8,447 research outputs found
Feature Selection for Linear SVM with Provable Guarantees
We give two provably accurate feature-selection techniques for the linear
SVM. The algorithms run in deterministic and randomized time respectively. Our
algorithms can be used in an unsupervised or supervised setting. The supervised
approach is based on sampling features from support vectors. We prove that the
margin in the feature space is preserved to within -relative error of
the margin in the full feature space in the worst-case. In the unsupervised
setting, we also provide worst-case guarantees of the radius of the minimum
enclosing ball, thereby ensuring comparable generalization as in the full
feature space and resolving an open problem posed in Dasgupta et al. We present
extensive experiments on real-world datasets to support our theory and to
demonstrate that our method is competitive and often better than prior
state-of-the-art, for which there are no known provable guarantees.Comment: Appearing in Proceedings of 18th AISTATS, JMLR W&CP, vol 38, 201
Efficient Benchmarking of Algorithm Configuration Procedures via Model-Based Surrogates
The optimization of algorithm (hyper-)parameters is crucial for achieving
peak performance across a wide range of domains, ranging from deep neural
networks to solvers for hard combinatorial problems. The resulting algorithm
configuration (AC) problem has attracted much attention from the machine
learning community. However, the proper evaluation of new AC procedures is
hindered by two key hurdles. First, AC benchmarks are hard to set up. Second
and even more significantly, they are computationally expensive: a single run
of an AC procedure involves many costly runs of the target algorithm whose
performance is to be optimized in a given AC benchmark scenario. One common
workaround is to optimize cheap-to-evaluate artificial benchmark functions
(e.g., Branin) instead of actual algorithms; however, these have different
properties than realistic AC problems. Here, we propose an alternative
benchmarking approach that is similarly cheap to evaluate but much closer to
the original AC problem: replacing expensive benchmarks by surrogate benchmarks
constructed from AC benchmarks. These surrogate benchmarks approximate the
response surface corresponding to true target algorithm performance using a
regression model, and the original and surrogate benchmark share the same
(hyper-)parameter space. In our experiments, we construct and evaluate
surrogate benchmarks for hyperparameter optimization as well as for AC problems
that involve performance optimization of solvers for hard combinatorial
problems, drawing training data from the runs of existing AC procedures. We
show that our surrogate benchmarks capture overall important characteristics of
the AC scenarios, such as high- and low-performing regions, from which they
were derived, while being much easier to use and orders of magnitude cheaper to
evaluate
A PARTAN-Accelerated Frank-Wolfe Algorithm for Large-Scale SVM Classification
Frank-Wolfe algorithms have recently regained the attention of the Machine
Learning community. Their solid theoretical properties and sparsity guarantees
make them a suitable choice for a wide range of problems in this field. In
addition, several variants of the basic procedure exist that improve its
theoretical properties and practical performance. In this paper, we investigate
the application of some of these techniques to Machine Learning, focusing in
particular on a Parallel Tangent (PARTAN) variant of the FW algorithm that has
not been previously suggested or studied for this type of problems. We provide
experiments both in a standard setting and using a stochastic speed-up
technique, showing that the considered algorithms obtain promising results on
several medium and large-scale benchmark datasets for SVM classification
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