129 research outputs found
Curvature and Optimal Algorithms for Learning and Minimizing Submodular Functions
We investigate three related and important problems connected to machine
learning: approximating a submodular function everywhere, learning a submodular
function (in a PAC-like setting [53]), and constrained minimization of
submodular functions. We show that the complexity of all three problems depends
on the 'curvature' of the submodular function, and provide lower and upper
bounds that refine and improve previous results [3, 16, 18, 52]. Our proof
techniques are fairly generic. We either use a black-box transformation of the
function (for approximation and learning), or a transformation of algorithms to
use an appropriate surrogate function (for minimization). Curiously, curvature
has been known to influence approximations for submodular maximization [7, 55],
but its effect on minimization, approximation and learning has hitherto been
open. We complete this picture, and also support our theoretical claims by
empirical results.Comment: 21 pages. A shorter version appeared in Advances of NIPS-201
Approximation Algorithms for Bregman Co-clustering and Tensor Clustering
In the past few years powerful generalizations to the Euclidean k-means
problem have been made, such as Bregman clustering [7], co-clustering (i.e.,
simultaneous clustering of rows and columns of an input matrix) [9,18], and
tensor clustering [8,34]. Like k-means, these more general problems also suffer
from the NP-hardness of the associated optimization. Researchers have developed
approximation algorithms of varying degrees of sophistication for k-means,
k-medians, and more recently also for Bregman clustering [2]. However, there
seem to be no approximation algorithms for Bregman co- and tensor clustering.
In this paper we derive the first (to our knowledge) guaranteed methods for
these increasingly important clustering settings. Going beyond Bregman
divergences, we also prove an approximation factor for tensor clustering with
arbitrary separable metrics. Through extensive experiments we evaluate the
characteristics of our method, and show that it also has practical impact.Comment: 18 pages; improved metric cas
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