arXiv subjects

Xin Bing

Publications and source records attributed to Xin Bing.

22 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Optimal estimation of sparse topic models

Topic models have become popular tools for dimension reduction and exploratory analysis of text data which consists in observed frequencies of a vocabulary of $p$ words in $n$ documents, stored in a $p\times n$ matrix. The main premise is that the mean of this data matrix can be factorized into a product of two non-negative matrices: a $p\times K$ word-topic matrix $A$ and a $K\times n$ topic-document matrix $W$. This paper studies the estimation of $A$ that is possibly element-wise sparse, and the number of topics $K$ is unknown. In this under-explored context, we derive a new minimax lower bound for the estimation of such $A$ and propose a new computationally efficient algorithm for its recovery. We derive a finite sample upper bound for our estimator, and show that it matches the minimax lower bound in many scenarios. Our estimate adapts to the unknown sparsity of $A$ and our analysis is valid for any finite $n$, $p$, $K$ and document lengths. Empirical results on both synthetic data and semi-synthetic data show that our proposed estimator is a strong competitor of the existing state-of-the-art algorithms for both non-sparse $A$ and sparse $A$, and has superior performance is many scenarios of interest.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

A fast algorithm with minimax optimal guarantees for topic models with an unknown number of topics

We propose a new method of estimation in topic models, that is not a variation on the existing simplex finding algorithms, and that estimates the number of topics K from the observed data. We derive new finite sample minimax lower bounds for the estimation of A, as well as new upper bounds for our proposed estimator. We describe the scenarios where our estimator is minimax adaptive. Our finite sample analysis is valid for any number of documents (n), individual document length (N_i), dictionary size (p) and number of topics (K), and both p and K are allowed to increase with n, a situation not handled well by previous analyses. We complement our theoretical results with a detailed simulation study. We illustrate that the new algorithm is faster and more accurate than the current ones, although we start out with a computational and theoretical disadvantage of not knowing the correct number of topics K, while we provide the competing methods with the correct value in our simulations.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

Adaptive Estimation in Structured Factor Models with Applications to Overlapping Clustering

This work introduces a novel estimation method, called LOVE, of the entries and structure of a loading matrix A in a sparse latent factor model X = AZ + E, for an observable random vector X in Rp, with correlated unobservable factors Z \in RK, with K unknown, and independent noise E. Each row of A is scaled and sparse. In order to identify the loading matrix A, we require the existence of pure variables, which are components of X that are associated, via A, with one and only one latent factor. Despite the fact that the number of factors K, the number of the pure variables, and their location are all unknown, we only require a mild condition on the covariance matrix of Z, and a minimum of only two pure variables per latent factor to show that A is uniquely defined, up to signed permutations. Our proofs for model identifiability are constructive, and lead to our novel estimation method of the number of factors and of the set of pure variables, from a sample of size n of observations on X. This is the first step of our LOVE algorithm, which is optimization-free, and has low computational complexity of order p2. The second step of LOVE is an easily implementable linear program that estimates A. We prove that the resulting estimator is minimax rate optimal up to logarithmic factors in p. The model structure is motivated by the problem of overlapping variable clustering, ubiquitous in data science. We define the population level clusters as groups of those components of X that are associated, via the sparse matrix A, with the same unobservable latent factor, and multi-factor association is allowed. Clusters are respectively anchored by the pure variables, and form overlapping sub-groups of the p-dimensional random vector X. The Latent model approach to OVErlapping clustering is reflected in the name of our algorithm, LOVE.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2018

Adaptive estimation of the rank of the coefficient matrix in high dimensional multivariate response regression models

We consider the multivariate response regression problem with a regression coefficient matrix of low, unknown rank. In this setting, we analyze a new criterion for selecting the optimal reduced rank. This criterion differs notably from the one proposed in Bunea, She and Wegkamp [7] in that it does not require estimation of the unknown variance of the noise, nor depends on a delicate choice of a tuning parameter. We develop an iterative, fully data-driven procedure, that adapts to the optimal signal to noise ratio. This procedure finds the true rank in a few steps with overwhelming probability. At each step, our estimate increases, while at the same time it does not exceed the true rank. Our finite sample results hold for any sample size and any dimension, even when the number of responses and of covariates grow much faster than the number of observations. We perform an extensive simulation study that confirms our theoretical findings. The new method performs better and more stable than that in [7] in both low- and high-dimensional settings.

stat.ME↗