A hierarchical loss and its problems when classifying non-hierarchically.

Failing to distinguish between a sheepdog and a skyscraper should be worse and penalized more than failing to distinguish between a sheepdog and a poodle; after all, sheepdogs and poodles are both breeds of dogs. However, existing metrics of failure (so-called "loss" or "win") used in textual or visual classification/recognition via neural networks seldom leverage a-priori information, such as a sheepdog being more similar to a poodle than to a skyscraper. We define a metric that, inter alia, can penalize failure to distinguish between a sheepdog and a skyscraper more than failure to distinguish between a sheepdog and a poodle.

Randomized algorithms for distributed computation of principal component analysis and singular value decomposition.

Randomized algorithms provide solutions to two ubiquitous problems: (1) the distributed calculation of a principal component analysis or singular value decomposition of a highly rectangular matrix, and (2) the distributed calculation of a low-rank approximation (in the form of a singular value decomposition) to an arbitrary matrix. Carefully honed algorithms yield results that are uniformly superior to those of the stock, deterministic implementations in Spark (the popular platform for distributed computation); in particular, whereas the stock software will without warning return left singular vectors that are far from numerically orthonormal, a significantly burnished randomized implementation generates left singular vectors that are numerically orthonormal to nearly the machine precision.

Algorithm 971: An Implementation of a Randomized Algorithm for Principal Component Analysis.

Recent years have witnessed intense development of randomized methods for low-rank approximation. These methods target principal component analysis and the calculation of truncated singular value decompositions. The present article presents an essentially black-box, foolproof implementation for Mathworks' MATLAB, a popular software platform for numerical computation.

A Mathematical Motivation for Complex-Valued Convolutional Networks.

A complex-valued convolutional network (convnet) implements the repeated application of the following composition of three operations, recursively applying the composition to an input vector of nonnegative real numbers: (1) convolution with complex-valued vectors, followed by (2) taking the absolute value of every entry of the resulting vectors, followed by (3) local averaging. For processing real-valued random vectors, complex-valued convnets can be viewed as data-driven multiscale windowed power spectra, data-driven multiscale windowed absolute spectra, data-driven multiwavelet absolute values, or (in their most general configuration) data-driven nonlinear multiwavelet packets. Indeed, complex-valued convnets can calculate multiscale windowed spectra when the convnet filters are windowed complex-valued exponentials.

Statistical tests for whether a given set of independent, identically distributed draws comes from a specified probability density.

We discuss several tests for determining whether a given set of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.

A fast randomized algorithm for overdetermined linear least-squares regression.

We introduce a randomized algorithm for overdetermined linear least-squares regression. Given an arbitrary full-rank m x n matrix A with m >/= n, any m x 1 vector b, and any positive real number epsilon, the procedure computes an n x 1 vector x such that x minimizes the Euclidean norm ||Ax - b || to relative precision epsilon. The algorithm typically requires ((log(n)+log(1/epsilon))mn+n(3)) floating-point operations.

Randomized algorithms for the low-rank approximation of matrices.

We describe two recently proposed randomized algorithms for the construction of low-rank approximations to matrices, and demonstrate their application (inter alia) to the evaluation of the singular value decompositions of numerically low-rank matrices. Being probabilistic, the schemes described here have a finite probability of failure; in most cases, this probability is rather negligible (10(-17) is a typical value). In many situations, the new procedures are considerably more efficient and reliable than the classical (deterministic) ones; they also parallelize naturally.