Regression with Linear Factored Functions

Many applications that use empirically estimated functions face a curse of dimensionality, because integrals over most function classes must be approximated by sampling. This paper introduces a novel regressionalgorithm that learns linear factored functions (LFF). This class of functions has structural properties that allow to analytically solve certain integrals and to calculate point-wise products. Applications like belief propagation and reinforcement learning can exploit these properties to break the curse and speed up computation. We derive a regularized greedy optimization scheme, that learns factored basis functions during training. The novel regression algorithm performs competitively to Gaussian processes on benchmark tasks, and the learned LFF functions are with 4-9 factored basis functions on average very compact.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: PKDD
• Authors: Wendelin Böhmer, Klaus Obermayer
• Keywords: Data Mining, PKDD 2015