accuracy in classifications.National Basic Research Program (973) of China under Grant 2014CB34040

Evolutionary Granular Kernel Machines

Kernel machines such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have been widely used in various data mining applications with good generalization properties. Performance of SVMs for solving nonlinear problems is highly affected by kernel functions. The complexity of SVMs training is mainly related to the size of a training dataset. How to design a powerful kernel, how to speed up SVMs training and how to train SVMs with millions of examples are still challenging problems in the SVMs research. For these important problems, powerful and flexible kernel trees called Evolutionary Granular Kernel Trees (EGKTs) are designed to incorporate prior domain knowledge. Granular Kernel Tree Structure Evolving System (GKTSES) is developed to evolve the structures of Granular Kernel Trees (GKTs) without prior knowledge. A voting scheme is also proposed to reduce the prediction deviation of GKTSES. To speed up EGKTs optimization, a master-slave parallel model is implemented. To help SVMs challenge large-scale data mining, a Minimum Enclosing Ball (MEB) based data reduction method is presented, and a new MEB-SVM algorithm is designed. All these kernel methods are designed based on Granular Computing (GrC). In general, Evolutionary Granular Kernel Machines (EGKMs) are investigated to optimize kernels effectively, speed up training greatly and mine huge amounts of data efficiently

Parallelizing support vector machines for scalable image annotation

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Machine learning techniques have facilitated image retrieval by automatically classifying and annotating images with keywords. Among them Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are used extensively due to their generalization properties. However, SVM training is notably a computationally intensive process especially when the training dataset is large. In this thesis distributed computing paradigms have been investigated to speed up SVM training, by partitioning a large training dataset into small data chunks and process each chunk in parallel utilizing the resources of a cluster of computers. A resource aware parallel SVM algorithm is introduced for large scale image annotation in parallel using a cluster of computers. A genetic algorithm based load balancing scheme is designed to optimize the performance of the algorithm in heterogeneous computing environments. SVM was initially designed for binary classifications. However, most classification problems arising in domains such as image annotation usually involve more than two classes. A resource aware parallel multiclass SVM algorithm for large scale image annotation in parallel using a cluster of computers is introduced. The combination of classifiers leads to substantial reduction of classification error in a wide range of applications. Among them SVM ensembles with bagging is shown to outperform a single SVM in terms of classification accuracy. However, SVM ensembles training are notably a computationally intensive process especially when the number replicated samples based on bootstrapping is large. A distributed SVM ensemble algorithm for image annotation is introduced which re-samples the training data based on bootstrapping and training SVM on each sample in parallel using a cluster of computers. The above algorithms are evaluated in both experimental and simulation environments showing that the distributed SVM algorithm, distributed multiclass SVM algorithm, and distributed SVM ensemble algorithm, reduces the training time significantly while maintaining a high level of accuracy in classifications

Approximation and Relaxation Approaches for Parallel and Distributed Machine Learning

Large scale machine learning requires tradeoffs. Commonly this tradeoff has led practitioners to choose simpler, less powerful models, e.g. linear models, in order to process more training examples in a limited time. In this work, we introduce parallelism to the training of non-linear models by leveraging a different tradeoff--approximation. We demonstrate various techniques by which non-linear models can be made amenable to larger data sets and significantly more training parallelism by strategically introducing approximation in certain optimization steps. For gradient boosted regression tree ensembles, we replace precise selection of tree splits with a coarse-grained, approximate split selection, yielding both faster sequential training and a significant increase in parallelism, in the distributed setting in particular. For metric learning with nearest neighbor classification, rather than explicitly train a neighborhood structure we leverage the implicit neighborhood structure induced by task-specific random forest classifiers, yielding a highly parallel method for metric learning. For support vector machines, we follow existing work to learn a reduced basis set with extremely high parallelism, particularly on GPUs, via existing linear algebra libraries. We believe these optimization tradeoffs are widely applicable wherever machine learning is put in practice in large scale settings. By carefully introducing approximation, we also introduce significantly higher parallelism and consequently can process more training examples for more iterations than competing exact methods. While seemingly learning the model with less precision, this tradeoff often yields noticeably higher accuracy under a restricted training time budget

Parallelizing support vector machines for scalable image annotation

Machine learning techniques have facilitated image retrieval by automatically classifying and annotating images with keywords. Among them Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are used extensively due to their generalization properties. However, SVM training is notably a computationally intensive process especially when the training dataset is large. In this thesis distributed computing paradigms have been investigated to speed up SVM training, by partitioning a large training dataset into small data chunks and process each chunk in parallel utilizing the resources of a cluster of computers. A resource aware parallel SVM algorithm is introduced for large scale image annotation in parallel using a cluster of computers. A genetic algorithm based load balancing scheme is designed to optimize the performance of the algorithm in heterogeneous computing environments. SVM was initially designed for binary classifications. However, most classification problems arising in domains such as image annotation usually involve more than two classes. A resource aware parallel multiclass SVM algorithm for large scale image annotation in parallel using a cluster of computers is introduced. The combination of classifiers leads to substantial reduction of classification error in a wide range of applications. Among them SVM ensembles with bagging is shown to outperform a single SVM in terms of classification accuracy. However, SVM ensembles training are notably a computationally intensive process especially when the number replicated samples based on bootstrapping is large. A distributed SVM ensemble algorithm for image annotation is introduced which re-samples the training data based on bootstrapping and training SVM on each sample in parallel using a cluster of computers. The above algorithms are evaluated in both experimental and simulation environments showing that the distributed SVM algorithm, distributed multiclass SVM algorithm, and distributed SVM ensemble algorithm, reduces the training time significantly while maintaining a high level of accuracy in classifications.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo