OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
TD(lambda) networks: temporal-difference networks with eligibility traces
Authors: Brian Tanner, Richard S. Sutton
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

Temporal-difference (TD) networks have been introduced as a formalism for expressing and learning grounded world knowledge in a predictive form (Sutton & Tanner, 2005). Like conventional TD(0) methods, the learning algorithm for TD networks uses 1-step backups to train prediction units about future events. In conventional TD learning, the TD(λ) algorithm is often used to do more general multi-step backups of future predictions. In our work, we introduce a generalization of the 1-step TD network specification that is based on the TD(λ) learning algorithm, creating TD(λ) networks. We present experimental results that show TD(λ) networks can learn solutions in more complex environments than TD networks. We also show that in problems that can be solved by TD networks, TD(λ) networks generally learn solutions much faster than their 1-step counterparts. Finally, we present an analysis of our algorithm that shows that the computational cost of TD(λ) networks is only slightly more than that of TD networks.
Core Vector Regression for very large regression problems
Authors: Ivor W. Tsang, James T. Kwok, Kimo T. Lai
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

In this paper, we extend the recently proposed Core Vector Machine algorithm to the regression setting by generalizing the underlying minimum enclosing ball problem. The resultant Core Vector Regression (CVR) algorithm can be used with any linear/nonlinear kernels and can obtain provably approximately optimal solutions. Its asymptotic time complexity is linear in the number of training patterns m, while its space complexity is independent of m. Experiments show that CVR has comparable performance with SVR, but is much faster and produces much fewer support vectors on very large data sets. It is also successfully applied to large 3D point sets in computer graphics for the modeling of implicit surfaces.
Hierarchical Dirichlet model for document classification
Authors: Sriharsha Veeramachaneni, Diego Sona, Paolo Avesani
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

The proliferation of text documents on the web as well as within institutions necessitates their convenient organization to enable efficient retrieval of information. Although text corpora are frequently organized into concept hierarchies or taxonomies, the classification of the documents into the hierarchy is expensive in terms human effort. We present a novel and simple hierarchical Dirichlet generative model for text corpora and derive an efficient algorithm for the estimation of model parameters and the unsupervised classification of text documents into a given hierarchy. The class conditional feature means are assumed to be inter-related due to the hierarchical Bayesian structure of the model. We show that the algorithm provides robust estimates of the classification parameters by performing smoothing or regularization. We present experimental evidence on real web data that our algorithm achieves significant gains in accuracy over simpler models.
Bayesian sparse sampling for on-line reward optimization
Authors: Tao Wang, Daniel J. Lizotte, Michael H. Bowling, Dale Schuurmans
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

We present an efficient "sparse sampling" technique for approximating Bayes optimal decision making in reinforcement learning, addressing the well known exploration versus exploitation tradeoff. Our approach combines sparse sampling with Bayesian exploration to achieve improved decision making while controlling computational cost. The idea is to grow a sparse lookahead tree, intelligently, by exploiting information in a Bayesian posterior---rather than enumerate action branches (standard sparse sampling) or compensate myopically (value of perfect information). The outcome is a flexible, practical technique for improving action selection in simple reinforcement learning scenarios.
New kernels for protein structural motif discovery and function classification
Authors: Chang Wang 0001, Stephen D. Scott 0001
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

We present new, general-purpose kernels for protein structure analysis, and describe how to apply them to structural motif discovery and function classification. Experiments show that our new methods are faster than conventional techniques, are capable of finding structural motifs, and are very effective in function classification. In addition to strong cross-validation results, we found possible new oxidoreductases and cytochrome P450 reductases and a possible new structural motif in cytochrome P450 reductases.
Exploiting syntactic, semantic and lexical regularities in language modeling via directed Markov random fields
Authors: Shaojun Wang, Shaomin Wang, Russell Greiner, Dale Schuurmans, Li Cheng 0001
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

