Mean Field Theory for Sigmoid Belief Networks

We develop a mean field theory for sigmoid belief networks based on ideas from statistical mechanics. Our mean field theory provides a tractable approximation to the true probability distribution in these networks; it also yields a lower bound on the likelihood of evidence. We demonstrate the utility of this framework on a benchmark problem in statistical pattern recognition---the classification of handwritten digits.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

Learning Scheduling Algorithms for Data Processing Clusters

Efficiently scheduling data processing jobs on distributed compute clusters requires complex algorithms. Current systems, however, use simple generalized heuristics and ignore workload characteristics, since developing and tuning a scheduling policy for each workload is infeasible. In this paper, we show that modern machine learning techniques can generate highly-efficient policies automatically. Decima uses reinforcement learning (RL) and neural networks to learn workload-specific scheduling algorithms without any human instruction beyond a high-level objective such as minimizing average job completion time. Off-the-shelf RL techniques, however, cannot handle the complexity and scale of the scheduling problem. To build Decima, we had to develop new representations for jobs' dependency graphs, design scalable RL models, and invent RL training methods for dealing with continuous stochastic job arrivals. Our prototype integration with Spark on a 25-node cluster shows that Decima improves the average job completion time over hand-tuned scheduling heuristics by at least 21%, achieving up to 2x improvement during periods of high cluster load

Efficient Deadlock Avoidance for Streaming Computation with Filtering

In this report, we show that deadlock avoidance for streaming computations with filtering can be performed efficiently for a large class of DAG topologies. We first give efficient algorithms for dummy interval computation in series-parallel DAGs, then generalize our results to a larger graph family, the CS4DAGs, in which every undirected cycle has exactly one source and one sink. Our results show that, for a large set of application topologies that are both intuitively useful and formalizable, the streaming model with filtering can be implemented safely with reasonable compilation overhead

Classification-based prediction of effective connectivity between timeseries with a realistic cortical network model

Effective connectivity measures the pattern of causal interactions between brain regions. Traditionally, these patterns of causality are inferred from brain recordings using either non-parametric, i.e., model-free, or parametric, i.e., model-based, approaches. The latter approaches, when based on biophysically plausible models, have the advantage that they may facilitate the interpretation of causality in terms of underlying neural mechanisms. Recent biophysically plausible neural network models of recurrent microcircuits have shown the ability to reproduce well the characteristics of real neural activity and can be applied to model interacting cortical circuits. Unfortunately, however, it is challenging to invert these models in order to estimate effective connectivity from observed data. Here, we propose to use a classification-based method to approximate the result of such complex model inversion. The classifier predicts the pattern of causal interactions given a multivariate timeseries as input. The classifier is trained on a large number of pairs of multivariate timeseries and the respective pattern of causal interactions, which are generated by simulation from the neural network model. In simulated experiments, we show that the proposed method is much more accurate in detecting the causal structure of timeseries than current best practice methods. Additionally, we present further results to characterize the validity of the neural network model and the ability of the classifier to adapt to the generative model of the data

Dynamic representation of consecutive-ones matrices and interval graphs

2015 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.We give an algorithm for updating a consecutive-ones ordering of a consecutive-ones matrix when a row or column is added or deleted. When the addition of the row or column would result in a matrix that does not have the consecutive-ones property, we return a well-known minimal forbidden submatrix for the consecutive-ones property, known as a Tucker submatrix, which serves as a certificate of correctness of the output in this case, in O(n log n) time. The ability to return such a certificate within this time bound is one of the new contributions of this work. Using this result, we obtain an O(n) algorithm for updating an interval model of an interval graph when an edge or vertex is added or deleted. This matches the bounds obtained by a previous dynamic interval-graph recognition algorithm due to Crespelle. We improve on Crespelle's result by producing an easy-to-check certificate, known as a Lekkerkerker-Boland subgraph, when a proposed change to the graph results in a graph that is not an interval graph. Our algorithm takes O(n log n) time to produce this certificate. The ability to return such a certificate within this time bound is the second main contribution of this work

Sparse Dynamic Programming on DAGs with Small Width

The minimum path cover problem asks us to find a minimum-cardinality set of paths that cover all the nodes of a directed acyclic graph (DAG). We study the case when the size k of a minimum path cover is small, that is, when the DAG has a small width. This case is motivated by applications in pan-genomics, where the genomic variation of a population is expressed as a DAG. We observe that classical alignment algorithms exploiting sparse dynamic programming can be extended to the sequence-against-DAG case by mimicking the algorithm for sequences on each path of a minimum path cover and handling an evaluation order anomaly with reachability queries. Namely, we introduce a general framework for DAG-extensions of sparse dynamic programming. This framework produces algorithms that are slower than their counterparts on sequences only by a factor k. We illustrate this on two classical problems extended to DAGs: longest increasing subsequence and longest common subsequence. For the former, we obtain an algorithm with running time O(k vertical bar E vertical bar log vertical bar V vertical bar). This matches the optimal solution to the classical problem variant when the input sequence is modeled as a path. We obtain an analogous result for the longest common subsequence problem. We then apply this technique to the co-linear chaining problem, which is a generalization of the above two problems. The algorithm for this problem turns out to be more involved, needing further ingredients, such as an FM-index tailored for large alphabets and a two-dimensional range search tree modified to support range maximum queries. We also study a general sequence-to-DAG alignment formulation that allows affine gap costs in the sequence. The main ingredient of the proposed framework is a new algorithm for finding a minimum path cover of a DAG (V, E) in O(k vertical bar E vertical bar log vertical bar V vertical bar) time, improving all known time-bounds when k is small and the DAG is not too dense. In addition to boosting the sparse dynamic programming framework, an immediate consequence of this new minimum path cover algorithm is an improved space/time tradeoff for reachability queries in arbitrary directed graphs.Peer reviewe