In this paper we argue that the choice of the SVM cost parameter can be critical. We then derive an algorithm that can fit the entire path of SVM solutions for every value of the cost parameter, with essentially the same computational cost as fitting one SVM model.

This paper presents a new learning algorithm based on decision tree ensembles. In opposition to the classical decision tree induction method, the trees of the ensemble are built by selecting the tests during their induction fully at random. This extreme

We present an algorithm for learning a quadratic Gaussian metric (Mahalanobis distance) for use in classification tasks. Our method relies on the simple geometric intuition that a good metric is one under which points in the same class are simultaneously near each other and far from points in the other classes. We construct a convex optimization problem whose solution generates such a metric by trying to collapse all examples in the same class to a single point and push examples in other classes infinitely far away. We show that when the metric we learn is used in simple classifiers, it yields substantial improvements over standard alternatives on a variety of problems. We also discuss how the learned metric may be used to obtain a compact low dimensional feature representation of the original input space, allowing more efficient classification with very little reduction in performance.

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We consider the generic regularized optimization problem ˆ β(λ) = arg minβ L(y, Xβ) + λJ(β). Recently, Efron et al. (2004) have shown that for the Lasso – that is, if L is squared error loss and J(β) = ‖β‖1 is the l1 norm of β – the optimal coefficient path is piecewise linear, i.e., ∂ ˆ β(λ)/∂λ is piecewise constant. We derive a general characterization of the properties of (loss L, penalty J) pairs which give piecewise linear coefficient paths. Such pairs allow for efficient generation of the full regularized coefficient paths. We investigate the nature of efficient path following algorithms which arise. We use our results to suggest robust versions of the Lasso for regression and classification, and to develop new, efficient algorithms for existing problems in the literature, including Mammen & van de Geer’s Locally Adaptive Regression Splines. 1

The paper is concerned with applying learning to rank to document retrieval. Ranking SVM is a typical method of learning to rank. We point out that there are two factors one must consider when applying Ranking SVM, in general a “learning to rank” method, to document retrieval. First, correctly ranking documents on the top of the result list is crucial for an Information Retrieval system. One must conduct training in a way that such ranked results are accurate. Second, the number of relevant documents can vary from query to query. One must avoid training a model biased toward queries with a large number of relevant documents. Previously, when existing methods that include Ranking SVM were applied to document retrieval, none of the two factors was taken into consideration. We show it is possible to make modifications in conventional Ranking SVM, so it can be better used for document retrieval. Specifically, we modify the “Hinge Loss ” function in Ranking SVM to deal with the problems described above. We employ two methods to conduct optimization on the loss function: gradient descent and quadratic programming. Experimental results show that our method, referred to as Ranking SVM for IR, can outperform the conventional Ranking SVM and other existing methods for document retrieval on two datasets.

occurrence data

Recently, several studies have analyzed the statistical properties of low power wireless links in real environments, clearly demonstrating the differences between experimentally observed communication properties and widely used simulation models. However, most of these studies have not performed in depth analysis of the temporal properties of wireless links. These properties have high impact on the performance of routing algorithms. Our first goal is to study the statistical temporal properties of links in low power wireless communications. We study short term temporal issues, like lagged autocorrelation of individual links, lagged correlation of reverse links, and consecutive same path links. We also study long term temporal aspects, gaining insight on the length of time the channel needs to be measured and how often we should update our models. Our second objective is to explore how statistical temporal properties impact routing protocols. We studied one-to-one routing schemes and developed new routing algorithms that consider autocorrelation, and reverse link and consecutive same path link lagged correlations. We have developed two new routing algorithms for the cost link model: (i) a generalized Dijkstra algorithm with centralized execution, and (ii)a localized distributed probabilistic algorithm. 1

We investigate practical selection of meta-parameters for SVM regression (that is, ε-insensitive zone and regularization parameter C). The proposed methodology advocates analytic parameter selection directly from the training data, rather than resampling approaches commonly used in SVM applications. Good generalization performance of the proposed parameter selection is demonstrated empirically using several low-dimensional and high-dimensional regression problems. Further, we point out the importance of Vapnik’s ε-insensitive loss for regression problems with finite samples. To this end, we compare generalization performance of SVM regression (with optimally chosen ε) with regression using ‘least-modulus ’ loss (ε =0). These comparisons indicate superior generalization performance of SVM regression, for finite sample settings.

This paper aims to conduct a study on the listwise approach to learning to rank. The listwise approach learns a ranking function by taking individual lists as instances and minimizing a loss function defined on the predicted list and the ground-truth list. Existing work on the approach mainly focused on the development of new algorithms; methods such as RankCosine and ListNet have been proposed and good performances by them have been observed. Unfortunately, the underlying theory was not sufficiently studied so far. To amend the problem, this paper proposes conducting theoretical analysis of learning to rank algorithms through investigations on the properties of the loss functions, including consistency, soundness, continuity, differentiability, convexity, and efficiency. A sufficient condition on consistency for ranking is given, which seems to be the first such result obtained in related research. The paper then conducts analysis on three loss functions: likelihood loss, cosine loss, and cross entropy loss. The latter two were used in RankCosine and ListNet. The use of the likelihood loss leads to the development of