Dimension Reduction Techniques for l_p (1<p<2), with Applications

For Euclidean space (l_2), there exists the powerful dimension reduction transform of Johnson and Lindenstrauss [Conf. in modern analysis and probability, AMS 1984], with a host of known applications. Here, we consider the problem of dimension reduction for all l_p spaces 1<p<2. Although strong lower bounds are known for dimension reduction in l_1, Ostrovsky and Rabani [JACM 2002] successfully circumvented these by presenting an l_1 embedding that maintains fidelity in only a bounded distance range, with applications to clustering and nearest neighbor search. However, their embedding techniques are specific to l_1 and do not naturally extend to other norms. In this paper, we apply a range of advanced techniques and produce bounded range dimension reduction embeddings for all of 1<p<2, thereby demonstrating that the approach initiated by Ostrovsky and Rabani for l_1 can be extended to a much more general framework. We also obtain improved bounds in terms of the intrinsic dimensionality. As a result we achieve improved bounds for proximity problems including snowflake embeddings and clustering

Latent Space Reinforcement Learning

Often we have to handle high dimensional spaces if we want to learn motor skills for robots. In policy search tasks we have to find several parameters to learn a desired movement. This high dimensionality in parameters can be challenging for reinforcement algorithms, since more samples for finding an optimal solution are needed with every additional dimension. On the other hand, if the robot has a high number of actuators, an inherent correlation between these can be found for a specific motor task, which we can exploit for a faster convergence. One possibility is to use techniques to reduce the dimensionality of the space, which is used as a pre-processing step or as an independent process in most applications. In this thesis we present a novel algorithm which combines the theory of policy search and probabilistic dimensionality reduction to uncover the hidden structure of high dimensional action spaces. Evaluations on an inverse kinematics task indicate that the presented algorithm is able to outperform the reference algorithms PoWER and CMA-ES, especially in high dimensional spaces. Furthermore we evaluate our algorithm on a real-world task. In this task, a NAO robot learns to lift his leg while keeping balance. The issue of collecting samples for learning on a real robot in such a task, which is often very time and cost consuming, is considered in here by using a small number of samples in each iteration

DROP: Dimensionality Reduction Optimization for Time Series

Dimensionality reduction is a critical step in scaling machine learning pipelines. Principal component analysis (PCA) is a standard tool for dimensionality reduction, but performing PCA over a full dataset can be prohibitively expensive. As a result, theoretical work has studied the effectiveness of iterative, stochastic PCA methods that operate over data samples. However, termination conditions for stochastic PCA either execute for a predetermined number of iterations, or until convergence of the solution, frequently sampling too many or too few datapoints for end-to-end runtime improvements. We show how accounting for downstream analytics operations during DR via PCA allows stochastic methods to efficiently terminate after operating over small (e.g., 1%) subsamples of input data, reducing whole workload runtime. Leveraging this, we propose DROP, a DR optimizer that enables speedups of up to 5x over Singular-Value-Decomposition-based PCA techniques, and exceeds conventional approaches like FFT and PAA by up to 16x in end-to-end workloads

A quick search method for audio signals based on a piecewise linear representation of feature trajectories

This paper presents a new method for a quick similarity-based search through long unlabeled audio streams to detect and locate audio clips provided by users. The method involves feature-dimension reduction based on a piecewise linear representation of a sequential feature trajectory extracted from a long audio stream. Two techniques enable us to obtain a piecewise linear representation: the dynamic segmentation of feature trajectories and the segment-based Karhunen-L\'{o}eve (KL) transform. The proposed search method guarantees the same search results as the search method without the proposed feature-dimension reduction method in principle. Experiment results indicate significant improvements in search speed. For example the proposed method reduced the total search time to approximately 1/12 that of previous methods and detected queries in approximately 0.3 seconds from a 200-hour audio database.Comment: 20 pages, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processin

A Detailed Investigation into Low-Level Feature Detection in Spectrogram Images

Being the first stage of analysis within an image, low-level feature detection is a crucial step in the image analysis process and, as such, deserves suitable attention. This paper presents a systematic investigation into low-level feature detection in spectrogram images. The result of which is the identification of frequency tracks. Analysis of the literature identifies different strategies for accomplishing low-level feature detection. Nevertheless, the advantages and disadvantages of each are not explicitly investigated. Three model-based detection strategies are outlined, each extracting an increasing amount of information from the spectrogram, and, through ROC analysis, it is shown that at increasing levels of extraction the detection rates increase. Nevertheless, further investigation suggests that model-based detection has a limitation—it is not computationally feasible to fully evaluate the model of even a simple sinusoidal track. Therefore, alternative approaches, such as dimensionality reduction, are investigated to reduce the complex search space. It is shown that, if carefully selected, these techniques can approach the detection rates of model-based strategies that perform the same level of information extraction. The implementations used to derive the results presented within this paper are available online from http://stdetect.googlecode.com