Penalized Smoothed Partial Rank Estimator for the Nonparametric Transformation Survival Model with High-dimensional Covariates

Microarray technology has the potential to lead to a better understanding of biological processes and diseases such as cancer. When failure time outcomes are also available, one might be interested in relating gene expression profiles to the survival outcome such as time to cancer recurrence or time to death. This is statistically challenging because the number of covariates greatly exceeds the number of observations. While the majority of work has focused on regularized Cox regression model and accelerated failure time model, they may be restrictive in practice. We relax the model assumption and and consider a nonparametric transformation model that makes no parametric assumption on either the transformation function or the error distribution. We propose a more flexible estimator, called penalized smoothed partial rank estimator, by regularizing the partial rank estimator with SCAD penalty. We also develop an efficient algorithm to obtain the whole solution path. Extensive simulations demonstrate the advantages of the proposal and the new method has been applied to a real genomic study

Deformable Convolutional Networks

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are inherently limited to model geometric transformations due to the fixed geometric structures in its building modules. In this work, we introduce two new modules to enhance the transformation modeling capacity of CNNs, namely, deformable convolution and deformable RoI pooling. Both are based on the idea of augmenting the spatial sampling locations in the modules with additional offsets and learning the offsets from target tasks, without additional supervision. The new modules can readily replace their plain counterparts in existing CNNs and can be easily trained end-to-end by standard back-propagation, giving rise to deformable convolutional networks. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach on sophisticated vision tasks of object detection and semantic segmentation. The code would be released

A Semisupervised Feature Selection with Support Vector Machine

Feature selection has proved to be a beneficial tool in learning problems with the main advantages of interpretation and generalization. Most existing feature selection methods do not achieve optimal classification performance, since they neglect the correlations among highly correlated features which all contribute to classification. In this paper, a novel semisupervised feature selection algorithm based on support vector machine (SVM) is proposed, termed SENFS. In order to solve SENFS, an efficient algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers is then developed. One advantage of SENFS is that it encourages highly correlated features to be selected or removed together. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our feature selection method on simulation data and benchmark data sets