Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_3
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper addresses the problem of distributed
estimation of underlying dynamic states (which is a geometric random walk)
on a graph. Estimate the underlying state is not hard is all the
observations are globally known. The main challenge here is to perform
local update based on information available from neighbors only. The
authors cast the problem into an online minimization of a separable,
time-varying cost function and then provide two methods to perform local
update on each node by employing distributed dual averaging methods. The
two methods differ in the way they choose the local loss function. Then
the necessary conditions for the convergence of beliefs are established.
By defining the steady state mean square deviation, the authors
provide a regret analysis of the two methods and establish a bound for the
regret. This paper is technically sound. The organization of the
paper is logical and clear. Main results of the paper seem to be
correct. As pointed out by the authors, there is a previous work
focusing of distributed estimation of the underlying world given a simple
random walk model [9]. [9] solves the special case where the graph is
a complete graph. This paper changes the underlying state model to a
geometric random walk and the analysis are conducted on a more general
graph. However, the problem this paper target at is of limited
practical impact. The underlying state is a geometric random walk with
a constant rate of change, which is assumed to be known apriori to all
agents. This constant rate of change could limit the application of
the proposed methods. It is hard to find a real world scenario where
the model could be used. Maybe the author could provide more
motivating examples.
Q2: Please summarize your
review in 1-2 sentences
This paper is technically sound and well written. The
applicable scenario of the proposed local update methods might be few.
Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_4
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper addresses the problem of predicting the
value of an hidden dynamic variable in a network of (cooperative) agents
with limited communications and noisy observations.
The
communication process between neighbors limits the effect of the noise in
the observations.
The authors provide a regret analysis and study
the impact of new connections in the network.
To the best of my
knowledge the content is original, but I am not familiar with some of the
papers reported in the references.
I suggest adding some examples
of practical application in the introduction.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
Overall, this is an interesting paper but probably its
impact in practice will be pretty limited. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_5
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper studies the problem of online learning in a
social network. The state of the world is dynamic, and each individual
observes a private signal about the state of the world from its
connections (friends). The paper introduces two update mechanisms for
estimating the true state. Steady mean-square deviation (MSD) is used to
measure the difference between the estimates and the truth. The paper
shows that one of the estimators recovers the optimal MSD. Furthermore,
analysis on the regret and the impact of new friendship in the network is
provided.
The paper is very well written and is clear.
Studying online learning in a dynamic social network is not a
novel problem and is studied in [7] and [8]. The novel part is that in
this paper the authors study the social network with geometric random walk
and provide a learning algorithm that achieves optical MSD.
The
problem is interesting. The addition to the previous work might not be
very significant. Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
This is not my area of expertise. The paper reads
well and is clear. The problem is interesting. Studying the specific
case of geometrical random walk in comparison to previous works that study
online learning in social networks with random walk might be interesting,
but at the same time might be incremental. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_6
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper presents a new online learning setting:
states are changing over dynamic networks. It then provides two
alternative ways of updating local loss functions. Convergence and Regret
analysis are given. In general, this paper presents a novel setting of
online learning. Parameters can be easily updated based on Duchi et. Al’s
paper on dual averaging for distributed optimization. The idea presented
in this paper looks quite impressive and the proofs seem to be correct,
though the reviewer has not checked all of them. The paper is also well
written. Though as a theory paper, this paper is self-contained. It
would be better to show a simulation or suggest a potential real
application for this paper.
Q2: Please summarize
your review in 1-2 sentences
A new setting of online learning for dynamic networks
is presented. The paper is self-contained, though a simulation can be
provided to show the usefulness of it.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
We thank the reviewers for their comments. The main
concern appears to be the applicability and the simplicity of the model.
While we agree that the model is simple, the goal of the paper was to
present a novel framework not yet considered within online learning.
Because of the simple setup, we were able to find a clean solution that
shows several surprising phase transitions. The first finding is the
critical rate of change that characterizes whether or not the agents are
able to estimate the state, even if the rate alpha is known. This critical
rate depends on the network structure, highlighting the interesting
distributed aspect of the problem. The second surprising fact (at least to
us) was the importance of the decomposition of loss functions. Whether
similar phase transitions hold for more complicated models remains to be
seen.
Potential applications of the model are, for instance, in
finance, where the rate of change alpha can be the known interest rate
that affects the amount invested by a hedge fund. From the outside, one
may only observe a noisy or corrupted version of this amount, and a
network of agents aims to recover the state.
As in the paper, we
remark again that the parameter alpha need not be known -- it can be
learned by the agents on the fly.
|