## Kernel Methods

Moderator : Zoltan Szabo

Wed 21 Jul 7 a.m. PDT — 8 a.m. PDT

Abstract:

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Wed 21 July 7:00 - 7:20 PDT

(Oral)
##### Kernel Stein Discrepancy Descent

Anna Korba · Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski · Szymon Majewski · Pierre Ablin

Among dissimilarities between probability distributions, the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) has received much interest recently. We investigate the properties of its Wasserstein gradient flow to approximate a target probability distribution $\pi$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$, known up to a normalization constant. This leads to a straightforwardly implementable, deterministic score-based method to sample from $\pi$, named KSD Descent, which uses a set of particles to approximate $\pi$. Remarkably, owing to a tractable loss function, KSD Descent can leverage robust parameter-free optimization schemes such as L-BFGS; this contrasts with other popular particle-based schemes such as the Stein Variational Gradient Descent algorithm. We study the convergence properties of KSD Descent and demonstrate its practical relevance. However, we also highlight failure cases by showing that the algorithm can get stuck in spurious local minima.

Wed 21 July 7:20 - 7:25 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Conditional Distributional Treatment Effect with Kernel Conditional Mean Embeddings and U-Statistic Regression

Junhyung Park · Uri Shalit · Bernhard Schölkopf · Krikamol Muandet

We propose to analyse the conditional distributional treatment effect (CoDiTE), which, in contrast to the more common conditional average treatment effect (CATE), is designed to encode a treatment's distributional aspects beyond the mean. We first introduce a formal definition of the CoDiTE associated with a distance function between probability measures. Then we discuss the CoDiTE associated with the maximum mean discrepancy via kernel conditional mean embeddings, which, coupled with a hypothesis test, tells us whether there is any conditional distributional effect of the treatment. Finally, we investigate what kind of conditional distributional effect the treatment has, both in an exploratory manner via the conditional witness function, and in a quantitative manner via U-statistic regression, generalising the CATE to higher-order moments. Experiments on synthetic, semi-synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the merits of our approach.

Wed 21 July 7:25 - 7:30 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Generalised Lipschitz Regularisation Equals Distributional Robustness

Zac Cranko · Zhan Shi · Xinhua Zhang · Richard Nock · Simon Kornblith

The problem of adversarial examples has highlighted the need for a theory of regularisation that is general enough to apply to exotic function classes, such as universal approximators. In response, we have been able to significantly sharpen existing results regarding the relationship between distributional robustness and regularisation, when defined with a transportation cost uncertainty set. The theory allows us to characterise the conditions under which the distributional robustness equals a Lipschitz-regularised model, and to tightly quantify, for the first time, the slackness under very mild assumptions. As a theoretical application we show a new result explicating the connection between adversarial learning and distributional robustness. We then give new results for how to achieve Lipschitz regularisation of kernel classifiers, which are demonstrated experimentally.

Wed 21 July 7:30 - 7:35 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Interpretable Stein Goodness-of-fit Tests on Riemannian Manifold

Wenkai Xu · Takeru Matsuda

In many applications, we encounter data on Riemannian manifolds such as torus and rotation groups. Standard statistical procedures for multivariate data are not applicable to such data. In this study, we develop goodness-of-fit testing and interpretable model criticism methods for general distributions on Riemannian manifolds, including those with an intractable normalization constant. The proposed methods are based on extensions of kernel Stein discrepancy, which are derived from Stein operators on Riemannian manifolds. We discuss the connections between the proposed tests with existing ones and provide a theoretical analysis of their asymptotic Bahadur efficiency. Simulation results and real data applications show the validity and usefulness of the proposed methods.

Wed 21 July 7:35 - 7:40 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### An exact solver for the Weston-Watkins SVM subproblem

Yutong Wang · Clay Scott

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the Weston-Watkins support vector machine is among the best performing multiclass extensions of the binary SVM. Current state-of-the-art solvers repeatedly solve a particular subproblem approximately using an iterative strategy. In this work, we propose an algorithm that solves the subproblem exactly using a novel reparametrization of the Weston-Watkins dual problem. For linear WW-SVMs, our solver shows significant speed-up over the state-of-the-art solver when the number of classes is large. Our exact subproblem solver also allows us to prove linear convergence of the overall solver.

Wed 21 July 7:40 - 7:45 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Proximal Causal Learning with Kernels: Two-Stage Estimation and Moment Restriction

Afsaneh Mastouri · Yuchen Zhu · Limor Gultchin · Anna Korba · Ricardo Silva · Matt J. Kusner · Arthur Gretton · Krikamol Muandet

We address the problem of causal effect estima-tion in the presence of unobserved confounding,but where proxies for the latent confounder(s) areobserved. We propose two kernel-based meth-ods for nonlinear causal effect estimation in thissetting: (a) a two-stage regression approach, and(b) a maximum moment restriction approach. Wefocus on the proximal causal learning setting, butour methods can be used to solve a wider classof inverse problems characterised by a Fredholmintegral equation. In particular, we provide a uni-fying view of two-stage and moment restrictionapproaches for solving this problem in a nonlin-ear setting. We provide consistency guaranteesfor each algorithm, and demonstrate that these ap-proaches achieve competitive results on syntheticdata and data simulating a real-world task. In par-ticular, our approach outperforms earlier methodsthat are not suited to leveraging proxy variables.

Wed 21 July 7:45 - 7:50 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Faster Kernel Matrix Algebra via Density Estimation

Arturs Backurs · Piotr Indyk · Cameron Musco · Tal Wagner

We study fast algorithms for computing basic properties of an n x n positive semidefinite kernel matrix K corresponding to n points x1,...,xn in R^d. In particular, we consider the estimating the sum of kernel matrix entries, along with its top eigenvalue and eigenvector. These are some of the most basic problems defined over kernel matrices.

We show that the sum of matrix entries can be estimated up to a multiplicative factor of 1+\epsilon in time sublinear in n and linear in d for many popular kernel functions, including the Gaussian, exponential, and rational quadratic kernels. For these kernels, we also show that the top eigenvalue (and a witnessing approximate eigenvector) can be approximated to a multiplicative factor of 1+\epsilon in time sub-quadratic in n and linear in d.

Our algorithms represent significant advances in the best known runtimes for these problems. They leverage the positive definiteness of the kernel matrix, along with a recent line of work on efficient kernel density estimation.

Wed 21 July 7:50 - 7:55 PDT

(Q&A)