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  • List of security hacking incidents

    List of security hacking incidents

    This list of security hacking incidents covers important or noteworthy events in the history of security hacking and cracking. == 1900 == === 1903 === Magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne disrupts John Ambrose Fleming's public demonstration of Guglielmo Marconi's purportedly secure wireless telegraphy technology, sending insulting Morse code messages through the auditorium's projector. == 1930s == === 1932 === Polish cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki broke the Enigma machine code. === 1939 === Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and Harold Keen worked together to develop the codebreaking device Bombe (based off of Rejewski's work on Bomba). The Enigma machine's use of a reliably small key space makes it vulnerable to brute force attacks. == 1940s == === 1943 === René Carmille, comptroller general of the Vichy French Army, hacked the punch card system used by the Nazis to locate Jews. === 1949 === The theory that underlies computer viruses was first made public in 1949, when computer pioneer John von Neumann presented a paper titled "Theory and Organization of Complicated Automata". In the paper, von Neumann speculated that computer programs could reproduce themselves. == 1950s == === 1955 === At MIT, "hack" first came to mean playing with machines. An April 1955 meeting of the Tech Model Railroad Club has one say that "Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing." === 1957 === Joe "Joybubbles" Engressia, a blind seven-year-old boy with perfect pitch, discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C (a frequency of 2600 Hz) would interfere with AT&T's automated telephone systems, thereby inadvertently opening the door for phreaking. == 1960s == Various phreaking boxes are used to interact with automated telephone systems. === 1963 === The first ever reference to malicious hacking is 'phreaking' in MIT's student newspaper, The Tech, containing hackers tying up the lines with Harvard, configuring the PDP-1 to make free calls, war dialing and accumulating large phone bills. === 1965 === William D. Mathews from MIT finds a vulnerability in a CTSS running on an IBM 7094. The standard text editor on the system was designed to be used by one user at a time, working in one directory, and so it created a temporary file with a constant name for all instances of the editor. The flaw was discovered when two system programmers were editing at the same time and the temporary files for the message of the day and the password file became swapped, causing the contents of the system CTSS password file to display to any user logging into the system. === 1967 === The first known incidence of network penetration hacking took place when members of a computer club at a suburban Chicago high school were provided access to IBM's APL network. In the fall of 1967, IBM (through Science Research Associates) approached Evanston Township High School with the offer of four 2741 Selectric teletypewriter-based terminals with dial-up modem connectivity to an experimental computer system which implemented an early version of the APL programming language. The APL network system was structured into workspaces which were assigned to various clients using the system. Working independently, the students quickly learned the language and the system. They were free to explore the system, often using existing code available in public workspaces as models for their own creations. Eventually, curiosity drove the students to explore the system's wider context. This first informal network penetration effort was later acknowledged as helping harden the security of one of the first publicly accessible networks:Science Research Associates undertook to write a full APL system for the IBM 1500. They modeled their system after APL/360, which had by that time been developed and seen substantial use inside of IBM, using code borrowed from MAT/1500 where possible. In their documentation, they acknowledge their gratitude to "a number of high school students for their compulsion to bomb the system". This was an early example of a kind of sportive, but very effective, debugging that was often repeated in the evolution of APL systems. == 1970s == === 1971 === John T. Draper (later nicknamed Captain Crunch), his friend Joe Engressia (also known as Joybubbles), and blue box phone phreaking hit the news with an Esquire magazine feature story. === 1979 === Kevin Mitnick breaks into his first major computer system, the Ark, which was the computer system Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) used for developing their RSTS/E operating system software. == 1980s == === 1980 === The FBI investigates a breach of security at National CSS (NCSS). The New York Times, reporting on the incident in 1981, describes hackers as: Technical experts, skilled, often young, computer programmers who almost whimsically probe the defenses of a computer system, searching out the limits and the possibilities of the machine. Despite their seemingly subversive role, hackers are a recognized asset in the computer industry, often highly prized. The newspaper describes white hat activities as part of a "mischievous but perversely positive 'hacker' tradition". When a National CSS employee revealed the existence of his password cracker, which he had used on customer accounts, the company chastised him not for writing the software but for not disclosing it sooner. The letter of reprimand stated that "The Company realizes the benefit to NCSS and in fact encourages the efforts of employees to identify security weaknesses to the VP, the directory, and other sensitive software in files". === 1981 === Chaos Computer Club forms in Germany. Ian Murphy, aka Captain Zap, was the first cracker to be tried and convicted as a felon. Murphy broke into AT&T's computers in 1981 and changed the internal clocks that metered billing rates. People were getting late-night discount rates when they called at midday. Of course, the bargain-seekers who waited until midnight to call long distance were hit with high bills. === 1983 === The 414s break into 60 computer systems at institutions ranging from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The incident appeared as the cover story of Newsweek with the title "Beware: Hackers at play". As a result, the U.S. House of Representatives held hearings on computer security and passed several laws. The group KILOBAUD is formed in February, kicking off a series of other hacker groups that formed soon after. The movie WarGames introduces the wider public to the phenomenon of hacking and creates a degree of mass paranoia about hackers and their supposed abilities to bring the world to a screeching halt by launching nuclear ICBMs. The U.S. House of Representatives begins hearings on computer security hacking. In his Turing Award lecture, Ken Thompson mentions "hacking" and describes a security exploit that he calls a "Trojan horse". === 1984 === Someone calling himself Lex Luthor founds the Legion of Doom. Named after a Saturday morning cartoon, the LOD had the reputation of attracting "the best of the best"—until one of the most talented members called Phiber Optik feuded with Legion of Doomer Erik Bloodaxe and got 'tossed out of the clubhouse'. Phiber's friends formed a rival group, the Masters of Deception. The Comprehensive Crime Control Act gives the Secret Service jurisdiction over computer fraud. The Cult of the Dead Cow forms in Lubbock, Texas, and begins publishing its underground ezine. The hacker magazine 2600 begins regular publication, right when TAP was putting out its final issue. The editor of 2600, "Emmanuel Goldstein" (whose real name is Eric Corley), takes his handle from the leader of the resistance in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The publication provides tips for would-be hackers and phone phreaks, as well as commentary on the hacker issues of the day. Today, copies of 2600 are sold at most large retail bookstores. The Chaos Communication Congress, the annual European hacker conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club, is held in Hamburg, Germany. William Gibson's groundbreaking science fiction novel Neuromancer, about "Case", a futuristic computer hacker, is published. Considered the first major cyberpunk novel, it brought into hacker jargon such terms as "cyberspace", "the matrix", "simstim", and "ICE". === 1985 === KILOBAUD is re-organized into P.H.I.R.M. and begins sysopping hundreds of bulletin board systems (BBSs) throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. The online 'zine Phrack is established. The Hacker's Handbook is published in the UK. The FBI, Secret Service, Middlesex County NJ Prosecutor's Office and various local law enforcement agencies execute seven search warrants concurrently across New Jersey on July 12, 1985, seizing equipment from BBS operators and users alike for "complicity in computer theft", under a n

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  • Probabilistic latent semantic analysis

    Probabilistic latent semantic analysis

    Probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA), also known as probabilistic latent semantic indexing (PLSI, especially in information retrieval circles) is a statistical technique for the analysis of two-mode and co-occurrence data. In effect, one can derive a low-dimensional representation of the observed variables in terms of their affinity to certain hidden variables, just as in latent semantic analysis, from which PLSA evolved. Compared to standard latent semantic analysis which stems from linear algebra and downsizes the occurrence tables (usually via a singular value decomposition), probabilistic latent semantic analysis is based on a mixture decomposition derived from a latent class model. == Model == Considering observations in the form of co-occurrences ( w , d ) {\displaystyle (w,d)} of words and documents, PLSA models the probability of each co-occurrence as a mixture of conditionally independent multinomial distributions: P ( w , d ) = ∑ c P ( d ) P ( c | d ) P ( w | c ) = P ( d ) ∑ c P ( c | d ) P ( w | c ) {\displaystyle P(w,d)=\sum _{c}P(d)P(c|d)P(w|c)=P(d)\sum _{c}P(c|d)P(w|c)} with c {\displaystyle c} being the words' topic. Note that the number of topics is a hyperparameter that must be chosen in advance and is not estimated from the data. The first formulation is the symmetric formulation, where w {\displaystyle w} and d {\displaystyle d} are both generated from the latent class c {\displaystyle c} in similar ways (using the conditional probabilities P ( d | c ) {\displaystyle P(d|c)} and P ( w | c ) {\displaystyle P(w|c)} ), whereas the second formulation is the asymmetric formulation, where, for each document d {\displaystyle d} , a latent class is chosen conditionally to the document according to P ( c | d ) {\displaystyle P(c|d)} , and a word is then generated from that class according to P ( w | c ) {\displaystyle P(w|c)} . Although we have used words and documents in this example, the co-occurrence of any couple of discrete variables may be modelled in exactly the same way. So, the number of parameters is equal to c d + w c {\displaystyle cd+wc} . The number of parameters grows linearly with the number of documents. In addition, although PLSA is a generative model of the documents in the collection it is estimated on, it is not a generative model of new documents. Their parameters are learned using the EM algorithm. == Application == PLSA may be used in a discriminative setting, via Fisher kernels. PLSA has applications in information retrieval and filtering, natural language processing, machine learning from text, bioinformatics, and related areas. It is reported that the aspect model used in the probabilistic latent semantic analysis has severe overfitting problems. == Extensions == Hierarchical extensions: Asymmetric: MASHA ("Multinomial ASymmetric Hierarchical Analysis") Symmetric: HPLSA ("Hierarchical Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis") Generative models: The following models have been developed to address an often-criticized shortcoming of PLSA, namely that it is not a proper generative model for new documents. Latent Dirichlet allocation – adds a Dirichlet prior on the per-document topic distribution Higher-order data: Although this is rarely discussed in the scientific literature, PLSA extends naturally to higher order data (three modes and higher), i.e. it can model co-occurrences over three or more variables. In the symmetric formulation above, this is done simply by adding conditional probability distributions for these additional variables. This is the probabilistic analogue to non-negative tensor factorisation. == History == This is an example of a latent class model (see references therein), and it is related to non-negative matrix factorization. The present terminology was coined in 1999 by Thomas Hofmann.

