arXiv subjects

Deanna Needell

Publications and source records attributed to Deanna Needell.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Online matrix factorization for Markovian data and applications to Network Dictionary Learning

Online Matrix Factorization (OMF) is a fundamental tool for dictionary learning problems, giving an approximate representation of complex data sets in terms of a reduced number of extracted features. Convergence guarantees for most of the OMF algorithms in the literature assume independence between data matrices, and the case of dependent data streams remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that a non-convex generalization of the well-known OMF algorithm for i.i.d. stream of data in \citep{mairal2010online} converges almost surely to the set of critical points of the expected loss function, even when the data matrices are functions of some underlying Markov chain satisfying a mild mixing condition. This allows one to extract features more efficiently from dependent data streams, as there is no need to subsample the data sequence to approximately satisfy the independence assumption. As the main application, by combining online non-negative matrix factorization and a recent MCMC algorithm for sampling motifs from networks, we propose a novel framework of Network Dictionary Learning, which extracts ``network dictionary patches' from a given network in an online manner that encodes main features of the network. We demonstrate this technique and its application to network denoising problems on real-world network data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

On Large-Scale Dynamic Topic Modeling with Nonnegative CP Tensor Decomposition

There is currently an unprecedented demand for large-scale temporal data analysis due to the explosive growth of data. Dynamic topic modeling has been widely used in social and data sciences with the goal of learning latent topics that emerge, evolve, and fade over time. Previous work on dynamic topic modeling primarily employ the method of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), where slices of the data tensor are each factorized into the product of lower-dimensional nonnegative matrices. With this approach, however, information contained in the temporal dimension of the data is often neglected or underutilized. To overcome this issue, we propose instead adopting the method of nonnegative CANDECOMP/PARAPAC (CP) tensor decomposition (NNCPD), where the data tensor is directly decomposed into a minimal sum of outer products of nonnegative vectors, thereby preserving the temporal information. The viability of NNCPD is demonstrated through application to both synthetic and real data, where significantly improved results are obtained compared to those of typical NMF-based methods. The advantages of NNCPD over such approaches are studied and discussed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that NNCPD has been utilized for the purpose of dynamic topic modeling, and our findings will be transformative for both applications and further developments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Semi-supervised NMF Models for Topic Modeling in Learning Tasks

We propose several new models for semi-supervised nonnegative matrix factorization (SSNMF) and provide motivation for SSNMF models as maximum likelihood estimators given specific distributions of uncertainty. We present multiplicative updates training methods for each new model, and demonstrate the application of these models to classification, although they are flexible to other supervised learning tasks. We illustrate the promise of these models and training methods on both synthetic and real data, and achieve high classification accuracy on the 20 Newsgroups dataset.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

COVID-19 Literature Topic-Based Search via Hierarchical NMF

A dataset of COVID-19-related scientific literature is compiled, combining the articles from several online libraries and selecting those with open access and full text available. Then, hierarchical nonnegative matrix factorization is used to organize literature related to the novel coronavirus into a tree structure that allows researchers to search for relevant literature based on detected topics. We discover eight major latent topics and 52 granular subtopics in the body of literature, related to vaccines, genetic structure and modeling of the disease and patient studies, as well as related diseases and virology. In order that our tool may help current researchers, an interactive website is created that organizes available literature using this hierarchical structure.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2020

Feature Selection on Lyme Disease Patient Survey Data

Lyme disease is a rapidly growing illness that remains poorly understood within the medical community. Critical questions about when and why patients respond to treatment or stay ill, what kinds of treatments are effective, and even how to properly diagnose the disease remain largely unanswered. We investigate these questions by applying machine learning techniques to a large scale Lyme disease patient registry, MyLymeData, developed by the nonprofit LymeDisease.org. We apply various machine learning methods in order to measure the effect of individual features in predicting participants' answers to the Global Rating of Change (GROC) survey questions that assess the self-reported degree to which their condition improved, worsened, or remained unchanged following antibiotic treatment. We use basic linear regression, support vector machines, neural networks, entropy-based decision tree models, and $k$-nearest neighbors approaches. We first analyze the general performance of the model and then identify the most important features for predicting participant answers to GROC. After we identify the "key" features, we separate them from the dataset and demonstrate the effectiveness of these features at identifying GROC. In doing so, we highlight possible directions for future study both mathematically and clinically.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Stochastic Greedy Algorithms For Multiple Measurement Vectors

