Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has become popular for solving large scale supervised machine learning optimization problems such as SVM, due to their strong theoretical guarantees. While the closely related Dual Coordinate Ascent (DCA) method has been implemented in various software packages, it has so far lacked good convergence analysis. This paper presents a new analysis of Stochastic Dua...

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This paper presents a formal analysis of popular text classification methods, focusing on their loss functions whose minimization is essential to the optimization of those methods, and whose decomposition into the trainingset loss and the model complexity enables cross-method comparisons on a common basis from an optimization point of view. Those methods include Support Vector Machines, Linear ...

Modern applications in sensitive domains such as biometrics and medicine frequently require the use of non-decomposable loss functions such as precision@k, F-measure etc. Compared to point loss functions such as hinge-loss, these offer much more fine grained control over prediction, but at the same time present novel challenges in terms of algorithm design and analysis. In this work we initiate...

BACKGROUND Annual US health-related productivity losses are estimated to reach some $260 billion, attributable not only to absenteeism but also to presenteeism (being present at work but working at a reduced capacity). The search for remedies has been hampered by the lack of accurate estimates of the loss of productivity and its true costs. To date, little effort has been made to assess the ava...

BACKGROUND Currently, various calculation methods for evaluating blood-loss in patients with total knee arthroplasty (TKA) are applied in clinical practice. However, different methods may yield different results. The purpose of this study was to determine the most reliable method for calculating blood-loss after primary TKA. METHODS We compared blood-loss in 245 patients who underwent primary...

To the Editor: In the American Heart Association’s (AHA) guidelines for the metabolic syndrome,1 the diagnosis of obesity is based on an abdominal circumference (AC) of 40 inches or more in males and 35 inches or more in females. For weight management, the AHA guidelines recommend reduction of weight to a body mass index (BMI) of less than 25 kg/m2. In this study, we compare that recommendation...