Similarity-based approaches represent a promising direction for time series analysis. However, many such methods rely on parameter tuning, and some have shortcomings if the time series are multivariate (MTS), due to dependencies between attributes, or the time series contain missing data. In this paper, we address these challenges within the powerful context of kernel methods by proposing the robust (TCK). The approach taken leverages the missing data handling properties of Gaussian mixture models (GMM) augmented with informative prior distributions. An ensemble learning approach is exploited to ensure robustness to parameters by combining the clustering results of many GMM to form the final kernel. We evaluate the TCK on synthetic and real data and compare to other state-of-the-art techniques. The experimental results demonstrate that the TCK is robust to parameter choices, provides competitive results for MTS without missing data and outstanding results for missing data.
Conversely, there exists a class of (probabilistic) kernels operating on the configurations of a given parametric model, where the idea is to leverage the way distributions capture similarity. For instance, the Fisher kernel assumes an underlying generative model to explain all observed data @cite_85 . The Fisher kernel maps each time series @math into a feature vector @math , which is the gradient of the log-likelihood of the generative model fit on the dataset. The kernel is defined as @math , where @math is the fisher information matrix. Another example is the probability product kernel @cite_10 , which is evaluated by means of the Bhattacharyya distance in the probability space. A further representative is the marginalized kernel @cite_64 , designed to deal with objects generated from latent variable models. Given two visible variables, @math and @math and two hidden variables, @math and @math , at first, a joint kernel @math is defined over the two combined variables @math and @math . Then, a marginalized kernel for visible data is derived from the expectation with respect to hidden variables: @math . The posterior distributions are in general unknown and are estimated by fitting a parametric model on the data.
@cite_85 @cite_10 @cite_64
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Motivation: Kernel methods such as support vector machines require a kernel function between objects to be defined a priori. Several works have been done to derive kernels from probability distributions, e.g., the Fisher kernel. However, a general methodology to design a kernel is not fully developed. Results: We propose a reasonable way of designing a kernel when objects are generated from latent variable models (e.g., HMM). First of all, a joint kernel is designed for complete data which include both visible and hidden variables. Then a marginalized kernel for visible data is obtained by taking the expectation with respect to hidden variables. We will show that the Fisher kernel is a special case of marginalized kernels, which gives another viewpoint to the Fisher kernel theory. Although our approach can be applied to any object, we particularly derive several marginalized kernels useful for biological sequences (e.g., DNA and proteins). The effectiveness of marginalized kernels is illustrated in the task of classifying bacterial gyrase subunit B (gyrB) amino acid sequences. We consider the problem of learning an unknown function @math on the @math -dimensional sphere with respect to the square loss, given i.i.d. samples @math where @math is a feature vector uniformly distributed on the sphere and @math . We study two popular classes of models that can be regarded as linearizations of two-layers neural networks around a random initialization: (RF) The random feature model of Rahimi-Recht; (NT) The neural tangent kernel model of Jacot-Gabriel-Hongler. Both these approaches can also be regarded as randomized approximations of kernel ridge regression (with respect to different kernels), and hence enjoy universal approximation properties when the number of neurons @math diverges, for a fixed dimension @math . We prove that, if both @math and @math are large, the behavior of these models is instead remarkably simpler. If @math , then RF performs no better than linear regression with respect to the raw features @math , and NT performs no better than linear regression with respect to degree-one and two monomials in the @math . More generally, if @math then RF fits at most a degree- @math polynomial in the raw features, and NT fits at most a degree- @math polynomial. We study the problem of distribution to real-value regression, where one aims to regress a mapping @math that takes in a distribution input covariate @math (for a non-parametric family of distributions @math ) and outputs a real-valued response @math . This setting was recently studied, and a "Kernel-Kernel" estimator was introduced and shown to have a polynomial rate of convergence. However, evaluating a new prediction with the Kernel-Kernel estimator scales as @math . This causes the difficult situation where a large amount of data may be necessary for a low estimation risk, but the computation cost of estimation becomes infeasible when the data-set is too large. To this end, we propose the Double-Basis estimator, which looks to alleviate this big data problem in two ways: first, the Double-Basis estimator is shown to have a computation complexity that is independent of the number of of instances @math when evaluating new predictions after training; secondly, the Double-Basis estimator is shown