Tractable Approaches to Learning and Planning in High Dimensions

The continuous increase, witnessed in the last decade, of both the amount of available data and the areas of application of machine learning, has lead to a demand for both learning and planning algorithms that are capable of handling large-scale problems. Thus scalability has become an important characteristic of modern machine learning algorithms. In this thesis we concentrate on tractable approaches to both learning and planning, capable of solving problems in high-dimensional spaces. We investigate multiple forms of high-dimensionality, where dimensionality can refer to the number of samples to be processed, the number of samples available for training, the dimensionality of the feature space, or even the dimensionality of the state-space. We present work on classifier cascades, developing a novel framework for interpreting, training, and employing such structures of classifiers. A Boosting algorithm developed in this framework highlights its ability to jointly train the classifiers at the cascade nodes. The work presented on goal-planning also results in a novel framework, this time for automatic macro-action discovery in imitation learning, specifically addressing problems with large state-spaces as well as with observation signals of high-dimensionality. The proposed DPBoost algorithm is capable of solving very complex goal-planning tasks where previous state-of-the-art fails. Addressing computer hardware limitations, and in particular memory limitations, we propose a new learning framework, which we call reservoir learning, which attempts to directly account for this limited memory during the training process. In particular we propose to consider learning in the presence of a reservoir in which the learner may store samples. Based on Boosting we develop a novel strategy for populating this reservoir which avoids redundancy by taking into account the joint behavior of samples. Finally high-dimensionality is also addressed in its most typical setting, that is when the feature space is large. We propose novel feature selection algorithms in the context of classification. Based on information theoretic tools, these algorithms attempt to maximize the joint mutual information between the selected, continuous, variables and the, discrete, class label variable.

Mixture models for unsupervised and supervised learning

In a society which produces and consumes an ever increasing amount of information, methods which can make sense out of al1 this data become of crucial importance. Machine learning tries to develop models which can make the information load accessible. Three important questions one can ask when constructing such models are: What is the structure of the data? This is especially relevant for high-dimensional data which cannot be visualized anymore. Which features are most characteristic? How to predict whether a pattern belongs to one class or to another? This thesis investigates these three questions by trying to construct complex models from simple ones. The decomposition into simpler parts can also be found in the methods used for estimating the parameter values of these models. The algorithms for the simple models constitute the core of the algorithms for the complex ones. The above questions are addressed in three stages: Unsupervised learning This part deals with the problem of probability density estimation with the goal of finding a good probabilistic representation of the data. One of the most popular density estimation methods is the Gaussian mixture model (GMM). A promising alternative to GMMs are the recently proposed mixtures of latent variable models. Examples of the latter are principal component analysis (PCA) and factor analysis. The advantage of these models is that they are capable of representing the covariance structure with less parameters by choosing the dimension of a subspace in a suitable way. An empirical evaluation on a large number of data sets shows that mixtures of latent variable models almost always outperform GMMs. To avoid having to choose a value for the dimension of the subspace by a computationally expensive search technique such as cross-validation, a Bayesian treatment of mixtures of latent variable models is proposed. This framework makes it possible to determine the appropriate dimension during training and experiments illustrate its viability. Feature extraction PCA is also (and foremost) a classic method for feature extraction. However, PCA is limited to linear feature extraction by a projection onto a subspace. Kernel PCA is a recent method which allows non-linear feature extraction. Applying kernel PCA to a data set with N patterns requires finding the eigenvectors of an N×N matrix. An Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for PCA which does not need to store this matrix is adapted to kernel PCA and applied to large data sets with more than 10,000 examples. The experiments confirm that this approach is feasible and that the extracted features lead to good performance when used as pre-processed data for a linear classifier. A new on-line variant of the EM algorithm for PCA is presented and shown to speed up the learning process. Supervised learning This part illustrates two ways of constructing complex models from simple ones for classification problems. The first approach is inspired by unsupervised mixture models and extends them to supervised learning. The resulting model, called a mixture of experts, tries to decompose a complex problem into subproblems treated by several simpler models. The division of the data space is effectuated by an input-dependent gating network. After a review of the model and existing training methods, different possible gating networks are proposed and compared. Unsupervised mixture models are one of the evaluated options. The experiments show that a standard mixture of experts with a neural network gate gives the best results. The second approach is a constructive algorithm called boosting which creates a committee of simple models by emphasizing patterns which have been frequently misclassified by the preceding classifiers. A new model has been developed which lies between a mixture of experts and a boosted committee. It adds an input-dependent combiner (like a gating network) to standard boosting. This has the advantage that with a considerably smaller committee results are obtained which are comparable to those of boosting. Finally, some of the investigated models have been evaluated on two problems of machine vision. The results confirm the potential of mixtures of latent variable models which lead to good performance when incorporated in a Bayes classifier.

