Area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) is an important metric for a wide range of machine-learning problems, and scalable methods for optimizing AUC have recently been proposed. However, handling very large data sets remains an open challenge for this problem. This article proposes a novel approach to AUC maximization based on sampling mini-batches of positive/negative instance pairs and computing U-statistics to approximate a global risk minimization problem. The resulting algorithm is simple, fast, and learning-rate free. We show that the number of samples required for good performance is independent of the number of pairs available, which is a quadratic function of the positive and negative instances. Extensive experiments show the practical utility of the proposed method.

Machine learning methods are used to discover complex nonlinear relationships in biological and medical data. However, sophisticated learning models are computationally unfeasible for data with millions of features. Here, we introduce the first feature selection method for nonlinear learning problems that can scale up to large, ultra-high dimensional biological data. More specifically, we scale up the novel Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion Lasso (HSIC Lasso) to handle millions of features with tens of thousand samples. The proposed method is guaranteed to find an optimal subset of maximally predictive features with minimal redundancy, yielding higher predictive power and improved interpretability. Its effectiveness is demonstrated through applications to classify phenotypes based on module expression in human prostate cancer patients and to detect enzymes among protein structures. We achieve high accuracy with as few as 20 out of one million features-a dimensionality reduction of 99.998 percent. Our algorithm can be implemented on commodity cloud computing platforms. The dramatic reduction of features may lead to the ubiquitous deployment of sophisticated prediction models in mobile health care applications.

We present a geometric formulation of the Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) problem. To do so, we reinterpret the problem of learning kernel weights as searching for a kernel that maximizes the minimum (kernel) distance between two convex polytopes. This interpretation combined with additional structural insights from our geometric formulation allows us to reduce the MKL problem to a simple optimization routine that yields provable convergence as well as quality guarantees. As a result our method scales efficiently to much larger data sets than most prior methods can handle. Empirical evaluation on eleven datasets shows that we are significantly faster and even compare favorably with an uniform unweighted combination of kernels.

Parallel I/O library performance can vary greatly in response to user-tunable parameter values such as aggregator count, file count, and aggregation strategy. Unfortunately, manual selection of these values is time consuming and dependent on characteristics of the target machine, the underlying file system, and the dataset itself. Some characteristics, such as the amount of memory per core, can also impose hard constraints on the range of viable parameter values. In this work we address these problems by using machine learning techniques to model the performance of the PIDX parallel I/O library and select appropriate tunable parameter values. We characterize both the network and I/O phases of PIDX on a Cray XE6 as well as an IBM Blue Gene/P system. We use the results of this study to develop a machine learning model for parameter space exploration and performance prediction.

This paper presents a co-regularization based approach to semi-supervised domain adaptation. Our proposed approach (EA++) builds on the notion of augmented space (introduced in EASYADAPT (EA) [1]) and harnesses unlabeled data in target domain to further enable the transfer of information from source to target. This semi-supervised approach to domain adaptation is extremely simple to implement and can be applied as a pre-processing step to any supervised learner. Our theoretical analysis (in terms of Rademacher complexity) of EA and EA++ show that the hypothesis class of EA++ has lower complexity (compared to EA) and hence results in tighter generalization bounds. Experimental results on sentiment analysis tasks reinforce our theoretical findings and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method when compared to EA as well as a few other baseline approaches.

When merging data from various sources, it is often the case that small variations in data format and interpretation cause traditional functional dependencies (FDs) to be violated, without there being an intrinsic violation of semantics. Examples include differing address formats, or different reported latitude/longitudes for a given address. In this paper, we define metric functional dependencies, which strictly generalize traditional FDs by allowing small differences (controlled by a metric) in values of the consequent attribute of an FD. We present efficient algorithms for the verification problem: determining whether a given metric FD holds for a given relation. We experimentally demonstrate the validity and efficiency of our approach on various data sets that lie in multidimensional spaces.

We study sequential dependencies that express the semantics of data with ordered domains and help identify quality problems with such data. Given an interval g , we write X → g Y to denote that the difference between the Y -attribute values of any two consecutive records, when sorted on X , must be in g. For example, time → (0,∞) sequence_number indicates that sequence numbers are strictly increasing over time, whereas sequence_number → [4, 5] time means that the time "gaps" between consecutive sequence numbers are between 4 and 5. Sequential dependencies express relationships between ordered attributes, and identify missing (gaps too large), extraneous (gaps too small) and out-of-order data. To make sequential dependencies applicable to real-world data, we relax their requirements and allow them to hold approximately (with some exceptions) and conditionally (on various subsets of the data). This paper proposes the notion of conditional approximate sequential dependencies and provides an efficient framework for discovering pattern tableaux, which are compact representations of the subsets of the data (i.e., ranges of values of the ordered attributes) that satisfy the underlying dependency. We present analyses of our proposed algorithms, and experiments on real data demonstrating the efficiency and utility of our framework.

This paper presents an FPGA based hardware design for full search block matching (FSBM) based motion estimation (ME) in video compression. The significantly higher resolution of HDTV based applications is achieved by using FSBM based ME. The proposed architecture uses a modification of the sum-of-absolute-differences (SAD) computation in FSBM such that the total number of additions/subtraction operations is drastically reduced. This successfully optimizes the conflicting design requirements of high throughput and small silicon area. Comparison results demonstrate the superior performance of our architecture. Finally, the design of a reconfigurable block matching hardware has been discussed.