Total Variation and Euler's Elastica for Supervised Learning

Abstract: In recent years, total variation (TV) and Euler's elastica (EE) have been successfully applied to image processing tasks such as denoising and inpainting. This paper investigates how to extend TV and EE to the supervised learning settings on high dimensional data. The supervised learning problem can be formulated as an energy functional minimization under Tikhonov regularization scheme, where the energy is composed of a squared loss and a total variation smoothing (or Euler's elastica smoothing). Its solution via variational principles leads to an Euler-Lagrange PDE. However, the PDE is always high-dimensional and cannot be directly solved by common methods. Instead, radial basis functions are utilized to approximate the target function, reducing the problem to finding the linear coefficients of basis functions. We apply the proposed methods to supervised learning tasks (including binary classification, multi-class classification, and regression) on benchmark data sets. Extensive experiments have demonstrated promising results of the proposed methods.