Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

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Convex Analysisの二,三の進展について

In this paper, we consider the problem of differentially private learning where access to the training features is through a kernel function only. As mentioned in Chaudhuri et al. (2011), the problem seems to be intractable for general kernel functions in the standard learning model of releasing different private predictor. We study this problem in three simpler but practical settings. We first study an interactive model where the user sends its test points to a trusted learner (like search engines) and expects accurate but differentially private predictions. In the second model, the learner has access to a subset of the unlabeled test set using which it releases a predictor, which preserves privacy of the training data. (NIH, 2003) is an example of such publicly available test set. Our third model is similar to the traditional model, where learner is oblivious to the test set but the kernels are restricted to functions over vector spaces. For each of the models, we derive differentially private learning algorithms with provable "utility" or error bounds. Moreover, we show that our methods can also be applied to the traditional model where they demonstrate better dimensionality dependence when compared to the methods of (Rubinstein et al., 2009; Chaudhuri et al., 2011). Finally, we provide experimental validation of our methods.

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Differentially Private Learning with Kernels

We study the problem of Robust Least Squares Regression (RLSR) where several response variables can be adversarially corrupted. More specifically, for a data matrix X ∈ ℝp x n and an underlying model w*, the response vector is generated as y = XT w* + b where b ∈ ℝn is the corruption vector supported over at most C · n coordinates. Existing exact recovery results for RLSR focus solely on L1-penalty based convex formulations and impose relatively strict model assumptions such as requiring the corruptions b to be selected independently of X.

In this work, we study a simple hard-thresholding algorithm called TORRENT which, under mild conditions on X, can recover w* exactly even if b corrupts the response variables in an adversarial manner, i.e. both the support and entries of b are selected adversarially after observing X and w*. Our results hold under deterministic assumptions which are satisfied if X is sampled from any sub-Gaussian distribution. Finally unlike existing results that apply only to a fixed w*, generated independently of X, our results are universal and hold for any w* ∈ ℝp.

Next, we propose gradient descent-based extensions of TORRENT that can scale efficiently to large scale problems, such as high dimensional sparse recovery. and prove similar recovery guarantees for these extensions. Empirically we find TORRENT, and more so its extensions, offering significantly faster recovery than the state-of-the-art L1 solvers. For instance, even on moderate-sized datasets (with p = 50K) with around 40% corrupted responses, a variant of our proposed method called TORRENT-HYB is more than 20 x faster than the best L1 solver.

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Robust Regression via hard thresholding

In this paper, we study the problem of one-bit compressed sensing (1-bit CS), where the goal is to design a measurement matrix A and a recovery algorithm such that a k-sparse unit vector x* can be efficiently recovered from the sign of its linear measurements, i.e., b = sign(Ax*). This is an important problem for signal acquisition and has several learning applications as well, e.g., multi-label classification (Hsu et al., 2009). We study this problem in two settings: a) support recovery: recover the support of x*, b) approximate vector recovery: recover a unit vector x such that ||x - x*||2 = e. For support recovery, we propose two novel and efficient solutions based on two combinatorial structures: union free families of sets and expanders. In contrast to existing methods for support recovery, our methods are universal i.e. a single measurement matrix A can recover all the signals. For approximate recovery, we propose the first method to recover a sparse vector using a near optimal number of measurements. We also empirically validate our algorithms and demonstrate that our algorithms recover the true signal using fewer measurements than the existing methods.

One-Bit Compressed Sensing: Provable Support and Vector Recovery

The use of M-estimators in generalized linear regression models in high dimensional settings requires risk minimization with hard L0 constraints. Of the known methods, the class of projected gradient descent (also known as iterative hard thresholding (IHT)) methods is known to offer the fastest and most scalable solutions. However, the current state-of-the-art is only able to analyze these methods in extremely restrictive settings which do not hold in high dimensional statistical models. In this work we bridge this gap by providing the first analysis for IHT-style methods in the high dimensional statistical setting. Our bounds are tight and match known minimax lower bounds. Our results rely on a general analysis framework that enables us to analyze several popular hard thresholding style algorithms (such as HTP, CoSaMP, SP) in the high dimensional regression setting. Finally, we extend our analysis to the problem of low-rank matrix recovery.

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On Iterative Hard Thresholding Methods for High-dimensional M-Estimation

Most clustering algorithms produce a single clustering for a given dataset even when the data can be clustered naturally in multiple ways. In this paper, we address the difficult problem of uncovering disparate clusterings from the data in a totally unsupervised manner. We propose two new approaches for this problem. In the first approach, we aim to find good clusterings of the data that are also decorrelated with one another. To this end, we give a new and tractable characterization of decorrelation between clusterings, and present an objective function to capture it. We provide an iterative “decorrelated” k-means type algorithm to minimize this objective function. In the second approach, we model the data as a sum of mixtures and associate each mixture with a clustering. This approach leads us to the problem of learning a convolution of mixture distributions. Though the latter problem can be formulated as one of factorial learning 8, 13, 16, the existing formulations and methods do not perform well on many real high-dimensional datasets. We propose a new regularized factorial-learning framework that is more suitable for capturing the notion of disparate clusterings in modern, high-dimensional datasets. Furthermore, we provide kernelized version of both of our algorithms. The resulting algorithms do well in uncovering multiple clusterings, and are much improved over existing methods. We evaluate our methods on two real-world datasets—a music dataset from the text-mining domain, and a portrait dataset from the computer-vision domain. Our methods achieve a substantially higher accuracy than existing factorial learning as well as traditional clustering algorithms. Copyright © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining 1: 000-000, 2008

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Prateek Jain

Papers

Differentially Private Learning with Kernels

Robust Regression via hard thresholding

One-Bit Compressed Sensing: Provable Support and Vector Recovery

On Iterative Hard Thresholding Methods for High-dimensional M-Estimation

Simultaneous Unsupervised Learning of Disparate Clusterings