Related papers: Dirichlet or Potts ?
This paper examines the classical matching distribution arising in the "problem of coincidences". We generalise the classical matching distribution with a preliminary round of allocation where items are correctly matched with some fixed…
Probabilistic modeling is cyclical: we specify a model, infer its posterior, and evaluate its performance. Evaluation drives the cycle, as we revise our model based on how it performs. This requires a metric. Traditionally, predictive…
A family of random probabilities is defined and studied. This family contains the Dirichlet process as a special case, corresponding to an inner point in the appropriate parameter space. The extension makes it possible to have random means…
Statistical modelling in the presence of data organized in groups is a crucial task in Bayesian statistics. The present paper conceives a mixture model based on a novel family of Bayesian priors designed for multilevel data and obtained by…
We study the problem of estimating mixtures of Gaussians under the constraint of differential privacy (DP). Our main result is that $\text{poly}(k,d,1/\alpha,1/\varepsilon,\log(1/\delta))$ samples are sufficient to estimate a mixture of $k$…
Potts models, which can be used to analyze dependent observations on a lattice, have seen widespread application in a variety of areas, including statistical mechanics, neuroscience, and quantum computing. To address the intractability of…
This article extends the literature on copulas with discrete or continuous marginals to the case where some of the marginals are a mixture of discrete and continuous components. We do so by carefully defining the likelihood as the density…
Clustering has become a core technology in machine learning, largely due to its application in the field of unsupervised learning, clustering, classification, and density estimation. A frequentist approach exists to hand clustering based on…
Mixtures of experts probabilistically divide the input space into regions, where the assumptions of each expert, or conditional model, need only hold locally. Combined with Gaussian process (GP) experts, this results in a powerful and…
Bimodal truncated count distributions are frequently observed in aggregate survey data and in user ratings when respondents are mixed in their opinion. They also arise in censored count data, where the highest category might create an…
We consider the problem of estimating the common mean of independently sampled data, where samples are drawn in a possibly non-identical manner from symmetric, unimodal distributions with a common mean. This generalizes the setting of…
A new two-parameter discrete distribution, namely the PoiG distribution is derived by the convolution of a Poisson variate and an independently distributed geometric random variable. This distribution generalizes both the Poisson and…
Density estimation, which estimates the distribution of data, is an important category of probabilistic machine learning. A family of density estimators is mixture models, such as Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) by expectation maximization.…
We propose probabilistic task modelling -- a generative probabilistic model for collections of tasks used in meta-learning. The proposed model combines variational auto-encoding and latent Dirichlet allocation to model each task as a…
Combining distributions is an important issue in decision theory and Bayesian inference. Logarithmic pooling is a popular method to aggregate expert opinions by using a set of weights that reflect the reliability of each information source.…
We initiate the study of differentially private (DP) estimation with access to a small amount of public data. For private estimation of d-dimensional Gaussians, we assume that the public data comes from a Gaussian that may have vanishing…
For better learning, large datasets are often split into small batches and fed sequentially to the predictive model. In this paper, we study such batch decompositions from a probabilistic perspective. We assume that data points (possibly…
This article is motivated by challenges in conducting Bayesian inferences on unknown discrete distributions, with a particular focus on count data. To avoid the computational disadvantages of traditional mixture models, we develop a novel…
Confidential data, such as electronic health records, activity data from wearable devices, and geolocation data, are becoming increasingly prevalent. Differential privacy provides a framework to conduct statistical analyses while mitigating…
We address two important statistical problems: that of estimating mixtures of multivariate normal distributions and mixtures of $t$-distributions based on univariate projections, and that of quantifying a discrepancy between mixture…