23,812 research outputs found
Convergence of Tomlin's HOTS algorithm
The HOTS algorithm uses the hyperlink structure of the web to compute a
vector of scores with which one can rank web pages. The HOTS vector is the
vector of the exponentials of the dual variables of an optimal flow problem
(the "temperature" of each page). The flow represents an optimal distribution
of web surfers on the web graph in the sense of entropy maximization.
In this paper, we prove the convergence of Tomlin's HOTS algorithm. We first
study a simplified version of the algorithm, which is a fixed point scaling
algorithm designed to solve the matrix balancing problem for nonnegative
irreducible matrices. The proof of convergence is general (nonlinear
Perron-Frobenius theory) and applies to a family of deformations of HOTS. Then,
we address the effective HOTS algorithm, designed by Tomlin for the ranking of
web pages. The model is a network entropy maximization problem generalizing
matrix balancing. We show that, under mild assumptions, the HOTS algorithm
converges with a linear convergence rate. The proof relies on a uniqueness
property of the fixed point and on the existence of a Lyapunov function.
We also show that the coordinate descent algorithm can be used to find the
ideal and effective HOTS vectors and we compare HOTS and coordinate descent on
fragments of the web graph. Our numerical experiments suggest that the
convergence rate of the HOTS algorithm may deteriorate when the size of the
input increases. We thus give a normalized version of HOTS with an
experimentally better convergence rate.Comment: 21 page
CoCoA: A General Framework for Communication-Efficient Distributed Optimization
The scale of modern datasets necessitates the development of efficient
distributed optimization methods for machine learning. We present a
general-purpose framework for distributed computing environments, CoCoA, that
has an efficient communication scheme and is applicable to a wide variety of
problems in machine learning and signal processing. We extend the framework to
cover general non-strongly-convex regularizers, including L1-regularized
problems like lasso, sparse logistic regression, and elastic net
regularization, and show how earlier work can be derived as a special case. We
provide convergence guarantees for the class of convex regularized loss
minimization objectives, leveraging a novel approach in handling
non-strongly-convex regularizers and non-smooth loss functions. The resulting
framework has markedly improved performance over state-of-the-art methods, as
we illustrate with an extensive set of experiments on real distributed
datasets
Random Coordinate Descent Methods for Minimizing Decomposable Submodular Functions
Submodular function minimization is a fundamental optimization problem that
arises in several applications in machine learning and computer vision. The
problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time, but general purpose
algorithms have high running times and are unsuitable for large-scale problems.
Recent work have used convex optimization techniques to obtain very practical
algorithms for minimizing functions that are sums of ``simple" functions. In
this paper, we use random coordinate descent methods to obtain algorithms with
faster linear convergence rates and cheaper iteration costs. Compared to
alternating projection methods, our algorithms do not rely on full-dimensional
vector operations and they converge in significantly fewer iterations
Reflection methods for user-friendly submodular optimization
Recently, it has become evident that submodularity naturally captures widely
occurring concepts in machine learning, signal processing and computer vision.
Consequently, there is need for efficient optimization procedures for
submodular functions, especially for minimization problems. While general
submodular minimization is challenging, we propose a new method that exploits
existing decomposability of submodular functions. In contrast to previous
approaches, our method is neither approximate, nor impractical, nor does it
need any cumbersome parameter tuning. Moreover, it is easy to implement and
parallelize. A key component of our method is a formulation of the discrete
submodular minimization problem as a continuous best approximation problem that
is solved through a sequence of reflections, and its solution can be easily
thresholded to obtain an optimal discrete solution. This method solves both the
continuous and discrete formulations of the problem, and therefore has
applications in learning, inference, and reconstruction. In our experiments, we
illustrate the benefits of our method on two image segmentation tasks.Comment: Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), \'Etats-Unis (2013
Efficient Rank Reduction of Correlation Matrices
Geometric optimisation algorithms are developed that efficiently find the
nearest low-rank correlation matrix. We show, in numerical tests, that our
methods compare favourably to the existing methods in the literature. The
connection with the Lagrange multiplier method is established, along with an
identification of whether a local minimum is a global minimum. An additional
benefit of the geometric approach is that any weighted norm can be applied. The
problem of finding the nearest low-rank correlation matrix occurs as part of
the calibration of multi-factor interest rate market models to correlation.Comment: First version: 20 pages, 4 figures Second version [changed content]:
21 pages, 6 figure
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