In this paper, we investigate the problem of optimization of multivariate performance measures, and propose a novel algorithm for it. Different from traditional machine learning methods which optimize simple loss functions to learn prediction function, the problem studied in this paper is how to learn effective hyper-predictor for a tuple of data points, so that a complex loss function corresponding to a multivariate performance measure can be minimized. We propose to present the tuple of data points to a tuple of sparse codes via a dictionary, and then apply a linear function to compare a sparse code against a given candidate class label. To learn the dictionary, sparse codes, and parameter of the linear function, we propose a joint optimization problem. In this problem, the both the reconstruction error and sparsity of sparse code, and the upper bound of the complex loss function are minimized. Moreover, the upper bound of the loss function is approximated by the sparse codes and the linear function parameter. To optimize this problem, we develop an iterative algorithm based on descent gradient methods to learn the sparse codes and hyper-predictor parameter alternately. Experiment results on some benchmark data sets show the advantage of the proposed methods over other state-of-the-art algorithms.
@cite_26 proposed a smoothing strategy for multivariate performance score optimization., in particular PREBP and AUC. The proposed method combines Nesterov's accelerated gradient algorithm and the smoothing strategy, and obtains an optimization algorithm. This algorithm converges to a given accurate solution in a limited number of iterations corresponding to the accurate.
@cite_26
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We introduce a generic scheme for accelerating first-order optimization methods in the sense of Nesterov, which builds upon a new analysis of the accelerated proximal point algorithm. Our approach consists of minimizing a convex objective by approximately solving a sequence of well-chosen auxiliary problems, leading to faster convergence. This strategy applies to a large class of algorithms, including gradient descent, block coordinate descent, SAG, SAGA, SDCA, SVRG, Finito MISO, and their proximal variants. For all of these methods, we provide acceleration and explicit support for non-strongly convex objectives. In addition to theoretical speed-up, we also show that acceleration is useful in practice, especially for ill-conditioned problems where we measure significant improvements. We propose a new method for unconstrained optimization of a smooth and strongly convex function, which attains the optimal rate of convergence of Nesterov’s accelerated gradient descent. The new algorithm has a simple geometric interpretation, loosely inspired by the ellipsoid method. We provide some numerical evidence that the new method can be superior to Nesterov’s accelerated gradient descent. Optimizing multivariate performance measure is an important task in Machine Learning. Joachims (2005) introduced a Support Vector Method whose underlying optimization problem is commonly solved by cutting plane methods (CPMs) such as SVM-Perf and BMRM. It can be shown that CPMs converge to an e accurate solution in O(1 λe) iterations, where λ is the trade-off parameter between the regularizer and the loss function. Motivated by the impressive convergence rate of CPM on a number of practical problems, it was conjectured that these rates can be further improved. We disprove this conjecture in this paper by constructing counter examples. However, surprisingly, we further discover that these problems are not inherently hard, and we develop a novel smoothing strategy, which in conjunction with Nesterov's accelerated gradient method, can find an e accurate solution in O* (min 1 e, 1 √λe ) iterations. Computationally, our smoothing technique is also particularly advantageous for optimizing multivariate performance scores such as precision recall break-even point and ROCArea; the cost per iteration remains the same as that of CPMs. Empirical evaluation on some of the largest publicly available data sets shows that our method converges significantly faster than CPMs without sacrificing generalization ability. Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (AGD), an instance of the general family of "momentum methods", provably achieves faster convergence rate than gradient descent (GD) in the convex setting. However, whether these methods are superior to GD in the nonconvex setting remains open. This paper studies a simple variant of AGD, and shows that it escapes saddle points and finds a second-order stationary point in @math iterations, faster than the @math iterations required by GD. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Hessian-free algorithm to find a second-order stationary point faster than GD, and also the first single-loop algorithm with a faster rate than GD even in the setting of finding a first-order stationary point. Our analysis is based on two key ideas: (1) the use of a simple Hamiltonian function, inspired by a continuous-time perspective, which AGD monotonically decreases per step even for nonconvex functions, and (2) a novel framework called improve or localize, which is useful for tracking the long-term behavior of gradient-based optimization algorithms. We believe that these techniques may deepen our understanding of both acceleration algorithms and nonconvex optimization.