Abstract:
Data is being generated at a tremendous rate in modern applications as diverse as internet applications, genomics, health care, energy management and social network analysis. There is a great need for developing scalable methods for analyzing these data sets. In this talk, I will present some new Divide-and-Conquer algorithms for various challenging problems in large-scale data analysis. Divide-and-Conquer has been a common paradigm that has been widely used in computer science and scientific computing, for example, in sorting, scalable computation of n-body interactions via the fast multipole method, and eigenvalue computations of symmetric matrices. However, this paradigm has not been widely
employed in problems that arise in machine learning. I will introduce some recent divide-and-conquer methods that we have developed for three representative problems: (i) classification using kernel support vector machines, (ii) dimensionality reduction for large-scale social network analysis, and (iii) structure learning of graphical models. For each of these problems, we develop specialized algorithms, in particular, tailored ways of "dividing" the problem into subproblems, solving the subproblems, and finally "conquering" them. It should be noted that the subproblem solutions yield localized models for analyzing the data; an intriguing question is whether the hierarchy of localized models can be combined to yield models that are not only easier to compute, but are also statistically more robust. This is joint work with Cho-Jui Hsieh, Donghyuk Shin and Si Si.

Bio:
Inderjit Dhillon is the Gottesman Family Centennial Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at UT Austin, where he is also the Director of the ICES Center for Big Data Analytics. His main research interests are in big data, machine learning, network analysis, linear algebra and optimization. He received his B.Tech. degree from IIT Bombay, and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Inderjit is an IEEE Fellow as well as a SIAM Fellow. Additionally, he has received several prestigious awards, including the ICES Distinguished Research Award in 2013, the SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize in 2011, the Moncrief Grand Challenge Award in 2010, the SIAM Linear Algebra Prize in 2006, the University Research Excellence Award in 2005, and the NSF Career Award in 2001. He has published over 100 journal and conference papers, and has served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the IEEE Transactions of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning and the SIAM Journal for Matrix Analysis and Applications.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/inderjit/biography.shtml