Sequential decision making under uncertainty is a problem class with solid real-life foundation and application. We overview the concept of Knowledge Gradient (KG) from the perspective of multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem and reinforcement learning. Then we discuss the first KG algorithm with sublinear regret bounds for Gaussian MAB problems.

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(Online participation) Zoom Link: https://kaist.zoom.us/j/87516570701

This talk presents new methods of solving machine learning problems using probability models. For classification problems, the classifier referred to as the class probability output network (CPON) which can provide accurate posterior probabilities for the soft classification decision, is proposed. In this model, the uncertainty of decision is defined using the accuracy of estimation. The deep structure of CPON is also presented to obtain the best classification performance for the given data. Applications of CPON models are also addressed.

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(Online participation) Zoom Link: https://kaist.zoom.us/j/87516570701

In this talk, we consider the problem of minimizing multi-modal loss functions with a large number of local optima. Since the local gradient points to the direction of the steepest slope in an infinitesimal neighborhood, an optimizer guided by the local gradient is often trapped in a local minimum. To address this issue, we develop a novel nonlocal gradient to skip small local minima by capturing major structures of the loss's landscape in black-box optimization. The nonlocal gradient is defined by a directional Gaussian smoothing (DGS) approach. The key idea is to conducts 1D long-range exploration with a large smoothing radius along orthogonal directions, each of which defines a nonlocal directional derivative as a 1D integral. Such long-range exploration enables the nonlocal gradient to skip small local minima. We use the Gauss-Hermite quadrature rule to approximate the d 1D integrals to obtain an accurate estimator. We also provide theoretical analysis on the convergence of the method on nonconvex landscape. In this work, we investigate the scenario where the objective function is composed of a convex function, perturbed by a highly oscillating, deterministic noise. We provide a convergence theory under which the iterates converge to a tightened neighborhood of the solution, whose size is characterized by the noise frequency. Furthermore, if the noise level decays to zero when approaching global minimum, we prove that the DGS optimization converges to the exact global minimum with linear rates, similarly to standard gradient-based method in optimizing convex functions. We complement our theoretical analysis with numerical experiments to illustrate the performance of this approach.

Time-series data analysis is found in various applications that deal with sequential data over the given interval of, e.g. time. In this talk, we discuss time-series data analysis based on topological data analysis (TDA). The commonly used TDA method for time-series data analysis utilizes the embedding techniques such as sliding window embedding. With sliding window embedding the given data points are translated into the point cloud in the embedding space and the method of persistent homology is applied to the obtained point cloud. In this talk, we first show some examples of time-series data analysis with TDA. The first example is from music data for which the dynamic processes in time is summarized by low dimensional representation based on persistence homology. The second is the example of the gravitational wave detection problem and we will discuss how we concatenate the real signal and topological features. Then we will introduce our recent work of exact and fast multi-parameter persistent homology (EMPH) theory. The EMPH method is based on the Fourier transform of the data and the exact persistent barcodes. The EMPH is highly advantageous for time-series data analysis in that its computational complexity is as low as O(N log N) and it provides various topological inferences almost in no time. The presented works are in collaboration with Mai Lan Tran, Chris Bresten and Keunsu Kim.

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(Online participation) Zoom Link: https://kaist.zoom.us/j/87516570701