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In this paper, we propose a gradient boosting algorithm for large-scale regression problems called textit{Gradient Boosted Binary Histogram Ensemble} (GBBHE) based on binary histogram partition and ensemble learning. From the theoretical perspective, by assuming the H{o}lder continuity of the target function, we establish the statistical convergence rate of GBBHE in the space $C^{0,alpha}$ and $C^{1,0}$, where a lower bound of the convergence rate for the base learner demonstrates the advantage of boosting. Moreover, in the space $C^{1,0}$, we prove that the number of iterations to achieve the fast convergence rate can be reduced by using ensemble regressor as the base learner, which improves the computational efficiency. In the experiments, compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms such as gradient boosted regression tree (GBRT), Breimans forest, and kernel-based methods, our GBBHE algorithm shows promising performance with less running time on large-scale datasets.
We propose a novel algorithm for large-scale regression problems named histogram transform ensembles (HTE), composed of random rotations, stretchings, and translations. First of all, we investigate the theoretical properties of HTE when the regression function lies in the H{o}lder space $C^{k,alpha}$, $k in mathbb{N}_0$, $alpha in (0,1]$. In the case that $k=0, 1$, we adopt the constant regressors and develop the na{i}ve histogram transforms (NHT). Within the space $C^{0,alpha}$, although almost optimal convergence rates can be derived for both single and ensemble NHT, we fail to show the benefits of ensembles over single estimators theoretically. In contrast, in the subspace $C^{1,alpha}$, we prove that if $d geq 2(1+alpha)/alpha$, the lower bound of the convergence rates for single NHT turns out to be worse than the upper bound of the convergence rates for ensemble NHT. In the other case when $k geq 2$, the NHT may no longer be appropriate in predicting smoother regression functions. Instead, we apply kernel histogram transforms (KHT) equipped with smoother regressors such as support vector machines (SVMs), and it turns out that both single and ensemble KHT enjoy almost optimal convergence rates. Then we validate the above theoretical results by numerical experiments. On the one hand, simulations are conducted to elucidate that ensemble NHT outperform single NHT. On the other hand, the effects of bin sizes on accuracy of both NHT and KHT also accord with theoretical analysis. Last but not least, in the real-data experiments, comparisons between the ensemble KHT, equipped with adaptive histogram transforms, and other state-of-the-art large-scale regression estimators verify the effectiveness and accuracy of our algorithm.
In this paper, we propose a density estimation algorithm called textit{Gradient Boosting Histogram Transform} (GBHT), where we adopt the textit{Negative Log Likelihood} as the loss function to make the boosting procedure available for the unsupervised tasks. From a learning theory viewpoint, we first prove fast convergence rates for GBHT with the smoothness assumption that the underlying density function lies in the space $C^{0,alpha}$. Then when the target density function lies in spaces $C^{1,alpha}$, we present an upper bound for GBHT which is smaller than the lower bound of its corresponding base learner, in the sense of convergence rates. To the best of our knowledge, we make the first attempt to theoretically explain why boosting can enhance the performance of its base learners for density estimation problems. In experiments, we not only conduct performance comparisons with the widely used KDE, but also apply GBHT to anomaly detection to showcase a further application of GBHT.
We propose a novel method designed for large-scale regression problems, namely the two-stage best-scored random forest (TBRF). Best-scored means to select one regression tree with the best empirical performance out of a certain number of purely random regression tree candidates, and two-stage means to divide the original random tree splitting procedure into two: In stage one, the feature space is partitioned into non-overlapping cells; in stage two, child trees grow separately on these cells. The strengths of this algorithm can be summarized as follows: First of all, the pure randomness in TBRF leads to the almost optimal learning rates, and also makes ensemble learning possible, which resolves the boundary discontinuities long plaguing the existing algorithms. Secondly, the two-stage procedure paves the way for parallel computing, leading to computational efficiency. Last but not least, TBRF can serve as an inclusive framework where different mainstream regression strategies such as linear predictor and least squares support vector machines (LS-SVMs) can also be incorporated as value assignment approaches on leaves of the child trees, depending on the characteristics of the underlying data sets. Numerical assessments on comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods on several large-scale real data sets validate the promising prediction accuracy and high computational efficiency of our algorithm.
Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM) are hugely popular for solving tabular data problems. However, practitioners are not only interested in point predictions, but also in probabilistic predictions in order to quantify the uncertainty of the predictions. Creating such probabilistic predictions is difficult with existing GBM-based solutions: they either require training multiple models or they become too computationally expensive to be useful for large-scale settings. We propose Probabilistic Gradient Boosting Machines (PGBM), a method to create probabilistic predictions with a single ensemble of decision trees in a computationally efficient manner. PGBM approximates the leaf weights in a decision tree as a random variable, and approximates the mean and variance of each sample in a dataset via stochastic tree ensemble update equations. These learned moments allow us to subsequently sample from a specified distribution after training. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of PGBM compared to existing state-of-the-art methods: (i) PGBM enables probabilistic estimates without compromising on point performance in a single model, (ii) PGBM learns probabilistic estimates via a single model only (and without requiring multi-parameter boosting), and thereby offers a speedup of up to several orders of magnitude over existing state-of-the-art methods on large datasets, and (iii) PGBM achieves accurate probabilistic estimates in tasks with complex differentiable loss functions, such as hierarchical time series problems, where we observed up to 10% improvement in point forecasting performance and up to 300% improvement in probabilistic forecasting performance.
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and in signal processing. In this paper, we intend to make this principle scalable. We introduce a stochastic majorization-minimization scheme which is able to deal with large-scale or possibly infinite data sets. When applied to convex optimization problems under suitable assumptions, we show that it achieves an expected convergence rate of $O(1/sqrt{n})$ after $n$ iterations, and of $O(1/n)$ for strongly convex functions. Equally important, our scheme almost surely converges to stationary points for a large class of non-convex problems. We develop several efficient algorithms based on our framework. First, we propose a new stochastic proximal gradient method, which experimentally matches state-of-the-art solvers for large-scale $ell_1$-logistic regression. Second, we develop an online DC programming algorithm for non-convex sparse estimation. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for solving large-scale structured matrix factorization problems.