arXiv research

In this paper, the estimation problem for sparse reduced rank regression (SRRR) model is considered. The SRRR model is widely used for dimension reduction and variable selection with applications in signal processing, econometrics, etc. The problem is formulated to minimize the least squares loss with a sparsity-induci…

Improves robustness of information bottleneck framework with sparsity-inducing prior.

This work aims at solving the problems with intractable sparsity-inducing norms that are often encountered in various machine learning tasks, such as multi-task learning, subspace clustering, feature selection, robust principal component analysis, and so on. Specifically, an Iteratively Re-Weighted method (IRW) with so…

Sparse estimation methods are aimed at using or obtaining parsimonious representations of data or models. They were first dedicated to linear variable selection but numerous extensions have now emerged such as structured sparsity or kernel selection. It turns out that many of the related estimation problems can be cast…

Existing methods for sparse channel estimation typically provide an estimate computed as the solution maximizing an objective function defined as the sum of the log-likelihood function and a penalization term proportional to the l1-norm of the parameter of interest. However, other penalization terms have proven to have…

We consider the empirical risk minimization problem for linear supervised learning, with regularization by structured sparsity-inducing norms. These are defined as sums of Euclidean norms on certain subsets of variables, extending the usual $\ell_1$-norm and the group $\ell_1$-norm by allowing the subsets to overlap. T…

DICCA maps multi-view data into a shared latent space with interpretable components.

This paper addresses the problem of sparsity penalized least squares for applications in sparse signal processing, e.g. sparse deconvolution. This paper aims to induce sparsity more strongly than L1 norm regularization, while avoiding non-convex optimization. For this purpose, this paper describes the design and use of…

Develops a sparsity-inducing Bayesian Causal Forest for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects.

While variational dropout approaches have been shown to be effective for network sparsification, they are still suboptimal in the sense that they set the dropout rate for each neuron without consideration of the input data. With such input-independent dropout, each neuron is evolved to be generic across inputs, which m…

For supervised and unsupervised learning, positive definite kernels allow to use large and potentially infinite dimensional feature spaces with a computational cost that only depends on the number of observations. This is usually done through the penalization of predictor functions by Euclidean or Hilbertian norms. In …

Variable selection is a fundamental task in statistical data analysis. Sparsity-inducing regularization methods are a popular class of methods that simultaneously perform variable selection and model estimation. The central problem is a quadratic optimization problem with an l0-norm penalty. Exactly enforcing the l0-no…

We study the problem of learning high dimensional regression models regularized by a structured-sparsity-inducing penalty that encodes prior structural information on either input or output sides. We consider two widely adopted types of such penalties as our motivating examples: 1) overlapping group lasso penalty, base…

The paper introduces a new method for feature selection without explicit sparsification.

In this paper, we propose a generalized scale mixture family of distributions, namely the Power Exponential Scale Mixture (PESM) family, to model the sparsity inducing priors currently in use for sparse signal recovery (SSR). We show that the successful and popular methods such as LASSO, Reweighted $\ell_1$ and Reweigh…

New algorithm reduces dimensionality in stochastic optimization.

We consider a class of sparse learning problems in high dimensional feature space regularized by a structured sparsity-inducing norm which incorporates prior knowledge of the group structure of the features. Such problems often pose a considerable challenge to optimization algorithms due to the non-smoothness and non-s…

We study the problem of estimating high-dimensional regression models regularized by a structured sparsity-inducing penalty that encodes prior structural information on either the input or output variables. We consider two widely adopted types of penalties of this kind as motivating examples: (1) the general overlappin…

HALO learns to prune neural networks by adaptively shrinking weights.

Path regularization reveals convex optimization in deep ReLU networks.

Classical scalar-response regression methods treat covariates as a vector and estimate a corresponding vector of regression coefficients. In medical applications, however, regressors are often in a form of multi-dimensional arrays. For example, one may be interested in using MRI imaging to identify which brain regions …

This paper proposes to learn hierarchical compositional AND-OR model for interpretable image synthesis by sparsifying the generator network. The proposed method adopts the scene-objects-parts-subparts-primitives hierarchy in image representation. A scene has different types (i.e., OR) each of which consists of a number…

Many of the algorithms used to solve minimization problems with sparsity-inducing regularizers are generic in the sense that they do not take into account the sparsity of the solution in any particular way. However, algorithms known as semismooth Newton are able to take advantage of this sparsity to accelerate their co…

This paper is about variable selection, clustering and estimation in an unsupervised high-dimensional setting. Our approach is based on fitting constrained Gaussian mixture models, where we learn the number of clusters $K$ and the set of relevant variables $S$ using a generalized Bayesian posterior with a sparsity indu…

ANN learner finds sparse needles in nonlinear haystacks with high probability.

