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Poster
Large Scale Distributed Sparse Precision Estimation
Huahua Wang · Arindam Banerjee · Cho-Jui Hsieh · Pradeep Ravikumar · Inderjit Dhillon

Fri Dec 06 07:00 PM -- 11:59 PM (PST) @ Harrah's Special Events Center, 2nd Floor

We consider the problem of sparse precision matrix estimation in high dimensions using the CLIME estimator, which has several desirable theoretical properties. We present an inexact alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) algorithm for CLIME, and establish rates of convergence for both the objective and optimality conditions. Further, we develop a large scale distributed framework for the computations, which scales to millions of dimensions and trillions of parameters, using hundreds of cores. The proposed framework solves CLIME in column-blocks and only involves elementwise operations and parallel matrix multiplications. We evaluate our algorithm on both shared-memory and distributed-memory architectures, which can use block cyclic distribution of data and parameters to achieve load balance and improve the efficiency in the use of memory hierarchies. Experimental results show that our algorithm is substantially more scalable than state-of-the-art methods and scales almost linearly with the number of cores.

Author Information

Huahua Wang (University of Minnesota, Twin Cites)
Arindam Banerjee (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Arindam Banerjee is a Professor at the Department of Computer & Engineering and a Resident Fellow at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His research interests are in machine learning, data mining, and applications in complex real-world problems in different areas including climate science, ecology, recommendation systems, text analysis, and finance. He has won several awards, including the NSF CAREER award (2010), the IBM Faculty Award (2013), and six best paper awards in top-tier conferences.

Cho-Jui Hsieh (UCLA)
Pradeep Ravikumar (Carnegie Mellon University)
Inderjit Dhillon (Google & UT Austin)

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