9,790 research outputs found
MapReduce is Good Enough? If All You Have is a Hammer, Throw Away Everything That's Not a Nail!
Hadoop is currently the large-scale data analysis "hammer" of choice, but
there exist classes of algorithms that aren't "nails", in the sense that they
are not particularly amenable to the MapReduce programming model. To address
this, researchers have proposed MapReduce extensions or alternative programming
models in which these algorithms can be elegantly expressed. This essay
espouses a very different position: that MapReduce is "good enough", and that
instead of trying to invent screwdrivers, we should simply get rid of
everything that's not a nail. To be more specific, much discussion in the
literature surrounds the fact that iterative algorithms are a poor fit for
MapReduce: the simple solution is to find alternative non-iterative algorithms
that solve the same problem. This essay captures my personal experiences as an
academic researcher as well as a software engineer in a "real-world" production
analytics environment. From this combined perspective I reflect on the current
state and future of "big data" research
Stochastic Training of Neural Networks via Successive Convex Approximations
This paper proposes a new family of algorithms for training neural networks
(NNs). These are based on recent developments in the field of non-convex
optimization, going under the general name of successive convex approximation
(SCA) techniques. The basic idea is to iteratively replace the original
(non-convex, highly dimensional) learning problem with a sequence of (strongly
convex) approximations, which are both accurate and simple to optimize.
Differently from similar ideas (e.g., quasi-Newton algorithms), the
approximations can be constructed using only first-order information of the
neural network function, in a stochastic fashion, while exploiting the overall
structure of the learning problem for a faster convergence. We discuss several
use cases, based on different choices for the loss function (e.g., squared loss
and cross-entropy loss), and for the regularization of the NN's weights. We
experiment on several medium-sized benchmark problems, and on a large-scale
dataset involving simulated physical data. The results show how the algorithm
outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, providing faster convergence to a
better minimum. Additionally, we show how the algorithm can be easily
parallelized over multiple computational units without hindering its
performance. In particular, each computational unit can optimize a tailored
surrogate function defined on a randomly assigned subset of the input
variables, whose dimension can be selected depending entirely on the available
computational power.Comment: Preprint submitted to IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and
Learning System
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Metaheuristic approaches for the quartet method of hierarchical clustering
Given a set of objects and their pairwise distances, we wish to determine a visual representation of the data. We use the quartet paradigm to compute a hierarchy of clusters of the objects. The method is based on an NP-hard graph optimization problem called the Minimum Quartet Tree Cost problem. This paper presents and compares several metaheuristic approaches to approximate the optimal hierarchy. The performance of the algorithms is tested through extensive computational experiments and it is shown that the Reduced Variable Neighbourhood Search metaheuristic is the most effective approach to the problem, obtaining high quality solutions in short computational running times
Compressive Spectral Clustering
Spectral clustering has become a popular technique due to its high
performance in many contexts. It comprises three main steps: create a
similarity graph between N objects to cluster, compute the first k eigenvectors
of its Laplacian matrix to define a feature vector for each object, and run
k-means on these features to separate objects into k classes. Each of these
three steps becomes computationally intensive for large N and/or k. We propose
to speed up the last two steps based on recent results in the emerging field of
graph signal processing: graph filtering of random signals, and random sampling
of bandlimited graph signals. We prove that our method, with a gain in
computation time that can reach several orders of magnitude, is in fact an
approximation of spectral clustering, for which we are able to control the
error. We test the performance of our method on artificial and real-world
network data.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure
A Bayesian alternative to mutual information for the hierarchical clustering of dependent random variables
The use of mutual information as a similarity measure in agglomerative
hierarchical clustering (AHC) raises an important issue: some correction needs
to be applied for the dimensionality of variables. In this work, we formulate
the decision of merging dependent multivariate normal variables in an AHC
procedure as a Bayesian model comparison. We found that the Bayesian
formulation naturally shrinks the empirical covariance matrix towards a matrix
set a priori (e.g., the identity), provides an automated stopping rule, and
corrects for dimensionality using a term that scales up the measure as a
function of the dimensionality of the variables. Also, the resulting log Bayes
factor is asymptotically proportional to the plug-in estimate of mutual
information, with an additive correction for dimensionality in agreement with
the Bayesian information criterion. We investigated the behavior of these
Bayesian alternatives (in exact and asymptotic forms) to mutual information on
simulated and real data. An encouraging result was first derived on
simulations: the hierarchical clustering based on the log Bayes factor
outperformed off-the-shelf clustering techniques as well as raw and normalized
mutual information in terms of classification accuracy. On a toy example, we
found that the Bayesian approaches led to results that were similar to those of
mutual information clustering techniques, with the advantage of an automated
thresholding. On real functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets
measuring brain activity, it identified clusters consistent with the
established outcome of standard procedures. On this application, normalized
mutual information had a highly atypical behavior, in the sense that it
systematically favored very large clusters. These initial experiments suggest
that the proposed Bayesian alternatives to mutual information are a useful new
tool for hierarchical clustering
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