Multiclass prediction is the problem of classifying an object into a relevant target class. We consider the problem of learning a multiclass predictor that uses only few features, and in particular, the number of used features should increase sub-linearly with the number of possible classes. This implies that features should be shared by several classes. We describe and analyze the ShareBoost algorithm for learning a multiclass predictor that uses few shared features. We prove that ShareBoost efficiently finds a predictor that uses few shared features (if such a predictor exists) and that it has a small generalization error. We also describe how to use ShareBoost for learning a non-linear predictor that has a fast evaluation time. In a series of experiments with natural data sets we demonstrate the benefits of ShareBoost and evaluate its success relatively to other state-of-the-art approaches.
Obtaining group sparsity by greedy methods has been also recently studied in @cite_4 @cite_21 , and indeed, ShareBoost shares similarities with these works. We differ from @cite_4 in that our analysis does not impose strong assumptions (e.g. group-RIP) and so ShareBoost applies to a much wider array of applications. In addition, the specific criterion for choosing the next feature is different. In @cite_4 , a ratio between difference in objective and different in costs is used. In ShareBoost, the L1 norm of the gradient matrix is used. For the multiclass problem with log loss, the criterion of ShareBoost is much easier to compute, especially in large scale problems. @cite_21 suggested many other selection rules that are geared toward the squared loss, which is far from being an optimal loss function for multiclass problems.
@cite_21 @cite_4
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We consider Multiclass and Multilabel classification with extremely large number of classes, of which only few are labeled to each instance. In such setting, standard methods that have training, prediction cost linear to the number of classes become intractable. State-of-the-art methods thus aim to reduce the complexity by exploiting correlation between labels under assumption that the similarity between labels can be captured by structures such as low-rank matrix or balanced tree. However, as the diversity of labels increases in the feature space, structural assumption can be easily violated, which leads to degrade in the testing performance. In this work, we show that a margin-maximizing loss with l1 penalty, in case of Extreme Classification, yields extremely sparse solution both in primal and in dual without sacrificing the expressive power of predictor. We thus propose a Fully-Corrective Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe (FC-BCFW) algorithm that exploits both primal and dual sparsity to achieve a complexity sublinear to the number of primal and dual variables. A bi-stochastic search method is proposed to further improve the efficiency. In our experiments on both Multiclass and Multilabel problems, the proposed method achieves significant higher accuracy than existing approaches of Extreme Classification with very competitive training and prediction time. We present a formulation of deep learning that aims at producing a large margin classifier. The notion of margin, minimum distance to a decision boundary, has served as the foundation of several theoretically profound and empirically successful results for both classification and regression tasks. However, most large margin algorithms are applicable only to shallow models with a preset feature representation; and conventional margin methods for neural networks only enforce margin at the output layer. Such methods are therefore not well suited for deep networks. In this work, we propose a novel loss function to impose a margin on any chosen set of layers of a deep network (including input and hidden layers). Our formulation allows choosing any norm on the metric measuring the margin. We demonstrate that the decision boundary obtained by our loss has nice properties compared to standard classification loss functions. Specifically, we show improved empirical results on the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets on multiple tasks: generalization from small training sets, corrupted labels, and robustness against adversarial perturbations. The resulting loss is general and complementary to existing data augmentation (such as random adversarial input transform) and regularization techniques (such as weight decay, dropout, and batch norm). This paper investigates a new learning formulation called dynamic group sparsity. It is a natural extension of the standard sparsity concept in compressive sensing, and is motivated by the observation that in some practical sparse data the nonzero coefficients are often not random but tend to be clustered. Intuitively, better results can be achieved in these cases by reasonably utilizing both clustering and sparsity priors. Motivated by this idea, we have developed a new greedy sparse recovery algorithm, which prunes data residues in the iterative process according to both sparsity and group clustering priors rather than only sparsity as in previous methods. The proposed algorithm can recover stably sparse data with clustering trends using far fewer measurements and computations than current state-of-the-art algorithms with provable guarantees. Moreover, our algorithm can adaptively learn the dynamic group structure and the sparsity number if they are not available in the practical applications. We have applied the algorithm to sparse recovery and background subtraction in videos. Numerous experiments with improved performance over previous methods further validate our theoretical proofs and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. This paper explores a class of empirical Bayes methods for level-dependent threshold selection in wavelet shrinkage. The prior considered for each wavelet coefficient is a mixture of an atom of probability at zero and a heavy-tailed density. The mixing weight, or sparsity parameter, for each level of the transform is chosen by marginal maximum likelihood. If estimation is carried out using the posterior median, this is a random thresholding procedure; the estimation can also be carried out using other thresholding rules with the same threshold. Details of the calculations needed for implementing the procedure are included. In practice, the estimates are quick to compute and there is software available. Simulations on the standard model functions show excellent performance, and applications to data drawn from various fields of application are used to explore the practical performance of the approach. By using a general result on the risk of the corresponding marginal maximum likelihood approach for a single sequence, overall bounds on the risk of the method are found subject to membership of the unknown function in one of a wide range of Besov classes, covering also the case of f of bounded variation. The rates obtained are optimal for any value of the parameter p in (0, ∞], simultaneously for a wide range of loss functions, each dominating the Lq norm of the σth derivative, with σ ≥ 0 and 0 < q ≤ 2. Attention is paid to the distinction between sampling the unknown function within white noise and sampling at discrete points, and between placing constraints on the function itself and on the discrete wavelet transform of its sequence of values at the observation points. Results for all relevant combinations of these scenarios are obtained. In some cases a key feature of the theory is a particular boundary-corrected wavelet basis, details of which are discussed. Overall, the approach described seems so far unique in combining the properties of fast computation, good theoretical properties and good performance in simulations and in practice. A key feature appears to be that the estimate of sparsity adapts to three different zones of estimation, first where the signal is not sparse enough for thresholding to be of benefit, second where an appropriately chosen threshold results in substantially improved estimation, and third where the signal is so sparse that the zero estimate gives the optimum accuracy rate.