Sparse representation of a single measurement vector (SMV) has been explored in a variety of compressive sensing applications. Recently, SMV models have been extended to solve multiple measurement vectors (MMV) problems, where the underlying signal is assumed to have joint sparse structures. To circumvent the NP-hardness of the $\ell_0$ minimization problem, many deterministic MMV algorithms solve the convex relaxed models with limited efficiency. In this paper, we develop stochastic greedy algorithms for solving the joint sparse MMV reconstruction problem. In particular, we propose the MMV Stochastic Iterative Hard Thresholding (MStoIHT) and MMV Stochastic Gradient Matching Pursuit (MStoGradMP) algorithms, and we also utilize the mini-batching technique to further improve their performance. Convergence analysis indicates that the proposed algorithms are able to converge faster than their SMV counterparts, i.e., concatenated StoIHT and StoGradMP, under certain conditions. Numerical experiments have illustrated the superior effectiveness of the proposed algorithms over their SMV counterparts.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

Stochastic Iterative Hard Thresholding for Low-Tucker-Rank Tensor Recovery

Low-rank tensor recovery problems have been widely studied in many applications of signal processing and machine learning. Tucker decomposition is known as one of the most popular decompositions in the tensor framework. In recent years, researchers have developed many state-of-the-art algorithms to address the problem of low-Tucker-rank tensor recovery. Motivated by the favorable properties of the stochastic algorithms, such as stochastic gradient descent and stochastic iterative hard thresholding, we aim to extend the well-known stochastic iterative hard thresholding algorithm to the tensor framework in order to address the problem of recovering a low-Tucker-rank tensor from its linear measurements. We have also developed linear convergence analysis for the proposed method and conducted a series of experiments with both synthetic and real data to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.

math.NA↗

arXiv2020

COVID-19 Time-series Prediction by Joint Dictionary Learning and Online NMF

Predicting the spread and containment of COVID-19 is a challenge of utmost importance that the broader scientific community is currently facing. One of the main sources of difficulty is that a very limited amount of daily COVID-19 case data is available, and with few exceptions, the majority of countries are currently in the "exponential spread stage," and thus there is scarce information available which would enable one to predict the phase transition between spread and containment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to predicting the spread of COVID-19 based on dictionary learning and online nonnegative matrix factorization (online NMF). The key idea is to learn dictionary patterns of short evolution instances of the new daily cases in multiple countries at the same time, so that their latent correlation structures are captured in the dictionary patterns. We first learn such patterns by minibatch learning from the entire time-series and then further adapt them to the time-series by online NMF. As we progressively adapt and improve the learned dictionary patterns to the more recent observations, we also use them to make one-step predictions by the partial fitting. Lastly, by recursively applying the one-step predictions, we can extrapolate our predictions into the near future. Our prediction results can be directly attributed to the learned dictionary patterns due to their interpretability.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Tensor Completion through Total Variationwith Initialization from Weighted HOSVD

In our paper, we have studied the tensor completion problem when the sampling pattern is deterministic. We first propose a simple but efficient weighted HOSVD algorithm for recovery from noisy observations. Then we use the weighted HOSVD result as an initialization for the total variation. We have proved the accuracy of the weighted HOSVD algorithm from theoretical and numerical perspectives. In the numerical simulation parts, we also showed that by using the proposed initialization, the total variation algorithm can efficiently fill the missing data for images and videos.

math.NA↗

arXiv2020

Randomized Kaczmarz with Averaging

The randomized Kaczmarz (RK) method is an iterative method for approximating the least-squares solution of large linear systems of equations. The standard RK method uses sequential updates, making parallel computation difficult. Here, we study a parallel version of RK where a weighted average of independent updates is used. We analyze the convergence of RK with averaging and demonstrate its performance empirically. We show that as the number of threads increases, the rate of convergence improves and the convergence horizon for inconsistent systems decreases.

math.NA↗

arXiv2020

On block Gaussian sketching for the Kaczmarz method

The Kaczmarz algorithm is one of the most popular methods for solving large-scale over-determined linear systems due to its simplicity and computational efficiency. This method can be viewed as a special instance of a more general class of sketch and project methods. Recently, a block Gaussian version was proposed that uses a block Gaussian sketch, enjoying the regularization properties of Gaussian sketching, combined with the acceleration of the block variants. Theoretical analysis was only provided for the non-block version of the Gaussian sketch method. Here, we provide theoretical guarantees for the block Gaussian Kaczmarz method, proving a number of convergence results showing convergence to the solution exponentially fast in expectation. On the flip side, with this theory and extensive experimental support, we observe that the numerical complexity of each iteration typically makes this method inferior to other iterative projection methods. We highlight only one setting in which it may be advantageous, namely when the regularizing effect is used to reduce variance in the iterates under certain noise models and convergence for some particular matrix constructions.

math.PR↗

arXiv2019

Topic-aware chatbot using Recurrent Neural Networks and Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

