3,948 research outputs found
Projected Estimators for Robust Semi-supervised Classification
For semi-supervised techniques to be applied safely in practice we at least
want methods to outperform their supervised counterparts. We study this
question for classification using the well-known quadratic surrogate loss
function. Using a projection of the supervised estimate onto a set of
constraints imposed by the unlabeled data, we find we can safely improve over
the supervised solution in terms of this quadratic loss. Unlike other
approaches to semi-supervised learning, the procedure does not rely on
assumptions that are not intrinsic to the classifier at hand. It is
theoretically demonstrated that, measured on the labeled and unlabeled training
data, this semi-supervised procedure never gives a lower quadratic loss than
the supervised alternative. To our knowledge this is the first approach that
offers such strong, albeit conservative, guarantees for improvement over the
supervised solution. The characteristics of our approach are explicated using
benchmark datasets to further understand the similarities and differences
between the quadratic loss criterion used in the theoretical results and the
classification accuracy often considered in practice.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl
The Importance of Being Clustered: Uncluttering the Trends of Statistics from 1970 to 2015
In this paper we retrace the recent history of statistics by analyzing all
the papers published in five prestigious statistical journals since 1970,
namely: Annals of Statistics, Biometrika, Journal of the American Statistical
Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, series B and Statistical
Science. The aim is to construct a kind of "taxonomy" of the statistical papers
by organizing and by clustering them in main themes. In this sense being
identified in a cluster means being important enough to be uncluttered in the
vast and interconnected world of the statistical research. Since the main
statistical research topics naturally born, evolve or die during time, we will
also develop a dynamic clustering strategy, where a group in a time period is
allowed to migrate or to merge into different groups in the following one.
Results show that statistics is a very dynamic and evolving science, stimulated
by the rise of new research questions and types of data
A review of domain adaptation without target labels
Domain adaptation has become a prominent problem setting in machine learning
and related fields. This review asks the question: how can a classifier learn
from a source domain and generalize to a target domain? We present a
categorization of approaches, divided into, what we refer to as, sample-based,
feature-based and inference-based methods. Sample-based methods focus on
weighting individual observations during training based on their importance to
the target domain. Feature-based methods revolve around on mapping, projecting
and representing features such that a source classifier performs well on the
target domain and inference-based methods incorporate adaptation into the
parameter estimation procedure, for instance through constraints on the
optimization procedure. Additionally, we review a number of conditions that
allow for formulating bounds on the cross-domain generalization error. Our
categorization highlights recurring ideas and raises questions important to
further research.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure
Randomized Dimension Reduction on Massive Data
Scalability of statistical estimators is of increasing importance in modern
applications and dimension reduction is often used to extract relevant
information from data. A variety of popular dimension reduction approaches can
be framed as symmetric generalized eigendecomposition problems. In this paper
we outline how taking into account the low rank structure assumption implicit
in these dimension reduction approaches provides both computational and
statistical advantages. We adapt recent randomized low-rank approximation
algorithms to provide efficient solutions to three dimension reduction methods:
Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Sliced Inverse Regression (SIR), and
Localized Sliced Inverse Regression (LSIR). A key observation in this paper is
that randomization serves a dual role, improving both computational and
statistical performance. This point is highlighted in our experiments on real
and simulated data.Comment: 31 pages, 6 figures, Key Words:dimension reduction, generalized
eigendecompositon, low-rank, supervised, inverse regression, random
projections, randomized algorithms, Krylov subspace method
Generative Adversarial Positive-Unlabelled Learning
In this work, we consider the task of classifying binary positive-unlabeled
(PU) data. The existing discriminative learning based PU models attempt to seek
an optimal reweighting strategy for U data, so that a decent decision boundary
can be found. However, given limited P data, the conventional PU models tend to
suffer from overfitting when adapted to very flexible deep neural networks. In
contrast, we are the first to innovate a totally new paradigm to attack the
binary PU task, from perspective of generative learning by leveraging the
powerful generative adversarial networks (GAN). Our generative
positive-unlabeled (GenPU) framework incorporates an array of discriminators
and generators that are endowed with different roles in simultaneously
producing positive and negative realistic samples. We provide theoretical
analysis to justify that, at equilibrium, GenPU is capable of recovering both
positive and negative data distributions. Moreover, we show GenPU is
generalizable and closely related to the semi-supervised classification. Given
rather limited P data, experiments on both synthetic and real-world dataset
demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. With infinite
realistic and diverse sample streams generated from GenPU, a very flexible
classifier can then be trained using deep neural networks.Comment: 8 page
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