to have a fast rate of convergence for a general class of mappings @math . We introduce a general purpose algorithm for rapidly computing certain types of oscillatory integrals which frequently arise in problems connected to wave propagation, general hyperbolic equations, and curvilinear tomography. The problem is to numerically evaluate a so-called Fourier integral operator (FIO) of the form @math at points given on a Cartesian grid. Here, @math is a frequency variable, @math is the Fourier transform of the input @math , @math is an amplitude, and @math is a phase function, which is typically as large as @math ; hence the integral is highly oscillatory. Because a FIO is a dense matrix, a naive matrix vector product with an input given on a Cartesian grid of size @math by @math would require @math operations. This paper develops a new numerical algorithm which requires @math operations and as low as @math in storage space (the constants in front of these estimates are small). It operates by localizing the integral over polar wedges with small angular aperture in the frequency plane. On each wedge, the algorithm factorizes the kernel @math into two components: (1) a diffeomorphism which is handled by means of a nonuniform FFT and (2) a residual factor which is handled by numerical separation of the spatial and frequency variables. The key to the complexity and accuracy estimates is the fact that the separation rank of the residual kernel is provably independent of the problem size. Several numerical examples demonstrate the numerical accuracy and low computational complexity of the proposed methodology. We also discuss the potential of our ideas for various applications such as reflection seismology. A number of problems in probability and statistics can be addressed using the multivariate normal (Gaussian) distribution. In the one-dimensional case, computing the probability for a given mean and variance simply requires the evaluation of the corresponding Gaussian density. In the @math -dimensional setting, however, it requires the inversion of an @math covariance matrix, @math , as well as the evaluation of its determinant, @math . In many cases, such as regression using Gaussian processes, the covariance matrix is of the form @math , where @math is computed using a specified covariance kernel which depends on the data and additional parameters (hyperparameters). The matrix @math is typically dense, causing standard direct methods for inversion and determinant evaluation to require @math work. This cost is prohibitive for large-scale modeling. Here, we show that for the most commonly used covariance functions, the matrix @math can be hierarchically factored into a product of block low-rank updates of the identity matrix, yielding an @math algorithm for inversion. More importantly, we show that this factorization enables the evaluation of the determinant @math , permitting the direct calculation of probabilities in high dimensions under fairly broad assumptions on the kernel defining @math . Our fast algorithm brings many problems in marginalization and the adaptation of hyperparameters within practical reach using a single CPU core. The combination of nearly optimal scaling in terms of problem size with high-performance computing resources will permit the modeling of previously intractable problems. We illustrate the performance of the scheme on standard covariance kernels. Low-rank approximation is a common tool used to accelerate kernel methods: the @math kernel matrix @math is approximated via a rank- @math matrix @math which can be stored in much less space and processed more quickly. In this work we study the limits of computationally efficient low-rank kernel approximation. We show that for a broad class of kernels, including the popular Gaussian and polynomial kernels, computing a relative error @math -rank approximation to @math is at least as difficult as multiplying the input data matrix @math by an arbitrary matrix @math . Barring a breakthrough in fast matrix multiplication, when @math is not too large, this requires @math time where @math is the number of non-zeros in @math . This lower bound matches, in many parameter regimes, recent work on subquadratic time algorithms for low-rank approximation of general kernels [MM16,MW17], demonstrating that these algorithms are unlikely to be significantly improved, in particular to @math input sparsity runtimes. At the same time there is hope: we show for the first time that @math time approximation is possible for general radial basis function kernels (e.g., the Gaussian kernel) for the closely related problem of low-rank approximation of the kernelized dataset. We derive the mean squared error convergence rates of kernel density-based plug-in estimators of mutual information measures between two multidimensional random variables @math and @math for two cases: 1) @math and @math are both continuous; 2) @math is continuous and @math is discrete. Using the derived rates, we propose an ensemble estimator of these information measures for the second case by taking a weighted sum of the plug-in estimators with varied bandwidths. The resulting ensemble estimator achieves the @math parametric convergence rate when the conditional densities of the continuous variables are sufficiently smooth. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first nonparametric mutual information estimator known to achieve the parametric convergence rate for this case, which frequently arises in applications (e.g. variable selection in classification). The estimator is simple to implement as it uses the solution to an offline convex optimization problem and simple plug-in estimators. A central limit theorem is also derived for the ensemble estimator. Ensemble estimators that achieve the parametric rate are also derived for the first case ( @math and @math are both continuous) and another case 3) @math and @math may have any mixture of discrete and continuous components. Let @math be an i.i.d. sequence of random variables in @math , @math . We show that, for any function @math , under regularity conditions, [n^ 1 2 (n^ -1 i=1 ^n (X_i) f ^(X_i) - (x) ,dx ) P 0, ] where @math is the classical kernel estimator of the density of @math . This result is striking because it speeds up traditional rates, in root @math , derived from the central limit theorem when @math . Although this paper highlights some applications, we mainly address theoretical issues related to the later result. We derive upper bounds for the rate of convergence in probability. These bounds depend on the regularity of the functions @math and @math , the dimension @math and the bandwidth of the kernel estimator @math . Moreover, they are shown to be accurate since they are used as renormalizing sequences in two central limit theorems each reflecting different degrees of smoothness of @math . As an application to regression modelling with random design, we provide the asymptotic normality of the estimation of the linear functionals of a regression function. As a consequence of the above result, the asymptotic variance does not depend on the regression function. Finally, we debate the choice of the bandwidth for integral approximation and we highlight the good behavior of our procedure through simulations. The advent of deep learning is a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, for which a theoretical understanding is lacking. Supervised deep learning involves the training of neural networks with a large number @math of parameters. For large enough @math , in the so-called over-parametrized regime, one can essentially fit the training data points. Sparsity-based arguments would suggest that the generalization error increases as @math grows past a certain threshold @math . Instead, empirical studies have shown that in the over-parametrized regime, generalization error keeps decreasing with @math . We resolve this paradox, through a new framework. We rely on the so-called Neural Tangent Kernel, which connects large neural nets to kernel methods, to show that the initialization causes finite-size random fluctuations @math of the neural net output function @math around its expectation @math . These affect the generalization error @math for classification: under natural assumptions, it decays to a plateau value @math in a power-law fashion @math . This description breaks down at a so-called jamming transition @math . At this threshold, we argue that @math diverges. This result leads to a plausible explanation for the cusp in test error known to occur at @math . Our results are confirmed by extensive empirical observations on the MNIST and CIFAR image datasets. Our analysis finally suggests that, given a computational envelope, it is best to use several nets of intermediate sizes, just beyond @math , and to average their outputs. We introduce a kernel approximation strategy that enables computation of the Gaussian process log marginal likelihood and all hyperparameter derivatives in @math time. Our GRIEF kernel consists of @math eigenfunctions found using a Nystrom approximation from a dense Cartesian product grid of inducing points. By exploiting algebraic properties of Kronecker and Khatri-Rao tensor products, computational complexity of the training procedure can be practically independent of the number of inducing points. This allows us to use arbitrarily many inducing points to achieve a globally accurate kernel approximation, even in high-dimensional problems. The fast likelihood evaluation enables type-I or II Bayesian inference on large-scale datasets. We benchmark our algorithms on real-world problems with up to two-million training points and @math inducing points. Kernel classifiers and regressors designed for structured data, such as sequences, trees and graphs, have significantly advanced a number of interdisciplinary areas such as computational biology and drug design. Typically, kernels are designed beforehand for a data type which either exploit statistics of the structures or make use of probabilistic generative models, and then a discriminative classifier is learned based on the kernels via convex optimization. However, such an elegant two-stage approach also limited kernel methods from scaling up to millions of data points, and exploiting discriminative information to learn feature representations. We propose, structure2vec, an effective and scalable approach for structured data representation based on the idea of embedding latent variable models into feature spaces, and learning such feature spaces using discriminative information. Interestingly, structure2vec extracts features by performing a sequence of function mappings in a way similar to graphical model inference procedures, such as mean field and belief propagation. In applications involving millions of data points, we showed that structure2vec runs 2 times faster, produces models which are @math times smaller, while at the same time achieving the state-of-the-art predictive performance. Heat kernel pagerank is a variation of Personalized PageRank given in an exponential formulation. In this work, we present a sublinear time algorithm for