We propose a novel model for a topic-aware chatbot by combining the traditional Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) encoder-decoder model with a topic attention layer based on Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF). After learning topic vectors from an auxiliary text corpus via NMF, the decoder is trained so that it is more likely to sample response words from the most correlated topic vectors. One of the main advantages in our architecture is that the user can easily switch the NMF-learned topic vectors so that the chatbot obtains desired topic-awareness. We demonstrate our model by training on a single conversational data set which is then augmented with topic matrices learned from different auxiliary data sets. We show that our topic-aware chatbot not only outperforms the non-topic counterpart, but also that each topic-aware model qualitatively and contextually gives the most relevant answer depending on the topic of question.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Sketching for Motzkin's Iterative Method for Linear Systems

Projection-based iterative methods for solving large over-determined linear systems are well-known for their simplicity and computational efficiency. It is also known that the correct choice of a sketching procedure (i.e., preprocessing steps that reduce the dimension of each iteration) can improve the performance of iterative methods in multiple ways, such as, to speed up the convergence of the method by fighting inner correlations of the system, or to reduce the variance incurred by the presence of noise. In the current work, we show that sketching can also help us to get better theoretical guarantees for the projection-based methods. Specifically, we use good properties of Gaussian sketching to prove an accelerated convergence rate of the sketched relaxation (also known as Motzkin's) method. The new estimates hold for linear systems of arbitrary structure. We also provide numerical experiments in support of our theoretical analysis of the sketched relaxation method.

math.NA↗

arXiv2019

Weighted matrix completion from non-random, non-uniform sampling patterns

We study the matrix completion problem when the observation pattern is deterministic and possibly non-uniform. We propose a simple and efficient debiased projection scheme for recovery from noisy observations and analyze the error under a suitable weighted metric. We introduce a simple function of the weight matrix and the sampling pattern that governs the accuracy of the recovered matrix. We derive theoretical guarantees that upper bound the recovery error and nearly matching lower bounds that showcase optimality in several regimes. Our numerical experiments demonstrate the computational efficiency and accuracy of our approach, and show that debiasing is essential when using non-uniform sampling patterns.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Analysis of Fast Structured Dictionary Learning

Sparsity-based models and techniques have been exploited in many signal processing and imaging applications. Data-driven methods based on dictionary and sparsifying transform learning enable learning rich image features from data, and can outperform analytical models. In particular, alternating optimization algorithms have been popular for learning such models. In this work, we focus on alternating minimization for a specific structured unitary sparsifying operator learning problem, and provide a convergence analysis. While the algorithm converges to the critical points of the problem generally, our analysis establishes under mild assumptions, the local linear convergence of the algorithm to the underlying sparsifying model of the data. Analysis and numerical simulations show that our assumptions hold for standard probabilistic data models. In practice, the algorithm is robust to initialization.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Adaptive Sketch-and-Project Methods for Solving Linear Systems

We present new adaptive sampling rules for the sketch-and-project method for solving linear systems. To deduce our new sampling rules, we first show how the progress of one step of the sketch-and-project method depends directly on a sketched residual. Based on this insight, we derive a 1) max-distance sampling rule, by sampling the sketch with the largest sketched residual 2) a proportional sampling rule, by sampling proportional to the sketched residual, and finally 3) a capped sampling rule. The capped sampling rule is a generalization of the recently introduced adaptive sampling rules for the Kaczmarz method. We provide a global linear convergence theorem for each sampling rule and show that the max-distance rule enjoys the fastest convergence. This finding is also verified in extensive numerical experiments that lead us to conclude that the max-distance sampling rule is superior both experimentally and theoretically to the capped sampling rule. We also provide numerical insights into implementing the adaptive strategies so that the per iteration cost is of the same order as using a fixed sampling strategy when the number of sketches times the sketch size is not significantly larger than the number of columns.

math.NA↗

arXiv2019

Tribracket Modules

Niebrzydowski tribrackets are ternary operations on sets satisfying conditions obtained from the oriented Reidemeister moves such that the set of tribracket colorings of an oriented knot or link diagram is an invariant of oriented knots and links. We introduce tribracket modules analogous to quandle/biquandle/rack modules and use these structures to enhance the tribracket counting invariant. We provide examples to illustrate the computation of the invariant and show that the enhancement is proper.

math.GT↗

arXiv2019

Iterative Hard Thresholding for Low CP-rank Tensor Models

Recovery of low-rank matrices from a small number of linear measurements is now well-known to be possible under various model assumptions on the measurements. Such results demonstrate robustness and are backed with provable theoretical guarantees. However, extensions to tensor recovery have only recently began to be studied and developed, despite an abundance of practical tensor applications. Recently, a tensor variant of the Iterative Hard Thresholding method was proposed and theoretical results were obtained that guarantee exact recovery of tensors with low Tucker rank. In this paper, we utilize the same tensor version of the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) to extend these results for tensors with low CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) rank. In doing so, we leverage recent results on efficient approximations of CP decompositions that remove the need for challenging assumptions in prior works. We complement our theoretical findings with empirical results that showcase the potential of the approach.

math.NA↗