Unsupervised Representation Learning with Minimax Distance Measures

We investigate the use of Minimax distances to extract in a nonparametric way the features that capture the unknown underlying patterns and structures in the data. We develop a general-purpose and computationally efficient framework to employ Minimax distances with many machine learning methods that perform on numerical data. We study both computing the pairwise Minimax distances for all pairs of objects and as well as computing the Minimax distances of all the objects to/from a fixed (test) object. We first efficiently compute the pairwise Minimax distances between the objects, using the equivalence of Minimax distances over a graph and over a minimum spanning tree constructed on that. Then, we perform an embedding of the pairwise Minimax distances into a new vector space, such that their squared Euclidean distances in the new space equal to the pairwise Minimax distances in the original space. We also study the case of having multiple pairwise Minimax matrices, instead of a single one. Thereby, we propose an embedding via first summing up the centered matrices and then performing an eigenvalue decomposition to obtain the relevant features. In the following, we study computing Minimax distances from a fixed (test) object which can be used for instance in K-nearest neighbor search. Similar to the case of all-pair pairwise Minimax distances, we develop an efficient and general-purpose algorithm that is applicable with any arbitrary base distance measure. Moreover, we investigate in detail the edges selected by the Minimax distances and thereby explore the ability of Minimax distances in detecting outlier objects. Finally, for each setting, we perform several experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.Comment: 32 page

Optimal Estimation and Prediction for Dense Signals in High-Dimensional Linear Models

Estimation and prediction problems for dense signals are often framed in terms of minimax problems over highly symmetric parameter spaces. In this paper, we study minimax problems over l2-balls for high-dimensional linear models with Gaussian predictors. We obtain sharp asymptotics for the minimax risk that are applicable in any asymptotic setting where the number of predictors diverges and prove that ridge regression is asymptotically minimax. Adaptive asymptotic minimax ridge estimators are also identified. Orthogonal invariance is heavily exploited throughout the paper and, beyond serving as a technical tool, provides additional insight into the problems considered here. Most of our results follow from an apparently novel analysis of an equivalent non-Gaussian sequence model with orthogonally invariant errors. As with many dense estimation and prediction problems, the minimax risk studied here has rate d/n, where d is the number of predictors and n is the number of observations; however, when d is roughly proportional to n the minimax risk is influenced by the spectral distribution of the predictors and is notably different from the linear minimax risk for the Gaussian sequence model (Pinsker, 1980) that often appears in other dense estimation and prediction problems.Comment: 29 pages, 0 figure

Minimax bounds for estimation of normal mixtures

This paper deals with minimax rates of convergence for estimation of density functions on the real line. The densities are assumed to be location mixtures of normals, a global regularity requirement that creates subtle difficulties for the application of standard minimax lower bound methods. Using novel Fourier and Hermite polynomial techniques, we determine the minimax optimal rate - slightly larger than the parametric rate - under squared error loss. For Hellinger loss, we provide a minimax lower bound using ideas modified from the squared error loss case.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/13-BEJ542 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Search versus Knowledge: An Empirical Study of Minimax on KRK

This article presents the results of an empirical experiment designed to gain insight into what is the effect of the minimax algorithm on the evaluation function. The experiment’s simulations were performed upon the KRK chess endgame. Our results show that dependencies between evaluations of sibling nodes in a game tree and an abundance of possibilities to commit blunders present in the KRK endgame are not sufficient to explain the success of the minimax principle in practical game-playing as was previously believed. The article shows that minimax in combination with a noisy evaluation function introduces a bias into the backed-up evaluations and argues that this bias is what masked the effectiveness of the minimax in previous studies