157,243 research outputs found
A Generic Path Algorithm for Regularized Statistical Estimation
Regularization is widely used in statistics and machine learning to prevent
overfitting and gear solution towards prior information. In general, a
regularized estimation problem minimizes the sum of a loss function and a
penalty term. The penalty term is usually weighted by a tuning parameter and
encourages certain constraints on the parameters to be estimated. Particular
choices of constraints lead to the popular lasso, fused-lasso, and other
generalized penalized regression methods. Although there has been a lot
of research in this area, developing efficient optimization methods for many
nonseparable penalties remains a challenge. In this article we propose an exact
path solver based on ordinary differential equations (EPSODE) that works for
any convex loss function and can deal with generalized penalties as well
as more complicated regularization such as inequality constraints encountered
in shape-restricted regressions and nonparametric density estimation. In the
path following process, the solution path hits, exits, and slides along the
various constraints and vividly illustrates the tradeoffs between goodness of
fit and model parsimony. In practice, the EPSODE can be coupled with AIC, BIC,
or cross-validation to select an optimal tuning parameter. Our
applications to generalized regularized generalized linear models,
shape-restricted regressions, Gaussian graphical models, and nonparametric
density estimation showcase the potential of the EPSODE algorithm.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figure
Incremental Learning of Nonparametric Bayesian Mixture Models
Clustering is a fundamental task in many vision applications.
To date, most clustering algorithms work in a
batch setting and training examples must be gathered in a
large group before learning can begin. Here we explore
incremental clustering, in which data can arrive continuously.
We present a novel incremental model-based clustering
algorithm based on nonparametric Bayesian methods,
which we call Memory Bounded Variational Dirichlet
Process (MB-VDP). The number of clusters are determined
flexibly by the data and the approach can be used to automatically
discover object categories. The computational requirements
required to produce model updates are bounded
and do not grow with the amount of data processed. The
technique is well suited to very large datasets, and we show
that our approach outperforms existing online alternatives
for learning nonparametric Bayesian mixture models
Learning in Markov Random Fields with Contrastive Free Energies
Learning Markov random field (MRF) models is notoriously hard due to the presence of a global normalization factor. In this paper we present a new framework for learning MRF models based on the contrastive free energy (CF) objective function. In this scheme the parameters are updated in an attempt to match the average statistics of the data distribution and a distribution which is (partially or approximately) "relaxed" to the equilibrium distribution. We show that maximum likelihood, mean field, contrastive divergence and pseudo-likelihood objectives can be understood in this paradigm. Moreover, we propose and study a new learning algorithm: the "kstep Kikuchi/Bethe approximation". This algorithm is then tested on a conditional random field model with "skip-chain" edges to model long range interactions in text data. It is demonstrated that with no loss in accuracy, the training time is brought down on average from 19 hours (BP based learning) to 83 minutes, an order of magnitude improvement
Bayesian Optimization for Adaptive MCMC
This paper proposes a new randomized strategy for adaptive MCMC using
Bayesian optimization. This approach applies to non-differentiable objective
functions and trades off exploration and exploitation to reduce the number of
potentially costly objective function evaluations. We demonstrate the strategy
in the complex setting of sampling from constrained, discrete and densely
connected probabilistic graphical models where, for each variation of the
problem, one needs to adjust the parameters of the proposal mechanism
automatically to ensure efficient mixing of the Markov chains.Comment: This paper contains 12 pages and 6 figures. A similar version of this
paper has been submitted to AISTATS 2012 and is currently under revie
A Graphical Model Formulation of Collaborative Filtering Neighbourhood Methods with Fast Maximum Entropy Training
Item neighbourhood methods for collaborative filtering learn a weighted graph
over the set of items, where each item is connected to those it is most similar
to. The prediction of a user's rating on an item is then given by that rating
of neighbouring items, weighted by their similarity. This paper presents a new
neighbourhood approach which we call item fields, whereby an undirected
graphical model is formed over the item graph. The resulting prediction rule is
a simple generalization of the classical approaches, which takes into account
non-local information in the graph, allowing its best results to be obtained
when using drastically fewer edges than other neighbourhood approaches. A fast
approximate maximum entropy training method based on the Bethe approximation is
presented, which uses a simple gradient ascent procedure. When using
precomputed sufficient statistics on the Movielens datasets, our method is
faster than maximum likelihood approaches by two orders of magnitude.Comment: ICML201
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