Sparse semi-supervised support vector machines by DC programming and DCA

Online Stochastic DCA With Applications to Principal Component Analysis

Stochastic algorithms are well-known for their performance in the era of big data. In this article, we study nonsmooth stochastic Difference-of-Convex functions (DC) programs-the major class of nonconvex stochastic optimization, which have a variety of applications in divers domains, in particular, machine learning. We propose new online stochastic algorithms based on the state-of-the-art DC Algorithm (DCA)-a powerful approach in nonconvex programming framework, in the online context of streaming data continuously generated by some (unknown) source distribution. The new schemes use the stochastic approximations (SAs) principle: deterministic quantities of the standard DCA are replaced by their noisy estimators constructed using newly arriving samples. The convergence analysis of the proposed algorithms is studied intensively with the help of tools from modern convex analysis and martingale theory. Finally, we study several aspects of the proposed algorithms on an important problem in machine learning: the expected problem in principal component analysis (PCA).

Efficient Nonnegative Matrix Factorization by DC Programming and DCA

In this letter, we consider the nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) problem and several NMF variants. Two approaches based on DC (difference of convex functions) programming and DCA (DC algorithm) are developed. The first approach follows the alternating framework that requires solving, at each iteration, two nonnegativity-constrained least squares subproblems for which DCA-based schemes are investigated. The convergence property of the proposed algorithm is carefully studied. We show that with suitable DC decompositions, our algorithm generates most of the standard methods for the NMF problem. The second approach directly applies DCA on the whole NMF problem. Two algorithms—one computing all variables and one deploying a variable selection strategy—are proposed. The proposed methods are then adapted to solve various NMF variants, including the nonnegative factorization, the smooth regularization NMF, the sparse regularization NMF, the multilayer NMF, the convex/convex-hull NMF, and the symmetric NMF. We also show that our algorithms include several existing methods for these NMF variants as special versions. The efficiency of the proposed approaches is empirically demonstrated on both real-world and synthetic data sets. It turns out that our algorithms compete favorably with five state-of-the-art alternating nonnegative least squares algorithms.