Aug 9, 2017

Learning about Unsupervised Learning







We give a tutorial and overview of the field of unsupervised learning from the perspective of statistical modelling. Unsupervised learning can be motivated from information theoretic and Bayesian principles. We briefly review basic models in unsupervised learning, including factor analysis, PCA, mixtures of Gaussians, ICA, hidden Markov models, state-space models, and many variants and extensions. We derive the EM algorithm and give an overview of fundamental concepts in graphical models, and inference algorithms on graphs. This is followed by a quick tour of approximate Bayesian inference, including Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), Laplace approximation, BIC, variational approximations, and expectation propagation (EP). The aim of this chapter is to provide a high-level view of the field. Along the way, many state-of-the-art ideas and future directions are also reviewed




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS-IM9C3eFg (Flat clustering with Kmeans)










https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.07817.pdf

We consider learning a sequence classifier without labeled data by using sequential output statistics. The problem is highly valuable since obtaining labels in training data is often costly, while the sequential output statistics (e.g., language models) could be obtained independently of input data and thus with low or no cost. To address the problem, we propose an unsupervised learning cost function and study its properties. We show that, compared to earlier works, it is less inclined to be stuck in trivial solutions and avoids the need for a strong generative model. Although it is harder to optimize in its functional form, a stochastic primal-dual gradient method is developed to effectively solve the problem. Experiment results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the new unsupervised learning method gives drastically lower errors than other baseline methods. Specifically, it reaches test errors about twice of those obtained by fully supervised learning.

NIPS 2010 Workshop on Deep Learning and Unsupervised Feature Learning:






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