Modern data collection in many data paradigms, including bioinformatics, often incorporates multiple traits derived from different data types (i.e. platforms). We call this data multi-block, multi-view, or multi-omics data. The emergent field of data integration develops and applies new methods for studying multi-block data and identifying how different data types relate and differ. One major frontier in contemporary data integration research is methodology that can identify partially-shared structure between sub-collections of data types. This work presents a new approach: Data Integration Via Analysis of Subspaces (DIVAS). DIVAS combines new insights in angular subspace perturbation theory with recent developments in matrix signal processing and convex-concave optimization into one algorithm for exploring partially-shared structure. Based on principal angles between subspaces, DIVAS provides built-in inference on the results of the analysis, and is effective even in high-dimension-low-sample-size (HDLSS) situations.
Transfer learning is known to perform efficiently in many applications empirically, yet limited literature reports the mechanism behind the scene. This study establishes both formal derivations and heuristic analysis to formulate the theory of transfer learning in deep learning. Our framework utilizing layer variational analysis proves that the success of transfer learning can be guaranteed with corresponding data conditions. Moreover, our theoretical calculation yields intuitive interpretations towards the knowledge transfer process. Subsequently, an alternative method for network-based transfer learning is derived. The method shows an increase in efficiency and accuracy for domain adaptation. It is particularly advantageous when new domain data is sufficiently sparse during adaptation. Numerical experiments over diverse tasks validated our theory and verified that our analytic expression achieved better performance in domain adaptation than the gradient descent method.
Factorial analyses offer a powerful nonparametric means to detect main or interaction effects among multiple treatments. For survival outcomes, e.g. from clinical trials, such techniques can be adopted for comparing reasonable quantifications of treatment effects. The key difficulty to solve in survival analysis concerns the proper handling of censoring. So far, all existing factorial analyses for survival data were developed under the independent censoring assumption, which is too strong for many applications. As a solution, the central aim of this article is to develop new methods in factorial survival analyses under quite general dependent censoring regimes. This will be accomplished by combining existing results for factorial survival analyses with techniques developed for survival copula models. As a result, we will present an appealing F-test that exhibits sound performance in our simulation study. The new methods are illustrated in real data analysis. We implement the proposed method in an R function surv.factorial(.) in the R package compound.Cox.
In this note, we prove that the following function space with absolutely convergent Fourier series \[ F_d:=\left\{ f\in L^2([0,1)^d)\:\middle| \: \|f\|:=\sum_{\boldsymbol{k}\in \mathbb{Z}^d}|\hat{f}(\boldsymbol{k})| \max\left(1,\min_{j\in \mathrm{supp}(\boldsymbol{k})}\log |k_j|\right) <\infty \right\}\] with $\hat{f}(\boldsymbol{k})$ being the $\boldsymbol{k}$-th Fourier coefficient of $f$ and $\mathrm{supp}(\boldsymbol{k}):=\{j\in \{1,\ldots,d\}\mid k_j\neq 0\}$ is polynomially tractable for multivariate integration in the worst-case setting. Here polynomial tractability means that the minimum number of function evaluations required to make the worst-case error less than or equal to a tolerance $\varepsilon$ grows only polynomially with respect to $\varepsilon^{-1}$ and $d$. It is important to remark that the function space $F_d$ is unweighted, that is, all variables contribute equally to the norm of functions. Our tractability result is in contrast to those for most of the unweighted integration problems studied in the literature, in which polynomial tractability does not hold and the problem suffers from the curse of dimensionality. Our proof is constructive in the sense that we provide an explicit quasi-Monte Carlo rule that attains a desired worst-case error bound.
We analyze a practical algorithm for sparse PCA on incomplete and noisy data under a general non-random sampling scheme. The algorithm is based on a semidefinite relaxation of the $\ell_1$-regularized PCA problem. We provide theoretical justification that under certain conditions, we can recover the support of the sparse leading eigenvector with high probability by obtaining a unique solution. The conditions involve the spectral gap between the largest and second-largest eigenvalues of the true data matrix, the magnitude of the noise, and the structural properties of the observed entries. The concepts of algebraic connectivity and irregularity are used to describe the structural properties of the observed entries. We empirically justify our theorem with synthetic and real data analysis. We also show that our algorithm outperforms several other sparse PCA approaches especially when the observed entries have good structural properties. As a by-product of our analysis, we provide two theorems to handle a deterministic sampling scheme, which can be applied to other matrix-related problems.
The concept of causality plays an important role in human cognition . In the past few decades, causal inference has been well developed in many fields, such as computer science, medicine, economics, and education. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, it has been increasingly used in causal inference against counterfactual data. Typically, deep causal models map the characteristics of covariates to a representation space and then design various objective optimization functions to estimate counterfactual data unbiasedly based on the different optimization methods. This paper focuses on the survey of the deep causal models, and its core contributions are as follows: 1) we provide relevant metrics under multiple treatments and continuous-dose treatment; 2) we incorporate a comprehensive overview of deep causal models from both temporal development and method classification perspectives; 3) we assist a detailed and comprehensive classification and analysis of relevant datasets and source code.
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.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
Generative models are now capable of producing highly realistic images that look nearly indistinguishable from the data on which they are trained. This raises the question: if we have good enough generative models, do we still need datasets? We investigate this question in the setting of learning general-purpose visual representations from a black-box generative model rather than directly from data. Given an off-the-shelf image generator without any access to its training data, we train representations from the samples output by this generator. We compare several representation learning methods that can be applied to this setting, using the latent space of the generator to generate multiple "views" of the same semantic content. We show that for contrastive methods, this multiview data can naturally be used to identify positive pairs (nearby in latent space) and negative pairs (far apart in latent space). We find that the resulting representations rival those learned directly from real data, but that good performance requires care in the sampling strategy applied and the training method. Generative models can be viewed as a compressed and organized copy of a dataset, and we envision a future where more and more "model zoos" proliferate while datasets become increasingly unwieldy, missing, or private. This paper suggests several techniques for dealing with visual representation learning in such a future. Code is released on our project page: //ali-design.github.io/GenRep/
Substantial progress has been made recently on developing provably accurate and efficient algorithms for low-rank matrix factorization via nonconvex optimization. While conventional wisdom often takes a dim view of nonconvex optimization algorithms due to their susceptibility to spurious local minima, simple iterative methods such as gradient descent have been remarkably successful in practice. The theoretical footings, however, had been largely lacking until recently. In this tutorial-style overview, we highlight the important role of statistical models in enabling efficient nonconvex optimization with performance guarantees. We review two contrasting approaches: (1) two-stage algorithms, which consist of a tailored initialization step followed by successive refinement; and (2) global landscape analysis and initialization-free algorithms. Several canonical matrix factorization problems are discussed, including but not limited to matrix sensing, phase retrieval, matrix completion, blind deconvolution, robust principal component analysis, phase synchronization, and joint alignment. Special care is taken to illustrate the key technical insights underlying their analyses. This article serves as a testament that the integrated consideration of optimization and statistics leads to fruitful research findings.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.