We present a directed Markov random field (MRF) model that combines n-gram models, probabilistic context free grammars (PCFGs) and probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) for the purpose of statistical language modeling. Even though the composite directed MRF model potentially has an exponential number of loops and becomes a context sensitive grammar, we are nevertheless able to estimate its parameters in cubic time using an efficient modified EM method, the generalized inside-outside algorithm, which extends the inside-outside algorithm to incorporate the effects of the n-gram and PLSA language models. We generalize various smoothing techniques to alleviate the sparseness of n-gram counts in cases where there are hidden variables. We also derive an analogous algorithm to calculate the probability of initial subsequence of a sentence, generated by the composite language model. Our experimental results on the Wall Street Journal corpus show that we obtain significant reductions in perplexity compared to the state-of-the-art baseline trigram model with Good-Turing and Kneser-Ney smoothings.
Incomplete-data classification using logistic regression
Authors: David Williams, Xuejun Liao, Ya Xue, Lawrence Carin
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

A logistic regression classification algorithm is developed for problems in which the feature vectors may be missing data (features). Single or multiple imputation for the missing data is avoided by performing analytic integration with an estimated conditional density function (conditioned on the non-missing data). Conditional density functions are estimated using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), with parameter estimation performed using both expectation maximization (EM) and Variational Bayesian EM (VB-EM). Using widely available real data, we demonstrate the general advantage of the VB-EM GMM estimation for handling incomplete data, vis-à-vis the EM algorithm. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the approach proposed here is generally superior to standard imputation procedures.
Learning predictive state representations in dynamical systems without reset
Authors: Britton Wolfe, Michael R. James 0001, Satinder Singh 0001
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

Predictive state representations (PSRs) are a recently-developed way to model discrete-time, controlled dynamical systems. We present and describe two algorithms for learning a PSR model: a Monte Carlo algorithm and a temporal difference (TD) algorithm. Both of these algorithms can learn models for systems without requiring a reset action as was needed by the previously available general PSR-model learning algorithm. We present empirical results that compare our two algorithms and also compare their performance with that of existing algorithms, including an EM algorithm for learning POMDP models.
Linear Asymmetric Classifier for cascade detectors
Authors: Jianxin Wu 0001, Matthew D. Mullin, James M. Rehg
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

The detection of faces in images is fundamentally a rare event detection problem. Cascade classifiers provide an efficient computational solution, by leveraging the asymmetry in the distribution of faces vs. non-faces. Training a cascade classifier in turn requires a solution for the following subproblems: Design a classifier for each node in the cascade with very high detection rate but only moderate false positive rate. While there are a few strategies in the literature for indirectly addressing this asymmetric node learning goal, none of them are based on a satisfactory theoretical framework. We present a mathematical characterization of the node-learning problem and describe an effective closed form approximation to the optimal solution, which we call the Linear Asymmetric Classifier (LAC). We first use AdaBoost or AsymBoost to select features, and use LAC to learn a linear discriminant function to achieve the node learning goal. Experimental results on face detection show that LAC can improve the detection performance in comparison to standard methods. We also show that Fisher Discriminant Analysis on the features selected by AdaBoost yields better performance than AdaBoost itself.
Building Sparse Large Margin Classifiers
Authors: Mingrui Wu, Bernhard Schölkopf, Gökhan H. Bakir
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

This paper presents an approach to build Sparse Large Margin Classifiers (SLMC) by adding one more constraint to the standard Support Vector Machine (SVM) training problem. The added constraint explicitly controls the sparseness of the classifier and an approach is provided to solve the formulated problem. When considering the dual of this problem. it can be seen that building an SLMC is equivalent to constructing an SVM with a modified kernel function. Further analysis of this kernel function indicates that the proposed approach essentially finds a discriminating subspace that can be spanned by a small number of vectors, and in this subspace different classes of data are linearly well separated. Experimental results over several classification benchmarks show that in most cases the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-art sparse learning algorithms.
Dirichlet enhanced relational learning
Authors: Zhao Xu 0001, Volker Tresp, Kai Yu 0001, Shipeng Yu, Hans-Peter Kriegel
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

