6,540 research outputs found
Moment-Matching Polynomials
We give a new framework for proving the existence of low-degree, polynomial
approximators for Boolean functions with respect to broad classes of
non-product distributions. Our proofs use techniques related to the classical
moment problem and deviate significantly from known Fourier-based methods,
which require the underlying distribution to have some product structure.
Our main application is the first polynomial-time algorithm for agnostically
learning any function of a constant number of halfspaces with respect to any
log-concave distribution (for any constant accuracy parameter). This result was
not known even for the case of learning the intersection of two halfspaces
without noise. Additionally, we show that in the "smoothed-analysis" setting,
the above results hold with respect to distributions that have sub-exponential
tails, a property satisfied by many natural and well-studied distributions in
machine learning.
Given that our algorithms can be implemented using Support Vector Machines
(SVMs) with a polynomial kernel, these results give a rigorous theoretical
explanation as to why many kernel methods work so well in practice
Uncertainty Propagation and Feature Selection for Loss Estimation in Performance-based Earthquake Engineering
This report presents a new methodology, called moment matching, of propagating the uncertainties in estimating repair costs of a building due to future earthquake excitation, which is required, for example, when assessing a design in performance-based earthquake engineering. Besides excitation uncertainties, other uncertain model variables are considered, including uncertainties in the structural model parameters and in the capacity and repair costs of structural and non-structural components. Using the first few moments of these uncertain variables, moment matching requires only a few well-chosen point estimates to propagate the uncertainties to estimate the first few moments of the repair costs with high accuracy. Furthermore, the use of moment matching to estimate the exceedance probability of the repair costs is also addressed. These examples illustrate that the moment-matching approach is quite general; for example, it can be applied to any decision variable in performance-based earthquake engineering.
Two buildings are chosen as illustrative examples to demonstrate the use of moment matching, a hypothetical three-story shear building and a real seven-story hotel building. For these two examples, the assembly-based vulnerability approach is employed when calculating repair costs. It is shown that the moment-matching technique is much more accurate than the well-known First-Order-Second-Moment approach when propagating the first two moments, while the resulting computational cost is of the same order. The repair-cost moments and exceedance probability estimated by the moment-matching technique are also compared with those by Monte Carlo simulation. It is concluded that as long as the order of the moment matching is sufficient, the comparison is satisfactory. Furthermore, the amount of computation for moment matching scales only linearly with the number of uncertain input variables.
Last but not least, a procedure for feature selection is presented and illustrated for the second example. The conclusion is that the most important uncertain input variables among the many influencing the uncertainty in future repair costs are, in order of importance, ground-motion spectral acceleration, component capacity, ground-motion details and unit repair costs
Rethinking LDA: moment matching for discrete ICA
We consider moment matching techniques for estimation in Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (LDA). By drawing explicit links between LDA and discrete versions
of independent component analysis (ICA), we first derive a new set of
cumulant-based tensors, with an improved sample complexity. Moreover, we reuse
standard ICA techniques such as joint diagonalization of tensors to improve
over existing methods based on the tensor power method. In an extensive set of
experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, we show that our new
combination of tensors and orthogonal joint diagonalization techniques
outperforms existing moment matching methods.Comment: 30 pages; added plate diagrams and clarifications, changed style,
corrected typos, updated figures. in Proceedings of the 29-th Conference on
Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 201
A moment-matching Ferguson and Klass algorithm
Completely random measures (CRM) represent the key building block of a wide
variety of popular stochastic models and play a pivotal role in modern Bayesian
Nonparametrics. A popular representation of CRMs as a random series with
decreasing jumps is due to Ferguson and Klass (1972). This can immediately be
turned into an algorithm for sampling realizations of CRMs or more elaborate
models involving transformed CRMs. However, concrete implementation requires to
truncate the random series at some threshold resulting in an approximation
error. The goal of this paper is to quantify the quality of the approximation
by a moment-matching criterion, which consists in evaluating a measure of
discrepancy between actual moments and moments based on the simulation output.
Seen as a function of the truncation level, the methodology can be used to
determine the truncation level needed to reach a certain level of precision.
The resulting moment-matching \FK algorithm is then implemented and illustrated
on several popular Bayesian nonparametric models.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, 5 table
Model reduction by matching the steady-state response of explicit signal generators
© 2015 IEEE.Model reduction by moment matching for interpolation signals which do not have an implicit model, i.e., they do not satisfy a differential equation, is considered. Particular attention is devoted to discontinuous, possibly periodic, signals. The notion of moment is reformulated using an integral matrix equation. It is shown that, under specific conditions, the new definition and the one based on the Sylvester equation are equivalent. New parameterized families of models achieving moment matching are given. The results are illustrated by means of a numerical example
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