In this paper, we consider the harmonic extension problem, which is widely used in many applications of machine learning. We formulate the harmonic extension as solving a Laplace-Beltrami equation with Dirichlet boundary condition. We use the point integral method (PIM) to solve the Laplace-Beltrami equation. The basic idea of the PIM method is to approximate the Laplace equation using an integral equation, which is easy to be discretized from points. Based on the integral equation, we found that traditional graph Laplacian method (GLM) may fail to approximate the harmonic functions in the classical sense. For the Laplace-Beltrami equation with Dirichlet boundary, we can prove the convergence of the point integral method. The point integral method is also very easy to implement, which only requires a minor modification of the graph Laplacian. One important application of the harmonic extension in machine learning is semi-supervised learning. We run a popular semi-supervised learning algorithm by Zhu et al. over a couple of well-known datasets and compare the performance of the aforementioned approaches. Our experiments show the PIM performs the best. We also apply PIM to an image recovery problem and show it outperforms GLM. Finally, on a model problem of Laplace-Beltrami equation with Dirichlet boundary, we prove the convergence of the point integral method.

We study different classes of Jensen measures for plurisubharmonic functions, in particular the relation between Jensen measures for continuous functions and Jensen measures for upper bounded functions. We prove an approximation theorem for plurisubharmonic functions in$B$-regular domain. This theorem implies that the two classes of Jensen measures coincide in$B$-regular domains. Conversely we show that if Jensen measures for continuous functions are the same as Jensen measures for upper bounded functions and the domain is hyperconvex, the domain satisfies the same approximation theorem as above.

The moment-entropy inequality shows that a contin- uous random variable with given second moment and maximal Shannon entropy must be Gaussian. Stam’s inequality shows that a continuous random variable with given Fisher information and minimal Shannon entropy must also be Gaussian. The Crame ́r- Rao inequality is a direct consequence of these two inequalities. In this paper the inequalities above are extended to Renyi entropy, p-th moment, and generalized Fisher information. Gen- eralized Gaussian random densities are introduced and shown to be the extremal densities for the new inequalities. An extension of the Crame ́r–Rao inequality is derived as a consequence of these moment and Fisher information inequalities.

This article studies the problem of image restoration of observed images corrupted by impulse noise and mixed Gaussian impulse noise. Since the pixels damaged by impulse noise contain no information about the true image, how to find this set correctly is a very important problem. We propose two methods based on blind inpainting and $\ell_0$ minimization that can simultaneously find the damaged pixels and restore the image. By iteratively restoring the image and updating the set of damaged pixels, these methods have better performance than other methods, as shown in the experiments. In addition, we provide convergence analysis for these methods; these algorithms will converge to coordinatewise minimum points. In addition, they will converge to local minimum points (or with probability one) with some modifications in the algorithms.

No abstract uploaded!