Chia-Hua Ho

Recent Advances of Large-Scale Linear Classification

Linear classification is a useful tool in machine learning and data mining. For some data in a rich dimensional space, the performance (i.e., testing accuracy) of linear classifiers has shown to be close to that of nonlinear classifiers such as kernel methods, but training and testing speed is much faster. Recently, many research works have developed efficient optimization methods to construct linear classifiers and applied them to some large-scale applications. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey on the recent development of this active research area.

An improved GLMNET for l1-regularized logistic regression

GLMNET proposed by Friedman et al. is an algorithm for generalized linear models with elastic net. It has been widely applied to solve L1-regularized logistic regression. However, recent experiments indicated that the existing GLMNET implementation may not be stable for large-scale problems. In this paper, we propose an improved GLMNET to address some theoretical and implementation issues. In particular, as a Newton-type method, GLMNET achieves fast local convergence, but may fail to quickly obtain a useful solution. By a careful design to adjust the effort for each iteration, our method is efficient regardless of loosely or strictly solving the optimization problem. Experiments demonstrate that the improved GLMNET is more efficient than a state-of-the-art coordinate descent method.

Active learning strategies using SVMs

In this paper, we decompose the problem of active learning into two parts, learning with few examples and learning by querying labels of samples. The first part is achieved mainly by SVM classifiers. We also consider variants based on transductive learning. In the second part, based on SVM decision values, we propose a framework to flexibly select points for query. Our experiments are conducted on the data sets of Causality Active Learning Challenge. With measurements of Area Under Curve (AUC) and Area under the Learning Curve (ALC), we find suitable methods for different data sets.

Warm Start for Parameter Selection of Linear Classifiers

In linear classification, a regularization term effectively remedies the overfitting problem, but selecting a good regularization parameter is usually time consuming. We consider cross validation for the selection process, so several optimization problems under different parameters must be solved. Our aim is to devise effective warm-start strategies to efficiently solve this sequence of optimization problems. We detailedly investigate the relationship between optimal solutions of logistic regression/linear SVM and regularization parameters. Based on the analysis, we develop an efficient tool to automatically find a suitable parameter for users with no related background knowledge.