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  • Distributional Soft Actor Critic

    Distributional Soft Actor Critic

    Distributional Soft Actor Critic (DSAC) is a suite of model-free off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms, tailored for learning decision-making or control policies in complex systems with continuous action spaces. Distinct from traditional methods that focus solely on expected returns, DSAC algorithms are designed to learn a Gaussian distribution over stochastic returns, called value distribution. This focus on Gaussian value distribution learning notably diminishes value overestimations, which in turn boosts policy performance. Additionally, the value distribution learned by DSAC can also be used for risk-aware policy learning. From a technical standpoint, DSAC is essentially a distributional adaptation of the well-established soft actor-critic (SAC) method. To date, the DSAC family comprises two iterations: the original DSAC-v1 and its successor, DSAC-T (also known as DSAC-v2), with the latter demonstrating superior capabilities over the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) in Mujoco benchmark tasks. The source code for DSAC-T can be found at the following URL: Jingliang-Duan/DSAC-T. Both iterations have been integrated into an advanced, Pytorch-powered reinforcement learning toolkit named GOPS: GOPS (General Optimal control Problem Solver).

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  • Nonlinear dimensionality reduction

    Nonlinear dimensionality reduction

    Nonlinear dimensionality reduction (NLDR), also known as manifold learning, is any of various related techniques that aim to project high-dimensional data, potentially existing across non-linear manifolds which cannot be adequately captured by linear decomposition methods, onto lower-dimensional latent manifolds, with the goal of either visualizing the data in the low-dimensional space, or learning the mapping (either from the high-dimensional space to the low-dimensional embedding or vice versa) itself. The techniques described below can be understood as generalizations of linear decomposition methods used for dimensionality reduction, such as singular value decomposition and principal component analysis. == Applications of NLDR == High dimensional data can be hard for machines to work with, requiring significant time and space for analysis. It also presents a challenge for humans, since it's hard to visualize or understand data in more than three dimensions. Reducing the dimensionality of a data set, while keeping its essential features relatively intact, can make algorithms more efficient and allow analysts to visualize trends and patterns. The reduced-dimensional representations of data are often referred to as "intrinsic variables". This description implies that these are the values from which the data was produced. For example, consider a dataset that contains images of a letter 'A', which has been scaled and rotated by varying amounts. Each image has 32×32 pixels. Each image can be represented as a vector of 1024 pixel values. Each row is a sample on a two-dimensional manifold in 1024-dimensional space (a Hamming space). The intrinsic dimensionality is two, because two variables (rotation and scale) were varied in order to produce the data. Information about the shape or look of a letter 'A' is not part of the intrinsic variables because it is the same in every instance. Nonlinear dimensionality reduction will discard the correlated information (the letter 'A') and recover only the varying information (rotation and scale). By comparison, if principal component analysis, which is a linear dimensionality reduction algorithm, is used to reduce this same dataset into two dimensions, the resulting values are not so well organized. This demonstrates that the high-dimensional vectors (each representing a letter 'A') that sample this manifold vary in a non-linear manner. It should be apparent, therefore, that NLDR has several applications in the field of computer-vision. For example, consider a robot that uses a camera to navigate in a closed static environment. The images obtained by that camera can be considered to be samples on a manifold in high-dimensional space, and the intrinsic variables of that manifold will represent the robot's position and orientation. Invariant manifolds are of general interest for model order reduction in dynamical systems. In particular, if there is an attracting invariant manifold in the phase space, nearby trajectories will converge onto it and stay on it indefinitely, rendering it a candidate for dimensionality reduction of the dynamical system. While such manifolds are not guaranteed to exist in general, the theory of spectral submanifolds (SSM) gives conditions for the existence of unique attracting invariant objects in a broad class of dynamical systems. Active research in NLDR seeks to unfold the observation manifolds associated with dynamical systems to develop modeling techniques. Some of the more prominent nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques are listed below. == Important concepts == === Sammon's mapping === Sammon's mapping is one of the first and most popular NLDR techniques. === Self-organizing map === The self-organizing map (SOM, also called Kohonen map) and its probabilistic variant generative topographic mapping (GTM) use a point representation in the embedded space to form a latent variable model based on a non-linear mapping from the embedded space to the high-dimensional space. These techniques are related to work on density networks, which also are based around the same probabilistic model. === Kernel principal component analysis === Perhaps the most widely used algorithm for dimensional reduction is kernel PCA. PCA begins by computing the covariance matrix of the m × n {\displaystyle m\times n} matrix X {\displaystyle \mathbf {X} } C = 1 m ∑ i = 1 m x i x i T . {\displaystyle C={\frac {1}{m}}\sum _{i=1}^{m}{\mathbf {x} _{i}\mathbf {x} _{i}^{\mathsf {T}}}.} It then projects the data onto the first k eigenvectors of that matrix. By comparison, KPCA begins by computing the covariance matrix of the data after being transformed into a higher-dimensional space, C = 1 m ∑ i = 1 m Φ ( x i ) Φ ( x i ) T . {\displaystyle C={\frac {1}{m}}\sum _{i=1}^{m}{\Phi (\mathbf {x} _{i})\Phi (\mathbf {x} _{i})^{\mathsf {T}}}.} It then projects the transformed data onto the first k eigenvectors of that matrix, just like PCA. It uses the kernel trick to factor away much of the computation, such that the entire process can be performed without actually computing Φ ( x ) {\displaystyle \Phi (\mathbf {x} )} . Of course Φ {\displaystyle \Phi } must be chosen such that it has a known corresponding kernel. Unfortunately, it is not trivial to find a good kernel for a given problem, so KPCA does not yield good results with some problems when using standard kernels. For example, it is known to perform poorly with these kernels on the Swiss roll manifold. However, one can view certain other methods that perform well in such settings (e.g., Laplacian Eigenmaps, LLE) as special cases of kernel PCA by constructing a data-dependent kernel matrix. KPCA has an internal model, so it can be used to map points onto its embedding that were not available at training time. === Principal curves and manifolds === Principal curves and manifolds give the natural geometric framework for nonlinear dimensionality reduction and extend the geometric interpretation of PCA by explicitly constructing an embedded manifold, and by encoding using standard geometric projection onto the manifold. This approach was originally proposed by Trevor Hastie in his 1984 thesis, which he formally introduced in 1989. This idea has been explored further by many authors. How to define the "simplicity" of the manifold is problem-dependent, however, it is commonly measured by the intrinsic dimensionality and/or the smoothness of the manifold. Usually, the principal manifold is defined as a solution to an optimization problem. The objective function includes a quality of data approximation and some penalty terms for the bending of the manifold. The popular initial approximations are generated by linear PCA and Kohonen's SOM. === Laplacian eigenmaps === Laplacian eigenmaps uses spectral techniques to perform dimensionality reduction. This technique relies on the basic assumption that the data lies in a low-dimensional manifold in a high-dimensional space. This algorithm cannot embed out-of-sample points, but techniques based on Reproducing kernel Hilbert space regularization exist for adding this capability. Such techniques can be applied to other nonlinear dimensionality reduction algorithms as well. Traditional techniques like principal component analysis do not consider the intrinsic geometry of the data. Laplacian eigenmaps builds a graph from neighborhood information of the data set. Each data point serves as a node on the graph and connectivity between nodes is governed by the proximity of neighboring points (using e.g. the k-nearest neighbor algorithm). The graph thus generated can be considered as a discrete approximation of the low-dimensional manifold in the high-dimensional space. Minimization of a cost function based on the graph ensures that points close to each other on the manifold are mapped close to each other in the low-dimensional space, preserving local distances. The eigenfunctions of the Laplace–Beltrami operator on the manifold serve as the embedding dimensions, since under mild conditions this operator has a countable spectrum that is a basis for square integrable functions on the manifold (compare to Fourier series on the unit circle manifold). Attempts to place Laplacian eigenmaps on solid theoretical ground have met with some success, as under certain nonrestrictive assumptions, the graph Laplacian matrix has been shown to converge to the Laplace–Beltrami operator as the number of points goes to infinity. === Isomap === Isomap is a combination of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm with classic Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). Classic MDS takes a matrix of pair-wise distances between all points and computes a position for each point. Isomap assumes that the pair-wise distances are only known between neighboring points, and uses the Floyd–Warshall algorithm to compute the pair-wise distances between all other points. This effectively estimates the full matrix of pair-wise geodesic distances between all of the points. Isomap th

