this paper we very briefly review some of these results. RKHS can be chosen tailored to the problem at hand in many ways, and we review a few of them, including radial basis function and smoothing spline ANOVA spaces. Girosi (1997), Smola and Scholkopf (1997), Scholkopf et al (1997) and others have noted the relationship between SVM's and penalty methods as used in the statistical theory of nonparametric regression. In Section 1.2 we elaborate on this, and show how replacing the likelihood functional of the logit (log odds ratio) in penalized likelihood methods for Bernoulli [yes-no] data, with certain other functionals of the logit (to be called SVM functionals) results in several of the SVM's that are of modern research interest. The SVM functionals we consider more closely resemble a "goodness-of-fit" measured by classification error than a "goodness-of-fit" measured by the comparative Kullback-Liebler distance, which is frequently associated with likelihood functionals. This observation is not new or profound, but it is hoped that the discussion here will help to bridge the conceptual gap between classical nonparametric regression via penalized likelihood methods, and SVM's in RKHS. Furthermore, since SVM's can be expected to provide more compact representations of the desired classification boundaries than boundaries based on estimating the logit by penalized likelihood methods, they have potential as a prescreening or model selection tool in sifting through many variables or regions of attribute space to find influential quantities, even when the ultimate goal is not classification, but to understand how the logit varies as the important variables change throughout their range. This is potentially applicable to the variable/model selection problem in demographic m...

We explore the use of the so-called zero-norm of the parameters of linear models in learning.

Abstract—We present a source localization method based on a sparse representation of sensor measurements with an overcomplete basis composed of samples from the array manifold. We enforce sparsity by imposing penalties based on the 1-norm. A number of recent theoretical results on sparsifying properties of 1 penalties justify this choice. Explicitly enforcing the sparsity of the representation is motivated by a desire to obtain a sharp estimate of the spatial spectrum that exhibits super-resolution. We propose to use the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the data matrix to summarize multiple time or frequency samples. Our formulation leads to an optimization problem, which we solve efficiently in a second-order cone (SOC) programming framework by an interior point implementation. We propose a grid refinement method to mitigate the effects of limiting estimates to a grid of spatial locations and introduce an automatic selection criterion for the regularization parameter involved in our approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method on simulated data by plots of spatial spectra and by comparing the estimator variance to the Cramér–Rao bound (CRB). We observe that our approach has a number of advantages over other source localization techniques, including increased resolution, improved robustness to noise, limitations in data quantity, and correlation of the sources, as well as not requiring an accurate initialization. Index Terms—Direction-of-arrival estimation, overcomplete representation, sensor array processing, source localization, sparse representation, superresolution. I.

Abstract — A methodology is developed to derive algorithms for optimal basis selection by minimizing diversity measures proposed by Wickerhauser and Donoho. These measures include the p-norm-like (`(p 1)) diversity measures and the Gaussian and Shannon entropies. The algorithm development methodology uses a factored representation for the gradient and involves successive relaxation of the Lagrangian necessary condition. This yields algorithms that are intimately related to the Affine Scaling Transformation (AST) based methods commonly employed by the interior point approach to nonlinear optimization. The algorithms minimizing the `(p 1) diversity measures are equivalent to a recently developed class of algorithms called FOCal Underdetermined System Solver (FOCUSS). The general nature of the methodology provides a systematic approach for deriving this class of algorithms and a natural mechanism for extending them. It also facilitates a better understanding of the convergence behavior and a strengthening of the convergence results. The Gaussian entropy minimization algorithm is shown to be equivalent to a well-behaved p =0norm-like optimization algorithm. Computer experiments demonstrate that the p-norm-like and the Gaussian entropy algorithms perform well, converging to sparse solutions. The Shannon entropy algorithm produces solutions that are concentrated but are shown to not converge to a fully sparse solution. I.

