11,716 research outputs found
High-Dimensional Dependency Structure Learning for Physical Processes
In this paper, we consider the use of structure learning methods for
probabilistic graphical models to identify statistical dependencies in
high-dimensional physical processes. Such processes are often synthetically
characterized using PDEs (partial differential equations) and are observed in a
variety of natural phenomena, including geoscience data capturing atmospheric
and hydrological phenomena. Classical structure learning approaches such as the
PC algorithm and variants are challenging to apply due to their high
computational and sample requirements. Modern approaches, often based on sparse
regression and variants, do come with finite sample guarantees, but are usually
highly sensitive to the choice of hyper-parameters, e.g., parameter
for sparsity inducing constraint or regularization. In this paper, we present
ACLIME-ADMM, an efficient two-step algorithm for adaptive structure learning,
which estimates an edge specific parameter in the first step,
and uses these parameters to learn the structure in the second step. Both steps
of our algorithm use (inexact) ADMM to solve suitable linear programs, and all
iterations can be done in closed form in an efficient block parallel manner. We
compare ACLIME-ADMM with baselines on both synthetic data simulated by partial
differential equations (PDEs) that model advection-diffusion processes, and
real data (50 years) of daily global geopotential heights to study information
flow in the atmosphere. ACLIME-ADMM is shown to be efficient, stable, and
competitive, usually better than the baselines especially on difficult
problems. On real data, ACLIME-ADMM recovers the underlying structure of global
atmospheric circulation, including switches in wind directions at the equator
and tropics entirely from the data.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, International Conference on Data Mining 201
High-performance Kernel Machines with Implicit Distributed Optimization and Randomization
In order to fully utilize "big data", it is often required to use "big
models". Such models tend to grow with the complexity and size of the training
data, and do not make strong parametric assumptions upfront on the nature of
the underlying statistical dependencies. Kernel methods fit this need well, as
they constitute a versatile and principled statistical methodology for solving
a wide range of non-parametric modelling problems. However, their high
computational costs (in storage and time) pose a significant barrier to their
widespread adoption in big data applications.
We propose an algorithmic framework and high-performance implementation for
massive-scale training of kernel-based statistical models, based on combining
two key technical ingredients: (i) distributed general purpose convex
optimization, and (ii) the use of randomization to improve the scalability of
kernel methods. Our approach is based on a block-splitting variant of the
Alternating Directions Method of Multipliers, carefully reconfigured to handle
very large random feature matrices, while exploiting hybrid parallelism
typically found in modern clusters of multicore machines. Our implementation
supports a variety of statistical learning tasks by enabling several loss
functions, regularization schemes, kernels, and layers of randomized
approximations for both dense and sparse datasets, in a highly extensible
framework. We evaluate the ability of our framework to learn models on data
from applications, and provide a comparison against existing sequential and
parallel libraries.Comment: Work presented at MMDS 2014 (June 2014) and JSM 201
Understanding and Comparing Scalable Gaussian Process Regression for Big Data
As a non-parametric Bayesian model which produces informative predictive
distribution, Gaussian process (GP) has been widely used in various fields,
like regression, classification and optimization. The cubic complexity of
standard GP however leads to poor scalability, which poses challenges in the
era of big data. Hence, various scalable GPs have been developed in the
literature in order to improve the scalability while retaining desirable
prediction accuracy. This paper devotes to investigating the methodological
characteristics and performance of representative global and local scalable GPs
including sparse approximations and local aggregations from four main
perspectives: scalability, capability, controllability and robustness. The
numerical experiments on two toy examples and five real-world datasets with up
to 250K points offer the following findings. In terms of scalability, most of
the scalable GPs own a time complexity that is linear to the training size. In
terms of capability, the sparse approximations capture the long-term spatial
correlations, the local aggregations capture the local patterns but suffer from
over-fitting in some scenarios. In terms of controllability, we could improve
the performance of sparse approximations by simply increasing the inducing
size. But this is not the case for local aggregations. In terms of robustness,
local aggregations are robust to various initializations of hyperparameters due
to the local attention mechanism. Finally, we highlight that the proper hybrid
of global and local scalable GPs may be a promising way to improve both the
model capability and scalability for big data.Comment: 25 pages, 15 figures, preprint submitted to KB
Optomechanical circuits for nanomechanical continuous variable quantum state processing
We propose and analyze a nanomechanical architecture where light is used to
perform linear quantum operations on a set of many vibrational modes. Suitable
amplitude modulation of a single laser beam is shown to generate squeezing,
entanglement, and state-transfer between modes that are selected according to
their mechanical oscillation frequency. Current optomechanical devices based on
photonic crystals may provide a platform for realizing this scheme.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure
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