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  • BeyondCorp

    BeyondCorp

    BeyondCorp is an implementation of zero-trust computer security concepts creating a zero trust network. It is created by Google. == Background == It was created in response to the 2009 Operation Aurora. An open source implementation inspired by Google's research paper on an access proxy is known as "transcend". Google documented its Zero Trust journey from 2014 to 2018 through a series of articles in the journal ;login:. Google called their ZT network "BeyondCorp". Google implemented a Zero Trust architecture on a large scale, and relied on user and device credentials, regardless of location. Data was encrypted and protected from managed devices. Unmanaged devices, such as BYOD, were not given access to the BeyondCorp resources. == Design and technology == BeyondCorp utilized a zero trust security model, which is a relatively new security model that it assumes that all devices and users are potentially compromised. This is in contrast to traditional security models, which rely on firewalls and other perimeter defenses to protect sensitive data. === Trust === The corporate network grants no inherent trust, and all internal apps are accessed via the BeyondCorp system, regardless of whether the user is in a Google office or working remotely. BeyondCorp is related to Zero Trust architecture as it implements a true Zero Trust network, where all access is granted on identity, device, and authentication, based on robust underlying device and identity data sources. BeyondCorp works by using a number of security policies including authentication, authorization, and access control to ensure that only authorized users can access corporate resources. Authentication verifies the identity of the user, authorization determines whether the user has permission to access the requested resource, and access control policies restrict what the user can do with the resource. ==== Trust Inferrer ==== One of the main components in BeyondCorp's implementation is the Trust Inferrer. The Trust Inferrer is a security component (typically software) that looks at information about a user's device, like a computer or phone, to decide how much it can be trusted to access certain resources like important company documents. The Trust Inferrer checks things like the security of the device, whether it has the right software installed, and if it belongs to an authorized user. Based on all this information, the Trust Inferrer decides what the device can access and what it can't. === Security mechanisms === Unlike traditional VPNs, BeyondCorp's access policies are based on information about a device, its state, and its associated user. BeyondCorp considers both internal networks and external networks to be completely untrusted, and gates access to applications by dynamically asserting and enforcing levels, or “tiers,” of access. === Device Inventory Database === BeyondCorp utilized a Device Inventory Database and Device Identity that uniquely identifies a device through a digital certificate. Any changes to the device are recorded in the Device Inventory Database. The certificate is used to uniquely identify a device; however, additional information is required to grant access privileges to a resource. === Access Control Engine === Another important component of BeyondCorp's implementation is the Access Control Engine. Think of this as the brain of the Zero Trust architecture. The Access Control Engine is like a traffic cop standing at an intersection. Its job is to make sure that only authorized devices and users are allowed to access specific resources (like files or applications) on the network. It checks the access policy (the rules that say who can access what), the device's state (like whether it has the right software updates or security settings), and the resources being requested. Then it makes a decision on whether to grant or deny access based on all of this information. It helps ensure that only the right people and devices are allowed access to the network, which helps keep things secure. The Access Control Engine utilizes the output from the Trust Inferrer and other data that is fed into its system. == Usage == One of the first things Google did to implement a Zero Trust architecture was to capture and analyze network traffic. The purpose of analyzing the traffic was to build a baseline of what typical network traffic looked like. In doing so, BeyondCorp also discovered unusual, unexpected, and unauthorized traffic. This was very useful because it gave the BeyondCorp engineers critical information that assisted them in reengineering the system in a secure manner. Some of the benefits BeyondCorp realized by adopting a Zero Trust architecture include the ability to allow their employees to work securely from any location. It reduces the risk of data breaches since data and applications are protected and users and devices are constantly being verified. The Zero Trust architecture is scalable and can be adapted to the changing needs of the businesses and their users. Especially relevant in today's work-from-home era, BeyondCorp allows employees to access enterprise resources securely from any location, without the need for traditional VPNs.

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  • Optical neural network

    Optical neural network

    An optical neural network is a physical implementation of an artificial neural network with optical components. Early optical neural networks used a photorefractive Volume hologram to interconnect arrays of input neurons to arrays of output with synaptic weights in proportion to the multiplexed hologram's strength. Volume holograms were further multiplexed using spectral hole burning to add one dimension of wavelength to space to achieve four dimensional interconnects of two dimensional arrays of neural inputs and outputs. This research led to extensive research on alternative methods using the strength of the optical interconnect for implementing neuronal communications. Some artificial neural networks that have been implemented as optical neural networks include the Hopfield neural network and the Kohonen self-organizing map with liquid crystal spatial light modulators Optical neural networks can also be based on the principles of neuromorphic engineering, creating neuromorphic photonic systems. Typically, these systems encode information in the networks using spikes, mimicking the functionality of spiking neural networks in optical and photonic hardware. Photonic devices that have demonstrated neuromorphic functionalities include (among others) vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, integrated photonic modulators, optoelectronic systems based on superconducting Josephson junctions or systems based on resonant tunnelling diodes. == Electrochemical vs. optical neural networks == Biological neural networks function on an electrochemical basis, while optical neural networks use electromagnetic waves. Optical interfaces to biological neural networks can be created with optogenetics, but is not the same as an optical neural networks. In biological neural networks there exist a lot of different mechanisms for dynamically changing the state of the neurons, these include short-term and long-term synaptic plasticity. Synaptic plasticity is among the electrophysiological phenomena used to control the efficiency of synaptic transmission, long-term for learning and memory, and short-term for short transient changes in synaptic transmission efficiency. Implementing this with optical components is difficult, and ideally requires advanced photonic materials. Properties that might be desirable in photonic materials for optical neural networks include the ability to change their efficiency of transmitting light, based on the intensity of incoming light. == Rising Era of Optical Neural Networks == With the increasing significance of computer vision in various domains, the computational cost of these tasks has increased, making it more important to develop the new approaches of the processing acceleration. Optical computing has emerged as a potential alternative to GPU acceleration for modern neural networks, particularly considering the looming obsolescence of Moore's Law. Consequently, optical neural networks have garnered increased attention in the research community. Presently, two primary methods of optical neural computing are under research: silicon photonics-based and free-space optics. Each approach has its benefits and drawbacks; while silicon photonics may offer superior speed, it lacks the massive parallelism that free-space optics can deliver. Given the substantial parallelism capabilities of free-space optics, researchers have focused on taking advantage of it. One implementation, proposed by Lin et al., involves the training and fabrication of phase masks for a handwritten digit classifier. By stacking 3D-printed phase masks, light passing through the fabricated network can be read by a photodetector array of ten detectors, each representing a digit class ranging from 1 to 10. Although this network can achieve terahertz-range classification, it lacks flexibility, as the phase masks are fabricated for a specific task and cannot be retrained. An alternative method for classification in free-space optics, introduced by Cahng et al., employs a 4F system that is based on the convolution theorem to perform convolution operations. This system uses two lenses to execute the Fourier transforms of the convolution operation, enabling passive conversion into the Fourier domain without power consumption or latency. However, the convolution operation kernels in this implementation are also fabricated phase masks, limiting the device's functionality to specific convolutional layers of the network only. In contrast, Li et al. proposed a technique involving kernel tiling to use the parallelism of the 4F system while using a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) instead of a phase mask. This approach allows users to upload various kernels into the 4F system and execute the entire network's inference on a single device. Unfortunately, modern neural networks are not designed for the 4F systems, as they were primarily developed during the CPU/GPU era. Mostly because they tend to use a lower resolution and a high number of channels in their feature maps. == Other Implementations == In 2007 there was one model of Optical Neural Network: the Programmable Optical Array/Analogic Computer (POAC). It had been implemented in the year 2000 and reported based on modified Joint Fourier Transform Correlator (JTC) and Bacteriorhodopsin (BR) as a holographic optical memory. Full parallelism, large array size and the speed of light are three promises offered by POAC to implement an optical CNN. They had been investigated during the last years with their practical limitations and considerations yielding the design of the first portable POAC version. The practical details – hardware (optical setups) and software (optical templates) – were published. However, POAC is a general purpose and programmable array computer that has a wide range of applications including: image processing pattern recognition target tracking real-time video processing document security optical switching == Progress in the 2020s == Taichi from Tsinghua University in Beijing is a hybrid ONN that combines the power efficiency and parallelism of optical diffraction and the configurability of optical interference. Taichi offers 13.96 million parameters. Taichi avoids the high error rates that afflict deep (multi-layer) networks by combining clusters of fewer-layer diffractive units with arrays of interferometers for reconfigurable computation. Its encoding protocol divides large network models into sub-models that can be distributed across multiple chiplets in parallel. Taichi achieved 91.89% accuracy in tests with the Omniglot database. It was also used to generate music Bach and generate images the styles of Van Gogh and Munch. The developers claimed energy efficiency of up to 160 trillion operations second−1 watt−1 and an area efficiency of 880 trillion multiply-accumulate operations mm−2 or 103 more energy efficient than the NVIDIA H100, and 102 times more energy efficient and 10 times more area efficient than previous ONNs. Time dimension has recently been introduced into diffractive neural network by fs laser lithography of perovskite hydration. The temporal behaviour of the neuron can be modulated by the fs laser at the nanoscale, enabling a programmable holographic neural network with temporal evolution functionality, i.e., the functionality can change with time under the hydration stimuli. An in-memory temporal inference functionality was demonstrated to mimic the function evolution of the human brain, i.e., the functionality can change from simple digit image classification to more complicated digit and clothing product image classification with time. This is the first time of introducing time dimension into the optical neural network, laying a foundation for future brain-like photonic chip development.

