Teng Zhang

Meng-Zhang Qian, Zheng Ai, Teng Zhang et al.

Margin has played an important role on the design and analysis of learning algorithms during the past years, mostly working with the maximization of the minimum margin. Recent years have witnessed the increasing empirical studies on the optimization of margin distribution according to different statistics such as medium margin, average margin, margin variance, etc., whereas there is a relative paucity of theoretical understanding. In this work, we take one step on this direction by providing a new generalization error bound, which is heavily relevant to margin distribution by incorporating ingredients such as average margin and semi-variance, a new margin statistics for the characterization of margin distribution. Inspired by the theoretical findings, we propose the MSVMAv, an efficient approach to achieve better performance by optimizing margin distribution in terms of its empirical average margin and semi-variance. We finally conduct extensive experiments to show the superiority of the proposed MSVMAv approach.

Tejal Bhamre, Teng Zhang, Amit Singer

The missing phase problem in X-ray crystallography is commonly solved using the technique of molecular replacement, which borrows phases from a previously solved homologous structure, and appends them to the measured Fourier magnitudes of the diffraction patterns of the unknown structure. More recently, molecular replacement has been proposed for solving the missing orthogonal matrices problem arising in Kam's autocorrelation analysis for single particle reconstruction using X-ray free electron lasers and cryo-EM. In classical molecular replacement, it is common to estimate the magnitudes of the unknown structure as twice the measured magnitudes minus the magnitudes of the homologous structure, a procedure known as `twicing'. Mathematically, this is equivalent to finding an unbiased estimator for a complex-valued scalar. We generalize this scheme for the case of estimating real or complex valued matrices arising in single particle autocorrelation analysis. We name this approach "Anisotropic Twicing" because unlike the scalar case, the unbiased estimator is not obtained by a simple magnitude isotropic correction. We compare the performance of the least squares, twicing and anisotropic twicing estimators on synthetic and experimental datasets. We demonstrate 3D homology modeling in cryo-EM directly from experimental data without iterative refinement or class averaging, for the first time.

Teng Zhang, Zhi-Hua Zhou

Support vector machine (SVM) has been one of the most popular learning algorithms, with the central idea of maximizing the minimum margin, i.e., the smallest distance from the instances to the classification boundary. Recent theoretical results, however, disclosed that maximizing the minimum margin does not necessarily lead to better generalization performances, and instead, the margin distribution has been proven to be more crucial. Based on this idea, we propose a new method, named Optimal margin Distribution Machine (ODM), which tries to achieve a better generalization performance by optimizing the margin distribution. We characterize the margin distribution by the first- and second-order statistics, i.e., the margin mean and variance. The proposed method is a general learning approach which can be used in any place where SVM can be applied, and their superiority is verified both theoretically and empirically in this paper.

Teng Zhang, Zhi-Hua Zhou

Support vector machine (SVM) has been one of the most popular learning algorithms, with the central idea of maximizing the minimum margin, i.e., the smallest distance from the instances to the classification boundary. Recent theoretical results, however, disclosed that maximizing the minimum margin does not necessarily lead to better generalization performances, and instead, the margin distribution has been proven to be more crucial. In this paper, we propose the Large margin Distribution Machine (LDM), which tries to achieve a better generalization performance by optimizing the margin distribution. We characterize the margin distribution by the first- and second-order statistics, i.e., the margin mean and variance. The LDM is a general learning approach which can be used in any place where SVM can be applied, and its superiority is verified both theoretically and empirically in this paper.

Ery Arias-Castro, Gilad Lerman, Teng Zhang

We propose a spectral clustering method based on local principal components analysis (PCA). After performing local PCA in selected neighborhoods, the algorithm builds a nearest neighbor graph weighted according to a discrepancy between the principal subspaces in the neighborhoods, and then applies spectral clustering. As opposed to standard spectral methods based solely on pairwise distances between points, our algorithm is able to resolve intersections. We establish theoretical guarantees for simpler variants within a prototypical mathematical framework for multi-manifold clustering, and evaluate our algorithm on various simulated data sets.