Randomized Robust Subspace Recovery for High Dimensional Data Matrices

This paper explores and analyzes two randomized designs for robust Principal Component Analysis (PCA) employing low-dimensional data sketching. In one design, a data sketch is constructed using random column sampling followed by low dimensional embedding, while in the other, sketching is based on random column and row sampling. Both designs are shown to bring about substantial savings in complexity and memory requirements for robust subspace learning over conventional approaches that use the full scale data. A characterization of the sample and computational complexity of both designs is derived in the context of two distinct outlier models, namely, sparse and independent outlier models. The proposed randomized approach can provably recover the correct subspace with computational and sample complexity that are almost independent of the size of the data. The results of the mathematical analysis are confirmed through numerical simulations using both synthetic and real data

Data Dropout in Arbitrary Basis for Deep Network Regularization

An important problem in training deep networks with high capacity is to ensure that the trained network works well when presented with new inputs outside the training dataset. Dropout is an effective regularization technique to boost the network generalization in which a random subset of the elements of the given data and the extracted features are set to zero during the training process. In this paper, a new randomized regularization technique in which we withhold a random part of the data without necessarily turning off the neurons/data-elements is proposed. In the proposed method, of which the conventional dropout is shown to be a special case, random data dropout is performed in an arbitrary basis, hence the designation Generalized Dropout. We also present a framework whereby the proposed technique can be applied efficiently to convolutional neural networks. The presented numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique yields notable performance gain. Generalized Dropout provides new insight into the idea of dropout, shows that we can achieve different performance gains by using different bases matrices, and opens up a new research question as of how to choose optimal bases matrices that achieve maximal performance gain

Innovation Pursuit: A New Approach to Subspace Clustering

In subspace clustering, a group of data points belonging to a union of subspaces are assigned membership to their respective subspaces. This paper presents a new approach dubbed Innovation Pursuit (iPursuit) to the problem of subspace clustering using a new geometrical idea whereby subspaces are identified based on their relative novelties. We present two frameworks in which the idea of innovation pursuit is used to distinguish the subspaces. Underlying the first framework is an iterative method that finds the subspaces consecutively by solving a series of simple linear optimization problems, each searching for a direction of innovation in the span of the data potentially orthogonal to all subspaces except for the one to be identified in one step of the algorithm. A detailed mathematical analysis is provided establishing sufficient conditions for iPursuit to correctly cluster the data. The proposed approach can provably yield exact clustering even when the subspaces have significant intersections. It is shown that the complexity of the iterative approach scales only linearly in the number of data points and subspaces, and quadratically in the dimension of the subspaces. The second framework integrates iPursuit with spectral clustering to yield a new variant of spectral-clustering-based algorithms. The numerical simulations with both real and synthetic data demonstrate that iPursuit can often outperform the state-of-the-art subspace clustering algorithms, more so for subspaces with significant intersections, and that it significantly improves the state-of-the-art result for subspace-segmentation-based face clustering

High Dimensional Low Rank plus Sparse Matrix Decomposition

This paper is concerned with the problem of low rank plus sparse matrix decomposition for big data. Conventional algorithms for matrix decomposition use the entire data to extract the low-rank and sparse components, and are based on optimization problems with complexity that scales with the dimension of the data, which limits their scalability. Furthermore, existing randomized approaches mostly rely on uniform random sampling, which is quite inefficient for many real world data matrices that exhibit additional structures (e.g. clustering). In this paper, a scalable subspace-pursuit approach that transforms the decomposition problem to a subspace learning problem is proposed. The decomposition is carried out using a small data sketch formed from sampled columns/rows. Even when the data is sampled uniformly at random, it is shown that the sufficient number of sampled columns/rows is roughly O(r\mu), where \mu is the coherency parameter and r the rank of the low rank component. In addition, adaptive sampling algorithms are proposed to address the problem of column/row sampling from structured data. We provide an analysis of the proposed method with adaptive sampling and show that adaptive sampling makes the required number of sampled columns/rows invariant to the distribution of the data. The proposed approach is amenable to online implementation and an online scheme is proposed.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Spatial Random Sampling: A Structure-Preserving Data Sketching Tool

Random column sampling is not guaranteed to yield data sketches that preserve the underlying structures of the data and may not sample sufficiently from less-populated data clusters. Also, adaptive sampling can often provide accurate low rank approximations, yet may fall short of producing descriptive data sketches, especially when the cluster centers are linearly dependent. Motivated by that, this paper introduces a novel randomized column sampling tool dubbed Spatial Random Sampling (SRS), in which data points are sampled based on their proximity to randomly sampled points on the unit sphere. The most compelling feature of SRS is that the corresponding probability of sampling from a given data cluster is proportional to the surface area the cluster occupies on the unit sphere, independently from the size of the cluster population. Although it is fully randomized, SRS is shown to provide descriptive and balanced data representations. The proposed idea addresses a pressing need in data science and holds potential to inspire many novel approaches for analysis of big data

Subspace Clustering via Optimal Direction Search

This letter presents a new spectral-clustering-based approach to the subspace clustering problem. Underpinning the proposed method is a convex program for optimal direction search, which for each data point d finds an optimal direction in the span of the data that has minimum projection on the other data points and non-vanishing projection on d. The obtained directions are subsequently leveraged to identify a neighborhood set for each data point. An alternating direction method of multipliers framework is provided to efficiently solve for the optimal directions. The proposed method is shown to notably outperform the existing subspace clustering methods, particularly for unwieldy scenarios involving high levels of noise and close subspaces, and yields the state-of-the-art results for the problem of face clustering using subspace segmentation

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

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