@inproceedings{sheth2020differentiable, author = {Sheth, Rishit and Fusi, Nicolo}, title = {Differentiable Feature Selection by Discrete Relaxation}, booktitle = {AISTATS}, year = {2020}, month = {April}, abstract = {In this paper, we introduce Differentiable Feature Selection, a gradient-based search algorithm for feature selection. Our approach extends a recent result on the estimation of learnability in the sublinear data regime by showing that the calculation can be performed iteratively (i.e., in mini-batches) and in linear time and space with respect to both the number of features D and the sample size N. This, along with a discrete-to-continuous relaxation of the search domain, allows for an efficient, gradient-based search algorithm among feature subsets for very large datasets. Our algorithm utilizes higher-order correlations between features and targets for both the N > D and N < D regimes, as opposed to approaches that do not consider such correlations and/or only consider one regime. We provide experimental demonstration of the algorithm in small and large sample- and feature-size settings.}, url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/differentiable-feature-selection-by-discrete-relaxation/}, }