110 research outputs found
Scalable and Robust Community Detection with Randomized Sketching
This paper explores and analyzes the unsupervised clustering of large
partially observed graphs. We propose a scalable and provable randomized
framework for clustering graphs generated from the stochastic block model. The
clustering is first applied to a sub-matrix of the graph's adjacency matrix
associated with a reduced graph sketch constructed using random sampling. Then,
the clusters of the full graph are inferred based on the clusters extracted
from the sketch using a correlation-based retrieval step. Uniform random node
sampling is shown to improve the computational complexity over clustering of
the full graph when the cluster sizes are balanced. A new random degree-based
node sampling algorithm is presented which significantly improves upon the
performance of the clustering algorithm even when clusters are unbalanced. This
algorithm improves the phase transitions for matrix-decomposition-based
clustering with regard to computational complexity and minimum cluster size,
which are shown to be nearly dimension-free in the low inter-cluster
connectivity regime. A third sampling technique is shown to improve balance by
randomly sampling nodes based on spatial distribution. We provide analysis and
numerical results using a convex clustering algorithm based on matrix
completion
Stability Yields Sublinear Time Algorithms for Geometric Optimization in Machine Learning
In this paper, we study several important geometric optimization problems arising in machine learning. First, we revisit the Minimum Enclosing Ball (MEB) problem in Euclidean space ?^d. The problem has been extensively studied before, but real-world machine learning tasks often need to handle large-scale datasets so that we cannot even afford linear time algorithms. Motivated by the recent developments on beyond worst-case analysis, we introduce the notion of stability for MEB, which is natural and easy to understand. Roughly speaking, an instance of MEB is stable, if the radius of the resulting ball cannot be significantly reduced by removing a small fraction of the input points. Under the stability assumption, we present two sampling algorithms for computing radius-approximate MEB with sample complexities independent of the number of input points n. In particular, the second algorithm has the sample complexity even independent of the dimensionality d. We also consider the general case without the stability assumption. We present a hybrid algorithm that can output either a radius-approximate MEB or a covering-approximate MEB, which improves the running time and the number of passes for the previous sublinear MEB algorithms. Further, we extend our proposed notion of stability and design sublinear time algorithms for other geometric optimization problems including MEB with outliers, polytope distance, one-class and two-class linear SVMs (without or with outliers). Our proposed algorithms also work fine for kernels
Compressive Sequential Learning for Action Similarity Labeling
Human action recognition in videos has been extensively studied in recent years due to its wide range of applications. Instead of classifying video sequences into a number of action categories, in this paper, we focus on a particular problem of action similarity labeling (ASLAN), which aims at verifying whether a pair of videos contain the same type of action or not. To address this challenge, a novel approach called compressive sequential learning (CSL) is proposed by leveraging the compressive sensing theory and sequential learning. We first project data points to a low-dimensional space by effectively exploring an important property in compressive sensing: the restricted isometry property. In particular, a very sparse measurement matrix is adopted to reduce the dimensionality efficiently. We then learn an ensemble classifier for measuring similarities between pairwise videos by iteratively minimizing its empirical risk with the AdaBoost strategy on the training set. Unlike conventional AdaBoost, the weak learner for each iteration is not explicitly defined and its parameters are learned through greedy optimization. Furthermore, an alternative of CSL named compressive sequential encoding is developed as an encoding technique and followed by a linear classifier to address the similarity-labeling problem. Our method has been systematically evaluated on four action data sets: ASLAN, KTH, HMDB51, and Hollywood2, and the results show the effectiveness and superiority of our method for ASLAN
Robust, Scalable, and Provable Approaches to High Dimensional Unsupervised Learning
This doctoral thesis focuses on three popular unsupervised learning problems: subspace clustering, robust PCA, and column sampling. For the subspace clustering problem, a new transformative idea is presented. The proposed approach, termed Innovation Pursuit, is a new geometrical solution to the subspace clustering problem whereby subspaces are identified based on their relative novelties. A detailed mathematical analysis is provided establishing sufficient conditions for the proposed method to correctly cluster the data points. The numerical simulations with both real and synthetic data demonstrate that Innovation Pursuit notably outperforms the state-of-the-art subspace clustering algorithms. For the robust PCA problem, we focus on both the outlier detection and the matrix decomposition problems. For the outlier detection problem, we present a new algorithm, termed Coherence Pursuit, in addition to two scalable randomized frameworks for the implementation of outlier detection algorithms. The Coherence Pursuit method is the first provable and non-iterative robust PCA method which is provably robust to both unstructured and structured outliers. Coherence Pursuit is remarkably simple and it notably outperforms the existing methods in dealing with structured outliers. In the proposed randomized designs, we leverage the low dimensional structure of the low rank component to apply the robust PCA algorithm to a random sketch of the data as opposed to the full scale data. Importantly, it is analytically shown that the presented randomized designs can make the computation or sample complexity of the low rank matrix recovery algorithm independent of the size of the data. At the end, we focus on the column sampling problem. A new sampling tool, dubbed Spatial Random Sampling, is presented which performs the random sampling in the spatial domain. The most compelling feature of Spatial Random Sampling is that it is the first unsupervised column sampling method which preserves the spatial distribution of the data
On Generalization Bounds for Projective Clustering
Given a set of points, clustering consists of finding a partition of a point
set into clusters such that the center to which a point is assigned is as
close as possible. Most commonly, centers are points themselves, which leads to
the famous -median and -means objectives. One may also choose centers to
be dimensional subspaces, which gives rise to subspace clustering. In this
paper, we consider learning bounds for these problems. That is, given a set of
samples drawn independently from some unknown, but fixed distribution
, how quickly does a solution computed on converge to the
optimal clustering of ? We give several near optimal results. In
particular,
For center-based objectives, we show a convergence rate of
. This matches the known optimal bounds
of [Fefferman, Mitter, and Narayanan, Journal of the Mathematical Society 2016]
and [Bartlett, Linder, and Lugosi, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 1998] for -means
and extends it to other important objectives such as -median.
For subspace clustering with -dimensional subspaces, we show a convergence
rate of . These are the first
provable bounds for most of these problems. For the specific case of projective
clustering, which generalizes -means, we show a convergence rate of
is necessary, thereby proving that the
bounds from [Fefferman, Mitter, and Narayanan, Journal of the Mathematical
Society 2016] are essentially optimal
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