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  • Feature selection

    Feature selection

    In machine learning, feature selection is the process of selecting a subset of relevant features (variables, predictors) for use in model construction. Feature selection techniques are used for several reasons: simplification of models to make them easier to interpret, shorter training times, to avoid the curse of dimensionality, improve the compatibility of the data with a certain learning model class, to encode inherent symmetries present in the input space. The central premise when using feature selection is that data sometimes contains features that are redundant or irrelevant, and can thus be removed without incurring much loss of information. Redundancy and irrelevance are two distinct notions, since one relevant feature may be redundant in the presence of another relevant feature with which it is strongly correlated. Feature extraction creates new features from functions of the original features, whereas feature selection finds a subset of the features. Feature selection techniques are often used in domains where there are many features and comparatively few samples (data points). == Introduction == A feature selection algorithm can be seen as the combination of a search technique for proposing new feature subsets, along with an evaluation measure which scores the different feature subsets. The simplest algorithm is to test each possible subset of features finding the one which minimizes the error rate. This is an exhaustive search of the space, and is computationally intractable for all but the smallest of feature sets. The choice of evaluation metric heavily influences the algorithm, and it is these evaluation metrics which distinguish between the three main categories of feature selection algorithms: wrappers, filters and embedded methods. Wrapper methods use a predictive model to score feature subsets. Each new subset is used to train a model, which is tested on a hold-out set. Counting the number of mistakes made on that hold-out set (the error rate of the model) gives the score for that subset. As wrapper methods train a new model for each subset, they are very computationally intensive, but usually provide the best performing feature set for that particular type of model or typical problem. Filter methods use a proxy measure instead of the error rate to score a feature subset. This measure is chosen to be fast to compute, while still capturing the usefulness of the feature set. Common measures include the mutual information, the pointwise mutual information, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, Relief-based algorithms, and inter/intra class distance or the scores of significance tests for each class/feature combinations. Filters are usually less computationally intensive than wrappers, but they produce a feature set which is not tuned to a specific type of predictive model. This lack of tuning means a feature set from a filter is more general than the set from a wrapper, usually giving lower prediction performance than a wrapper. However the feature set doesn't contain the assumptions of a prediction model, and so is more useful for exposing the relationships between the features. Many filters provide a feature ranking rather than an explicit best feature subset, and the cut off point in the ranking is chosen via cross-validation. Filter methods have also been used as a preprocessing step for wrapper methods, allowing a wrapper to be used on larger problems. One other popular approach is the Recursive Feature Elimination algorithm, commonly used with Support Vector Machines to repeatedly construct a model and remove features with low weights. Embedded methods are a catch-all group of techniques which perform feature selection as part of the model construction process. The exemplar of this approach is the LASSO method for constructing a linear model, which penalizes the regression coefficients with an L1 penalty, shrinking many of them to zero. Any features which have non-zero regression coefficients are 'selected' by the LASSO algorithm. Improvements to the LASSO include Bolasso which bootstraps samples; Elastic net regularization, which combines the L1 penalty of LASSO with the L2 penalty of ridge regression; and FeaLect which scores all the features based on combinatorial analysis of regression coefficients. AEFS further extends LASSO to nonlinear scenario with autoencoders. These approaches tend to be between filters and wrappers in terms of computational complexity. In traditional regression analysis, the most popular form of feature selection is stepwise regression, which is a wrapper technique. It is a greedy algorithm that adds the best feature (or deletes the worst feature) at each round. The main control issue is deciding when to stop the algorithm. In machine learning, this is typically done by cross-validation. In statistics, some criteria are optimized. This leads to the inherent problem of nesting. More robust methods have been explored, such as branch and bound and piecewise linear network. == Subset selection == Subset selection evaluates a subset of features as a group for suitability. Subset selection algorithms can be broken up into wrappers, filters, and embedded methods. Wrappers use a search algorithm to search through the space of possible features and evaluate each subset by running a model on the subset. Wrappers can be computationally expensive and have a risk of over fitting to the model. Filters are similar to wrappers in the search approach, but instead of evaluating against a model, a simpler filter is evaluated. Embedded techniques are embedded in, and specific to, a model. Many popular search approaches use greedy hill climbing, which iteratively evaluates a candidate subset of features, then modifies the subset and evaluates if the new subset is an improvement over the old. Evaluation of the subsets requires a scoring metric that grades a subset of features. Exhaustive search is generally impractical, so at some implementor (or operator) defined stopping point, the subset of features with the highest score discovered up to that point is selected as the satisfactory feature subset. The stopping criterion varies by algorithm; possible criteria include: a subset score exceeds a threshold, a program's maximum allowed run time has been surpassed, etc. Alternative search-based techniques are based on targeted projection pursuit which finds low-dimensional projections of the data that score highly: the features that have the largest projections in the lower-dimensional space are then selected. Search approaches include: Exhaustive Best first Simulated annealing Genetic algorithm Greedy forward selection Greedy backward elimination Particle swarm optimization Targeted projection pursuit Scatter search Variable neighborhood search Two popular filter metrics for classification problems are correlation and mutual information, although neither are true metrics or 'distance measures' in the mathematical sense, since they fail to obey the triangle inequality and thus do not compute any actual 'distance' – they should rather be regarded as 'scores'. These scores are computed between a candidate feature (or set of features) and the desired output category. There are, however, true metrics that are a simple function of the mutual information; see here. Other available filter metrics include: Class separability Error probability Inter-class distance Probabilistic distance Entropy Consistency-based feature selection Correlation-based feature selection == Optimality criteria == The choice of optimality criteria is difficult as there are multiple objectives in a feature selection task. Many common criteria incorporate a measure of accuracy, penalised by the number of features selected. Examples include Akaike information criterion (AIC) and Mallows's Cp, which have a penalty of 2 for each added feature. AIC is based on information theory, and is effectively derived via the maximum entropy principle. Other criteria are Bayesian information criterion (BIC), which uses a penalty of log ⁡ n {\displaystyle {\sqrt {\log {n}}}} for each added feature, minimum description length (MDL) which asymptotically uses log ⁡ n {\displaystyle {\sqrt {\log {n}}}} , Bonferroni / RIC which use 2 log ⁡ p {\displaystyle {\sqrt {2\log {p}}}} , maximum dependency feature selection, and a variety of new criteria that are motivated by false discovery rate (FDR), which use something close to 2 log ⁡ p q {\displaystyle {\sqrt {2\log {\frac {p}{q}}}}} . A maximum entropy rate criterion may also be used to select the most relevant subset of features. == Structure learning == Filter feature selection is a specific case of a more general paradigm called structure learning. Feature selection finds the relevant feature set for a specific target variable whereas structure learning finds the relationships between all the variables, usually by expressing these relationships as a graph. The most common structure learning algorithms

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  • Multilayer perceptron

    Multilayer perceptron

    In deep learning, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a kind of modern feedforward neural network consisting of fully connected neurons with nonlinear activation functions, organized in layers, notable for being able to distinguish data that is not linearly separable. Modern neural networks are trained using backpropagation and are colloquially referred to as "vanilla" networks. MLPs grew out of an effort to improve on single-layer perceptrons, which could only be applied to linearly separable data. A perceptron traditionally used a Heaviside step function as its nonlinear activation function. However, the backpropagation algorithm requires that modern MLPs use continuous activation functions such as sigmoid or ReLU. Multilayer perceptrons form the basis of deep learning, and are applicable across a vast set of diverse domains. == Timeline == In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts proposed the binary artificial neuron as a logical model of biological neural networks. In 1958, Frank Rosenblatt proposed the multilayered perceptron model, consisting of an input layer, a hidden layer with randomized weights that did not learn, and an output layer with learnable connections. In 1962, Rosenblatt published many variants and experiments on perceptrons in his book Principles of Neurodynamics, including up to 2 trainable layers by "back-propagating errors". However, it was not the backpropagation algorithm, and he did not have a general method for training multiple layers. In 1965, Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko and Valentin Lapa published Group Method of Data Handling. It was one of the first deep learning methods, used to train an eight-layer neural net in 1971. In 1967, Shun'ichi Amari reported the first multilayered neural network trained by stochastic gradient descent, was able to classify non-linearily separable pattern classes. Amari's student Saito conducted the computer experiments, using a five-layered feedforward network with two learning layers. Backpropagation was independently developed multiple times in early 1970s. The earliest published instance was Seppo Linnainmaa's master thesis (1970). Paul Werbos developed it independently in 1971, but had difficulty publishing it until 1982. In 1986, David E. Rumelhart et al. popularized backpropagation. In 2003, interest in backpropagation networks returned due to the successes of deep learning being applied to language modelling by Yoshua Bengio with co-authors. In 2021, a very simple NN architecture combining two deep MLPs with skip connections and layer normalizations was designed and called MLP-Mixer; its realizations featuring 19 to 431 millions of parameters were shown to be comparable to vision transformers of similar size on ImageNet and similar image classification tasks. == Mathematical foundations == === Activation function === If a multilayer perceptron has a linear activation function in all neurons, that is, a linear function that maps the weighted inputs to the output of each neuron, then linear algebra shows that any number of layers can be reduced to a two-layer input-output model. In MLPs some neurons use a nonlinear activation function that was developed to model the frequency of action potentials, or firing, of biological neurons. The two historically common activation functions are both sigmoids, and are described by y ( v i ) = tanh ⁡ ( v i ) and y ( v i ) = ( 1 + e − v i ) − 1 {\displaystyle y(v_{i})=\tanh(v_{i})~~{\textrm {and}}~~y(v_{i})=(1+e^{-v_{i}})^{-1}} . The first is a hyperbolic tangent that ranges from −1 to 1, while the other is the logistic function, which is similar in shape but ranges from 0 to 1. Here y i {\displaystyle y_{i}} is the output of the i {\displaystyle i} th node (neuron) and v i {\displaystyle v_{i}} is the weighted sum of the input connections. Alternative activation functions have been proposed, including the rectifier and softplus functions. More specialized activation functions include radial basis functions (used in radial basis networks, another class of supervised neural network models). In recent developments of deep learning the rectified linear unit (ReLU) is more frequently used as one of the possible ways to overcome the numerical problems related to the sigmoids. === Layers === The MLP consists of three or more layers (an input and an output layer with one or more hidden layers) of nonlinearly-activating nodes. Since MLPs are fully connected, each node in one layer connects with a certain weight w i j {\displaystyle w_{ij}} to every node in the following layer. === Learning === Learning occurs in the perceptron by changing connection weights after each piece of data is processed, based on the amount of error in the output compared to the expected result. This is an example of supervised learning, and is carried out through backpropagation, a generalization of the least mean squares algorithm in the linear perceptron. We can represent the degree of error in an output node j {\displaystyle j} in the n {\displaystyle n} th data point (training example) by e j ( n ) = d j ( n ) − y j ( n ) {\displaystyle e_{j}(n)=d_{j}(n)-y_{j}(n)} , where d j ( n ) {\displaystyle d_{j}(n)} is the desired target value for n {\displaystyle n} th data point at node j {\displaystyle j} , and y j ( n ) {\displaystyle y_{j}(n)} is the value produced by the perceptron at node j {\displaystyle j} when the n {\displaystyle n} th data point is given as an input. The node weights can then be adjusted based on corrections that minimize the error in the entire output for the n {\displaystyle n} th data point, given by E ( n ) = 1 2 ∑ output node j e j 2 ( n ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {E}}(n)={\frac {1}{2}}\sum _{{\text{output node }}j}e_{j}^{2}(n)} . Using gradient descent, the change in each weight w i j {\displaystyle w_{ij}} is Δ w j i ( n ) = − η ∂ E ( n ) ∂ v j ( n ) y i ( n ) {\displaystyle \Delta w_{ji}(n)=-\eta {\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}(n)}{\partial v_{j}(n)}}y_{i}(n)} where y i ( n ) {\displaystyle y_{i}(n)} is the output of the previous neuron i {\displaystyle i} , and η {\displaystyle \eta } is the learning rate, which is selected to ensure that the weights quickly converge to a response, without oscillations. In the previous expression, ∂ E ( n ) ∂ v j ( n ) {\displaystyle {\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}(n)}{\partial v_{j}(n)}}} denotes the partial derivate of the error E ( n ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {E}}(n)} according to the weighted sum v j ( n ) {\displaystyle v_{j}(n)} of the input connections of neuron i {\displaystyle i} . The derivative to be calculated depends on the induced local field v j {\displaystyle v_{j}} , which itself varies. It is easy to prove that for an output node this derivative can be simplified to − ∂ E ( n ) ∂ v j ( n ) = e j ( n ) ϕ ′ ( v j ( n ) ) {\displaystyle -{\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}(n)}{\partial v_{j}(n)}}=e_{j}(n)\phi ^{\prime }(v_{j}(n))} where ϕ ′ {\displaystyle \phi ^{\prime }} is the derivative of the activation function described above, which itself does not vary. The analysis is more difficult for the change in weights to a hidden node, but it can be shown that the relevant derivative is − ∂ E ( n ) ∂ v j ( n ) = ϕ ′ ( v j ( n ) ) ∑ k − ∂ E ( n ) ∂ v k ( n ) w k j ( n ) {\displaystyle -{\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}(n)}{\partial v_{j}(n)}}=\phi ^{\prime }(v_{j}(n))\sum _{k}-{\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}(n)}{\partial v_{k}(n)}}w_{kj}(n)} . This depends on the change in weights of the k {\displaystyle k} th nodes, which represent the output layer. So to change the hidden layer weights, the output layer weights change according to the derivative of the activation function, and so this algorithm represents a backpropagation of the activation function.