EPFL2000

Mixture Models for Unsupervised and Supervised Learning

In a society which produces and consumes an ever increasing amount of information, methods which can make sense out of all this data become of crucial importance. Machine learning tries to develop models which can make the information load accessible. Three important questions one can ask when constructing such models are: - What is the structure of the data? This is especially relevant for high-dimensional data which cannot be visualized anymore. - Which features are most characteristic? -How to predict whether a pattern belongs to one class or to another? This thesis investigates these three questions by trying to construct complex models from simple ones. The decomposition into simpler parts can also be found in the methods used for estimating the parameter values of these models. The algorithms for the simple models constitute the core of the algorithms for the complex ones. The above questions are addressed in three stages: Unsupervised learning: This part deals with the problem of probability density estimation with the goal of finding a good probabilistic representation of the data. One of the most popular density estimation methods is the Gaussian mixture model (GMM). A promising alternative to GMMs are the recently proposed mixtures of latent variable models. Examples of the latter are principal component analysis (PCA) and factor analysis. The advantage of these models is that they are capable of representing the covariance structure with less parameters by choosing the dimension of a subspace in a suitable way. An empirical evaluation on a large number of data sets shows that mixtures of latent variable models almost always outperform GMMs. To avoid having to choose a value for the dimension of the subspace by a computationally expensive search technique such as cross-validation, a Bayesian treatment of mixtures of latent variable models is proposed. This framework makes it possible to determine the appropriate dimension during training and experiments illustrate its viability. Feature extraction: PCA is also (and foremost) a classic method for feature extraction. However, PCA is limited to linear feature extraction by a projection onto a subspace. Kernel PCA is a recent method which allows non-linear feature extraction. Applying kernel PCA to a data set with N patterns requires finding the eigenvectors of an N*N matrix. An Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for PCA which does not need to store this matrix is adapted to kernel PCA and applied to large data sets with more than 10,000 examples. The experiments confirm that this approach is feasible and that the extracted features lead to good performance when used as pre-processed data for a linear classifier. A new on-line variant of the EM algorithm for PCA is presented and shown to speed up the learning process. Supervised learning: This part illustrates two ways of constructing complex models from simple ones for classification problems. The first approach is inspired by unsupervised mixture models and extends them to supervised learning. The resulting model, called a mixture of experts, tries to decompose a complex problem into subproblems treated by several simpler models. The division of the data space is effectuated by an input-dependent gating network. After a review of the model and existing training methods, different possible gating networks are proposed and compared. Unsupervised mixture models are one of the evaluated options. The experiments show that a standard mixture of experts with a neural network gate gives the best results. The second approach is a constructive algorithm called boosting which creates a committee of simple models by emphasizing patterns which have been frequently misclassified by the preceding classifiers. A new model has been developed which lies between a mixture of experts and a boosted committee. It adds an input-dependent combiner (like a gating network) to standard boosting. This has the advantage that with a considerably smaller committee results are obtained which are comparable to those of boosting. Finally, some of the investigated models have been evaluated on two problems of machine vision. The results confirm the potential of mixtures of latent variable models which lead to good performance when incorporated in a Bayes classifier.

IDIAP2000

Mixture Models for Unsupervised and Supervised Learning

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Computer Science Department2000

Mixture Models for Unsupervised and Supervised Learning

IDIAP2000

Mixture models for unsupervised and supervised learning

EPFL2000

Mixture Models for Unsupervised and Supervised Learning

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Computer Science Department2000