More Like this

1. On Distance and Kernel Measures of Conditional Dependence

   Sheng, Tianhong; Sriperumbudur, Bharath K. (January 2023, Journal of machine learning research)

   Measuring conditional dependence is one of the important tasks in statistical inference and is fundamental in causal discovery, feature selection, dimensionality reduction, Bayesian network learning, and others. In this work, we explore the connection between conditional dependence measures induced by distances on a metric space and reproducing kernels associated with a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). For certain distance and kernel pairs, we show the distance-based conditional dependence measures to be equivalent to that of kernel-based measures. On the other hand, we also show that some popular kernel conditional dependence measures based on the Hilbert-Schmidt norm of a certain crossconditional covariance operator, do not have a simple distance representation, except in some limiting cases. 

   more » « less
2. Sparse Learning of Dynamical Systems in RKHS: An Operator-Theoretic Approach

   Hou, Boya; Sanjari, Sina; Dahlin, Nathan; Bose, Subhonmesh; Vaidya, Umesh (July 2023, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   Krause, Andreas; Brunskill, Emma; Cho, Kyunghyun; Engelhardt, Barbara; Sabato, Sivan; Scarlett, Jonathan (Ed.)

   Transfer operators provide a rich framework for representing the dynamics of very general, nonlinear dynamical systems. When interacting with reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS), descriptions of dynamics often incur prohibitive data storage requirements, motivating dataset sparsification as a precursory step to computation. Further, in practice, data is available in the form of trajectories, introducing correlation between samples. In this work, we present a method for sparse learning of transfer operators from $$\beta$$-mixing stochastic processes, in both discrete and continuous time, and provide sample complexity analysis extending existing theoretical guarantees for learning from non-sparse, i.i.d. data. In addressing continuous-time settings, we develop precise descriptions using covariance-type operators for the infinitesimal generator that aids in the sample complexity analysis. We empirically illustrate the efficacy of our sparse embedding approach through deterministic and stochastic nonlinear system examples. 

   more » « less
3. Distributionally Robust Decision Making Leveraging Conditional Distributions

   Chen, Yuxiao; Kim, Jip; Anderson, James (December 2022, Proceedings of the IEEE 61st Conference on Decision and Control (CDC))

   Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a powerful tool for decision making under uncertainty. It is particularly appealing because of its ability to leverage existing data. However, many practical problems call for decision- making with some auxiliary information, and DRO in the context of conditional distributions is not straightforward. We propose a conditional kernel distributionally robust optimiza- tion (CKDRO) method that enables robust decision making under conditional distributions through kernel DRO and the conditional mean operator in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). In particular, we consider problems where there is a correlation between the unknown variable y and an auxiliary observable variable x. Given past data of the two variables and a queried auxiliary variable, CKDRO represents the conditional distribution P(y|x) as the conditional mean operator in the RKHS space and quantifies the ambiguity set in the RKHS as well, which depends on the size of the dataset as well as the query point. To justify the use of RKHS, we demonstrate that the ambiguity set defined in RKHS can be viewed as a ball under a metric that is similar to the Wasserstein metric. The DRO is then dualized and solved via a finite dimensional convex program. The proposed CKDRO approach is applied to a generation scheduling problem and shows that the result of CKDRO is superior to common benchmarks in terms of quality and robustness. 

   more » « less
4. Weighted Minwise Hashing Beats Linear Sketching for Inner Product Estimation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3584372.3588679  

   Bessa, Aline; Daliri, Majid; Freire, Juliana; Musco, Cameron; Musco, Christopher; Santos, Aécio; Zhang, Haoxiang (June 2023, Proceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems)

   We present a new approach for independently computing compact sketches that can be used to approximate the inner product between pairs of high-dimensional vectors. Based on the Weighted MinHash algorithm, our approach admits strong accuracy guarantees that improve on the guarantees of popular linear sketching approaches for inner product estimation, such as CountSketch and Johnson-Lindenstrauss projection. Specifically, while our method exactly matches linear sketching for dense vectors, it yields significantly lower error for sparse vectors with limited overlap between non-zero entries. Such vectors arise in many applications involving sparse data, as well as in increasingly popular dataset search applications, where inner products are used to estimate data covariance, conditional means, and other quantities involving columns in unjoined tables. We complement our theoretical results by showing that our approach empirically outperforms existing linear sketches and unweighted hashing-based sketches for sparse vectors. 

   more » « less
5. Conditional Deep Gaussian Processes: Empirical Bayes Hyperdata Learning

   https://doi.org/10.3390/e23111387  

   Lu, Chi-Ken; Shafto, Patrick (November 2021, Entropy)

   null (Ed.)

   It is desirable to combine the expressive power of deep learning with Gaussian Process (GP) in one expressive Bayesian learning model. Deep kernel learning showed success as a deep network used for feature extraction. Then, a GP was used as the function model. Recently, it was suggested that, albeit training with marginal likelihood, the deterministic nature of a feature extractor might lead to overfitting, and replacement with a Bayesian network seemed to cure it. Here, we propose the conditional deep Gaussian process (DGP) in which the intermediate GPs in hierarchical composition are supported by the hyperdata and the exposed GP remains zero mean. Motivated by the inducing points in sparse GP, the hyperdata also play the role of function supports, but are hyperparameters rather than random variables. It follows our previous moment matching approach to approximate the marginal prior for conditional DGP with a GP carrying an effective kernel. Thus, as in empirical Bayes, the hyperdata are learned by optimizing the approximate marginal likelihood which implicitly depends on the hyperdata via the kernel. We show the equivalence with the deep kernel learning in the limit of dense hyperdata in latent space. However, the conditional DGP and the corresponding approximate inference enjoy the benefit of being more Bayesian than deep kernel learning. Preliminary extrapolation results demonstrate expressive power from the depth of hierarchy by exploiting the exact covariance and hyperdata learning, in comparison with GP kernel composition, DGP variational inference and deep kernel learning. We also address the non-Gaussian aspect of our model as well as way of upgrading to a full Bayes inference. 

   more » « less