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  • Tandem (app)

    Tandem (app)

    Tandem is a mobile language exchange and language learning app. == History == Tandem was founded in Hannover, Germany in 2014 by Arnd Aschentrup, Tobias Dickmeis, and Matthias Kleimann. Prior to founding Tandem, the trio had launched Vive, a members-only mobile video chat platform. Tandem has been criticised for not accepting members into the community immediately, as opposed to competitors including HelloTalk, Speaky or Cafehub. In some countries, there is a waiting list and applicants can wait up to seven days for their application to be processed by human moderators. In 2015, Tandem completed its first funding round (seed funding) of €600,000. Participating investors included business angels such as Atlantic Labs (Christophe Maire), Hannover Beteiligungsfonds, Marcus Englert (Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Rocket Internet SE ), Catagonia, Ludwig zu Salm, Florian Langenscheidt, Heiko Hubertz, Martin Sinner, and Zehden Enterprises. In 2016, the company received a further €2 million from new investors Rubylight and Faber Ventures, as well as from existing investors Hannover Beteiligungsfonds, Atlantic Labs, and Zehden Enterprises. Since 2018, the premium membership Tandem Pro has been available, which offers members unlimited access to all language learning features of the app as well as the removal of advertising for a monthly fee.

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  • Log-linear model

    Log-linear model

    A log-linear model is a mathematical model that takes the form of a function whose logarithm equals a linear combination of the parameters of the model, which makes it possible to apply (possibly multivariate) linear regression. That is, it has the general form exp ⁡ ( c + ∑ i w i f i ( X ) ) {\displaystyle \exp \left(c+\sum _{i}w_{i}f_{i}(X)\right)} , in which the fi(X) are quantities that are functions of the variable X, in general a vector of values, while c and the wi stand for the model parameters. The term may specifically be used for: A log-linear plot or graph, which is a type of semi-log plot. Poisson regression for contingency tables, a type of generalized linear model. The specific applications of log-linear models are where the output quantity lies in the range 0 to ∞, for values of the independent variables X, or more immediately, the transformed quantities fi(X) in the range −∞ to +∞. This may be contrasted to logistic models, similar to the logistic function, for which the output quantity lies in the range 0 to 1. Thus the contexts where these models are useful or realistic often depends on the range of the values being modelled.

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  • Multilayer perceptron

    Multilayer perceptron

    In deep learning, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a kind of modern feedforward neural network consisting of fully connected neurons with nonlinear activation functions, organized in layers, notable for being able to distinguish data that is not linearly separable. Modern neural networks are trained using backpropagation and are colloquially referred to as "vanilla" networks. MLPs grew out of an effort to improve on single-layer perceptrons, which could only be applied to linearly separable data. A perceptron traditionally used a Heaviside step function as its nonlinear activation function. However, the backpropagation algorithm requires that modern MLPs use continuous activation functions such as sigmoid or ReLU. Multilayer perceptrons form the basis of deep learning, and are applicable across a vast set of diverse domains. == Timeline == In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts proposed the binary artificial neuron as a logical model of biological neural networks. In 1958, Frank Rosenblatt proposed the multilayered perceptron model, consisting of an input layer, a hidden layer with randomized weights that did not learn, and an output layer with learnable connections. In 1962, Rosenblatt published many variants and experiments on perceptrons in his book Principles of Neurodynamics, including up to 2 trainable layers by "back-propagating errors". However, it was not the backpropagation algorithm, and he did not have a general method for training multiple layers. In 1965, Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko and Valentin Lapa published Group Method of Data Handling. It was one of the first deep learning methods, used to train an eight-layer neural net in 1971. In 1967, Shun'ichi Amari reported the first multilayered neural network trained by stochastic gradient descent, was able to classify non-linearily separable pattern classes. Amari's student Saito conducted the computer experiments, using a five-layered feedforward network with two learning layers. Backpropagation was independently developed multiple times in early 1970s. The earliest published instance was Seppo Linnainmaa's master thesis (1970). Paul Werbos developed it independently in 1971, but had difficulty publishing it until 1982. In 1986, David E. Rumelhart et al. popularized backpropagation. In 2003, interest in backpropagation networks returned due to the successes of deep learning being applied to language modelling by Yoshua Bengio with co-authors. In 2021, a very simple NN architecture combining two deep MLPs with skip connections and layer normalizations was designed and called MLP-Mixer; its realizations featuring 19 to 431 millions of parameters were shown to be comparable to vision transformers of similar size on ImageNet and similar image classification tasks. == Mathematical foundations == === Activation function === If a multilayer perceptron has a linear activation function in all neurons, that is, a linear function that maps the weighted inputs to the output of each neuron, then linear algebra shows that any number of layers can be reduced to a two-layer input-output model. In MLPs some neurons use a nonlinear activation function that was developed to model the frequency of action potentials, or firing, of biological neurons. The two historically common activation functions are both sigmoids, and are described by y ( v i ) = tanh ⁡ ( v i ) and y ( v i ) = ( 1 + e − v i ) − 1 {\displaystyle y(v_{i})=\tanh(v_{i})~~{\textrm {and}}~~y(v_{i})=(1+e^{-v_{i}})^{-1}} . The first is a hyperbolic tangent that ranges from −1 to 1, while the other is the logistic function, which is similar in shape but ranges from 0 to 1. Here y i {\displaystyle y_{i}} is the output of the i {\displaystyle i} th node (neuron) and v i {\displaystyle v_{i}} is the weighted sum of the input connections. Alternative activation functions have been proposed, including the rectifier and softplus functions. More specialized activation functions include radial basis functions (used in radial basis networks, another class of supervised neural network models). In recent developments of deep learning the rectified linear unit (ReLU) is more frequently used as one of the possible ways to overcome the numerical problems related to the sigmoids. === Layers === The MLP consists of three or more layers (an input and an output layer with one or more hidden layers) of nonlinearly-activating nodes. Since MLPs are fully connected, each node in one layer connects with a certain weight w i j {\displaystyle w_{ij}} to every node in the following layer. === Learning === Learning occurs in the perceptron by changing connection weights after each piece of data is processed, based on the amount of error in the output compared to the expected result. This is an example of supervised learning, and is carried out through backpropagation, a generalization of the least mean squares algorithm in the linear perceptron. We can represent the degree of error in an output node j {\displaystyle j} in the n {\displaystyle n} th data point (training example) by e j ( n ) = d j ( n ) − y j ( n ) {\displaystyle e_{j}(n)=d_{j}(n)-y_{j}(n)} , where d j ( n ) {\displaystyle d_{j}(n)} is the desired target value for n {\displaystyle n} th data point at node j {\displaystyle j} , and y j ( n ) {\displaystyle y_{j}(n)} is the value produced by the perceptron at node j {\displaystyle j} when the n {\displaystyle n} th data point is given as an input. The node weights can then be adjusted based on corrections that minimize the error in the entire output for the n {\displaystyle n} th data point, given by E ( n ) = 1 2 ∑ output node j e j 2 ( n ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {E}}(n)={\frac {1}{2}}\sum _{{\text{output node }}j}e_{j}^{2}(n)} . Using gradient descent, the change in each weight w i j {\displaystyle w_{ij}} is Δ w j i ( n ) = − η ∂ E ( n ) ∂ v j ( n ) y i ( n ) {\displaystyle \Delta w_{ji}(n)=-\eta {\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}(n)}{\partial v_{j}(n)}}y_{i}(n)} where y i ( n ) {\displaystyle y_{i}(n)} is the output of the previous neuron i {\displaystyle i} , and η {\displaystyle \eta } is the learning rate, which is selected to ensure that the weights quickly converge to a response, without oscillations. In the previous expression, ∂ E ( n ) ∂ v j ( n ) {\displaystyle {\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}(n)}{\partial v_{j}(n)}}} denotes the partial derivate of the error E ( n ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {E}}(n)} according to the weighted sum v j ( n ) {\displaystyle v_{j}(n)} of the input connections of neuron i {\displaystyle i} . The derivative to be calculated depends on the induced local field v j {\displaystyle v_{j}} , which itself varies. It is easy to prove that for an output node this derivative can be simplified to − ∂ E ( n ) ∂ v j ( n ) = e j ( n ) ϕ ′ ( v j ( n ) ) {\displaystyle -{\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}(n)}{\partial v_{j}(n)}}=e_{j}(n)\phi ^{\prime }(v_{j}(n))} where ϕ ′ {\displaystyle \phi ^{\prime }} is the derivative of the activation function described above, which itself does not vary. The analysis is more difficult for the change in weights to a hidden node, but it can be shown that the relevant derivative is − ∂ E ( n ) ∂ v j ( n ) = ϕ ′ ( v j ( n ) ) ∑ k − ∂ E ( n ) ∂ v k ( n ) w k j ( n ) {\displaystyle -{\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}(n)}{\partial v_{j}(n)}}=\phi ^{\prime }(v_{j}(n))\sum _{k}-{\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}(n)}{\partial v_{k}(n)}}w_{kj}(n)} . This depends on the change in weights of the k {\displaystyle k} th nodes, which represent the output layer. So to change the hidden layer weights, the output layer weights change according to the derivative of the activation function, and so this algorithm represents a backpropagation of the activation function.