We apply nonparametric hierarchical Bayesian modelling to relational learning. In a hierarchical Bayesian approach, model parameters can be "personalized", i.e., owned by entities or relationships, and are coupled via a common prior distribution. Flexibility is added in a nonparametric hierarchical Bayesian approach, such that the learned knowledge can be truthfully represented. We apply our approach to a medical domain where we form a nonparametric hierarchical Bayesian model for relations involving hospitals, patients, procedures and diagnosis. The experiments show that the additional flexibility in a nonparametric hierarchical Bayes approach results in a more accurate model of the dependencies between procedures and diagnosis and gives significantly improved estimates of the probabilities of future procedures.
Learning Gaussian processes from multiple tasks
Authors: Kai Yu 0001, Volker Tresp, Anton Schwaighofer
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

We consider the problem of multi-task learning, that is, learning multiple related functions. Our approach is based on a hierarchical Bayesian framework, that exploits the equivalence between parametric linear models and nonparametric Gaussian processes (GPs). The resulting models can be learned easily via an EM-algorithm. Empirical studies on multi-label text categorization suggest that the presented models allow accurate solutions of these multi-task problems.
Augmenting naive Bayes for ranking
Authors: Harry Zhang, Liangxiao Jiang, Jiang Su
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

Naive Bayes is an effective and efficient learning algorithm in classification. In many applications, however, an accurate ranking of instances based on the class probability is more desirable. Unfortunately, naive Bayes has been found to produce poor probability estimates. Numerous techniques have been proposed to extend naive Bayes for better classification accuracy, of which selective Bayesian classifiers (SBC) (Langley & Sage, 1994), tree-augmented naive Bayes (TAN) (Friedman et al., 1997), NBTree (Kohavi, 1996), boosted naive Bayes (Elkan, 1997), and AODE (Webb et al., 2005) achieve remarkable improvement over naive Bayes in terms of classification accuracy. An interesting question is: Do these techniques also produce accurate ranking? In this paper, we first conduct a systematic experimental study on their efficacy for ranking. Then, we propose a new approach to augmenting naive Bayes for generating accurate ranking, called hidden naive Bayes (HNB). In an HNB, a hidden parent is created for each attribute to represent the influences from all other attributes, and thus a more accurate ranking is expected. HNB inherits the structural simplicity of naive Bayes and can be easily learned without structure learning. Our experiments show that HNB outperforms naive Bayes, SBC, boosted naive Bayes, NBTree, and TAN significantly, and performs slightly better than AODE in ranking.
Harmonic mixtures: combining mixture models and graph-based methods for inductive and scalable semi-supervised learning
Authors: Xiaojin Zhu 0001, John D. Lafferty
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

Graph-based methods for semi-supervised learning have recently been shown to be promising for combining labeled and unlabeled data in classification problems. However, inference for graph-based methods often does not scale well to very large data sets, since it requires inversion of a large matrix or solution of a large linear program. Moreover, such approaches are inherently transductive, giving predictions for only those points in the unlabeled set, and not for an arbitrary test point. In this paper a new approach is presented that preserves the strengths of graph-based semi-supervised learning while overcoming the limitations of scalability and non-inductive inference, through a combination of generative mixture models and discriminative regularization using the graph Laplacian. Experimental results show that this approach preserves the accuracy of purely graph-based transductive methods when the data has "manifold structure," and at the same time achieves inductive learning with significantly reduced computational cost.
2D Conditional Random Fields for Web information extraction
Authors: Jun Zhu 0001, Zaiqing Nie, Ji-Rong Wen, Bo Zhang 0010, Wei-Ying Ma
Venue: ICML
Year: 2005

