183,162 research outputs found
Bellman Error Based Feature Generation using Random Projections on Sparse Spaces
We address the problem of automatic generation of features for value function
approximation. Bellman Error Basis Functions (BEBFs) have been shown to improve
the error of policy evaluation with function approximation, with a convergence
rate similar to that of value iteration. We propose a simple, fast and robust
algorithm based on random projections to generate BEBFs for sparse feature
spaces. We provide a finite sample analysis of the proposed method, and prove
that projections logarithmic in the dimension of the original space are enough
to guarantee contraction in the error. Empirical results demonstrate the
strength of this method
Randomized Dimensionality Reduction for k-means Clustering
We study the topic of dimensionality reduction for -means clustering.
Dimensionality reduction encompasses the union of two approaches: \emph{feature
selection} and \emph{feature extraction}. A feature selection based algorithm
for -means clustering selects a small subset of the input features and then
applies -means clustering on the selected features. A feature extraction
based algorithm for -means clustering constructs a small set of new
artificial features and then applies -means clustering on the constructed
features. Despite the significance of -means clustering as well as the
wealth of heuristic methods addressing it, provably accurate feature selection
methods for -means clustering are not known. On the other hand, two provably
accurate feature extraction methods for -means clustering are known in the
literature; one is based on random projections and the other is based on the
singular value decomposition (SVD).
This paper makes further progress towards a better understanding of
dimensionality reduction for -means clustering. Namely, we present the first
provably accurate feature selection method for -means clustering and, in
addition, we present two feature extraction methods. The first feature
extraction method is based on random projections and it improves upon the
existing results in terms of time complexity and number of features needed to
be extracted. The second feature extraction method is based on fast approximate
SVD factorizations and it also improves upon the existing results in terms of
time complexity. The proposed algorithms are randomized and provide
constant-factor approximation guarantees with respect to the optimal -means
objective value.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, to appea
Efficient Learning of Sparse Conditional Random Fields for Supervised Sequence Labelling
Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) constitute a popular and efficient approach
for supervised sequence labelling. CRFs can cope with large description spaces
and can integrate some form of structural dependency between labels. In this
contribution, we address the issue of efficient feature selection for CRFs
based on imposing sparsity through an L1 penalty. We first show how sparsity of
the parameter set can be exploited to significantly speed up training and
labelling. We then introduce coordinate descent parameter update schemes for
CRFs with L1 regularization. We finally provide some empirical comparisons of
the proposed approach with state-of-the-art CRF training strategies. In
particular, it is shown that the proposed approach is able to take profit of
the sparsity to speed up processing and hence potentially handle larger
dimensional models
A Noise-Robust Fast Sparse Bayesian Learning Model
This paper utilizes the hierarchical model structure from the Bayesian Lasso
in the Sparse Bayesian Learning process to develop a new type of probabilistic
supervised learning approach. The hierarchical model structure in this Bayesian
framework is designed such that the priors do not only penalize the unnecessary
complexity of the model but will also be conditioned on the variance of the
random noise in the data. The hyperparameters in the model are estimated by the
Fast Marginal Likelihood Maximization algorithm which can achieve sparsity, low
computational cost and faster learning process. We compare our methodology with
two other popular learning models; the Relevance Vector Machine and the
Bayesian Lasso. We test our model on examples involving both simulated and
empirical data, and the results show that this approach has several performance
advantages, such as being fast, sparse and also robust to the variance in
random noise. In addition, our method can give out a more stable estimation of
variance of random error, compared with the other methods in the study.Comment: 15 page
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