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  • Kernel method

    Kernel method

    In machine learning, kernel machines are a class of algorithms for pattern analysis, whose best known member is the support-vector machine (SVM). These methods involve using linear classifiers to solve nonlinear problems. The general task of pattern analysis is to find and study general types of relations (for example clusters, rankings, principal components, correlations, classifications) in datasets. For many algorithms that solve these tasks, the data in raw representation have to be explicitly transformed into feature vector representations via a user-specified feature map: in contrast, kernel methods require only a user-specified kernel, i.e., a similarity function over all pairs of data points computed using inner products. The feature map in kernel machines is infinite dimensional but only requires a finite dimensional matrix from user-input according to the representer theorem. Kernel machines are slow to compute for datasets larger than a couple of thousand examples without parallel processing. Kernel methods owe their name to the use of kernel functions, which enable them to operate in a high-dimensional, implicit feature space without ever computing the coordinates of the data in that space, but rather by simply computing the inner products between the images of all pairs of data in the feature space. This operation is often computationally cheaper than the explicit computation of the coordinates. This approach is called the "kernel trick". Kernel functions have been introduced for sequence data, graphs, text, images, as well as vectors. Algorithms capable of operating with kernels include the kernel perceptron, support-vector machines (SVM), Gaussian processes, principal components analysis (PCA), canonical correlation analysis, ridge regression, spectral clustering, linear adaptive filters and many others. Most kernel algorithms are based on convex optimization or eigenproblems and are statistically well-founded. Typically, their statistical properties are analyzed using statistical learning theory (for example, using Rademacher complexity). == Motivation and informal explanation == Kernel methods can be thought of as instance-based learners: rather than learning some fixed set of parameters corresponding to the features of their inputs, they instead "remember" the i {\displaystyle i} -th training example ( x i , y i ) {\displaystyle (\mathbf {x} _{i},y_{i})} and learn for it a corresponding weight w i {\displaystyle w_{i}} . Prediction for unlabeled inputs, i.e., those not in the training set, are treated by the application of a similarity function k {\displaystyle k} , called a kernel, between the unlabeled input x ′ {\displaystyle \mathbf {x'} } and each of the training inputs x i {\displaystyle \mathbf {x} _{i}} . For instance, a kernelized binary classifier typically computes a weighted sum of similarities y ^ = sgn ⁡ ∑ i = 1 n w i y i k ( x i , x ′ ) , {\displaystyle {\hat {y}}=\operatorname {sgn} \sum _{i=1}^{n}w_{i}y_{i}k(\mathbf {x} _{i},\mathbf {x'} ),} where y ^ ∈ { − 1 , + 1 } {\displaystyle {\hat {y}}\in \{-1,+1\}} is the kernelized binary classifier's predicted label for the unlabeled input x ′ {\displaystyle \mathbf {x'} } whose hidden true label y {\displaystyle y} is of interest; k : X × X → R {\displaystyle k\colon {\mathcal {X}}\times {\mathcal {X}}\to \mathbb {R} } is the kernel function that measures similarity between any pair of inputs x , x ′ ∈ X {\displaystyle \mathbf {x} ,\mathbf {x'} \in {\mathcal {X}}} ; the sum ranges over the n labeled examples { ( x i , y i ) } i = 1 n {\displaystyle \{(\mathbf {x} _{i},y_{i})\}_{i=1}^{n}} in the classifier's training set, with y i ∈ { − 1 , + 1 } {\displaystyle y_{i}\in \{-1,+1\}} ; the w i ∈ R {\displaystyle w_{i}\in \mathbb {R} } are the weights for the training examples, as determined by the learning algorithm; the sign function sgn {\displaystyle \operatorname {sgn} } determines whether the predicted classification y ^ {\displaystyle {\hat {y}}} comes out positive or negative. Kernel classifiers were described as early as the 1960s, with the invention of the kernel perceptron. They rose to great prominence with the popularity of the support-vector machine (SVM) in the 1990s, when the SVM was found to be competitive with neural networks on tasks such as handwriting recognition. == Mathematics: the kernel trick == The kernel trick avoids the explicit mapping that is needed to get linear learning algorithms to learn a nonlinear function or decision boundary. For all x {\displaystyle \mathbf {x} } and x ′ {\displaystyle \mathbf {x'} } in the input space X {\displaystyle {\mathcal {X}}} , certain functions k ( x , x ′ ) {\displaystyle k(\mathbf {x} ,\mathbf {x'} )} can be expressed as an inner product in another space V {\displaystyle {\mathcal {V}}} . The function k : X × X → R {\displaystyle k\colon {\mathcal {X}}\times {\mathcal {X}}\to \mathbb {R} } is often referred to as a kernel or a kernel function. The word "kernel" is used in mathematics to denote a weighting function for a weighted sum or integral. Certain problems in machine learning have more structure than an arbitrary weighting function k {\displaystyle k} . The computation is made much simpler if the kernel can be written in the form of a "feature map" φ : X → V {\displaystyle \varphi \colon {\mathcal {X}}\to {\mathcal {V}}} which satisfies k ( x , x ′ ) = ⟨ φ ( x ) , φ ( x ′ ) ⟩ V . {\displaystyle k(\mathbf {x} ,\mathbf {x'} )=\langle \varphi (\mathbf {x} ),\varphi (\mathbf {x'} )\rangle _{\mathcal {V}}.} The key restriction is that ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ V {\displaystyle \langle \cdot ,\cdot \rangle _{\mathcal {V}}} must be a proper inner product. On the other hand, an explicit representation for φ {\displaystyle \varphi } is not necessary, as long as V {\displaystyle {\mathcal {V}}} is an inner product space. The alternative follows from Mercer's theorem: an implicitly defined function φ {\displaystyle \varphi } exists whenever the space X {\displaystyle {\mathcal {X}}} can be equipped with a suitable measure ensuring the function k {\displaystyle k} satisfies Mercer's condition. Mercer's theorem is similar to a generalization of the result from linear algebra that associates an inner product to any positive-definite matrix. In fact, Mercer's condition can be reduced to this simpler case. If we choose as our measure the counting measure μ ( T ) = | T | {\displaystyle \mu (T)=|T|} for all T ⊂ X {\displaystyle T\subset X} , which counts the number of points inside the set T {\displaystyle T} , then the integral in Mercer's theorem reduces to a summation ∑ i = 1 n ∑ j = 1 n k ( x i , x j ) c i c j ≥ 0. {\displaystyle \sum _{i=1}^{n}\sum _{j=1}^{n}k(\mathbf {x} _{i},\mathbf {x} _{j})c_{i}c_{j}\geq 0.} If this summation holds for all finite sequences of points ( x 1 , … , x n ) {\displaystyle (\mathbf {x} _{1},\dotsc ,\mathbf {x} _{n})} in X {\displaystyle {\mathcal {X}}} and all choices of n {\displaystyle n} real-valued coefficients ( c 1 , … , c n ) {\displaystyle (c_{1},\dots ,c_{n})} (cf. positive definite kernel), then the function k {\displaystyle k} satisfies Mercer's condition. Some algorithms that depend on arbitrary relationships in the native space X {\displaystyle {\mathcal {X}}} would, in fact, have a linear interpretation in a different setting: the range space of φ {\displaystyle \varphi } . The linear interpretation gives us insight about the algorithm. Furthermore, there is often no need to compute φ {\displaystyle \varphi } directly during computation, as is the case with support-vector machines. Some cite this running time shortcut as the primary benefit. Researchers also use it to justify the meanings and properties of existing algorithms. Theoretically, a Gram matrix K ∈ R n × n {\displaystyle \mathbf {K} \in \mathbb {R} ^{n\times n}} with respect to { x 1 , … , x n } {\displaystyle \{\mathbf {x} _{1},\dotsc ,\mathbf {x} _{n}\}} (sometimes also called a "kernel matrix"), where K i j = k ( x i , x j ) {\displaystyle K_{ij}=k(\mathbf {x} _{i},\mathbf {x} _{j})} , must be positive semi-definite (PSD). Empirically, for machine learning heuristics, choices of a function k {\displaystyle k} that do not satisfy Mercer's condition may still perform reasonably if k {\displaystyle k} at least approximates the intuitive idea of similarity. Regardless of whether k {\displaystyle k} is a Mercer kernel, k {\displaystyle k} may still be referred to as a "kernel". If the kernel function k {\displaystyle k} is also a covariance function as used in Gaussian processes, then the Gram matrix K {\displaystyle \mathbf {K} } can also be called a covariance matrix. == Applications == Application areas of kernel methods are diverse and include geostatistics, kriging, inverse distance weighting, 3D reconstruction, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, information extraction and handwriting recognition. == Popular kernels == Fisher kernel Graph kernels Kernel smoother Polynomial kernel Radial basis function kern

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  • List of JavaScript libraries

    List of JavaScript libraries

    This is a list of notable JavaScript libraries. == Constraint programming == Cassowary (software) CHR.js == DOM (manipulation) oriented == Google Polymer Dojo Toolkit jQuery MooTools Prototype JavaScript Framework == Graphical/visualization (canvas, SVG, or WebGL related) == AnyChart Apache ECharts Babylon.js Chart.js Cytoscape D3.js Dojo Toolkit FusionCharts Google Charts JointJS p5.js Plotly.js Processing.js Raphaël RGraph SWFObject Teechart Three.js Velocity.js Verge3D Webix == GUI (Graphical user interface) and widget related == Angular (application platform) by Google AngularJS by Google Bootstrap Dojo Widgets Ext JS by Sencha Foundation by ZURB jQuery UI jQWidgets OpenUI5 by SAP Polymer (library) by Google qooxdoo React.js by Meta/Facebook Vue.js Webix WinJS Svelte === No longer actively developed === Glow Lively Kernel Script.aculo.us YUI Library == Pure JavaScript/Ajax == Google Closure Library JsPHP Microsoft's Ajax library MochiKit PDF.js Socket.IO Spry framework Underscore.js == Template systems == jQuery Mobile Mustache Jinja-JS Twig.js == Unit testing == Jasmine Mocha QUnit == Test automation == Playwright Cypress == Web-application related (MVC, MVVM) == Angular (application platform) by Google AngularJS by Google Backbone.js Echo Ember.js Enyo Express.js Ext JS Google Web Toolkit JsRender/JsViews Knockout Meteor Mojito MooTools Next.js Nuxt.js OpenUI5 by SAP Polymer (library) by Google Prototype JavaScript Framework qooxdoo React.js SproutCore svelte Vue.js == Other == Blockly Cannon.js MathJax Modernizr TensorFlow Brain.js

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  • Correlation clustering

    Correlation clustering

    Clustering is the problem of partitioning data points into groups based on similarity or dissimilarity. Correlation clustering is a clustering framework in which a set of objects is partitioned into clusters based on pairwise similarity and dissimilarity information, without requiring the number of clusters to be specified in advance. == Description of the problem == In machine learning, correlation clustering (also known as cluster editing) considers settings in which pairwise similarity or dissimilarity relationships between objects are known. A standard formulation models the input as an unweighted complete graph G = ( V , E ) {\displaystyle G=(V,E)} , where each edge is labeled either + {\displaystyle +} or − {\displaystyle -} (that is, the graph is a signed graph), indicating whether the corresponding endpoints are similar or dissimilar. The goal is to find a clustering (that is, a partition of V {\displaystyle V} ) that either maximizes the number of agreements—the sum of positive edges whose endpoints lie in the same cluster and negative edges whose endpoints lie in different clusters—or minimizes the number of disagreements—the sum of positive edges whose endpoints are separated and negative edges whose endpoints lie in the same cluster. Unlike other clustering methods such as k-means, correlation clustering does not require choosing the number of clusters k {\displaystyle k} in advance. It is not always possible to find a clustering with zero disagreements. For example, consider a triangle graph containing two positive edges and one negative edge. In this case, every clustering incurs at least one disagreement. Such configurations are referred to in the literature as bad triangles. From a computational perspective, optimizing the correlation clustering objective is challenging. The (decision version of the) problem is NP-complete. A large body of subsequent work has developed approximation algorithms for correlation clustering under various assumptions, including complete or general graphs and unweighted or weighted graphs, for both minimization and maximization objectives. This problem is considered one of the fundamental combinatorial optimization problems, and many algorithmic techniques have been developed to address it. The problem has also been studied extensively across multiple disciplines. A comprehensive literature review of early correlation clustering research is provided by Wahid and Hassini. == Formal Definitions == Let G = ( V , E ) {\displaystyle G=(V,E)} be a graph with nodes V {\displaystyle V} and edges E {\displaystyle E} . A clustering of G {\displaystyle G} is a partition of its node set Π = { π 1 , … , π k } {\displaystyle \Pi =\{\pi _{1},\dots ,\pi _{k}\}} with V = π 1 ∪ ⋯ ∪ π k {\displaystyle V=\pi _{1}\cup \dots \cup \pi _{k}} and π i ∩ π j = ∅ {\displaystyle \pi _{i}\cap \pi _{j}=\emptyset } for i ≠ j {\displaystyle i\neq j} . For a given clustering Π {\displaystyle \Pi } , let δ ( Π ) = { { u , v } ∈ E ∣ { u , v } ⊈ π ∀ π ∈ Π } {\displaystyle \delta (\Pi )=\{\{u,v\}\in E\mid \{u,v\}\not \subseteq \pi \;\forall \pi \in \Pi \}} denote the subset of edges of G {\displaystyle G} whose endpoints are in different subsets of the clustering Π {\displaystyle \Pi } . Now, let w : E → R ≥ 0 {\displaystyle w\colon E\to \mathbb {R} _{\geq 0}} be a function that assigns a non-negative weight to each edge of the graph and let E = E + ∪ E − {\displaystyle E=E^{+}\cup E^{-}} be a partition of the edges into attractive ( E + {\displaystyle E^{+}} ) and repulsive ( E − {\displaystyle E^{-}} ) edges; that is, the edges are signed. The minimum disagreement correlation clustering problem is the following optimization problem: minimize Π ∑ e ∈ E + ∩ δ ( Π ) w e + ∑ e ∈ E − ∖ δ ( Π ) w e . {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&{\underset {\Pi }{\operatorname {minimize} }}&&\sum _{e\in E^{+}\cap \delta (\Pi )}w_{e}+\sum _{e\in E^{-}\setminus \delta (\Pi )}w_{e}\;.\end{aligned}}} Here, the set E + ∩ δ ( Π ) {\displaystyle E^{+}\cap \delta (\Pi )} contains the attractive edges whose endpoints are in different components with respect to the clustering Π {\displaystyle \Pi } and the set E − ∖ δ ( Π ) {\displaystyle E^{-}\setminus \delta (\Pi )} contains the repulsive edges whose endpoints are in the same component with respect to the clustering Π {\displaystyle \Pi } . Together these two sets contain all edges that disagree with the clustering Π {\displaystyle \Pi } . Similarly to the minimum disagreement correlation clustering problem, the maximum agreement correlation clustering problem is defined as maximize Π ∑ e ∈ E + ∖ δ ( Π ) w e + ∑ e ∈ E − ∩ δ ( Π ) w e . {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&{\underset {\Pi }{\operatorname {maximize} }}&&\sum _{e\in E^{+}\setminus \delta (\Pi )}w_{e}+\sum _{e\in E^{-}\cap \delta (\Pi )}w_{e}\;.\end{aligned}}} Here, the set E + ∖ δ ( Π ) {\displaystyle E^{+}\setminus \delta (\Pi )} contains the attractive edges whose endpoints are in the same component with respect to the clustering Π {\displaystyle \Pi } and the set E − ∩ δ ( Π ) {\displaystyle E^{-}\cap \delta (\Pi )} contains the repulsive edges whose endpoints are in different components with respect to the clustering Π {\displaystyle \Pi } . Together these two sets contain all edges that agree with the clustering Π {\displaystyle \Pi } . Instead of formulating the correlation clustering problem in terms of non-negative edge weights and a partition of the edges into attractive and repulsive edges the problem is also formulated in terms of positive and negative edge costs without partitioning the set of edges explicitly. For given weights w : E → R ≥ 0 {\displaystyle w\colon E\to \mathbb {R} _{\geq 0}} and a given partition E = E + ∪ E − {\displaystyle E=E^{+}\cup E^{-}} of the edges into attractive and repulsive edges, the edge costs can be defined by c e = { w e if e ∈ E + − w e if e ∈ E − {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}c_{e}={\begin{cases}\;\;w_{e}&{\text{if }}e\in E^{+}\\-w_{e}&{\text{if }}e\in E^{-}\end{cases}}\end{aligned}}} for all e ∈ E {\displaystyle e\in E} . An edge whose endpoints are in different clusters is said to be cut. The set δ ( Π ) {\displaystyle \delta (\Pi )} of all edges that are cut is often called a multicut of G {\displaystyle G} . The minimum cost multicut problem is the problem of finding a clustering Π {\displaystyle \Pi } of G {\displaystyle G} such that the sum of the costs of the edges whose endpoints are in different clusters is minimal: minimize Π ∑ e ∈ δ ( Π ) c e . {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&{\underset {\Pi }{\operatorname {minimize} }}&&\sum _{e\in \delta (\Pi )}c_{e}\;.\end{aligned}}} Similar to the minimum cost multicut problem, coalition structure generation in weighted graph games is the problem of finding a clustering such that the sum of the costs of the edges that are not cut is maximal: maximize Π ∑ e ∈ E ∖ δ ( Π ) c e . {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&{\underset {\Pi }{\operatorname {maximize} }}&&\sum _{e\in E\setminus \delta (\Pi )}c_{e}\;.\end{aligned}}} This formulation is also known as the clique partitioning problem. It can be shown that all four problems that are formulated above are equivalent. This means that a clustering that is optimal with respect to any of the four objectives is optimal for all of the four objectives. == Algorithms == If the graph admits a clustering with zero disagreements, then deleting all negative edges and computing the connected components of the remaining graph yields an optimal clustering. A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of such a clustering was given by Davis: no cycle in the graph may contain exactly one negative edge. Bansal et al. discuss the NP-completeness proof and also present both a constant factor approximation algorithm and polynomial-time approximation scheme to find the clusters in this setting. Ailon et al. propose a randomized 3-approximation algorithm for the same problem. CC-Pivot(G=(V,E+,E−)) Pick random pivot i ∈ V Set C = { i } {\displaystyle C=\{i\}} , V'=Ø For all j ∈ V, j ≠ i; If (i,j) ∈ E+ then Add j to C Else (If (i,j) ∈ E−) Add j to V' Let G' be the subgraph induced by V' Return clustering C,CC-Pivot(G') The authors show that the above algorithm is a 3-approximation algorithm for correlation clustering. The best polynomial-time approximation algorithm known at the moment for this problem achieves a ~2.06 approximation by rounding a linear program, as shown by Chawla, Makarychev, Schramm, and Yaroslavtsev. Karpinski and Schudy proved existence of a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for that problem on complete graphs and fixed number of clusters. == Optimal number of clusters == In 2011, it was shown by Bagon and Galun that the optimization of the correlation clustering functional is closely related to well known discrete optimization methods. In their work they proposed a probabilistic analysis of the underlying implicit model that allows the correlation clustering functional to estimate the

