4 research outputs found
Polynomial Time and Sample Complexity for Non-Gaussian Component Analysis: Spectral Methods
The problem of Non-Gaussian Component Analysis (NGCA) is about finding a
maximal low-dimensional subspace in so that data points
projected onto follow a non-gaussian distribution. Although this is an
appropriate model for some real world data analysis problems, there has been
little progress on this problem over the last decade.
In this paper, we attempt to address this state of affairs in two ways.
First, we give a new characterization of standard gaussian distributions in
high-dimensions, which lead to effective tests for non-gaussianness. Second, we
propose a simple algorithm, \emph{Reweighted PCA}, as a method for solving the
NGCA problem. We prove that for a general unknown non-gaussian distribution,
this algorithm recovers at least one direction in , with sample and time
complexity depending polynomially on the dimension of the ambient space. We
conjecture that the algorithm actually recovers the entire
Non-Gaussian Component Analysis using Entropy Methods
Non-Gaussian component analysis (NGCA) is a problem in multidimensional data
analysis which, since its formulation in 2006, has attracted considerable
attention in statistics and machine learning. In this problem, we have a random
variable in -dimensional Euclidean space. There is an unknown subspace
of the -dimensional Euclidean space such that the orthogonal
projection of onto is standard multidimensional Gaussian and the
orthogonal projection of onto , the orthogonal complement
of , is non-Gaussian, in the sense that all its one-dimensional
marginals are different from the Gaussian in a certain metric defined in terms
of moments. The NGCA problem is to approximate the non-Gaussian subspace
given samples of .
Vectors in correspond to `interesting' directions, whereas
vectors in correspond to the directions where data is very noisy. The
most interesting applications of the NGCA model is for the case when the
magnitude of the noise is comparable to that of the true signal, a setting in
which traditional noise reduction techniques such as PCA don't apply directly.
NGCA is also related to dimension reduction and to other data analysis problems
such as ICA. NGCA-like problems have been studied in statistics for a long time
using techniques such as projection pursuit.
We give an algorithm that takes polynomial time in the dimension and has
an inverse polynomial dependence on the error parameter measuring the angle
distance between the non-Gaussian subspace and the subspace output by the
algorithm. Our algorithm is based on relative entropy as the contrast function
and fits under the projection pursuit framework. The techniques we develop for
analyzing our algorithm maybe of use for other related problems
Some Algorithms and Paradigms for Big Data
The reality of big data poses both opportunities and challenges to modern researchers. Its key features -- large sample sizes, high-dimensional feature spaces, and structural complexity -- enforce new paradigms upon the creation of effective yet algorithmic efficient data analysis algorithms. In this dissertation, we illustrate a few paradigms through the analysis of three new algorithms. The first two algorithms consider the problem of phase retrieval, in which we seek to recover a signal from random rank-one quadratic measurements. We first show that an adaptation of the randomized Kaczmarz method provably exhibits linear convergence so long as our sample size is linear in the signal dimension. Next, we show that the standard SDP relaxation of sparse PCA yields an algorithm that does signal recovery for sparse, model-misspecified phase retrieval with a sample complexity that scales according to the square of the sparsity parameter. Finally, our third algorithm addresses the problem of Non-Gaussian Component Analysis, in which we are trying to identify the non-Gaussian marginals of a high-dimensional distribution. We prove that our algorithm exhibits polynomial time convergence with polynomial sample complexity.PHDMathematicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145895/1/yanshuo_1.pd
Estimating Non-Gaussian Subspaces by Characteristic Functions
In this article, we consider high-dimensional data which contains a low-dimensional non-Gaussian structure contaminated with Gaussian noise and propose a new method to identify the non-Gaussian subspace. A linear dimension reduction algorithm based on the fourth-order cumulant tensor was proposed in our previous work [4]. Although it works well for sub-Gaussian structures, the performance is not satisfactory for super-Gaussian data due to outliers. To overcome this problem, we construct an alternative by using Hessian of characteristic functions which was applied to (multidimensional) independent component analysis [10,11]. A numerical study demonstrates the validity of our method