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Factor analysis, principal component analysis, mixtures of gaussian clusters, vector quantization, Kalman filter models, and hidden Markov models can all be unified as variations of unsupervised learning under a single basic generative model. This is achieved by collecting together disparate observations and derivations made by many previous authors and introducing a new way of linking discrete and continuous state models using a simple nonlinearity. Through the use of other nonlinearities, we show how independent component analysis is also a variation of the same basic generative model. We show that factor analysis and mixtures of gaussians can be implemented in autoencoder neural networks and learned using squared error plus the same regularization term. We introduce a new model for static data, known as sensible principal component analysis, as well as a novel concept of spatially adaptive observation noise. We also review some of the literature involving global and local mixtures of the basic models and provide pseudocode for inference and learning for all the basic models.

Decision trees have proved to be valuable tools for the description, classification and generalization of data. Work on constructing decision trees from data exists in multiple disciplines such as statistics, pattern recognition, decision theory, signal processing, machine learning and artificial neural networks. Researchers in these disciplines, sometimes working on quite different problems, identified similar issues and heuristics for decision tree construction. This paper surveys existing work on decision tree construction, attempting to identify the important issues involved, directions the work has taken and the current state of the art. Keywords: classification, tree-structured classifiers, data compaction 1. Introduction Advances in data collection methods, storage and processing technology are providing a unique challenge and opportunity for automated data exploration techniques. Enormous amounts of data are being collected daily from major scientific projects e.g., Human Genome...

. This paper describes an approach to constructing derivative-free algorithms for unconstrained optimization that are easy to implement on parallel machines. A special feature of this approach is the ease with which algorithms can be generated to take advantage of any number of processors and to adapt to any cost ratio of communication to function evaluation. Numerical tests show speed-ups on two fronts. The cost of synchronization being minimal, the speed-up is almost linear with the addition of more processors, i.e., given a problem and a search strategy, the decrease in execution time is proportional to the number of processors added. Even more encouraging, however, is that different search strategies, devised to take advantage of additional (or more powerful) processors, may actually lead to dramatic improvements in the performance of the basic algorithm. Thus search strategies intended for many processors actually may generate algorithms that are better even when implemented seque...

An articulated figure is often modeled as a set of rigid segments connected with joints. Its configuration can be altered by varying the joint angles. Although it is straightforward to compute figure configurations given joint angles (forward kinematics), it is not so to find the joint angles for a desired configuration (inverse kinematics). Since the inverse kinematics problem is of special importance to an animator wishing to set a figure to a posture satisfying a set of positioning constraints, researchers have proposed many approaches. But when we try to follow these approaches in an interactive animation system where the object to operate on is as highly articulated as a realistic human figure, they fail in either generality or performance, and so a new approach is fostered. Our approach is based on nonlinear programming techniques. It has been used for several years in the spatial constraint system in the Jack TM human figure simulation software developed at the Compute...

Abstract. Direct search methods are best known as unconstrained optimization techniques that do not explicitly use derivatives. Direct search methods were formally proposed and widely applied in the 1960s but fell out of favor with the mathematical optimization community by the early 1970s because they lacked coherent mathematical analysis. Nonetheless, users remained loyal to these methods, most of which were easy to program, some of which were reliable. In the past fifteen years, these methods have seen a revival due, in part, to the appearance of mathematical analysis, as well as to interest in parallel and distributed computing. This review begins by briefly summarizing the history of direct search methods and considering the special properties of problems for which they are well suited. Our focus then turns to a broad class of methods for which we provide a unifying framework that lends itself to a variety of convergence results. The underlying principles allow generalization to handle bound constraints and linear constraints. We also discuss extensions to problems with nonlinear constraints.

this article I will attempt to review the most recent advances in the theory of unconstrained optimization, and will also describe some important open questions. Before doing so, I should point out that the value of the theory of optimization is not limited to its capacity for explaining the behavior of the most widely used techniques. The question

An algorithm for solving large-scale nonlinear ' programs with linear constraints is presented. The method combines efficient sparse-matrix techniques as in the revised simplex method with stable quasi-Newton methods for handling the nonlinearities. A general-purpose production code (MINOS) is described, along with computational experience on a wide variety of problems.

We discuss direct search methods for unconstrained optimization. We give a modern perspective on this classical family of derivative-free algorithms, focusing on the development of direct search methods during their golden age from 1960 to 1971. We discuss how direct search methods are characterized by the absence of the construction of a model of the objective. We then consider a number of the classical direct search methods and discuss what research in the intervening years has uncovered about these algorithms. In particular, while the original direct search methods were consciously based on straightforward heuristics, more recent analysis has shown that in most — but not all — cases these heuristics actually

: UOBYQA is a new algorithm for general unconstrained optimization calculations, that takes account of the curvature of the objective function, F say, by forming quadratic models by interpolation. Therefore, because no first derivatives are required, each model is defined by 1 2 (n+1)(n+2) values of F , where n is the number of variables, and the interpolation points must have the property that no nonzero quadratic polynomial vanishes at all of them. A typical iteration of the algorithm generates a new vector of variables, e x t say, either by minimizing the quadratic model subject to a trust region bound, or by a procedure that should improve the accuracy of the model. Then usually F (e x t ) is obtained, and one of the interpolation points is replaced by e x t . Therefore the paper addresses the initial positions of the interpolation points, the adjustment of trust region radii, the calculation of e x t in the two cases that have been mentioned, and the selection of the point to b...