Feature subset selection is an important problem in knowl- edge discovery, not only for the insight gained from deter- mining relevant modeling variables but also for the improved understandability, scalability, and possibly, accuracy of the resulting models. In this paper we consider the problem of feature selection for unsupervised learning. A number of heuristic criteria can be used to estimate the quality of clusters built from a given featuresubset. Rather than combining such criteria, we use ELSA, an evolutionary lo- cal selection algorithm that maintains a diverse population of solutions that approximate the Pareto front in a multi- dimensional objectiv espace. Each evolved solution repre- sents a feature subset and a number of clusters; a standard K-means algorithm is applied to form the given n umber of clusters based on the selected features. Preliminary results on both real and synthetic data show promise in finding Pareto-optimal solutions through which we can identify the significant features and the correct number of clusters.

Usually, objects to be classified are represented by features. In this paper, we discuss an alternative object representation based on dissimilarity values. If such distances separate the classes well, the nearest neighbor method offers a good solution. However, dissimilarities used in practice are usually far from ideal and the performance of the nearest neighbor rule suffers from its sensitivity to noisy examples. We show that other, more global classification techniques are preferable to the nearest neighbor rule, in such cases. For classification purposes, two different ways of using generalized dissimilarity kernels are considered. In the first one, distances are isometrically embedded in a pseudo-Euclidean space and the classification task is performed there. In the second approach, classifiers are built directly on distance kernels. Both approaches are described theoretically and then compared using experiments with different dissimilarity measures and datasets including degraded data simulating the problem of missing values.

This paper is intended to serve as an overview of a rapidly emerging research and applications area. In addition to providing a general overview, motivating the importance of data mining problems within the area of knowledge discovery in databases, our aim is to list some of the pressing research challenges, and outline opportunities for contributions by the optimization research communities. Towards these goals, we include formulations of the basic categories of data mining methods as optimization problems. We also provide examples of successful mathematical programming approaches to some data mining problems. keywords: data analysis, data mining, mathematical programming methods, challenges for massive data sets, classification, clustering, prediction, optimization. To appear: INFORMS: Journal of Compting, special issue on Data Mining, A. Basu and B. Golden (guest editors). Also appears as Mathematical Programming Technical Report 98-01, Computer Sciences Department, University of Wi...

We provide a new linear program to deal with classification of data in the case of functions written in terms of pairwise proximities. This allows to avoid the problems inherent in using feature spaces with indefinite metric in Support Vector Machines, since the notion of a margin is purely needed in input space where the classification actually occurs. Moreover in our approach we can enforce sparsity in the proximity representation by sacrificing training error. This turns out to be favorable for proximity data. Similar to --SV methods, the only parameter needed in the algorithm is the (asymptotical) number of data points being classified with a margin. Finally, the algorithm is successfully compared with --SV learning in proximity space and K--nearest-neighbors on real world data from Neuroscience and molecular biology. 1 Introduction Support Vector (SV) learning has proven to be an effective algorithm for data classification. However, it is inherently connected to using quadratic ...

Mathematical programming approaches to three fundamental problems will be described: feature selection, clustering and robust representation. The feature selection problem considered is that of discriminating between two sets while recognizing irrelevant and redundant features and suppressing them. This creates a lean model that often generalizes better to new unseen data. Computational results on real data confirm improved generalization of leaner models. Clustering is exemplified by the unsupervised learning of patterns and clusters that may exist in a given database and is a useful tool for knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). A mathematical programming formulation of this problem is proposed that is theoretically justifiable and computationally implementable in a finite number of steps. A resulting k-Median Algorithm is utilized to discover very useful survival curves for breast cancer patients from a medical database. Robust representation is concerned with minimizing trained m...

Two fundamental problems of machine learning, misclassification minimization [10, 24, 18] and feature selection, [25, 29, 14] are formulated as the minimization of a concave function on a polyhedral set. Other formulations of these problems utilize linear programs with equilibrium constraints [18, 1, 4, 3] which are generally intractable. In contrast, for the proposed concave minimization formulation, a successive linearization algorithm without stepsize terminates after a maximum average of 7 linear programs on problems with as many as 4192 points in 14dimensional space. The algorithm terminates at a stationary point or a global solution to the problem. Preliminary numerical results indicate that the proposed approach is quite effective and more efficient than other approaches. 1 Introduction We shall consider the following two fundamental problems of machine learning: Problem 1.1 Misclassification Minimization [24, 18] Given two finite point sets A and B in the n-dimensional real s...