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The optimal selection of experimental conditions is essential to maximizing the value of data for inference and prediction, particularly in situations where experiments are time-consuming and expensive to conduct. We propose a general…

Convexity prior is one of the main cue for human vision and shape completion with important applications in image processing, computer vision. This paper focuses on characterization methods for convex objects and applications in image…

This paper describes a new form of unsupervised learning, whose input is a set of unlabeled points that are assumed to be local maxima of an unknown value function v in an unknown subset of the vector space. Two functions are learned: (i) a…

In contrast to the many continuous global optimization methods that assume the objective function and constraints are factorable, we study how to find globally maximal solutions to problems that are not factorable, focusing on a particular…

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly employed in real-world applications like medicine or economics, thus, potentially affecting large populations. However, ML models often do not perform homogeneously, leading to underperformance or,…

Random feature model with a nonlinear activation function has been shown to perform asymptotically equivalent to a Gaussian model in terms of training and generalization errors. Analysis of the equivalent model reveals an important yet not…

We study ``selective'' or ``conditional'' classification problems under an agnostic setting. Classification tasks commonly focus on modeling the relationship between features and categories that captures the vast majority of data. In…

Classification tasks are usually evaluated in terms of accuracy. However, accuracy is discontinuous and cannot be directly optimized using gradient ascent. Popular methods minimize cross-entropy, hinge loss, or other surrogate losses, which…

We consider model selection and estimation for partial spline models and propose a new regularization method in the context of smoothing splines. The regularization method has a simple yet elegant form, consisting of roughness penalty on…

We introduce computational methods that allow for effective estimation of a flexible, parametric non-stationary spatial model when the field size is too large to compute the multivariate normal likelihood directly. In this method, the field…

Modern classification problems frequently present mild to severe label imbalance as well as specific requirements on classification characteristics, and require optimizing performance measures that are non-decomposable over the dataset,…

We consider robust optimization problems, where the goal is to optimize in the worst case over a class of objective functions. We develop a reduction from robust improper optimization to Bayesian optimization: given an oracle that returns…

In classification problems, sampling bias between training data and testing data is critical to the ranking performance of classification scores. Such bias can be both unintentionally introduced by data collection and intentionally…

The predictive quality of machine learning models is typically measured in terms of their (approximate) expected prediction accuracy or the so-called Area Under the Curve (AUC). Minimizing the reciprocals of these measures are the goals of…

We consider the problem of active coarse ranking, where the goal is to sort items according to their means into clusters of pre-specified sizes, by adaptively sampling from their reward distributions. This setting is useful in many social…

We explore the connection between outlier-robust high-dimensional statistics and non-convex optimization in the presence of sparsity constraints, with a focus on the fundamental tasks of robust sparse mean estimation and robust sparse PCA.…

In this paper we relate the partition function to the max-statistics of random variables. In particular, we provide a novel framework for approximating and bounding the partition function using MAP inference on randomly perturbed models. As…

Sparse representation based classification (SRC) has been proved to be a simple, effective and robust solution to face recognition. As it gets popular, doubts on the necessity of enforcing sparsity starts coming up, and primary experimental…

Binary classification involves predicting the label of an instance based on whether the model score for the positive class exceeds a threshold chosen based on the application requirements (e.g., maximizing recall for a precision bound).…

Positive and unlabelled learning is an important problem which arises naturally in many applications. The significant limitation of almost all existing methods lies in assuming that the propensity score function is constant (SCAR…