12,057 research outputs found
Clustering Partially Observed Graphs via Convex Optimization
This paper considers the problem of clustering a partially observed
unweighted graph---i.e., one where for some node pairs we know there is an edge
between them, for some others we know there is no edge, and for the remaining
we do not know whether or not there is an edge. We want to organize the nodes
into disjoint clusters so that there is relatively dense (observed)
connectivity within clusters, and sparse across clusters.
We take a novel yet natural approach to this problem, by focusing on finding
the clustering that minimizes the number of "disagreements"---i.e., the sum of
the number of (observed) missing edges within clusters, and (observed) present
edges across clusters. Our algorithm uses convex optimization; its basis is a
reduction of disagreement minimization to the problem of recovering an
(unknown) low-rank matrix and an (unknown) sparse matrix from their partially
observed sum. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm on the classical
Planted Partition/Stochastic Block Model. Our main theorem provides sufficient
conditions for the success of our algorithm as a function of the minimum
cluster size, edge density and observation probability; in particular, the
results characterize the tradeoff between the observation probability and the
edge density gap. When there are a constant number of clusters of equal size,
our results are optimal up to logarithmic factors.Comment: This is the final version published in Journal of Machine Learning
Research (JMLR). Partial results appeared in International Conference on
Machine Learning (ICML) 201
Validation of Voting Committees
This article contains a method to bound the test errors of voting committees with members chosen from a pool of trained classifiers. There are so many prospective committees that validating them directly does not achieve useful error bounds. Because there are fewer classifiers than prospective committees, it is better to validate the classifiers individually than use linear programming to infer committee error bounds. We test the method using credit card data. Also, we extend the method to infer bounds for classifiers in general
A Contextual Bandit Bake-off
Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world
interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on
statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of
these algorithms is still poorly understood. We leverage the availability of
large numbers of supervised learning datasets to empirically evaluate
contextual bandit algorithms, focusing on practical methods that learn by
relying on optimization oracles from supervised learning. We find that a recent
method (Foster et al., 2018) using optimism under uncertainty works the best
overall. A surprisingly close second is a simple greedy baseline that only
explores implicitly through the diversity of contexts, followed by a variant of
Online Cover (Agarwal et al., 2014) which tends to be more conservative but
robust to problem specification by design. Along the way, we also evaluate
various components of contextual bandit algorithm design such as loss
estimators. Overall, this is a thorough study and review of contextual bandit
methodology
Agnostic Active Learning Without Constraints
We present and analyze an agnostic active learning algorithm that works
without keeping a version space. This is unlike all previous approaches where a
restricted set of candidate hypotheses is maintained throughout learning, and
only hypotheses from this set are ever returned. By avoiding this version space
approach, our algorithm sheds the computational burden and brittleness
associated with maintaining version spaces, yet still allows for substantial
improvements over supervised learning for classification
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