We connect high-dimensional subset selection and submodular maximization. Our results extend the work of Das and Kempe (2011) from the setting of linear regression to arbitrary objective functions. For greedy feature selection, this connection allows us to obtain strong multiplicative performance bounds on several methods without statistical modeling assumptions. We also derive recovery guarantees of this form under standard assumptions. Our work shows that greedy algorithms perform within a constant factor from the best possible subset-selection solution for a broad class of general objective functions. Our methods allow a direct control over the number of obtained features as opposed to regularization parameters that only implicitly control sparsity. Our proof technique uses the concept of weak submodularity initially defined by Das and Kempe. We draw a connection between convex analysis and submodular set function theory which may be of independent interest for other statistical learning applications that have combinatorial structure.

Abstract. We investigate social networks of characters found in cultural works such as novels and films. These character networks exhibit many of the properties of complex networks such as skewed degree distribution and community structure, but may be of relatively small order with a high multiplicity of edges. Building on recent work of Beveridge and Shan [4], we consider graph extraction, visualization, and network statistics for three novels: Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, Steven King's The Stand, and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Coupling with 800 character networks from films found in the http://moviegalaxies.com/ database, we compare the data sets to simulations from various stochastic complex networks models including random graphs with given expected degrees (also known as the Chung-Lu model), the configuration model, and the preferential attachment model. Using machine learning techniques based on motif (or small subgraph) counts, we determine that the Chung-Lu model best fits character networks and we conjecture why this may be the case.

We present a novel distributed algorithm for counting all four-node induced subgraphs in a big graph. These counts, called the 4-profile, describe a graph's connectivity properties and have found several uses ranging from bioinformatics to spam detection. We also study the more complicated problem of estimating the local 4-profiles centered at each vertex of the graph. The local 4-profile embeds every vertex in an 11-dimensional space that characterizes the local geometry of its neighborhood: vertices that connect different clusters will have different local 4-profiles compared to those that are only part of one dense cluster.Our algorithm is a local, distributed message-passing scheme on the graph and computes all the local 4-profiles in parallel. We rely on two novel theoretical contributions: we show that local 4-profiles can be calculated using compressed two-hop information and also establish novel concentration results that show that graphs can be substantially sparsified and still retain good approximation quality for the global 4-profile.We empirically evaluate our algorithm using a distributed GraphLab implementation that we scaled up to 640 cores. We show that our algorithm can compute global and local 4-profiles of graphs with millions of edges in a few minutes, significantly improving upon the previous state of the art.

Not all data in a typical training set help with generalization; some samples can be overly ambiguous or outrightly mislabeled. This paper introduces a new method to identify such samples and mitigate their impact when training neural networks. At the heart of our algorithm is the Area Under the Margin (AUM) statistic, which exploits differences in the training dynamics of clean and mislabeled samples. A simple procedure-adding an extra class populated with purposefully mislabeled indicator samples-learns a threshold that isolates mislabeled data based on this metric. This approach consistently improves upon prior work on synthetic and real-world datasets. On the Web-Vision50 classification task our method removes 17% of training data, yielding a 2.6% (absolute) improvement in test error. On CIFAR100 removing 13% of the data leads to a 1.2% drop in error.

No abstract

No abstract

Traditional text classifiers are limited to predicting over a fixed set of labels. However, in many real-world applications the label set is frequently changing. For example, in intent classification, new intents may be added over time while others are removed.We propose to address the problem of dynamic text classification by replacing the traditional, fixed-size output layer with a learned, semantically meaningful metric space. Here the distances between textual inputs are optimized to perform nearest-neighbor classification across overlapping label sets. Changing the label set does not involve removing parameters, but rather simply adding or removing support points in the metric space. Then the learned metric can be fine-tuned with only a few additional training examples.We demonstrate that this simple strategy is robust to changes in the label space. Furthermore, our results show that learning a non-Euclidean metric can improve performance in the low data regime, suggesting that further work on metric spaces may benefit lowresource research. 1

No abstract