approximating the heat kernel pagerank of a graph. The algorithm works by simulating random walks of bounded length and runs in time @math , assuming performing a random walk step and sampling from a distribution with bounded support take constant time. The quantitative ranking of vertices obtained with heat kernel pagerank can be used for local clustering algorithms. We present an efficient local clustering algorithm that finds cuts by performing a sweep over a heat kernel pagerank vector, using the heat kernel pagerank approximation algorithm as a subroutine. Specifically, we show that for a subset @math of Cheeger ratio @math , many vertices in @math may serve as seeds for a heat kernel pagerank vector which will find a cut of conductance @math . Fitting a function by using linear combinations of a large number @math of simple' components is one of the most fruitful ideas in statistical learning. This idea lies at the core of a variety of methods, from two-layer neural networks to kernel regression, to boosting. In general, the resulting risk minimization problem is non-convex and is solved by gradient descent or its variants. Unfortunately, little is known about global convergence properties of these approaches. Here we consider the problem of learning a concave function @math on a compact convex domain @math , using linear combinations of bump-like' components (neurons). The parameters to be fitted are the centers of @math bumps, and the resulting empirical risk minimization problem is highly non-convex. We prove that, in the limit in which the number of neurons diverges, the evolution of gradient descent converges to a Wasserstein gradient flow in the space of probability distributions over @math . Further, when the bump width @math tends to @math , this gradient flow has a limit which is a viscous porous medium equation. Remarkably, the cost function optimized by this gradient flow exhibits a special property known as displacement convexity, which implies exponential convergence rates for @math , @math . Surprisingly, this asymptotic theory appears to capture well the behavior for moderate values of @math . Explaining this phenomenon, and understanding the dependence on @math in a quantitative manner remains an outstanding challenge. We study the density estimation problem with observations generated by certain dynamical systems that admit a unique underlying invariant Lebesgue density. Observations drawn from dynamical systems are not independent and moreover, usual mixing concepts may not be appropriate for measuring the dependence among these observations. By employing the @math -mixing concept to measure the dependence, we conduct statistical analysis on the consistency and convergence of the kernel density estimator. Our main results are as follows: First, we show that with properly chosen bandwidth, the kernel density estimator is universally consistent under @math -norm; Second, we establish convergence rates for the estimator with respect to several classes of dynamical systems under @math -norm. In the analysis, the density function @math is only assumed to be H " o lder continuous which is a weak assumption in the literature of nonparametric density estimation and also more realistic in the dynamical system context. Last but not least, we prove that the same convergence rates of the estimator under @math -norm and @math -norm can be achieved when the density function is H " o lder continuous, compactly supported and bounded. The bandwidth selection problem of the kernel density estimator for dynamical system is also discussed in our study via numerical simulations. We consider learning two layer neural networks using stochastic gradient descent. The mean-field description of this learning dynamics approximates the evolution of the network weights by an evolution in the space of probability distributions in @math (where @math is the number of parameters associated to each neuron). This evolution can be defined through a partial differential equation or, equivalently, as the gradient flow in the Wasserstein space of probability distributions. Earlier work shows that (under some regularity assumptions), the mean field description is accurate as soon as the number of hidden units is much larger than the dimension @math . In this paper we establish stronger and more general approximation guarantees. First of all, we show that the number of hidden units only needs to be larger than a quantity dependent on the regularity properties of the data, and independent of the dimensions. Next, we generalize this analysis to the case of unbounded activation functions, which was not covered by earlier bounds. We extend our results to noisy stochastic gradient descent. Finally, we show that kernel ridge regression can be recovered as a special limit of the mean field analysis. This paper considers stochastic optimization problems whose objective functions involve powers of random variables. For example, consider the classic Stochastic lp Load Balancing Problem (SLBp): There are @math machines and @math jobs, and known independent random variables @math decribe the load incurred on machine @math if we assign job @math to it. The goal is to assign each jobs to machines in order to minimize the expected @math -norm of the total load on the machines. While convex relaxations represent one of the most powerful algorithmic tools, in problems such as SLBp the main difficulty is to capture the objective function in a way that only depends on each random variable separately. We show how to capture @math -power-type objectives in