93,329 research outputs found
Missing ordinal covariates with informative selection
This paper considers the problem of parameter estimation in a model for a continuous response variable y when an important ordinal explanatory variable x is missing for a large proportion of the sample. Non-missingness of x, or sample selection, is correlated with the response variable and/or with the unobserved values the ordinal explanatory variable takes when missing. We suggest solving the endogenous selection, or 'not missing at random' (NMAR), problem by modelling the informative selection mechanism, the ordinal explanatory variable, and the response variable together. The use of the method is illustrated by re-examining the problem of the ethnic gap in school achievement at age 16 in England using linked data from the National Pupil database (NPD), the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE), and the Census 2001.Missing covariate, sample selection, latent class models, ordinal variables, NMAR
A Convex Feature Learning Formulation for Latent Task Structure Discovery
This paper considers the multi-task learning problem and in the setting where
some relevant features could be shared across few related tasks. Most of the
existing methods assume the extent to which the given tasks are related or
share a common feature space to be known apriori. In real-world applications
however, it is desirable to automatically discover the groups of related tasks
that share a feature space. In this paper we aim at searching the exponentially
large space of all possible groups of tasks that may share a feature space. The
main contribution is a convex formulation that employs a graph-based
regularizer and simultaneously discovers few groups of related tasks, having
close-by task parameters, as well as the feature space shared within each
group. The regularizer encodes an important structure among the groups of tasks
leading to an efficient algorithm for solving it: if there is no feature space
under which a group of tasks has close-by task parameters, then there does not
exist such a feature space for any of its supersets. An efficient active set
algorithm that exploits this simplification and performs a clever search in the
exponentially large space is presented. The algorithm is guaranteed to solve
the proposed formulation (within some precision) in a time polynomial in the
number of groups of related tasks discovered. Empirical results on benchmark
datasets show that the proposed formulation achieves good generalization and
outperforms state-of-the-art multi-task learning algorithms in some cases.Comment: ICML201
Multi-task CNN Model for Attribute Prediction
This paper proposes a joint multi-task learning algorithm to better predict
attributes in images using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). We
consider learning binary semantic attributes through a multi-task CNN model,
where each CNN will predict one binary attribute. The multi-task learning
allows CNN models to simultaneously share visual knowledge among different
attribute categories. Each CNN will generate attribute-specific feature
representations, and then we apply multi-task learning on the features to
predict their attributes. In our multi-task framework, we propose a method to
decompose the overall model's parameters into a latent task matrix and
combination matrix. Furthermore, under-sampled classifiers can leverage shared
statistics from other classifiers to improve their performance. Natural
grouping of attributes is applied such that attributes in the same group are
encouraged to share more knowledge. Meanwhile, attributes in different groups
will generally compete with each other, and consequently share less knowledge.
We show the effectiveness of our method on two popular attribute datasets.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, ieee transaction pape
Approximating a similarity matrix by a latent class model: A reappraisal of additive fuzzy clustering
Let Q be a given nĆn square symmetric matrix of nonnegative elements between 0 and 1, similarities. Fuzzy clustering results in fuzzy assignment of individuals to K clusters. In additive fuzzy clustering, the nĆK fuzzy memberships matrix P is found by least-squares approximation of the off-diagonal elements of Q by inner products of rows of P. By contrast, kernelized fuzzy c-means is not least-squares and requires an additional fuzziness parameter. The aim is to popularize additive fuzzy clustering by interpreting it as a latent class model, whereby the elements of Q are modeled as the probability that two individuals share the same class on the basis of the assignment probability matrix P. Two new algorithms are provided, a brute force genetic algorithm (differential evolution) and an iterative row-wise quadratic programming algorithm of which the latter is the more effective. Simulations showed that (1) the method usually has a unique solution, except in special cases, (2) both algorithms reached this solution from random restarts and (3) the number of clusters can be well estimated by AIC. Additive fuzzy clustering is computationally efficient and combines attractive features of both the vector model and the cluster mode
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