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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
European Initiatives
SIERRA
Participants : Francis Bach [correspondent] , Simon Lacoste-Julien, Augustin Lefèvre, Nicolas Le Roux, Mark Schmidt.
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Abstract: Machine learning is now a core part of many research domains, where the abundance of data has forced researchers to rely on automated processing of information. The main current paradigm of application of machine learning techniques consists in two sequential stages: in the representation phase, practitioners first build a large set of features and potential responses for model building or prediction. Then, in the learning phase, off-the-shelf algorithms are used to solve the appropriate data processing tasks. While this has led to significant advances in many domains, the potential of machine learning techniques is far from being reached.
SIPA
Participants : Alexandre d'Aspremont [correspondent] , Fajwel Fogel.
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Abstract: Interior point algorithms and a dramatic growth in computing power have revolutionized optimization in the last two decades. Highly nonlinear problems which were previously thought intractable are now routinely solved at reasonable scales. Semidefinite programs (i.e. linear programs on the cone of positive semidefinite matrices) are a perfect example of this trend: reasonably large, highly nonlinear but convex eigenvalue optimization problems are now solved efficiently by reliable numerical packages. This in turn means that a wide array of new applications for semidefinite programming have been discovered, mimicking the early development of linear programming. To cite only a few examples, semidefinite programs have been used to solve collaborative filtering problems (e.g. make personalized movie recommendations), approximate the solution of combinatorial programs, optimize the mixing rate of Markov chains over networks, infer dependence patterns from multivariate time series or produce optimal kernels in classification problems. These new applications also come with radically different algorithmic requirements. While interior point methods solve relatively small problems with a high precision, most recent applications of semidefinite programming in statistical learning for example form very large-scale problems with comparatively low precision targets, programs for which current algorithms cannot form even a single iteration. This proposal seeks to break this limit on problem size by deriving reliable first-order algorithms for solving large-scale semidefinite programs with a significantly lower cost per iteration, using for example subsampling techniques to considerably reduce the cost of forming gradients. Beyond these algorithmic challenges, the proposed research will focus heavily on applications of convex programming to statistical learning and signal processing theory where optimization and duality results quantify the statistical performance of coding or variable selection algorithms for example. Finally, another central goal of this work will be to produce efficient, customized algorithms for some key problems arising in machine learning and statistics.