arXiv subjects

Furong Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Furong Huang.

204 records · Page 12Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

Discovery of Latent Factors in High-dimensional Data Using Tensor Methods

Unsupervised learning aims at the discovery of hidden structure that drives the observations in the real world. It is essential for success in modern machine learning. Latent variable models are versatile in unsupervised learning and have applications in almost every domain. Training latent variable models is challenging due to the non-convexity of the likelihood objective. An alternative method is based on the spectral decomposition of low order moment tensors. This versatile framework is guaranteed to estimate the correct model consistently. My thesis spans both theoretical analysis of tensor decomposition framework and practical implementation of various applications. This thesis presents theoretical results on convergence to globally optimal solution of tensor decomposition using the stochastic gradient descent, despite non-convexity of the objective. This is the first work that gives global convergence guarantees for the stochastic gradient descent on non-convex functions with exponentially many local minima and saddle points. This thesis also presents large-scale deployment of spectral methods carried out on various platforms. Dimensionality reduction techniques such as random projection are incorporated for a highly parallel and scalable tensor decomposition algorithm. We obtain a gain in both accuracies and in running times by several orders of magnitude compared to the state-of-art variational methods. To solve real world problems, more advanced models and learning algorithms are proposed. This thesis discusses generalization of LDA model to mixed membership stochastic block model for learning user communities in social network, convolutional dictionary model for learning word-sequence embeddings, hierarchical tensor decomposition and latent tree structure model for learning disease hierarchy, and spatial point process mixture model for detecting cell types in neuroscience.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

Are you going to the party: depends, who else is coming? [Learning hidden group dynamics via conditional latent tree models]

Scalable probabilistic modeling and prediction in high dimensional multivariate time-series is a challenging problem, particularly for systems with hidden sources of dependence and/or homogeneity. Examples of such problems include dynamic social networks with co-evolving nodes and edges and dynamic student learning in online courses. Here, we address these problems through the discovery of hierarchical latent groups. We introduce a family of Conditional Latent Tree Models (CLTM), in which tree-structured latent variables incorporate the unknown groups. The latent tree itself is conditioned on observed covariates such as seasonality, historical activity, and node attributes. We propose a statistically efficient framework for learning both the hierarchical tree structure and the parameters of the CLTM. We demonstrate competitive performance in multiple real world datasets from different domains. These include a dataset on students' attempts at answering questions in a psychology MOOC, Twitter users participating in an emergency management discussion and interacting with one another, and windsurfers interacting on a beach in Southern California. In addition, our modeling framework provides valuable and interpretable information about the hidden group structures and their effect on the evolution of the time series.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2015

Online Tensor Methods for Learning Latent Variable Models

We introduce an online tensor decomposition based approach for two latent variable modeling problems namely, (1) community detection, in which we learn the latent communities that the social actors in social networks belong to, and (2) topic modeling, in which we infer hidden topics of text articles. We consider decomposition of moment tensors using stochastic gradient descent. We conduct optimization of multilinear operations in SGD and avoid directly forming the tensors, to save computational and storage costs. We present optimized algorithm in two platforms. Our GPU-based implementation exploits the parallelism of SIMD architectures to allow for maximum speed-up by a careful optimization of storage and data transfer, whereas our CPU-based implementation uses efficient sparse matrix computations and is suitable for large sparse datasets. For the community detection problem, we demonstrate accuracy and computational efficiency on Facebook, Yelp and DBLP datasets, and for the topic modeling problem, we also demonstrate good performance on the New York Times dataset. We compare our results to the state-of-the-art algorithms such as the variational method, and report a gain of accuracy and a gain of several orders of magnitude in the execution time.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2015

Convolutional Dictionary Learning through Tensor Factorization

Tensor methods have emerged as a powerful paradigm for consistent learning of many latent variable models such as topic models, independent component analysis and dictionary learning. Model parameters are estimated via CP decomposition of the observed higher order input moments. However, in many domains, additional invariances such as shift invariances exist, enforced via models such as convolutional dictionary learning. In this paper, we develop novel tensor decomposition algorithms for parameter estimation of convolutional models. Our algorithm is based on the popular alternating least squares method, but with efficient projections onto the space of stacked circulant matrices. Our method is embarrassingly parallel and consists of simple operations such as fast Fourier transforms and matrix multiplications. Our algorithm converges to the dictionary much faster and more accurately compared to the alternating minimization over filters and activation maps.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2015

Escaping From Saddle Points --- Online Stochastic Gradient for Tensor Decomposition

We analyze stochastic gradient descent for optimizing non-convex functions. In many cases for non-convex functions the goal is to find a reasonable local minimum, and the main concern is that gradient updates are trapped in saddle points. In this paper we identify strict saddle property for non-convex problem that allows for efficient optimization. Using this property we show that stochastic gradient descent converges to a local minimum in a polynomial number of iterations. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work that gives global convergence guarantees for stochastic gradient descent on non-convex functions with exponentially many local minima and saddle points. Our analysis can be applied to orthogonal tensor decomposition, which is widely used in learning a rich class of latent variable models. We propose a new optimization formulation for the tensor decomposition problem that has strict saddle property. As a result we get the first online algorithm for orthogonal tensor decomposition with global convergence guarantee.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2012

High-dimensional structure estimation in Ising models: Local separation criterion

We consider the problem of high-dimensional Ising (graphical) model selection. We propose a simple algorithm for structure estimation based on the thresholding of the empirical conditional variation distances. We introduce a novel criterion for tractable graph families, where this method is efficient, based on the presence of sparse local separators between node pairs in the underlying graph. For such graphs, the proposed algorithm has a sample complexity of $n=Ω(J_{\min}^{-2}\log p)$, where $p$ is the number of variables, and $J_{\min}$ is the minimum (absolute) edge potential in the model. We also establish nonasymptotic necessary and sufficient conditions for structure estimation.

stat.ML↗