Learning Boolean functions in AC0 on attribute and classification noise—Estimating an upper bound on attribute and classification noise

AbstractWe study a procedure for estimating an upper bound of an unknown noise factor in the frequency domain. A learning algorithm using a Fourier transformation method was originally given by Linial, Mansour and Nisan. While Linial, Mansour and Nisan assumed that the learning algorithm estimates Fourier coefficients from noiseless data, Bshouty, Jackson, and Tamon, and also Ohtsuki and Tomita extended the algorithm to ones that are robust for noisy data. The noise process that we consider is as follows: for an example 〈x,f(x)〉, where x∈{0,1}n,f(x)∈{−1,1}, each bit of x and f(x) gets flipped independently with probability η during a learning process. The previous learning algorithms for noisy data all assume that the noise factor η or an upper bound of η is known in advance. The learning algorithm proposed in this paper works without this assumption. We estimate an upper bound of the noise factor by evaluating a noisy power spectrum in the frequency domain and by using a sampling trick. Combining this procedure with Ohtsuki and Tomita’s algorithm, we obtain a quasi-polynomial-time learning algorithm that can cope with noise without knowing any information about the noise in advance

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

Applied Metaheuristic Computing

For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC

A study of the design expertise for plants handling hazardous materials

A study of the design expertise for plants handling hazardous material

Statistical Analysis of Structured Latent Attribute Models

In modern psychological and biomedical research with diagnostic purposes, scientists often formulate the key task as inferring the fine-grained latent information under structural constraints. These structural constraints usually come from the domain experts' prior knowledge or insight. The emerging family of Structured Latent Attribute Models (SLAMs) accommodate these modeling needs and have received substantial attention in psychology, education, and epidemiology. SLAMs bring exciting opportunities and unique challenges. In particular, with high-dimensional discrete latent attributes and structural constraints encoded by a structural matrix, one needs to balance the gain in the model's explanatory power and interpretability, against the difficulty of understanding and handling the complex model structure. This dissertation studies such a family of structured latent attribute models from theoretical, methodological, and computational perspectives. On the theoretical front, we present identifiability results that advance the theoretical knowledge of how the structural matrix influences the estimability of SLAMs. The new identifiability conditions guide real-world practices of designing diagnostic tests and also lay the foundation for drawing valid statistical conclusions. On the methodology side, we propose a statistically consistent penalized likelihood approach to selecting significant latent patterns in the population in high dimensions. Computationally, we develop scalable algorithms to simultaneously recover both the structural matrix and the dependence structure of the latent attributes in ultrahigh dimensional scenarios. These developments explore an exponentially large model space involving many discrete latent variables, and they address the estimation and computation challenges of high-dimensional SLAMs arising from large-scale scientific measurements. The application of the proposed methodology to the data from international educational assessments reveals meaningful knowledge structures of the student population.PHDStatisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155196/1/yuqigu_1.pd

Improving the hierarchical classification of protein functions With swarm intelligence

This thesis investigates methods to improve the performance of hierarchical classification. In terms of this thesis hierarchical classification is a form of supervised learning, where the classes in a data set are arranged in a tree structure. As a base for our new methods we use the TDDC (top-down divide-and-conquer) approach for hierarchical classification, where each classifier is built only to discriminate between sibling classes. Firstly, we propose a swarm intelligence technique which varies the types of classifiers used at each divide within the TDDC tree. Our technique, PSO/ACO-CS (Particle Swarm Optimisation/Ant Colony Optimisation Classifier Selection), finds combinations of classifiers to be used in the TDDC tree using the global search ability of PSO/ACO. Secondly, we propose a technique that attempts to mitigate a major drawback of the TDDC approach. The drawback is that if at any point in the TDDC tree an example is misclassified it can never be correctly classified further down the TDDC tree. Our approach, PSO/ACO-RO (PSO/ACO-Recovery Optimisation) decides whether to redirect examples at a given classifier node using, again, the global search ability of PSO/ACO. Thirdly, we propose an ensemble based technique, HEHRS (Hierarchical Ensembles of Hierarchical Rule Sets), which attempts to boost the accuracy at each classifier node in the TDDC tree by using information from classifiers (rule sets) in the rest of that tree. We use Particle Swarm Optimisation to weight the individual rules within each ensemble. We evaluate these three new methods in hierarchical bioinformatics datasets that we have created for this research. These data sets represent the real world problem of protein function prediction. We find through extensive experimentation that the three proposed methods improve upon the baseline TDDC method to varying degrees. Overall the HEHRS and PSO/ACO- CS-RO approaches are most effective, although they are associated with a higher computational cost

Applied Methuerstic computing

For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC