Compressive Network Analysis

Modern data acquisition routinely produces massive amounts of network data. Though many methods and models have been proposed to analyze such data, the research of network data is largely disconnected with the classical theory of statistical learning and signal processing. In this paper, we present a new framework for modeling network data, which connects two seemingly different areas: network data analysis and compressed sensing. From a nonparametric perspective, we model an observed network using a large dictionary. In particular, we consider the network clique detection problem and show connections between our formulation with a new algebraic tool, namely Randon basis pursuit in homogeneous spaces. Such a connection allows us to identify rigorous recovery conditions for clique detection problems. Though this paper is mainly conceptual, we also develop practical approximation algorithms for solving empirical problems and demonstrate their usefulness on real-world datasets

Recovery Conditions and Sampling Strategies for Network Lasso

The network Lasso is a recently proposed convex optimization method for machine learning from massive network structured datasets, i.e., big data over networks. It is a variant of the well-known least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso), which is underlying many methods in learning and signal processing involving sparse models. Highly scalable implementations of the network Lasso can be obtained by state-of-the art proximal methods, e.g., the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). By generalizing the concept of the compatibility condition put forward by van de Geer and Buehlmann as a powerful tool for the analysis of plain Lasso, we derive a sufficient condition, i.e., the network compatibility condition, on the underlying network topology such that network Lasso accurately learns a clustered underlying graph signal. This network compatibility condition relates the location of the sampled nodes with the clustering structure of the network. In particular, the NCC informs the choice of which nodes to sample, or in machine learning terms, which data points provide most information if labeled.Comment: nominated as student paper award finalist at Asilomar 2017. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1704.0210

Bias Reduction via End-to-End Shift Learning: Application to Citizen Science

Citizen science projects are successful at gathering rich datasets for various applications. However, the data collected by citizen scientists are often biased --- in particular, aligned more with the citizens' preferences than with scientific objectives. We propose the Shift Compensation Network (SCN), an end-to-end learning scheme which learns the shift from the scientific objectives to the biased data while compensating for the shift by re-weighting the training data. Applied to bird observational data from the citizen science project eBird, we demonstrate how SCN quantifies the data distribution shift and outperforms supervised learning models that do not address the data bias. Compared with competing models in the context of covariate shift, we further demonstrate the advantage of SCN in both its effectiveness and its capability of handling massive high-dimensional data