16,243 research outputs found
Optimizing Sample Design for Approximate Query Processing
The rapid increase of data volumes makes sampling a crucial component of modern data management systems. Although there is a large body of work on database sampling, the problem of automatically determine the optimal sample for a given query remained (almost) unaddressed. To tackle this problem the authors propose a sample advisor based on a novel cost model. Primarily designed for advising samples of a few queries specified by an expert, the authors additionally propose two extensions of the sample advisor. The first extension enhances the applicability by utilizing recorded workload information and taking memory bounds into account. The second extension increases the effectiveness by merging samples in case of overlapping pieces of sample advice. For both extensions, the authors present exact and heuristic solutions. Within their evaluation, the authors analyze the properties of the cost model and demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the heuristic solutions with a variety of experiments
Unbiased Comparative Evaluation of Ranking Functions
Eliciting relevance judgments for ranking evaluation is labor-intensive and
costly, motivating careful selection of which documents to judge. Unlike
traditional approaches that make this selection deterministically,
probabilistic sampling has shown intriguing promise since it enables the design
of estimators that are provably unbiased even when reusing data with missing
judgments. In this paper, we first unify and extend these sampling approaches
by viewing the evaluation problem as a Monte Carlo estimation task that applies
to a large number of common IR metrics. Drawing on the theoretical clarity that
this view offers, we tackle three practical evaluation scenarios: comparing two
systems, comparing systems against a baseline, and ranking systems. For
each scenario, we derive an estimator and a variance-optimizing sampling
distribution while retaining the strengths of sampling-based evaluation,
including unbiasedness, reusability despite missing data, and ease of use in
practice. In addition to the theoretical contribution, we empirically evaluate
our methods against previously used sampling heuristics and find that they
generally cut the number of required relevance judgments at least in half.Comment: Under review; 10 page
Bayesian Optimization for Probabilistic Programs
We present the first general purpose framework for marginal maximum a
posteriori estimation of probabilistic program variables. By using a series of
code transformations, the evidence of any probabilistic program, and therefore
of any graphical model, can be optimized with respect to an arbitrary subset of
its sampled variables. To carry out this optimization, we develop the first
Bayesian optimization package to directly exploit the source code of its
target, leading to innovations in problem-independent hyperpriors, unbounded
optimization, and implicit constraint satisfaction; delivering significant
performance improvements over prominent existing packages. We present
applications of our method to a number of tasks including engineering design
and parameter optimization
Scalable Audience Reach Estimation in Real-time Online Advertising
Online advertising has been introduced as one of the most efficient methods
of advertising throughout the recent years. Yet, advertisers are concerned
about the efficiency of their online advertising campaigns and consequently,
would like to restrict their ad impressions to certain websites and/or certain
groups of audience. These restrictions, known as targeting criteria, limit the
reachability for better performance. This trade-off between reachability and
performance illustrates a need for a forecasting system that can quickly
predict/estimate (with good accuracy) this trade-off. Designing such a system
is challenging due to (a) the huge amount of data to process, and, (b) the need
for fast and accurate estimates. In this paper, we propose a distributed fault
tolerant system that can generate such estimates fast with good accuracy. The
main idea is to keep a small representative sample in memory across multiple
machines and formulate the forecasting problem as queries against the sample.
The key challenge is to find the best strata across the past data, perform
multivariate stratified sampling while ensuring fuzzy fall-back to cover the
small minorities. Our results show a significant improvement over the uniform
and simple stratified sampling strategies which are currently widely used in
the industry
Local Descriptors Optimized for Average Precision
Extraction of local feature descriptors is a vital stage in the solution
pipelines for numerous computer vision tasks. Learning-based approaches improve
performance in certain tasks, but still cannot replace handcrafted features in
general. In this paper, we improve the learning of local feature descriptors by
optimizing the performance of descriptor matching, which is a common stage that
follows descriptor extraction in local feature based pipelines, and can be
formulated as nearest neighbor retrieval. Specifically, we directly optimize a
ranking-based retrieval performance metric, Average Precision, using deep
neural networks. This general-purpose solution can also be viewed as a listwise
learning to rank approach, which is advantageous compared to recent local
ranking approaches. On standard benchmarks, descriptors learned with our
formulation achieve state-of-the-art results in patch verification, patch
retrieval, and image matching.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition (CVPR), 201
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