We design simple screening tests to automatically discard data samples in empirical risk minimization without losing optimization guarantees. We derive loss functions that produce dual objectives with a sparse solution. We also show how to regularize convex losses to ensure such a dual sparsity-inducing property, and p…

New learning algorithm mimics biological neural networks.

Recommender systems play a central role in providing individualized access to information and services. This paper focuses on collaborative filtering, an approach that exploits the shared structure among mind-liked users and similar items. In particular, we focus on a formal probabilistic framework known as Markov rand…

Hospital readmissions have become one of the key measures of healthcare quality. Preventable readmissions have been identified as one of the primary targets for reducing costs and improving healthcare delivery. However, most data driven studies for understanding readmissions have produced black box classification and p…

In this paper, we propose an unifying view of several recently proposed structured sparsity-inducing norms. We consider the situation of a model simultaneously (a) penalized by a set- function de ned on the support of the unknown parameter vector which represents prior knowledge on supports, and (b) regularized in Lp-n…

We present sparse topical coding (STC), a non-probabilistic formulation of topic models for discovering latent representations of large collections of data. Unlike probabilistic topic models, STC relaxes the normalization constraint of admixture proportions and the constraint of defining a normalized likelihood functio…

SVD training reduces DNN rank and computation load without SVD per step.

This paper proposes a new interpretation of sparse penalties such as the elastic-net and the group-lasso. Beyond providing a new viewpoint on these penalization schemes, our approach results in a unified optimization strategy. Our experiments demonstrate that this strategy, implemented on the elastic-net, is computatio…

New algorithms improve Bayesian linear regression with spike-and-slab priors.

Compression and computational efficiency in deep learning have become a problem of great significance. In this work, we argue that the most principled and effective way to attack this problem is by adopting a Bayesian point of view, where through sparsity inducing priors we prune large parts of the network. We introduc…

During the past years there has been an explosion of interest in learning methods based on sparsity regularization. In this paper, we discuss a general class of such methods, in which the regularizer can be expressed as the composition of a convex function $ω$ with a linear function. This setting includes several metho…

Holistic GLMs add constraints for better model quality.

In this paper, we propose a low-rank approximation method based on discrete least-squares for the approximation of a multivariate function from random, noisy-free observations. Sparsity inducing regularization techniques are used within classical algorithms for low-rank approximation in order to exploit the possible sp…

A key problem in statistics and machine learning is the determination of network structure from data. We consider the case where the structure of the graph to be reconstructed is known to be scale-free. We show that in such cases it is natural to formulate structured sparsity inducing priors using submodular functions,…

We introduce dropout compaction, a novel method for training feed-forward neural networks which realizes the performance gains of training a large model with dropout regularization, yet extracts a compact neural network for run-time efficiency. In the proposed method, we introduce a sparsity-inducing prior on the per u…

This paper studies simultaneous feature selection and extraction in supervised and unsupervised learning. We propose and investigate selective reduced rank regression for constructing optimal explanatory factors from a parsimonious subset of input features. The proposed estimators enjoy sharp oracle inequalities, and w…

In this paper, we address the problem of embedded feature selection for ranking on top of the list problems. We pose this problem as a regularized empirical risk minimization with $p$-norm push loss function ($p=\infty$) and sparsity inducing regularizers. We leverage the issues related to this challenging optimization…

Bayesian inference corrected for bias in high-dimensional models.

This paper proposes a simple approach to derive efficient error bounds for learning multiple components with sparsity-inducing regularization. We show that for such regularization schemes, known decompositions of the Rademacher complexity over the components can be used in a more efficient manner to result in tighter b…

Picasso is a new library for sparse learning problems in R and Python.

Improved Thompson Sampling for high-dimensional sparse bandits.

We propose an inexact variable-metric proximal point algorithm to accelerate gradient-based optimization algorithms. The proposed scheme, called QNing can be notably applied to incremental first-order methods such as the stochastic variance-reduced gradient descent algorithm (SVRG) and other randomized incremental opti…

Multi-task learning has shown to significantly enhance the performance of multiple related learning tasks in a variety of situations. We present the fused logistic regression, a sparse multi-task learning approach for binary classification. Specifically, we introduce sparsity inducing penalties over parameter differenc…