A Self-consistent-field Iteration for Orthogonal Canonical Correlation Analysis

We propose an efficient algorithm for solving orthogonal canonical correlation analysis (OCCA) in the form of trace-fractional structure and orthogonal linear projections. Even though orthogonality has been widely used and proved to be a useful criterion for pattern recognition and feature extraction, existing methods for solving OCCA problem are either numerical unstable by relying on a deflation scheme, or less efficient by directly using generic optimization methods. In this paper, we propose an alternating numerical scheme whose core is the sub-maximization problem in the trace-fractional form with an orthogonal constraint. A customized self-consistent-field (SCF) iteration for this sub-maximization problem is devised. It is proved that the SCF iteration is globally convergent to a KKT point and that the alternating numerical scheme always converges. We further formulate a new trace-fractional maximization problem for orthogonal multiset CCA (OMCCA) and then propose an efficient algorithm with an either Jacobi-style or Gauss-Seidel-style updating scheme based on the same SCF iteration. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithms against existing methods including two real world applications: multi-label classification and multi-view feature extraction. Experimental results show that our methods not only perform competitively to or better than baselines but also are more efficient

Optimal Convergence Rate of Self-Consistent Field Iteration for Solving Eigenvector-dependent Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problems

We present a comprehensive convergence analysis for Self-Consistent Field (SCF) iteration to solve a class of nonlinear eigenvalue problems with eigenvector-dependency (NEPv). Using a tangent-angle matrix as an intermediate measure for approximation error, we establish new formulas for two fundamental quantities that optimally characterize the local convergence of the plain SCF: the local contraction factor and the local average contraction factor. In comparison with previously established results, new convergence rate estimates provide much sharper bounds on the convergence speed. As an application, we extend the convergence analysis to a popular SCF variant -- the level-shifted SCF. The effectiveness of the convergence rate estimates is demonstrated numerically for NEPv arising from solving the Kohn-Sham equation in electronic structure calculation and the Gross-Pitaevskii equation in the modeling of Bose-Einstein condensation

Uncorrelated Semi-paired Subspace Learning

Multi-view datasets are increasingly collected in many real-world applications, and we have seen better learning performance by existing multi-view learning methods than by conventional single-view learning methods applied to each view individually. But, most of these multi-view learning methods are built on the assumption that at each instance no view is missing and all data points from all views must be perfectly paired. Hence they cannot handle unpaired data but ignore them completely from their learning process. However, unpaired data can be more abundant in reality than paired ones and simply ignoring all unpaired data incur tremendous waste in resources. In this paper, we focus on learning uncorrelated features by semi-paired subspace learning, motivated by many existing works that show great successes of learning uncorrelated features. Specifically, we propose a generalized uncorrelated multi-view subspace learning framework, which can naturally integrate many proven learning criteria on the semi-paired data. To showcase the flexibility of the framework, we instantiate five new semi-paired models for both unsupervised and semi-supervised learning. We also design a successive alternating approximation (SAA) method to solve the resulting optimization problem and the method can be combined with the powerful Krylov subspace projection technique if needed. Extensive experimental results on multi-view feature extraction and multi-modality classification show that our proposed models perform competitively to or better than the baselines