Given a matrix $D$ describing the pairwise dissimilarities of a data set, a common task is to embed the data points into Euclidean space. The classical multidimensional scaling (cMDS) algorithm is a widespread method to do this. However, theoretical analysis of the robustness of the algorithm and an in-depth analysis of its performance on non-Euclidean metrics is lacking. In this paper, we derive a formula, based on the eigenvalues of a matrix obtained from $D$, for the Frobenius norm of the difference between $D$ and the metric $D_{\text{cmds}}$ returned by cMDS. This error analysis leads us to the conclusion that when the derived matrix has a significant number of negative eigenvalues, then $\|D-D_{\text{cmds}}\|_F$, after initially decreasing, will eventually increase as we increase the dimension. Hence, counterintuitively, the quality of the embedding degrades as we increase the dimension. We empirically verify that the Frobenius norm increases as we increase the dimension for a variety of non-Euclidean metrics. We also show on several benchmark datasets that this degradation in the embedding results in the classification accuracy of both simple (e.g., 1-nearest neighbor) and complex (e.g., multi-layer neural nets) classifiers decreasing as we increase the embedding dimension. Finally, our analysis leads us to a new efficiently computable algorithm that returns a matrix $D_l$ that is at least as close to the original distances as $D_t$ (the Euclidean metric closest in $\ell_2$ distance). While $D_l$ is not metric, when given as input to cMDS instead of $D$, it empirically results in solutions whose distance to $D$ does not increase when we increase the dimension and the classification accuracy degrades less than the cMDS solution.
Permutation polynomials over finite fields are an interesting and constantly active research subject of study for many years. They have important applications in areas of mathematics and engineering. In recent years, permutation binomials and permutation trinomials attract people's interests due to their simple algebraic forms. By reversely using Tu's method for the characterization of permutation polynomials with exponents of Niho type, we construct a class of permutation trinomials with coefficients 1 in this paper. As applications, two conjectures of [19] and a conjecture of [13] are all special cases of our result. To our knowledge, the construction method of permutation polynomials by polar decomposition in this paper is new. Moreover, we prove that in new class of permutation trinomials, there exists a permutation polynomial which is EA-inequivalent to known permutation polynomials for all m greater than or equal to 2. Also we give the explicit compositional inverses of the new permutation trinomials for a special case.
We study the asymptotic normality of two estimators of the integrated volatility of volatility based on the Fourier methodology, which does not require the pre-estimation of the spot volatility. We show that the bias-corrected estimator reaches the optimal rate 1/4, while the estimator without bias-correction has a slower convergence rate and a smaller asymptotic variance. Additionally, we provide simulation results that support the theoretical asymptotic distribution of the rate-efficient estimator and show the accuracy of the Fourier estimator in comparison with a rate-optimal estimator based on the pre-estimation of the spot volatility. Finally, we reconstruct the daily volatility of volatility of the S&P500 and EUROSTOXX50 indices over long samples via the rate-optimal Fourier estimator and provide novel insight into the existence of stylized facts about its dynamics.
We reexamine the the classical multidimensional scaling (MDS). We study some special cases, in particular, the exact solution for the sub-space formed by the 3 dimensional principal coordinates is derived. Also we give the extreme case when the points are collinear. Some insight into the effect on the MDS solution of the excluded eigenvalues (could be both positive as well as negative) of the doubly centered matrix is provided. As an illustration, we work through an example to understand the distortion in the MDS construction with positive and negative eigenvalues.
Escaping saddle points is a central research topic in nonconvex optimization. In this paper, we propose a simple gradient-based algorithm such that for a smooth function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^n\to\mathbb{R}$, it outputs an $\epsilon$-approximate second-order stationary point in $\tilde{O}(\log n/\epsilon^{1.75})$ iterations. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art algorithms by Jin et al. with $\tilde{O}((\log n)^{4}/\epsilon^{2})$ or $\tilde{O}((\log n)^{6}/\epsilon^{1.75})$ iterations, our algorithm is polynomially better in terms of $\log n$ and matches their complexities in terms of $1/\epsilon$. For the stochastic setting, our algorithm outputs an $\epsilon$-approximate second-order stationary point in $\tilde{O}((\log n)^{2}/\epsilon^{4})$ iterations. Technically, our main contribution is an idea of implementing a robust Hessian power method using only gradients, which can find negative curvature near saddle points and achieve the polynomial speedup in $\log n$ compared to the perturbed gradient descent methods. Finally, we also perform numerical experiments that support our results.
