A novel elastic time distance for sparse multivariate functional data is proposed and used to develop a robust distance-based two-layer partition clustering method. With this proposed distance, the new approach not only can detect correct clusters for sparse multivariate functional data under outlier settings but also can detect those outliers that do not belong to any clusters. Classical distance-based clustering methods such as density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), agglomerative hierarchical clustering, and $K$-medoids are extended to the sparse multivariate functional case based on the newly-proposed distance. Numerical experiments on simulated data highlight that the performance of the proposed algorithm is superior to the performances of existing model-based and extended distance-based methods. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated using Northwest Pacific cyclone tracks data as an example.
We consider the problem of learning functions in the $\mathcal{F}_{p,\pi}$ and Barron spaces, which are natural function spaces that arise in the high-dimensional analysis of random feature models (RFMs) and two-layer neural networks. Through a duality analysis, we reveal that the approximation and estimation of these spaces can be considered equivalent in a certain sense. This enables us to focus on the easier problem of approximation and estimation when studying the generalization of both models. The dual equivalence is established by defining an information-based complexity that can effectively control estimation errors. Additionally, we demonstrate the flexibility of our duality framework through comprehensive analyses of two concrete applications. The first application is to study learning functions in $\mathcal{F}_{p,\pi}$ with RFMs. We prove that the learning does not suffer from the curse of dimensionality as long as $p>1$, implying RFMs can work beyond the kernel regime. Our analysis extends existing results [CMM21] to the noisy case and removes the requirement of overparameterization. The second application is to investigate the learnability of reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) under the $L^\infty$ metric. We derive both lower and upper bounds of the minimax estimation error by using the spectrum of the associated kernel. We then apply these bounds to dot-product kernels and analyze how they scale with the input dimension. Our results suggest that learning with ReLU (random) features is generally intractable in terms of reaching high uniform accuracy.
Vision transformers (ViTs) that model an image as a sequence of partitioned patches have shown notable performance in diverse vision tasks. Because partitioning patches eliminates the image structure, to reflect the order of patches, ViTs utilize an explicit component called positional embedding. However, we claim that the use of positional embedding does not simply guarantee the order-awareness of ViT. To support this claim, we analyze the actual behavior of ViTs using an effective receptive field. We demonstrate that during training, ViT acquires an understanding of patch order from the positional embedding that is trained to be a specific pattern. Based on this observation, we propose explicitly adding a Gaussian attention bias that guides the positional embedding to have the corresponding pattern from the beginning of training. We evaluated the influence of Gaussian attention bias on the performance of ViTs in several image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation experiments. The results showed that proposed method not only facilitates ViTs to understand images but also boosts their performance on various datasets, including ImageNet, COCO 2017, and ADE20K.
We propose a new auto-regressive model for the statistical analysis of multivariate distributional time series. The data of interest consist of a collection of multiple series of probability measures supported over a bounded interval of the real line, and that are indexed by distinct time instants. The probability measures are modelled as random objects in the Wasserstein space. We establish the auto-regressive model in the tangent space at the Lebesgue measure by first centering all the raw measures so that their Fr\'echet means turn to be the Lebesgue measure. Using the theory of iterated random function systems, results on the existence, uniqueness and stationarity of the solution of such a model are provided. We also propose a consistent estimator for the model coefficient. In addition to the analysis of simulated data, the proposed model is illustrated with two real data sets made of observations from age distribution in different countries and bike sharing network in Paris. Finally, due to the positive and boundedness constraints that we impose on the model coefficients, the proposed estimator that is learned under these constraints, naturally has a sparse structure. The sparsity allows furthermore the application of the proposed model in learning a graph of temporal dependency from the multivariate distributional time series.
Factor analysis provides a canonical framework for imposing lower-dimensional structure such as sparse covariance in high-dimensional data. High-dimensional data on the same set of variables are often collected under different conditions, for instance in reproducing studies across research groups. In such cases, it is natural to seek to learn the shared versus condition-specific structure. Existing hierarchical extensions of factor analysis have been proposed, but face practical issues including identifiability problems. To address these shortcomings, we propose a class of SUbspace Factor Analysis (SUFA) models, which characterize variation across groups at the level of a lower-dimensional subspace. We prove that the proposed class of SUFA models lead to identifiability of the shared versus group-specific components of the covariance, and study their posterior contraction properties. Taking a Bayesian approach, these contributions are developed alongside efficient posterior computation algorithms. Our sampler fully integrates out latent variables, is easily parallelizable and has complexity that does not depend on sample size. We illustrate the methods through application to integration of multiple gene expression datasets relevant to immunology.
Feature screening approaches are effective in selecting active features from data with ultrahigh dimensionality and increasing complexity; however, the majority of existing feature screening approaches are either restricted to a univariate response or rely on some distribution or model assumptions. In this article, we propose a novel sure independence screening approach based on the multivariate rank distance correlation (MrDc-SIS). The MrDc-SIS achieves multiple desirable properties such as being distribution-free, completely nonparametric, scale-free, robust for outliers or heavy tails, and sensitive for hidden structures. Moreover, the MrDc-SIS can be used to screen either univariate or multivariate responses and either one dimensional or multi-dimensional predictors. We establish the asymptotic sure screening consistency property of the MrDc-SIS under a mild condition by lifting previous assumptions about the finite moments. Simulation studies demonstrate that MrDc-SIS outperforms three other closely relevant approaches under various settings. We also apply the MrDc-SIS approach to a multi-omics ovarian carcinoma data downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).
We study the implicit bias of gradient flow on linear equivariant steerable networks in group-invariant binary classification. Our findings reveal that the parameterized predictor converges in direction to the unique group-invariant classifier with a maximum margin defined by the input group action. Under a unitary assumption on the input representation, we establish the equivalence between steerable networks and data augmentation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the improved margin and generalization bound of steerable networks over their non-invariant counterparts.
Grade of Membership (GoM) models are popular individual-level mixture models for multivariate categorical data. GoM allows each subject to have mixed memberships in multiple extreme latent profiles. Therefore GoM models have a richer modeling capacity than latent class models that restrict each subject to belong to a single profile. The flexibility of GoM comes at the cost of more challenging identifiability and estimation problems. In this work, we propose a singular value decomposition (SVD) based spectral approach to GoM analysis with multivariate binary responses. Our approach hinges on the observation that the expectation of the data matrix has a low-rank decomposition under a GoM model. For identifiability, we develop sufficient and almost necessary conditions for a notion of expectation identifiability. For estimation, we extract only a few leading singular vectors of the observed data matrix, and exploit the simplex geometry of these vectors to estimate the mixed membership scores and other parameters. Our spectral method has a huge computational advantage over Bayesian or likelihood-based methods and is scalable to large-scale and high-dimensional data. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate the superior efficiency and accuracy of our method. We also illustrate our method by applying it to a personality test dataset.
Learning on big data brings success for artificial intelligence (AI), but the annotation and training costs are expensive. In future, learning on small data is one of the ultimate purposes of AI, which requires machines to recognize objectives and scenarios relying on small data as humans. A series of machine learning models is going on this way such as active learning, few-shot learning, deep clustering. However, there are few theoretical guarantees for their generalization performance. Moreover, most of their settings are passive, that is, the label distribution is explicitly controlled by one specified sampling scenario. This survey follows the agnostic active sampling under a PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) framework to analyze the generalization error and label complexity of learning on small data using a supervised and unsupervised fashion. With these theoretical analyses, we categorize the small data learning models from two geometric perspectives: the Euclidean and non-Euclidean (hyperbolic) mean representation, where their optimization solutions are also presented and discussed. Later, some potential learning scenarios that may benefit from small data learning are then summarized, and their potential learning scenarios are also analyzed. Finally, some challenging applications such as computer vision, natural language processing that may benefit from learning on small data are also surveyed.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
We present Deep Graph Infomax (DGI), a general approach for learning node representations within graph-structured data in an unsupervised manner. DGI relies on maximizing mutual information between patch representations and corresponding high-level summaries of graphs---both derived using established graph convolutional network architectures. The learnt patch representations summarize subgraphs centered around nodes of interest, and can thus be reused for downstream node-wise learning tasks. In contrast to most prior approaches to unsupervised learning with GCNs, DGI does not rely on random walk objectives, and is readily applicable to both transductive and inductive learning setups. We demonstrate competitive performance on a variety of node classification benchmarks, which at times even exceeds the performance of supervised learning.