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Deep learning has been the engine powering many successes of data science. However, the deep neural network (DNN), as the basic model of deep learning, is often excessively over-parameterized, causing many difficulties in training, prediction and interpretation. We propose a frequentist-like method for learning sparse DNNs and justify its consistency under the Bayesian framework: the proposed method could learn a sparse DNN with at most $O(n/log(n))$ connections and nice theoretical guarantees such as posterior consistency, variable selection consistency and asymptotically optimal generalization bounds. In particular, we establish posterior consistency for the sparse DNN with a mixture Gaussian prior, show that the structure of the sparse DNN can be consistently determined using a Laplace approximation-based marginal posterior inclusion probability approach, and use Bayesian evidence to elicit sparse DNNs learned by an optimization method such as stochastic gradient descent in multiple runs with different initializations. The proposed method is computationally more efficient than standard Bayesian methods for large-scale sparse DNNs. The numerical results indicate that the proposed method can perform very well for large-scale network compression and high-dimensional nonlinear variable selection, both advancing interpretable machine learning.
Spike-and-Slab Deep Learning (SS-DL) is a fully Bayesian alternative to Dropout for improving generalizability of deep ReLU networks. This new type of regularization enables provable recovery of smooth input-output maps with unknown levels of smoothness. Indeed, we show that the posterior distribution concentrates at the near minimax rate for $alpha$-Holder smooth maps, performing as well as if we knew the smoothness level $alpha$ ahead of time. Our result sheds light on architecture design for deep neural networks, namely the choice of depth, width and sparsity level. These network attributes typically depend on unknown smoothness in order to be optimal. We obviate this constraint with the fully Bayes construction. As an aside, we show that SS-DL does not overfit in the sense that the posterior concentrates on smaller networks with fewer (up to the optimal number of) nodes and links. Our results provide new theoretical justifications for deep ReLU networks from a Bayesian point of view.
Sparse deep learning aims to address the challenge of huge storage consumption by deep neural networks, and to recover the sparse structure of target functions. Although tremendous empirical successes have been achieved, most sparse deep learning algorithms are lacking of theoretical support. On the other hand, another line of works have proposed theoretical frameworks that are computationally infeasible. In this paper, we train sparse deep neural networks with a fully Bayesian treatment under spike-and-slab priors, and develop a set of computationally efficient variational inferences via continuous relaxation of Bernoulli distribution. The variational posterior contraction rate is provided, which justifies the consistency of the proposed variational Bayes method. Notably, our empirical results demonstrate that this variational procedure provides uncertainty quantification in terms of Bayesian predictive distribution and is also capable to accomplish consistent variable selection by training a sparse multi-layer neural network.
We propose SPARFA-Trace, a new machine learning-based framework for time-varying learning and content analytics for education applications. We develop a novel message passing-based, blind, approximate Kalman filter for sparse factor analysis (SPARFA), that jointly (i) traces learner concept knowledge over time, (ii) analyzes learner concept knowledge state transitions (induced by interacting with learning resources, such as textbook sections, lecture videos, etc, or the forgetting effect), and (iii) estimates the content organization and intrinsic difficulty of the assessment questions. These quantities are estimated solely from binary-valued (correct/incorrect) graded learner response data and a summary of the specific actions each learner performs (e.g., answering a question or studying a learning resource) at each time instance. Experimental results on two online course datasets demonstrate that SPARFA-Trace is capable of tracing each learners concept knowledge evolution over time, as well as analyzing the quality and content organization of learning resources, the question-concept associations, and the question intrinsic difficulties. Moreover, we show that SPARFA-Trace achieves comparable or better performance in predicting unobserved learner responses than existing collaborative filtering and knowledge tracing approaches for personalized education.
Iterative hard thresholding (IHT) is a projected gradient descent algorithm, known to achieve state of the art performance for a wide range of structured estimation problems, such as sparse inference. In this work, we consider IHT as a solution to the problem of learning sparse discrete distributions. We study the hardness of using IHT on the space of measures. As a practical alternative, we propose a greedy approximate projection which simultaneously captures appropriate notions of sparsity in distributions, while satisfying the simplex constraint, and investigate the convergence behavior of the resulting procedure in various settings. Our results show, both in theory and practice, that IHT can achieve state of the art results for learning sparse distributions.
In this paper, we consider linear prediction models in the form of a sparse linear combination of rules, where a rule is an indicator function defined over a hyperrectangle in the input space. Since the number of all possible rules generated from the training dataset becomes extremely large, it has been difficult to consider all of them when fitting a sparse model. In this paper, we propose Safe Optimal Rule Fit (SORF) as an approach to resolve this problem, which is formulated as a convex optimization problem with sparse regularization. The proposed SORF method utilizes the fact that the set of all possible rules can be represented as a tree. By extending a recently popularized convex optimization technique called safe screening, we develop a novel method for pruning the tree such that pruned nodes are guaranteed to be irrelevant to the prediction model. This approach allows us to efficiently learn a prediction model constructed from an exponentially large number of all possible rules. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method by numerical experiments using several benchmark datasets.