Finite mixture regression: A sparse variable selection by model selection for clustering

We consider a finite mixture of Gaussian regression model for high- dimensional data, where the number of covariates may be much larger than the sample size. We propose to estimate the unknown conditional mixture density by a maximum likelihood estimator, restricted on relevant variables selected by an 1-penalized maximum likelihood estimator. We get an oracle inequality satisfied by this estimator with a Jensen-Kullback-Leibler type loss. Our oracle inequality is deduced from a general model selection theorem for maximum likelihood estimators with a random model collection. We can derive the penalty shape of the criterion, which depends on the complexity of the random model collection.Comment: 20 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1103.2021 by other author

Block-diagonal covariance selection for high-dimensional Gaussian graphical models

Gaussian graphical models are widely utilized to infer and visualize networks of dependencies between continuous variables. However, inferring the graph is difficult when the sample size is small compared to the number of variables. To reduce the number of parameters to estimate in the model, we propose a non-asymptotic model selection procedure supported by strong theoretical guarantees based on an oracle inequality and a minimax lower bound. The covariance matrix of the model is approximated by a block-diagonal matrix. The structure of this matrix is detected by thresholding the sample covariance matrix, where the threshold is selected using the slope heuristic. Based on the block-diagonal structure of the covariance matrix, the estimation problem is divided into several independent problems: subsequently, the network of dependencies between variables is inferred using the graphical lasso algorithm in each block. The performance of the procedure is illustrated on simulated data. An application to a real gene expression dataset with a limited sample size is also presented: the dimension reduction allows attention to be objectively focused on interactions among smaller subsets of genes, leading to a more parsimonious and interpretable modular network.Comment: Accepted in JAS

An ℓ 1 -oracle inequality for the Lasso in finite mixture of multivariate Gaussian regression models.

International audienceWe consider a multivariate finite mixture of Gaussian regression models for high-dimensional data, where the number of covariates and the size of the response may be much larger than the sample size. We provide an ℓ 1 -oracle inequality satisfied by the Lasso estimator according to the Kullback-Leibler loss. This result is an extension of the ℓ 1 -oracle inequality established by Meynet in the multivariate case. We focus on the Lasso for its ℓ 1 -regularization properties rather than for the variable selection procedure, as it was done in Städler et al

Modèles de mélange pour la régression en grande dimension, application aux données fonctionnelles

Finite mixture regression models are useful for modeling the relationship between a response and predictors, arising from different subpopulations. In this thesis, we focus on high-dimensional predictors and a high-dimensional response. First of all, we provide an ℓ1-oracle inequality satisfied by the Lasso estimator. We focus on this estimator for its ℓ1-regularization properties rather than for the variable selection procedure. We also propose two procedures to deal with this issue. The first procedure leads to estimate the unknown conditional mixture density by a maximum likelihood estimator, restricted to the relevant variables selected by an ℓ1-penalized maximum likelihood estimator. The second procedure considers jointly predictor selection and rank reduction for obtaining lower-dimensional approximations of parameters matrices. For each procedure, we get an oracle inequality, which derives the penalty shape of the criterion, depending on the complexity of the random model collection. We extend these procedures to the functional case, where predictors and responses are functions. For this purpose, we use a wavelet-based approach. For each situation, we provide algorithms, apply and evaluate our methods both on simulations and real datasets. In particular, we illustrate the first procedure on an electricity load consumption dataset.Les modèles de mélange pour la régression sont utilisés pour modéliser la relation entre la réponse et les prédicteurs, pour des données issues de différentes sous-populations. Dans cette thèse, on étudie des prédicteurs de grande dimension et une réponse de grande dimension. Tout d’abord, on obtient une inégalité oracle ℓ1 satisfaite par l’estimateur du Lasso. On s’intéresse à cet estimateur pour ses propriétés de régularisation ℓ1. On propose aussi deux procédures pour pallier ce problème de classification en grande dimension. La première procédure utilise l’estimateur du maximum de vraisemblance pour estimer la densité conditionnelle inconnue, en se restreignant aux variables actives sélectionnées par un estimateur de type Lasso. La seconde procédure considère la sélection de variables et la réduction de rang pour diminuer la dimension. Pour chaque procédure, on obtient une inégalité oracle, qui explicite la pénalité nécessaire pour sélectionner un modèle proche de l’oracle. On étend ces procédures au cas des données fonctionnelles, où les prédicteurs et la réponse peuvent être des fonctions. Dans ce but, on utilise une approche par ondelettes. Pour chaque procédure, on fournit des algorithmes, et on applique et évalue nos méthodes sur des simulations et des données réelles. En particulier, on illustre la première méthode par des données de consommation électrique

Uncertain Trees: Dealing with Uncertain Inputs in Regression Trees

Tree-based ensemble methods, as Random Forests and Gradient Boosted Trees, have been successfully used for regression in many applications and research studies. Furthermore, these methods have been extended in order to deal with uncertainty in the output variable, using for example a quantile loss in Random Forests (Meinshausen, 2006). To the best of our knowledge, no extension has been provided yet for dealing with uncertainties in the input variables, even though such uncertainties are common in practical situations. We propose here such an extension by showing how standard regression trees optimizing a quadratic loss can be adapted and learned while taking into account the uncertainties in the inputs. By doing so, one no longer assumes that an observation lies into a single region of the regression tree, but rather that it belongs to each region with a certain probability. Experiments conducted on several data sets illustrate the good behavior of the proposed extension.Comment: 9 page

Unsupervised topological learning for identification of atomic structures

We propose an unsupervised learning methodology with descriptors based on Topological Data Analysis (TDA) concepts to describe the local structural properties of materials at the atomic scale. Based only on atomic positions and without a priori knowledge, our method allows for an autonomous identification of clusters of atomic structures through a Gaussian mixture model. We apply successfully this approach to the analysis of elemental Zr in the crystalline and liquid states as well as homogeneous nucleation events under deep undercooling conditions. This opens the way to deeper and autonomous study of complex phenomena in materials at the atomic scale

Self-Training: A Survey

Semi-supervised algorithms aim to learn prediction functions from a small set of labeled observations and a large set of unlabeled observations. Because this framework is relevant in many applications, they have received a lot of interest in both academia and industry. Among the existing techniques, self-training methods have undoubtedly attracted greater attention in recent years. These models are designed to find the decision boundary on low density regions without making additional assumptions about the data distribution, and use the unsigned output score of a learned classifier, or its margin, as an indicator of confidence. The working principle of self-training algorithms is to learn a classifier iteratively by assigning pseudo-labels to the set of unlabeled training samples with a margin greater than a certain threshold. The pseudo-labeled examples are then used to enrich the labeled training data and to train a new classifier in conjunction with the labeled training set. In this paper, we present self-training methods for binary and multi-class classification; as well as their variants and two related approaches, namely consistency-based approaches and transductive learning. We examine the impact of significant self-training features on various methods, using different general and image classification benchmarks, and we discuss our ideas for future research in self-training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first thorough and complete survey on this subject.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur