382,538 research outputs found
Speculative Approximations for Terascale Analytics
Model calibration is a major challenge faced by the plethora of statistical
analytics packages that are increasingly used in Big Data applications.
Identifying the optimal model parameters is a time-consuming process that has
to be executed from scratch for every dataset/model combination even by
experienced data scientists. We argue that the incapacity to evaluate multiple
parameter configurations simultaneously and the lack of support to quickly
identify sub-optimal configurations are the principal causes. In this paper, we
develop two database-inspired techniques for efficient model calibration.
Speculative parameter testing applies advanced parallel multi-query processing
methods to evaluate several configurations concurrently. The number of
configurations is determined adaptively at runtime, while the configurations
themselves are extracted from a distribution that is continuously learned
following a Bayesian process. Online aggregation is applied to identify
sub-optimal configurations early in the processing by incrementally sampling
the training dataset and estimating the objective function corresponding to
each configuration. We design concurrent online aggregation estimators and
define halting conditions to accurately and timely stop the execution. We apply
the proposed techniques to distributed gradient descent optimization -- batch
and incremental -- for support vector machines and logistic regression models.
We implement the resulting solutions in GLADE PF-OLA -- a state-of-the-art Big
Data analytics system -- and evaluate their performance over terascale-size
synthetic and real datasets. The results confirm that as many as 32
configurations can be evaluated concurrently almost as fast as one, while
sub-optimal configurations are detected accurately in as little as a
fraction of the time
Reliability demonstration for safety-critical systems
This paper suggests a new model for reliability demonstration of safety-critical systems, based on the TRW Software Reliability Theory. The paper describes the model; the test equipment required and test strategies based on the various constraints occurring during software development. The paper also compares a new testing method, Single Risk Sequential Testing (SRST), with the standard Probability Ratio Sequential Testing method (PRST), and concludes that: • SRST provides higher chances of success than PRST • SRST takes less time to complete than PRST • SRST satisfies the consumer risk criterion, whereas PRST provides a much smaller consumer risk than the requirement
Gibbs Max-margin Topic Models with Data Augmentation
Max-margin learning is a powerful approach to building classifiers and
structured output predictors. Recent work on max-margin supervised topic models
has successfully integrated it with Bayesian topic models to discover
discriminative latent semantic structures and make accurate predictions for
unseen testing data. However, the resulting learning problems are usually hard
to solve because of the non-smoothness of the margin loss. Existing approaches
to building max-margin supervised topic models rely on an iterative procedure
to solve multiple latent SVM subproblems with additional mean-field assumptions
on the desired posterior distributions. This paper presents an alternative
approach by defining a new max-margin loss. Namely, we present Gibbs max-margin
supervised topic models, a latent variable Gibbs classifier to discover hidden
topic representations for various tasks, including classification, regression
and multi-task learning. Gibbs max-margin supervised topic models minimize an
expected margin loss, which is an upper bound of the existing margin loss
derived from an expected prediction rule. By introducing augmented variables
and integrating out the Dirichlet variables analytically by conjugacy, we
develop simple Gibbs sampling algorithms with no restricting assumptions and no
need to solve SVM subproblems. Furthermore, each step of the
"augment-and-collapse" Gibbs sampling algorithms has an analytical conditional
distribution, from which samples can be easily drawn. Experimental results
demonstrate significant improvements on time efficiency. The classification
performance is also significantly improved over competitors on binary,
multi-class and multi-label classification tasks.Comment: 35 page
An ontology enhanced parallel SVM for scalable spam filter training
This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Neurocomputing. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier B.V.Spam, under a variety of shapes and forms, continues to inflict increased damage. Varying approaches including Support Vector Machine (SVM) techniques have been proposed for spam filter training and classification. However, SVM training is a computationally intensive process. This paper presents a MapReduce based parallel SVM algorithm for scalable spam filter training. By distributing, processing and optimizing the subsets of the training data across multiple participating computer nodes, the parallel SVM reduces the training time significantly. Ontology semantics are employed to minimize the impact of accuracy degradation when distributing the training data among a number of SVM classifiers. Experimental results show that ontology based augmentation improves the accuracy level of the parallel SVM beyond the original sequential counterpart
Bayesian sequential estimation of the reliability of a parallel-series system
We give a risk-averse solution to the problem of estimating the reliability
of a parallel-series system. We adopt a beta-binomial model for components
reliabilities, and assume that the total sample size for the experience is
fixed. The allocation at subsystems or components level may be random. Based on
the sampling schemes for parallel and series systems separately, we propose a
hybrid sequential scheme for the parallel-series system. Asymptotic optimality
of the Bayes risk associated with quadratic loss is proved with the help of
martingale convergence properties.Comment: 12 page
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