A description of perturbation-based methods developed in machine learning to augment novel optimization methods with strong statistical guarantees.

In nearly all machine learning, decisions must be made given current knowledge. Surprisingly, making what is believed to be the best decision is not always the best strategy, even when learning in a supervised learning setting. An emerging body of work on learning under different rules applies perturbations to decision and learning procedures. These methods provide simple and highly efficient learning rules with improved theoretical guarantees. This book describes perturbation-based methods developed in machine learning to augment novel optimization methods with strong statistical guarantees, offering readers a state-of-the-art overview.

Chapters address recent modeling ideas that have arisen within the perturbations framework, including Perturb & MAP, herding, and the use of neural networks to map generic noise to distribution over highly structured data. They describe new learning procedures for perturbation models, including an improved EM algorithm and a learning algorithm that aims to match moments of model samples to moments of data. They discuss understanding the relation of perturbation models to their traditional counterparts, with one chapter showing that the perturbations viewpoint can lead to new algorithms in the traditional setting. And they consider perturbation-based regularization in neural networks, offering a more complete understanding of dropout and studying perturbations in the context of deep neural networks.

Tamir Hazan is Assistant Professor at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

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George Papandreou was the prime minister of Greece from 2009 to 2011. He is the current president of the Socialist International. He was named one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in 2010 for “making the best of Greece’s worst year.” Papandreou also held the portfolio of foreign minister from 1999 to 2004. He was a key player in the negotiations that led to Turkey’s candidacy for membership in the European Union in 1999 and Cyprus’s entry into the EU in 2004. He also held other government posts, including under-secretary for cultural affairs and minister for education. Following his grandfather Georgios Papandreou and his father Andreas Papandreou, he was the third member of the Papandreou family to serve as the country’s prime minister.

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Daniel Tarlow is a Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK.

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