In the robust submodular partitioning problem, we aim to allocate a set of items into m blocks, so that the evaluation of the minimum block according to a submodular function is maximized. Robust submodular partitioning promotes the diversity of every block in the partition. It has many applications in machine learning, e.g., partitioning data for distributed training so that the gradients computed on every block are consistent. We study an extension of the robust submodular partition problem with additional constraints (e.g., cardinality, multiple matroids, and/or knapsack) on every block. For example, when partitioning data for distributed training, we can add a constraint that the number of samples of each class is the same in each partition block, ensuring data balance. We present two classes of algorithms, i.e., Min-Block Greedy based algorithms (with an ⌦(1/m) bound), and Round-Robin Greedy based algorithms (with a constant bound) and show that under various constraints, they still have good approximation guarantees. Interestingly, while normally the latter runs in only weakly polynomial time, we show that using the two together yields strongly polynomial running time while preserving the approximation guarantee. Lastly, we apply the algorithms on a real-world machine learning data partitioning problem showing good results.
more »
« less
Recursive Partitioning for Personalization using Observational Data
We study the problem of learning to choose from $$m$$ discrete treatment options (e.g., news item or medical drug) the one with best causal effect for a particular instance (e.g., user or patient) where the training data consists of passive observations of covariates, treatment, and the outcome of the treatment. The standard approach to this problem is regress and compare: split the training data by treatment, fit a regression model in each split, and, for a new instance, predict all $$m$$ outcomes and pick the best. By reformulating the problem as a single learning task rather than $$m$$ separate ones, we propose a new approach based on recursively partitioning the data into regimes where different treatments are optimal. We extend this approach to an optimal partitioning approach that finds a globally optimal partition, achieving a compact, interpretable, and impactful personalization model. We develop new tools for validating and evaluating personalization models on observational data and use these to demonstrate the power of our novel approaches in a personalized medicine and a job training application.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1656996
- PAR ID:
- 10054058
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1789-1798
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)Web personalization, e.g., recommendation or relevance search, tailoring a service/product to accommodate specific online users, is becoming increasingly important. Inductive personalization aims to infer the relations between existing entities and unseen new ones, e.g., searching relevant authors for new papers or recommending new items to users. This problem, however, is challenging since most of recent studies focus on transductive problem for existing entities. In addition, despite some inductive learning approaches have been introduced recently, their performance is sub-optimal due to relatively simple and inflexible architectures for aggregating entity’s content. To this end, we propose the inductive contextual personalization (ICP) framework through contextual relation learning. Specifically, we first formulate the pairwise relations between entities with a ranking optimization scheme that employs neural aggregator to fuse entity’s heterogeneous contents. Next, we introduce a node embedding term to capture entity’s contextual relations, as a smoothness constraint over the prior ranking objective. Finally, the gradient descent procedure with adaptive negative sampling is employed to learn the model parameters. The learned model is capable of inferring the relations between existing entities and inductive ones. Thorough experiments demonstrate that ICP outperforms numerous baseline methods for two different applications, i.e., relevant author search and new item recommendation.more » « less
-
Abstract It is common to split a dataset into training and testing sets before fitting a statistical or machine learning model. However, there is no clear guidance on how much data should be used for training and testing. In this article, we show that the optimal training/testing splitting ratio is , where is the number of parameters in a linear regression model that explains the data well.more » « less
-
This paper proposes a new mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation to optimize split rule selection in the decision tree induction process and develops an efficient search algorithm that is able to solve practical instances of the MIP model faster than commercial solvers. The formulation is novel for it directly maximizes the Gini reduction, an effective split selection criterion that has never been modeled in a mathematical program for its nonconvexity. The proposed approach differs from other optimal classification tree models in that it does not attempt to optimize the whole tree; therefore, the flexibility of the recursive partitioning scheme is retained, and the optimization model is more amenable. The approach is implemented in an open-source R package named bsnsing. Benchmarking experiments on 75 open data sets suggest that bsnsing trees are the most capable of discriminating new cases compared with trees trained by other decision tree codes including the rpart, C50, party, and tree packages in R. Compared with other optimal decision tree packages, including DL8.5, OSDT, GOSDT, and indirectly more, bsnsing stands out in its training speed, ease of use, and broader applicability without losing in prediction accuracy. History: Accepted by RamRamesh, Area Editor for Data Science & Machine Learning. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Division of Civil, MechanicalandManufacturing Innovation [Grant 1944068]. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2022.1225 .more » « less
-
Applying machine learning (ML) in design flow is a popular trend in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) with various applications from design quality predictions to optimizations. Despite its promise, which has been demonstrated in both academic researches and industrial tools, its effectiveness largely hinges on the availability of a large amount of high-quality training data. In reality, EDA developers have very limited access to the latest design data, which is owned by design companies and mostly confidential. Although one can commission ML model training to a design company, the data of a single company might be still inadequate or biased, especially for small companies. Such data availability problem is becoming the limiting constraint on future growth of ML for chip design. In this work, we propose an Federated-Learning based approach for well-studied ML applications in EDA. Our approach allows an ML model to be collaboratively trained with data from multiple clients but without explicit access to the data for respecting their data privacy. To further strengthen the results, we co-design a customized ML model FLNet and its personalization under the decentralized training scenario. Experiments on a comprehensive dataset show that collaborative training improves accuracy by 11% compared with individual local models, and our customized model FLNet significantly outperforms the best of previous routability estimators in this collaborative training flow.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

