Related papers: Best-item Learning in Random Utility Models with S…

Association rules mining (ARM) is one of the most important problems in knowledge discovery and data mining. Given a transaction database that has a large number of transactions and items, the task of ARM is to acquire consumption habits of…

We revisit the framework of Smart PAC learning, which seeks supervised learners which compete with semi-supervised learners that are provided full knowledge of the marginal distribution on unlabeled data. Prior work has shown that such…

Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves are plots of true positive rate versus false positive rate which are useful for evaluating binary classification models, but difficult to use for learning since the Area Under the Curve (AUC)…

In this thesis, we research learning algorithms for optimal decision making in two different contexts, Reinforcement Learning in Part I and Auction Design in Part II. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning that is…

We consider learning problems of an intuitive and concise preference model, called lexicographic preference lists (LP-lists). Given a set of examples that are pairwise ordinal preferences over a universe of objects built of attributes of…

One of the main current challenges in itemset mining is to discover a small set of high-quality itemsets. In this paper we propose a new and general approach for measuring the quality of itemsets. The method is solidly founded in Bayesian…

A basic question in the PAC model of learning is whether proper learning is harder than improper learning. In the classical case, there are examples of concept classes with VC dimension $d$ that have sample complexity $\Omega\left(\frac…

We consider an assignment problem that has aspects of fair division as well as social choice. In particular, we investigate the problem of assigning a small subset from a set of indivisible items to multiple players so that the chosen…

In this paper we analyze a budgeted learning setting, in which the learner can only choose and observe a small subset of the attributes of each training example. We develop efficient algorithms for ridge and lasso linear regression, which…

The empirical risk minimization (ERM) principle has been highly impactful in machine learning, leading both to near-optimal theoretical guarantees for ERM-based learning algorithms as well as driving many of the recent empirical successes…

This paper investigates simultaneous preference and metric learning from a crowd of respondents. A set of items represented by $d$-dimensional feature vectors and paired comparisons of the form ``item $i$ is preferable to item $j$'' made by…

This work studies algorithms for learning from aggregate responses. We focus on the construction of aggregation sets (called bags in the literature) for event-level loss functions. We prove for linear regression and generalized linear…

The question of aggregating pair-wise comparisons to obtain a global ranking over a collection of objects has been of interest for a very long time: be it ranking of online gamers (e.g. MSR's TrueSkill system) and chess players, aggregating…

Neural networks are not learning optimal decision boundaries. We show that decision boundaries are situated in areas of low training data density. They are impacted by few training samples which can easily lead to overfitting. We provide a…

We study the problem of selecting $K$ arms with the highest expected rewards in a stochastic $n$-armed bandit game. This problem has a wide range of applications, e.g., A/B testing, crowdsourcing, simulation optimization. Our goal is to…

We study the problem of crowdsourced PAC learning of threshold functions. This is a challenging problem and only recently have query-efficient algorithms been established under the assumption that a noticeable fraction of the workers are…

Knapsack and Subset Sum are fundamental NP-hard problems in combinatorial optimization. Recently there has been a growing interest in understanding the best possible pseudopolynomial running times for these problems with respect to various…

We study the problem of learning an unknown mixture of $k$ rankings over $n$ elements, given access to noisy samples drawn from the unknown mixture. We consider a range of different noise models, including natural variants of the "heat…

This paper advocates a new paradigm Personalized Empirical Risk Minimization (PERM) to facilitate learning from heterogeneous data sources without imposing stringent constraints on computational resources shared by participating devices. In…

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…