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  • Online machine learning

    Online machine learning

    In computer science, online machine learning is a method of machine learning in which data becomes available in a sequential order and is used to update the best predictor for future data at each step, as opposed to batch learning techniques which generate the best predictor by learning on the entire training data set at once. Online learning is a common technique used in areas of machine learning where it is computationally infeasible to train over the entire dataset, requiring the need of out-of-core algorithms. It is also used in situations where it is necessary for the algorithm to dynamically adapt to new patterns in the data, or when the data itself is generated as a function of time, e.g., prediction of prices in the financial international markets. Online learning algorithms may be prone to catastrophic interference, a problem that can be addressed by incremental learning approaches. Online machine learning algorithms find applications in a wide variety of fields such as sponsored search to maximize ad revenue, portfolio optimization, shortest path prediction (with stochastic weights, e.g. traffic on roads for a maps application), spam filtering, real-time fraud detection, dynamic pricing for e-commerce, etc. There is also growing interest in usage of online learning paradigms for LLMs to enable continuous, real-time adaptation after the initial training. == Introduction == In the setting of supervised learning, a function of f : X → Y {\displaystyle f:X\to Y} is to be learned, where X {\displaystyle X} is thought of as a space of inputs and Y {\displaystyle Y} as a space of outputs, that predicts well on instances that are drawn from a joint probability distribution p ( x , y ) {\displaystyle p(x,y)} on X × Y {\displaystyle X\times Y} . In reality, the learner never knows the true distribution p ( x , y ) {\displaystyle p(x,y)} over instances. Instead, the learner usually has access to a training set of examples ( x 1 , y 1 ) , … , ( x n , y n ) {\displaystyle (x_{1},y_{1}),\ldots ,(x_{n},y_{n})} . In this setting, the loss function is given as V : Y × Y → R {\displaystyle V:Y\times Y\to \mathbb {R} } , such that V ( f ( x ) , y ) {\displaystyle V(f(x),y)} measures the difference between the predicted value f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} and the true value y {\displaystyle y} . The ideal goal is to select a function f ∈ H {\displaystyle f\in {\mathcal {H}}} , where H {\displaystyle {\mathcal {H}}} is a space of functions called a hypothesis space, so that some notion of total loss is minimized. Depending on the type of model (statistical or adversarial), one can devise different notions of loss, which lead to different learning algorithms. == Statistical view of online learning == In statistical learning models, the training sample ( x i , y i ) {\displaystyle (x_{i},y_{i})} are assumed to have been drawn from the true distribution p ( x , y ) {\displaystyle p(x,y)} and the objective is to minimize the expected "risk" I [ f ] = E [ V ( f ( x ) , y ) ] = ∫ V ( f ( x ) , y ) d p ( x , y ) . {\displaystyle I[f]=\mathbb {E} [V(f(x),y)]=\int V(f(x),y)\,dp(x,y)\ .} A common paradigm in this situation is to estimate a function f ^ {\displaystyle {\hat {f}}} through empirical risk minimization or regularized empirical risk minimization (usually Tikhonov regularization). The choice of loss function here gives rise to several well-known learning algorithms such as regularized least squares and support vector machines. A purely online model in this category would learn based on just the new input ( x t + 1 , y t + 1 ) {\displaystyle (x_{t+1},y_{t+1})} , the current best predictor f t {\displaystyle f_{t}} and some extra stored information (which is usually expected to have storage requirements independent of training data size). For many formulations, for example nonlinear kernel methods, true online learning is not possible, though a form of hybrid online learning with recursive algorithms can be used where f t + 1 {\displaystyle f_{t+1}} is permitted to depend on f t {\displaystyle f_{t}} and all previous data points ( x 1 , y 1 ) , … , ( x t , y t ) {\displaystyle (x_{1},y_{1}),\ldots ,(x_{t},y_{t})} . In this case, the space requirements are no longer guaranteed to be constant since it requires storing all previous data points, but the solution may take less time to compute with the addition of a new data point, as compared to batch learning techniques. A common strategy to overcome the above issues is to learn using mini-batches, which process a small batch of b ≥ 1 {\displaystyle b\geq 1} data points at a time, this can be considered as pseudo-online learning for b {\displaystyle b} much smaller than the total number of training points. Mini-batch techniques are used with repeated passing over the training data to obtain optimized out-of-core versions of machine learning algorithms, for example, stochastic gradient descent. When combined with backpropagation, this is currently the de facto training method for training artificial neural networks. === Example: linear least squares === The simple example of linear least squares is used to explain a variety of ideas in online learning. The ideas are general enough to be applied to other settings, for example, with other convex loss functions. === Batch learning === Consider the setting of supervised learning with f {\displaystyle f} being a linear function to be learned: f ( x j ) = ⟨ w , x j ⟩ = w ⋅ x j {\displaystyle f(x_{j})=\langle w,x_{j}\rangle =w\cdot x_{j}} where x j ∈ R d {\displaystyle x_{j}\in \mathbb {R} ^{d}} is a vector of inputs (data points) and w ∈ R d {\displaystyle w\in \mathbb {R} ^{d}} is a linear filter vector. The goal is to compute the filter vector w {\displaystyle w} . To this end, a square loss function V ( f ( x j ) , y j ) = ( f ( x j ) − y j ) 2 = ( ⟨ w , x j ⟩ − y j ) 2 {\displaystyle V(f(x_{j}),y_{j})=(f(x_{j})-y_{j})^{2}=(\langle w,x_{j}\rangle -y_{j})^{2}} is used to compute the vector w {\displaystyle w} that minimizes the empirical loss I n [ w ] = ∑ j = 1 n V ( ⟨ w , x j ⟩ , y j ) = ∑ j = 1 n ( x j T w − y j ) 2 {\displaystyle I_{n}[w]=\sum _{j=1}^{n}V(\langle w,x_{j}\rangle ,y_{j})=\sum _{j=1}^{n}(x_{j}^{\mathsf {T}}w-y_{j})^{2}} where y j ∈ R . {\displaystyle y_{j}\in \mathbb {R} .} Let X {\displaystyle X} be the i × d {\displaystyle i\times d} data matrix and y ∈ R i {\displaystyle y\in \mathbb {R} ^{i}} is the column vector of target values after the arrival of the first i {\displaystyle i} data points. Assuming that the covariance matrix Σ i = X T X {\displaystyle \Sigma _{i}=X^{\mathsf {T}}X} is invertible (otherwise it is preferential to proceed in a similar fashion with Tikhonov regularization), the best solution f ∗ ( x ) = ⟨ w ∗ , x ⟩ {\displaystyle f^{}(x)=\langle w^{},x\rangle } to the linear least squares problem is given by w ∗ = ( X T X ) − 1 X T y = Σ i − 1 ∑ j = 1 i x j y j . {\displaystyle w^{}=(X^{\mathsf {T}}X)^{-1}X^{\mathsf {T}}y=\Sigma _{i}^{-1}\sum _{j=1}^{i}x_{j}y_{j}.} Now, calculating the covariance matrix Σ i = ∑ j = 1 i x j x j T {\displaystyle \Sigma _{i}=\sum _{j=1}^{i}x_{j}x_{j}^{\mathsf {T}}} takes time O ( i d 2 ) {\displaystyle O(id^{2})} , inverting the d × d {\displaystyle d\times d} matrix takes time O ( d 3 ) {\displaystyle O(d^{3})} , while the rest of the multiplication takes time O ( d 2 ) {\displaystyle O(d^{2})} , giving a total time of O ( i d 2 + d 3 ) {\displaystyle O(id^{2}+d^{3})} . When there are n {\displaystyle n} total points in the dataset, to recompute the solution after the arrival of every datapoint i = 1 , … , n {\displaystyle i=1,\ldots ,n} , the naive approach will have a total complexity O ( n 2 d 2 + n d 3 ) {\displaystyle O(n^{2}d^{2}+nd^{3})} . Note that when storing the matrix Σ i {\displaystyle \Sigma _{i}} , then updating it at each step needs only adding x i + 1 x i + 1 T {\displaystyle x_{i+1}x_{i+1}^{\mathsf {T}}} , which takes O ( d 2 ) {\displaystyle O(d^{2})} time, reducing the total time to O ( n d 2 + n d 3 ) = O ( n d 3 ) {\displaystyle O(nd^{2}+nd^{3})=O(nd^{3})} , but with an additional storage space of O ( d 2 ) {\displaystyle O(d^{2})} to store Σ i {\displaystyle \Sigma _{i}} . === Online learning: recursive least squares === The recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm considers an online approach to the least squares problem. It can be shown that by initialising w 0 = 0 ∈ R d {\displaystyle \textstyle w_{0}=0\in \mathbb {R} ^{d}} and Γ 0 = I ∈ R d × d {\displaystyle \textstyle \Gamma _{0}=I\in \mathbb {R} ^{d\times d}} , the solution of the linear least squares problem given in the previous section can be computed by the following iteration: Γ i = Γ i − 1 − Γ i − 1 x i x i T Γ i − 1 1 + x i T Γ i − 1 x i {\displaystyle \Gamma _{i}=\Gamma _{i-1}-{\frac {\Gamma _{i-1}x_{i}x_{i}^{\mathsf {T}}\Gamma _{i-1}}{1+x_{i}^{\mathsf {T}}\Gamma _{i-1}x_{i}}}} w i = w i − 1 − Γ i x i ( x i T w i − 1 − y i ) {\displaystyle w_{i}=w_{i-1}-\Gamma _{i}x_{i}\left(x_{i}^{\mathsf {T}}w_{

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