such separable way by using the @math -function method, introduced by Lata a to relate the moment of sums of random variables to the individual marginals. We show how this quickly leads to a constant-factor approximation for very general subset selection problem with @math -moment objective. Moreover, we give a constant-factor approximation for SLBp, improving on the recent @math -approximation of [, SODA 18]. Here the application of the method is much more involved. In particular, we need to sharply connect the expected @math -norm of a random vector with the @math -moments of its marginals (machine loads), taking into account simultaneously the different scales of the loads that are incurred by an unknown assignment. Consider the problem: given the data pair @math drawn from a population with @math , specify a neural network model and run gradient flow on the weights over time until reaching any stationarity. How does @math , the function computed by the neural network at time @math , relate to @math , in terms of approximation and representation? What are the provable benefits of the adaptive representation by neural networks compared to the pre-specified fixed basis representation in the classical nonparametric literature? We answer the above questions via a dynamic reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) approach indexed by the training process of neural networks. Firstly, we show that when reaching any local stationarity, gradient flow learns an adaptive RKHS representation and performs the global least-squares projection onto the adaptive RKHS, simultaneously. Secondly, we prove that as the RKHS is data-adaptive and task-specific, the residual for @math lies in a subspace that is potentially much smaller than the orthogonal complement of the RKHS. The result formalizes the representation and approximation benefits of neural networks. Lastly, we show that the neural network function computed by gradient flow converges to the kernel ridgeless regression with an adaptive kernel, in the limit of vanishing regularization. The adaptive kernel viewpoint provides new angles of studying the approximation, representation, generalization, and optimization advantages of neural networks. We give the first dimension-efficient algorithms for learning Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs), which are functions of the form @math with @math . Our algorithm works in the challenging Reliable Agnostic learning model of Kalai, Kanade, and Mansour (2009) where the learner is given access to a distribution @math on labeled examples but the labeling may be arbitrary. We construct a hypothesis that simultaneously minimizes the false-positive rate and the loss on inputs given positive labels by @math , for any convex, bounded, and Lipschitz loss function. The algorithm runs in polynomial-time (in @math ) with respect to any distribution on @math (the unit sphere in @math dimensions) and for any error parameter @math (this yields a PTAS for a question raised by F. Bach on the complexity of maximizing ReLUs). These results are in contrast to known efficient algorithms for reliably learning linear threshold functions, where @math must be @math and strong assumptions are required on the marginal distribution. We can compose our results to obtain the first set of efficient algorithms for learning constant-depth networks of ReLUs. Our techniques combine kernel methods and polynomial approximations with a "dual-loss" approach to convex programming. As a byproduct we obtain a number of applications including the first set of efficient algorithms for "convex piecewise-linear fitting" and the first efficient algorithms for noisy polynomial reconstruction of low-weight polynomials on the unit sphere. A primary computational problem in kernel regression is solution of a dense linear system with the @math kernel matrix. Because a direct solution has an O( @math ) cost, iterative Krylov methods are often used with fast matrix-vector products. For poorly conditioned problems, convergence of the iteration is slow and preconditioning becomes necessary. We investigate preconditioning from the viewpoint of scalability and efficiency. The problems that conventional preconditioners face when applied to kernel methods are demonstrated. A that not only improves convergence but also allows utilization of fast kernel matrix-vector products is introduced. The performance of this preconditioner is first illustrated on synthetic data, and subsequently on a suite of test problems in kernel regression and geostatistical kriging. Interpolators---estimators that achieve zero training error---have attracted growing attention in machine learning, mainly because state-of-the art neural networks appear to be models of this type. In this paper, we study minimum @math norm ( ridgeless') interpolation in high-dimensional least squares regression. We consider two different models for the feature distribution: a linear model, where the feature vectors @math are obtained by applying a linear transform to a vector of i.i.d. entries, @math (with @math ); and a nonlinear model, where the feature vectors are obtained by passing the input through a random one-layer neural network, @math (with @math , @math a matrix of i.i.d. entries, and @math an activation function acting componentwise on @math ). We recover---in a precise quantitative way---several phenomena that have been observed in large-scale neural networks and kernel machines, including the double descent' behavior of the prediction risk, and the potential benefits of overparametrization.