Despite the recent success of graph neural networks (GNN), common architectures often exhibit significant limitations, including sensitivity to oversmoothing, long-range dependencies, and spurious edges, e.g., as can occur as a result of graph heterophily or adversarial attacks. To at least partially address these issues within a simple transparent framework, we consider a new family of GNN layers designed to mimic and integrate the update rules of two classical iterative algorithms, namely, proximal gradient descent and iterative reweighted least squares (IRLS). The former defines an extensible base GNN architecture that is immune to oversmoothing while nonetheless capturing long-range dependencies by allowing arbitrary propagation steps. In contrast, the latter produces a novel attention mechanism that is explicitly anchored to an underlying end-toend energy function, contributing stability with respect to edge uncertainty. When combined we obtain an extremely simple yet robust model that we evaluate across disparate scenarios including standardized benchmarks, adversarially-perturbated graphs, graphs with heterophily, and graphs involving long-range dependencies. In doing so, we compare against SOTA GNN approaches that have been explicitly designed for the respective task, achieving competitive or superior node classification accuracy.
Graph representation learning has recently been applied to a broad spectrum of problems ranging from computer graphics and chemistry to high energy physics and social media. The popularity of graph neural networks has sparked interest, both in academia and in industry, in developing methods that scale to very large graphs such as Facebook or Twitter social networks. In most of these approaches, the computational cost is alleviated by a sampling strategy retaining a subset of node neighbors or subgraphs at training time. In this paper we propose a new, efficient and scalable graph deep learning architecture which sidesteps the need for graph sampling by using graph convolutional filters of different size that are amenable to efficient precomputation, allowing extremely fast training and inference. Our architecture allows using different local graph operators (e.g. motif-induced adjacency matrices or Personalized Page Rank diffusion matrix) to best suit the task at hand. We conduct extensive experimental evaluation on various open benchmarks and show that our approach is competitive with other state-of-the-art architectures, while requiring a fraction of the training and inference time.
Markov Logic Networks (MLNs), which elegantly combine logic rules and probabilistic graphical models, can be used to address many knowledge graph problems. However, inference in MLN is computationally intensive, making the industrial-scale application of MLN very difficult. In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as efficient and effective tools for large-scale graph problems. Nevertheless, GNNs do not explicitly incorporate prior logic rules into the models, and may require many labeled examples for a target task. In this paper, we explore the combination of MLNs and GNNs, and use graph neural networks for variational inference in MLN. We propose a GNN variant, named ExpressGNN, which strikes a nice balance between the representation power and the simplicity of the model. Our extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that ExpressGNN leads to effective and efficient probabilistic logic reasoning.
Robust estimation is much more challenging in high dimensions than it is in one dimension: Most techniques either lead to intractable optimization problems or estimators that can tolerate only a tiny fraction of errors. Recent work in theoretical computer science has shown that, in appropriate distributional models, it is possible to robustly estimate the mean and covariance with polynomial time algorithms that can tolerate a constant fraction of corruptions, independent of the dimension. However, the sample and time complexity of these algorithms is prohibitively large for high-dimensional applications. In this work, we address both of these issues by establishing sample complexity bounds that are optimal, up to logarithmic factors, as well as giving various refinements that allow the algorithms to tolerate a much larger fraction of corruptions. Finally, we show on both synthetic and real data that our algorithms have state-of-the-art performance and suddenly make high-dimensional robust estimation a realistic possibility.
During recent years, active learning has evolved into a popular paradigm for utilizing user's feedback to improve accuracy of learning algorithms. Active learning works by selecting the most informative sample among unlabeled data and querying the label of that point from user. Many different methods such as uncertainty sampling and minimum risk sampling have been utilized to select the most informative sample in active learning. Although many active learning algorithms have been proposed so far, most of them work with binary or multi-class classification problems and therefore can not be applied to problems in which only samples from one class as well as a set of unlabeled data are available. Such problems arise in many real-world situations and are known as the problem of learning from positive and unlabeled data. In this paper we propose an active learning algorithm that can work when only samples of one class as well as a set of unlabelled data are available. Our method works by separately estimating probability desnity of positive and unlabeled points and then computing expected value of informativeness to get rid of a hyper-parameter and have a better measure of informativeness./ Experiments and empirical analysis show promising results compared to other similar methods.
This project addresses the problem of sentiment analysis in twitter; that is classifying tweets according to the sentiment expressed in them: positive, negative or neutral. Twitter is an online micro-blogging and social-networking platform which allows users to write short status updates of maximum length 140 characters. It is a rapidly expanding service with over 200 million registered users - out of which 100 million are active users and half of them log on twitter on a daily basis - generating nearly 250 million tweets per day. Due to this large amount of usage we hope to achieve a reflection of public sentiment by analysing the sentiments expressed in the tweets. Analysing the public sentiment is important for many applications such as firms trying to find out the response of their products in the market, predicting political elections and predicting socioeconomic phenomena like stock exchange. The aim of this project is to develop a functional classifier for accurate and automatic sentiment classification of an unknown tweet stream.