398 research outputs found
Robust Densest Subgraph Discovery
Dense subgraph discovery is an important primitive in graph mining, which has
a wide variety of applications in diverse domains. In the densest subgraph
problem, given an undirected graph with an edge-weight vector
, we aim to find that maximizes the density,
i.e., , where is the sum of the weights of the edges in the
subgraph induced by . Although the densest subgraph problem is one of the
most well-studied optimization problems for dense subgraph discovery, there is
an implicit strong assumption; it is assumed that the weights of all the edges
are known exactly as input. In real-world applications, there are often cases
where we have only uncertain information of the edge weights. In this study, we
provide a framework for dense subgraph discovery under the uncertainty of edge
weights. Specifically, we address such an uncertainty issue using the theory of
robust optimization. First, we formulate our fundamental problem, the robust
densest subgraph problem, and present a simple algorithm. We then formulate the
robust densest subgraph problem with sampling oracle that models dense subgraph
discovery using an edge-weight sampling oracle, and present an algorithm with a
strong theoretical performance guarantee. Computational experiments using both
synthetic graphs and popular real-world graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of
our proposed algorithms.Comment: 10 pages; Accepted to ICDM 201
Optimistic Robust Optimization With Applications To Machine Learning
Robust Optimization has traditionally taken a pessimistic, or worst-case
viewpoint of uncertainty which is motivated by a desire to find sets of optimal
policies that maintain feasibility under a variety of operating conditions. In
this paper, we explore an optimistic, or best-case view of uncertainty and show
that it can be a fruitful approach. We show that these techniques can be used
to address a wide variety of problems. First, we apply our methods in the
context of robust linear programming, providing a method for reducing
conservatism in intuitive ways that encode economically realistic modeling
assumptions. Second, we look at problems in machine learning and find that this
approach is strongly connected to the existing literature. Specifically, we
provide a new interpretation for popular sparsity inducing non-convex
regularization schemes. Additionally, we show that successful approaches for
dealing with outliers and noise can be interpreted as optimistic robust
optimization problems. Although many of the problems resulting from our
approach are non-convex, we find that DCA or DCA-like optimization approaches
can be intuitive and efficient
A successive difference-of-convex approximation method for a class of nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems
We consider a class of nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems whose
objective is the sum of a smooth function and a finite number of nonnegative
proper closed possibly nonsmooth functions (whose proximal mappings are easy to
compute), some of which are further composed with linear maps. This kind of
problems arises naturally in various applications when different regularizers
are introduced for inducing simultaneous structures in the solutions. Solving
these problems, however, can be challenging because of the coupled nonsmooth
functions: the corresponding proximal mapping can be hard to compute so that
standard first-order methods such as the proximal gradient algorithm cannot be
applied efficiently. In this paper, we propose a successive
difference-of-convex approximation method for solving this kind of problems. In
this algorithm, we approximate the nonsmooth functions by their Moreau
envelopes in each iteration. Making use of the simple observation that Moreau
envelopes of nonnegative proper closed functions are continuous {\em
difference-of-convex} functions, we can then approximately minimize the
approximation function by first-order methods with suitable majorization
techniques. These first-order methods can be implemented efficiently thanks to
the fact that the proximal mapping of {\em each} nonsmooth function is easy to
compute. Under suitable assumptions, we prove that the sequence generated by
our method is bounded and any accumulation point is a stationary point of the
objective. We also discuss how our method can be applied to concrete
applications such as nonconvex fused regularized optimization problems and
simultaneously structured matrix optimization problems, and illustrate the
performance numerically for these two specific applications
Trimmed Density Ratio Estimation
Density ratio estimation is a vital tool in both machine learning and
statistical community. However, due to the unbounded nature of density ratio,
the estimation procedure can be vulnerable to corrupted data points, which
often pushes the estimated ratio toward infinity. In this paper, we present a
robust estimator which automatically identifies and trims outliers. The
proposed estimator has a convex formulation, and the global optimum can be
obtained via subgradient descent. We analyze the parameter estimation error of
this estimator under high-dimensional settings. Experiments are conducted to
verify the effectiveness of the estimator.Comment: Made minor revisions. Restructured the introductory section
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