Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (NeurIPS 2021)
Zixiu Wang, Yiwen Guo, Hu Ding
In many machine learning tasks, a common approach for dealing with large-scale data is to build a small summary, {\em e.g.,} coreset, that can efficiently represent the original input. However, real-world datasets usually contain outliers and most existing coreset construction methods are not resilient against outliers (in particular, an outlier can be located arbitrarily in the space by an adversarial attacker). In this paper, we propose a novel robust coreset method for the {\em continuous-and-bounded learning} problems (with outliers) which includes a broad range of popular optimization objectives in machine learning, {\em e.g.,} logistic regression and $ k $-means clustering. Moreover, our robust coreset can be efficiently maintained in fully-dynamic environment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first robust and fully-dynamic coreset construction method for these optimization problems. Another highlight is that our coreset size can depend on the doubling dimension of the parameter space, rather than the VC dimension of the objective function which could be very large or even challenging to compute. Finally, we conduct the experiments on real-world datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed robust coreset method.