Max-margin classification of incomplete data

Gal Chechik*, Geremy Heitz, Gal Elidan, Pieter Abbeel, Daphne Koller

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

We consider the problem of learning classifiers for structurally incomplete data, where some objects have a subset of features inherently absent due to complex relationships between the features. The common approach for handling missing features is to begin with a preprocessing phase that completes the missing features, and then use a standard classification procedure. In this paper we show how incomplete data can be classified directly without any completion of the missing features using a max-margin learning framework. We formulate this task using a geometrically-inspired objective function, and discuss two optimization approaches: The linearly separable case is written as a set of convex feasibility problems, and the non-separable case has a non-convex objective that we optimize iteratively. By avoiding the pre-processing phase in which the data is completed, these approaches offer considerable computational savings. More importantly, we show that by elegantly handling complex patterns of missing values, our approach is both competitive with other methods when the values are missing at random and outperforms them when the missing values have non-trivial structure. We demonstrate our results on two real-world problems: edge prediction in metabolic pathways, and automobile detection in natural images.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19 - Proceedings of the 2006 Conference
Pages233-240
Number of pages8
StatePublished - 2007
Externally publishedYes
Event20th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2006 - Vancouver, BC, Canada
Duration: 4 Dec 20067 Dec 2006

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
ISSN (Print)1049-5258

Conference

Conference20th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2006
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver, BC
Period4/12/067/12/06

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