Multiclass prediction is the problem of classifying an object into a relevant target class. We consider the problem of learning a multiclass predictor that uses only few features, and in particular, the number of used features should increase sub-linearly with the number of possible classes. This implies that features should be shared by several classes. We describe and analyze the ShareBoost algorithm for learning a multiclass predictor that uses few shared features. We prove that ShareBoost efficiently finds a predictor that uses few shared features (if such a predictor exists) and that it has a small generalization error. We also describe how to use ShareBoost for learning a non-linear predictor that has a fast evaluation time. In a series of experiments with natural data sets we demonstrate the benefits of ShareBoost and evaluate its success relatively to other state-of-the-art approaches.
@cite_21: The following problem is considered: given a matrix @math in @math , ( @math rows and @math columns), a vector @math in @math , and @math , compute a vector @math satisfying @math if such exists, such that @math has the fewest number of non-zero entries over all such vectors. It is shown that the problem is NP-hard, but that the well-known greedy heuristic is good in that it computes a solution with at most @math non-zero entries, where @math is the optimum number of nonzero entries at error @math , @math is the matrix obtained by normalizing each column of @math with respect to the @math norm, and @math is its pseudo-inverse.
@cite_4: This paper investigates a new learning formulation called structured sparsity, which is a natural extension of the standard sparsity concept in statistical learning and compressive sensing. By allowing arbitrary structures on the feature set, this concept generalizes the group sparsity idea that has become popular in recent years. A general theory is developed for learning with structured sparsity, based on the notion of coding complexity associated with the structure. It is shown that if the coding complexity of the target signal is small, then one can achieve improved performance by using coding complexity regularization methods, which generalize the standard sparse regularization. Moreover, a structured greedy algorithm is proposed to efficiently solve the structured sparsity problem. It is shown that the greedy algorithm approximately solves the coding complexity optimization problem under appropriate conditions. Experiments are included to demonstrate the advantage of structured sparsity over standard sparsity on some real applications.
Obtaining group sparsity by greedy methods has been also recently studied in @cite_4 @cite_21 , and indeed, ShareBoost shares similarities with these works. We differ from @cite_4 in that our analysis does not impose strong assumptions (e.g. group-RIP) and so ShareBoost applies to a much wider array of applications. In addition, the specific criterion for choosing the next feature is different. In @cite_4 , a ratio between difference in objective and different in costs is used. In ShareBoost, the L1 norm of the gradient matrix is used. For the multiclass problem with log loss, the criterion of ShareBoost is much easier to compute, especially in large scale problems. @cite_21 suggested many other selection rules that are geared toward the squared loss, which is far from being an optimal loss function for multiclass problems.