Learning Dynamic Feature Selection for Fast Sequential Prediction

We present paired learning and inference algorithms for significantly reducing computation and increasing speed of the vector dot products in the classifiers that are at the heart of many NLP components. This is accomplished by partitioning the features into a sequence of templates which are ordered such that high confidence can often be reached using only a small fraction of all features. Parameter estimation is arranged to maximize accuracy and early confidence in this sequence. Our approach is simpler and better suited to NLP than other related cascade methods. We present experiments in left-to-right part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and transition-based dependency parsing. On the typical benchmarking datasets we can preserve POS tagging accuracy above 97% and parsing LAS above 88.5% both with over a five-fold reduction in run-time, and NER F1 above 88 with more than 2x increase in speed.Comment: Appears in The 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Beijing, China, July 201

Parsimonious Kernel Fisher Discrimination

By applying recent results in optimization transfer, a new algorithm for kernel Fisher Discriminant Analysis is provided that makes use of a non-smooth penalty on the coefficients to provide a parsimonious solution. The algorithm is simple, easily programmed and is shown to perform as well as or better than a number of leading machine learning algorithms on a substantial benchmark. It is then applied to a set of extreme small-sample-size problems in virtual screening where it is found to be less accurate than a currently leading approach but is still comparable in a number of cases

Cholesky-factorized sparse Kernel in support vector machines

Support Vector Machine (SVM) is one of the most powerful machine learning algorithms due to its convex optimization formulation and handling non-linear classification. However, one of its main drawbacks is the long time it takes to train large data sets. This limitation is often aroused when applying non-linear kernels (e.g. RBF Kernel) which are usually required to obtain better separation for linearly inseparable data sets. In this thesis, we study an approach that aims to speed-up the training time by combining both the better performance of RBF kernels and fast training by a linear solver, LIBLINEAR. The approach uses an RBF kernel with a sparse matrix which is factorized using Cholesky decomposition. The method is tested on large artificial and real data sets and compared to the standard RBF and linear kernels where both the accuracy and training time are reported. For most data sets, the result shows a huge training time reduction, over 90\%, whilst maintaining the accuracy