The Web contains an abundance of useful semistructured information about real world objects, and our empirical study shows that strong sequence characteristics exist for Web information about objects of the same type across different Web sites. Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are the state of the art approaches taking the sequence characteristics to do better labeling. However, as the information on a Web page is two-dimensionally laid out, previous linear-chain CRFs have their limitations for Web information extraction. To better incorporate the two-dimensional neighborhood interactions, this paper presents a two-dimensional CRF model to automatically extract object information from the Web. We empirically compare the proposed model with existing linear-chain CRF models for product information extraction, and the results show the effectiveness of our model.
Relational temporal difference learning
Authors: Nima Asgharbeygi, David J. Stracuzzi, Pat Langley
Venue: ICML
Year: 2006

We introduce relational temporal difference learning as an effective approach to solving multi-agent Markov decision problems with large state spaces. Our algorithm uses temporal difference reinforcement to learn a distributed value function represented over a conceptual hierarchy of relational predicates. We present experiments using two domains from the General Game Playing repository, in which we observe that our system achieves higher learning rates than non-relational methods. We also discuss related work and directions for future research.
A new approach to data driven clustering
Authors: Arik Azran, Zoubin Ghahramani
Venue: ICML
Year: 2006

We consider the problem of clustering in its most basic form where only a local metric on the data space is given. No parametric statistical model is assumed, and the number of clusters is learned from the data. We introduce, analyze and demonstrate a novel approach to clustering where data points are viewed as nodes of a graph, and pairwise similarities are used to derive a transition probability matrix P for a Markov random walk between them. The algorithm automatically reveals structure at increasing scales by varying the number of steps taken by this random walk. Points are represented as rows of Pt, which are the t-step distributions of the walk starting at that point; these distributions are then clustered using a KL-minimizing iterative algorithm. Both the number of clusters, and the number of steps that 'best reveal' it, are found by optimizing spectral properties of P.
Agnostic active learning
Authors: Maria-Florina Balcan, Alina Beygelzimer, John Langford 0001
Venue: ICML
Year: 2006

We state and analyze the first active learning algorithm which works in the presence of arbitrary forms of noise. The algorithm, A2 (for Agnostic Active), relies only upon the assumption that the samples are drawn i.i.d. from a fixed distribution. We show that A2 achieves an exponential improvement (i.e., requires only O (ln 1/ε) samples to find an ε-optimal classifier) over the usual sample complexity of supervised learning, for several settings considered before in the realizable case. These include learning threshold classifiers and learning homogeneous linear separators with respect to an input distribution which is uniform over the unit sphere.
On Bayesian bounds
Authors: Arindam Banerjee 0001
Venue: ICML
Year: 2006

We show that several important Bayesian bounds studied in machine learning, both in the batch as well as the online setting, arise by an application of a simple compression lemma. In particular, we derive (i) PAC-Bayesian bounds in the batch setting, (ii) Bayesian log-loss bounds and (iii) Bayesian bounded-loss bounds in the online setting using the compression lemma. Although every setting has different semantics for prior, posterior and loss, we show that the core bound argument is the same. The paper simplifies our understanding of several important and apparently disparate results, as well as brings to light a powerful tool for developing similar arguments for other methods.
Dynamic topic models
Authors: David M. Blei, John D. Lafferty
Venue: ICML
Year: 2006

A family of probabilistic time series models is developed to analyze the time evolution of topics in large document collections. The approach is to use state space models on the natural parameters of the multinomial distributions that represent the topics. Variational approximations based on Kalman filters and nonparametric wavelet regression are developed to carry out approximate posterior inference over the latent topics. In addition to giving quantitative, predictive models of a sequential corpus, dynamic topic models provide a qualitative window into the contents of a large document collection. The models are demonstrated by analyzing the OCR'ed archives of the journal Science from 1880 through 2000.
Predictive search distributions
Authors: Edwin V. Bonilla, Christopher K. I. Williams, Felix V. Agakov, John Cavazos, John Thomson, Michael F. P. O&apos, Boyle
Venue: ICML
Year: 2006

Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) are a popular approach to learn a probability distribution over the "good" solutions to a combinatorial optimization problem. Here we consider the case where there is a collection of such optimization problems with learned distributions, and where each problem can be characterized by some vector of features. Now we can define a machine learning problem to predict the distribution of good solutions q(s|x) for a new problem with features x, where s denotes a solution. This predictive distribution is then used to focus the search. We demonstrate the utility of our method on a compiler optimization task where the goal is to find a sequence of code transformations to make the code run fastest. Results on a set of 12 different benchmarks on two distinct architectures show that our approach consistently leads to significant improvements in performance.
Learning predictive state representations using non-blind policies
Authors: Michael H. Bowling, Peter McCracken, Michael James 0001, James Neufeld, Dana F. Wilkinson
Venue: ICML
Year: 2006

Predictive state representations (PSRs) are powerful models of non-Markovian decision processes that differ from traditional models (e.g., HMMs, POMDPs) by representing state using only observable quantities. Because of this, PSRs can be learned solely using data from interaction with the process. The majority of existing techniques, though, explicitly or implicitly require that this data be gathered using a blind policy, where actions are selected independently of preceding observations. This is a severe limitation for practical learning of PSRs. We present two methods for fixing this limitation in most of the existing PSR algorithms: one when the policy is known and one when it is not. We then present an efficient optimization for computing good exploration policies to be used when learning a PSR. The exploration policies, which are not blind, significantly lower the amount of data needed to build an accurate model, thus demonstrating the importance of non-blind policies. 1.
Efficient co-regularised least squares regression
Authors: Ulf Brefeld, Thomas Gärtner 0001, Tobias Scheffer, Stefan Wrobel
Venue: ICML
Year: 2006

In many applications, unlabelled examples are inexpensive and easy to obtain. Semi-supervised approaches try to utilise such examples to reduce the predictive error. In this paper, we investigate a semi-supervised least squares regression algorithm based on the co-learning approach. Similar to other semi-supervised algorithms, our base algorithm has cubic runtime complexity in the number of unlabelled examples. To be able to handle larger sets of unlabelled examples, we devise a semi-parametric variant that scales linearly in the number of unlabelled examples. Experiments show a significant error reduction by co-regularisation and a large runtime improvement for the semi-parametric approximation. Last but not least, we propose a distributed procedure that can be applied without collecting all data at a single site.
Semi-supervised learning for structured output variables
Authors: Ulf Brefeld, Tobias Scheffer
Venue: ICML
Year: 2006

The problem of learning a mapping between input and structured, interdependent output variables covers sequential, spatial, and relational learning as well as predicting recursive structures. Joint feature representations of the input and output variables have paved the way to leveraging discriminative learners such as SVMs to this class of problems. We address the problem of semi-supervised learning in joint input output spaces. The co-training approach is based on the principle of maximizing the consensus among multiple independent hypotheses; we develop this principle into a semi-supervised support vector learning algorithm for joint input output spaces and arbitrary loss functions. Experiments investigate the benefit of semi-supervised structured models in terms of accuracy and F1 score.
An empirical comparison of supervised learning algorithms
Authors: Rich Caruana, Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil
Venue: ICML
Year: 2006

A number of supervised learning methods have been introduced in the last decade. Unfortunately, the last comprehensive empirical evaluation of supervised learning was the Statlog Project in the early 90's. We present a large-scale empirical comparison between ten supervised learning methods: SVMs, neural nets, logistic regression, naive bayes, memory-based learning, random forests, decision trees, bagged trees, boosted trees, and boosted stumps. We also examine the effect that calibrating the models via Platt Scaling and Isotonic Regression has on their performance. An important aspect of our study is the use of a variety of performance criteria to evaluate the learning methods.