12 research outputs found
On the matrix square root via geometric optimization
This paper is triggered by the preprint "\emph{Computing Matrix Squareroot
via Non Convex Local Search}" by Jain et al.
(\textit{\textcolor{blue}{arXiv:1507.05854}}), which analyzes gradient-descent
for computing the square root of a positive definite matrix. Contrary to claims
of~\citet{jain2015}, our experiments reveal that Newton-like methods compute
matrix square roots rapidly and reliably, even for highly ill-conditioned
matrices and without requiring commutativity. We observe that gradient-descent
converges very slowly primarily due to tiny step-sizes and ill-conditioning. We
derive an alternative first-order method based on geodesic convexity: our
method admits a transparent convergence analysis ( page), attains linear
rate, and displays reliable convergence even for rank deficient problems.
Though superior to gradient-descent, ultimately our method is also outperformed
by a well-known scaled Newton method. Nevertheless, the primary value of our
work is its conceptual value: it shows that for deriving gradient based methods
for the matrix square root, \emph{the manifold geometric view of positive
definite matrices can be much more advantageous than the Euclidean view}.Comment: 8 pages, 12 plots, this version contains several more references and
more words about the rank-deficient cas
An Efficient Parallel Algorithm for Spectral Sparsification of Laplacian and SDDM Matrix Polynomials
For "large" class of continuous probability density functions
(p.d.f.), we demonstrate that for every there is mixture of
discrete Binomial distributions (MDBD) with
distinct Binomial distributions that -approximates a
discretized p.d.f. for all , where
. Also, we give two efficient parallel
algorithms to find such MDBD.
Moreover, we propose a sequential algorithm that on input MDBD with
for that induces a discretized p.d.f. ,
that is either Laplacian or SDDM matrix and parameter ,
outputs in time a spectral
sparsifier of a matrix-polynomial, where
notation hides factors.
This improves the Cheng et al.'s [CCLPT15] algorithm whose run time is
.
Furthermore, our algorithm is parallelizable and runs in work
and depth . Our main algorithmic contribution is to
propose the first efficient parallel algorithm that on input continuous p.d.f.
, matrix as above, outputs a spectral sparsifier of
matrix-polynomial whose coefficients approximate component-wise the discretized
p.d.f. .
Our results yield the first efficient and parallel algorithm that runs in
nearly linear work and poly-logarithmic depth and analyzes the long term
behaviour of Markov chains in non-trivial settings. In addition, we strengthen
the Spielman and Peng's [PS14] parallel SDD solver
NetSMF: Large-Scale Network Embedding as Sparse Matrix Factorization
We study the problem of large-scale network embedding, which aims to learn
latent representations for network mining applications. Previous research shows
that 1) popular network embedding benchmarks, such as DeepWalk, are in essence
implicitly factorizing a matrix with a closed form, and 2)the explicit
factorization of such matrix generates more powerful embeddings than existing
methods. However, directly constructing and factorizing this matrix---which is
dense---is prohibitively expensive in terms of both time and space, making it
not scalable for large networks.
In this work, we present the algorithm of large-scale network embedding as
sparse matrix factorization (NetSMF). NetSMF leverages theories from spectral
sparsification to efficiently sparsify the aforementioned dense matrix,
enabling significantly improved efficiency in embedding learning. The
sparsified matrix is spectrally close to the original dense one with a
theoretically bounded approximation error, which helps maintain the
representation power of the learned embeddings. We conduct experiments on
networks of various scales and types. Results show that among both popular
benchmarks and factorization based methods, NetSMF is the only method that
achieves both high efficiency and effectiveness. We show that NetSMF requires
only 24 hours to generate effective embeddings for a large-scale academic
collaboration network with tens of millions of nodes, while it would cost
DeepWalk months and is computationally infeasible for the dense matrix
factorization solution. The source code of NetSMF is publicly available
(https://github.com/xptree/NetSMF).Comment: 11 pages, in Proceedings of the Web Conference 2019 (WWW 19
Inference via low-dimensional couplings
We investigate the low-dimensional structure of deterministic transformations
between random variables, i.e., transport maps between probability measures. In
the context of statistics and machine learning, these transformations can be
used to couple a tractable "reference" measure (e.g., a standard Gaussian) with
a target measure of interest. Direct simulation from the desired measure can
then be achieved by pushing forward reference samples through the map. Yet
characterizing such a map---e.g., representing and evaluating it---grows
challenging in high dimensions. The central contribution of this paper is to
establish a link between the Markov properties of the target measure and the
existence of low-dimensional couplings, induced by transport maps that are
sparse and/or decomposable. Our analysis not only facilitates the construction
of transformations in high-dimensional settings, but also suggests new
inference methodologies for continuous non-Gaussian graphical models. For
instance, in the context of nonlinear state-space models, we describe new
variational algorithms for filtering, smoothing, and sequential parameter
inference. These algorithms can be understood as the natural
generalization---to the non-Gaussian case---of the square-root
Rauch-Tung-Striebel Gaussian smoother.Comment: 78 pages, 25 figure