No Arabic abstract
A new procedure, called DDa-procedure, is developed to solve the problem of classifying d-dimensional objects into q >= 2 classes. The procedure is completely nonparametric; it uses q-dimensional depth plots and a very efficient algorithm for discrimination analysis in the depth space [0,1]^q. Specifically, the depth is the zonoid depth, and the algorithm is the alpha-procedure. In case of more than two classes several binary classifications are performed and a majority rule is applied. Special treatments are discussed for outsiders, that is, data having zero depth vector. The DDa-classifier is applied to simulated as well as real data, and the results are compared with those of similar procedures that have been recently proposed. In most cases the new procedure has comparable error rates, but is much faster than other classification approaches, including the SVM.
In real-world classification problems, pairwise supervision (i.e., a pair of patterns with a binary label indicating whether they belong to the same class or not) can often be obtained at a lower cost than ordinary class labels. Similarity learning is a general framework to utilize such pairwise supervision to elicit useful representations by inferring the relationship between two data points, which encompasses various important preprocessing tasks such as metric learning, kernel learning, graph embedding, and contrastive representation learning. Although elicited representations are expected to perform well in downstream tasks such as classification, little theoretical insight has been given in the literature so far. In this paper, we reveal that a specific formulation of similarity learning is strongly related to the objective of binary classification, which spurs us to learn a binary classifier without ordinary class labels---by fitting the product of real-valued prediction functions of pairwise patterns to their similarity. Our formulation of similarity learning does not only generalize many existing ones, but also admits an excess risk bound showing an explicit connection to classification. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the practical usefulness of the proposed method on benchmark datasets.
In this paper, we propose a compositional nonparametric method in which a model is expressed as a labeled binary tree of $2k+1$ nodes, where each node is either a summation, a multiplication, or the application of one of the $q$ basis functions to one of the $p$ covariates. We show that in order to recover a labeled binary tree from a given dataset, the sufficient number of samples is $O(klog(pq)+log(k!))$, and the necessary number of samples is $Omega(klog (pq)-log(k!))$. We further propose a greedy algorithm for regression in order to validate our theoretical findings through synthetic experiments.
Classifiers based on sparse representations have recently been shown to provide excellent results in many visual recognition and classification tasks. However, the high cost of computing sparse representations at test time is a major obstacle that limits the applicability of these methods in large-scale problems, or in scenarios where computational power is restricted. We consider in this paper a simple yet efficient alternative to sparse coding for feature extraction. We study a classification scheme that applies the soft-thresholding nonlinear mapping in a dictionary, followed by a linear classifier. A novel supervised dictionary learning algorithm tailored for this low complexity classification architecture is proposed. The dictionary learning problem, which jointly learns the dictionary and linear classifier, is cast as a difference of convex (DC) program and solved efficiently with an iterative DC solver. We conduct experiments on several datasets, and show that our learning algorithm that leverages the structure of the classification problem outperforms generic learning procedures. Our simple classifier based on soft-thresholding also competes with the recent sparse coding classifiers, when the dictionary is learned appropriately. The adopted classification scheme further requires less computational time at the testing stage, compared to other classifiers. The proposed scheme shows the potential of the adequately trained soft-thresholding mapping for classification and paves the way towards the development of very efficient classification methods for vision problems.
We introduce a method for reconstructing an infinitesimal normalizing flow given only an infinitesimal change to a (possibly unnormalized) probability distribution. This reverses the conventional task of normalizing flows -- rather than being given samples from a unknown target distribution and learning a flow that approximates the distribution, we are given a perturbation to an initial distribution and aim to reconstruct a flow that would generate samples from the known perturbed distribution. While this is an underdetermined problem, we find that choosing the flow to be an integrable vector field yields a solution closely related to electrostatics, and a solution can be computed by the method of Greens functions. Unlike conventional normalizing flows, this flow can be represented in an entirely nonparametric manner. We validate this derivation on low-dimensional problems, and discuss potential applications to problems in quantum Monte Carlo and machine learning.
We consider neural network training, in applications in which there are many possible classes, but at test-time, the task is a binary classification task of determining whether the given example belongs to a specific class, where the class of interest can be different each time the classifier is applied. For instance, this is the case for real-time image search. We define the Single Logit Classification (SLC) task: training the network so that at test-time, it would be possible to accurately identify whether the example belongs to a given class in a computationally efficient manner, based only on the output logit for this class. We propose a natural principle, the Principle of Logit Separation, as a guideline for choosing and designing losses suitable for the SLC. We show that the cross-entropy loss function is not aligned with the Principle of Logit Separation. In contrast, there are known loss functions, as well as novel batch loss functions that we propose, which are aligned with this principle. In total, we study seven loss functions. Our experiments show that indeed in almost all cases, losses that are aligned with the Principle of Logit Separation obtain at least 20% relative accuracy improvement in the SLC task compared to losses that are not aligned with it, and sometimes considerably more. Furthermore, we show that fast SLC does not cause any drop in binary classification accuracy, compared to standard classification in which all logits are computed, and yields a speedup which grows with the number of classes. For instance, we demonstrate a 10x speedup when the number of classes is 400,000. Tensorflow code for optimizing the new batch losses is publicly available at https://github.com/cruvadom/Logit Separation.