4,832 research outputs found
Supervised Learning with Similarity Functions
We address the problem of general supervised learning when data can only be
accessed through an (indefinite) similarity function between data points.
Existing work on learning with indefinite kernels has concentrated solely on
binary/multi-class classification problems. We propose a model that is generic
enough to handle any supervised learning task and also subsumes the model
previously proposed for classification. We give a "goodness" criterion for
similarity functions w.r.t. a given supervised learning task and then adapt a
well-known landmarking technique to provide efficient algorithms for supervised
learning using "good" similarity functions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of
our model on three important super-vised learning problems: a) real-valued
regression, b) ordinal regression and c) ranking where we show that our method
guarantees bounded generalization error. Furthermore, for the case of
real-valued regression, we give a natural goodness definition that, when used
in conjunction with a recent result in sparse vector recovery, guarantees a
sparse predictor with bounded generalization error. Finally, we report results
of our learning algorithms on regression and ordinal regression tasks using
non-PSD similarity functions and demonstrate the effectiveness of our
algorithms, especially that of the sparse landmark selection algorithm that
achieves significantly higher accuracies than the baseline methods while
offering reduced computational costs.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of NIPS 2012, 30 page
Interpretable statistics for complex modelling: quantile and topological learning
As the complexity of our data increased exponentially in the last decades, so has our
need for interpretable features. This thesis revolves around two paradigms to approach
this quest for insights.
In the first part we focus on parametric models, where the problem of interpretability
can be seen as a “parametrization selection”. We introduce a quantile-centric
parametrization and we show the advantages of our proposal in the context of regression,
where it allows to bridge the gap between classical generalized linear (mixed)
models and increasingly popular quantile methods.
The second part of the thesis, concerned with topological learning, tackles the
problem from a non-parametric perspective. As topology can be thought of as a way
of characterizing data in terms of their connectivity structure, it allows to represent
complex and possibly high dimensional through few features, such as the number of
connected components, loops and voids. We illustrate how the emerging branch of
statistics devoted to recovering topological structures in the data, Topological Data
Analysis, can be exploited both for exploratory and inferential purposes with a special
emphasis on kernels that preserve the topological information in the data.
Finally, we show with an application how these two approaches can borrow strength
from one another in the identification and description of brain activity through fMRI
data from the ABIDE project
Regularized Regression Problem in hyper-RKHS for Learning Kernels
This paper generalizes the two-stage kernel learning framework, illustrates
its utility for kernel learning and out-of-sample extensions, and proves
{asymptotic} convergence results for the introduced kernel learning model.
Algorithmically, we extend target alignment by hyper-kernels in the two-stage
kernel learning framework. The associated kernel learning task is formulated as
a regression problem in a hyper-reproducing kernel Hilbert space (hyper-RKHS),
i.e., learning on the space of kernels itself. To solve this problem, we
present two regression models with bivariate forms in this space, including
kernel ridge regression (KRR) and support vector regression (SVR) in the
hyper-RKHS. By doing so, it provides significant model flexibility for kernel
learning with outstanding performance in real-world applications. Specifically,
our kernel learning framework is general, that is, the learned underlying
kernel can be positive definite or indefinite, which adapts to various
requirements in kernel learning. Theoretically, we study the convergence
behavior of these learning algorithms in the hyper-RKHS and derive the learning
rates. Different from the traditional approximation analysis in RKHS, our
analyses need to consider the non-trivial independence of pairwise samples and
the characterisation of hyper-RKHS. To the best of our knowledge, this is the
first work in learning theory to study the approximation performance of
regularized regression problem in hyper-RKHS.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figure
A Survey on Graph Kernels
Graph kernels have become an established and widely-used technique for
solving classification tasks on graphs. This survey gives a comprehensive
overview of techniques for kernel-based graph classification developed in the
past 15 years. We describe and categorize graph kernels based on properties
inherent to their design, such as the nature of their extracted graph features,
their method of computation and their applicability to problems in practice. In
an extensive experimental evaluation, we study the classification accuracy of a
large suite of graph kernels on established benchmarks as well as new datasets.
We compare the performance of popular kernels with several baseline methods and
study the effect of applying a Gaussian RBF kernel to the metric induced by a
graph kernel. In doing so, we find that simple baselines become competitive
after this transformation on some datasets. Moreover, we study the extent to
which existing graph kernels agree in their predictions (and prediction errors)
and obtain a data-driven categorization of kernels as result. Finally, based on
our experimental results, we derive a practitioner's guide to kernel-based
graph classification
Positive Definite Kernels in Machine Learning
This survey is an introduction to positive definite kernels and the set of
methods they have inspired in the machine learning literature, namely kernel
methods. We first discuss some properties of positive definite kernels as well
as reproducing kernel Hibert spaces, the natural extension of the set of
functions associated with a kernel defined
on a space . We discuss at length the construction of kernel
functions that take advantage of well-known statistical models. We provide an
overview of numerous data-analysis methods which take advantage of reproducing
kernel Hilbert spaces and discuss the idea of combining several kernels to
improve the performance on certain tasks. We also provide a short cookbook of
different kernels which are particularly useful for certain data-types such as
images, graphs or speech segments.Comment: draft. corrected a typo in figure
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