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We generalize the stochastic block model to the important case in which edges are annotated with weights drawn from an exponential family distribution. This generalization introduces several technical difficulties for model estimation,…
We develop Bayesian predictive stacking for geostatistical models, where the primary inferential objective is to provide inference on the latent spatial random field and conduct spatial predictions at arbitrary locations. We exploit…
Bayesian neural network posterior distributions have a great number of modes that correspond to the same network function. The abundance of such modes can make it difficult for approximate inference methods to do their job. Recent work has…
We introduce a novel training principle for probabilistic models that is an alternative to maximum likelihood. The proposed Generative Stochastic Networks (GSN) framework is based on learning the transition operator of a Markov chain whose…
In this article, we introduce mixture representations for likelihood ratio ordered distributions. Essentially, the ratio of two probability densities, or mass functions, is monotone if and only if one can be expressed as a mixture of…
Within many machine learning algorithms, a fundamental problem concerns efficient calculation of an unbiased gradient wrt parameters $\gammav$ for expectation-based objectives $\Ebb_{q_{\gammav} (\yv)} [f(\yv)]$. Most existing methods…
Automatic differentiation frameworks are optimized for exactly one thing: computing the average mini-batch gradient. Yet, other quantities such as the variance of the mini-batch gradients or many approximations to the Hessian can, in…
Most successful machine intelligence systems rely on gradient-based learning, which is made possible by backpropagation. Some systems are designed to aid us in interpreting data when explicit goals cannot be provided. These unsupervised…
A probability distribution allows practitioners to uncover hidden structure in the data and build models to solve supervised learning problems using limited data. The focus of this report is on Variational autoencoders, a method to learn…
Modern statistical inference tasks often require iterative optimization methods to compute the solution. Convergence analysis from an optimization viewpoint only informs us how well the solution is approximated numerically but overlooks the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has achieved great success in training deep neural network, where the gradient is computed through back-propagation. However, the back-propagated values of different layers vary dramatically. This…
Variational approximation methods have proven to be useful for scaling Bayesian computations to large data sets and highly parametrized models. Applying variational methods involves solving an optimization problem, and recent research in…
We introduce a Bayesian approach to predictive density calibration and combination that accounts for parameter uncertainty and model set incompleteness through the use of random calibration functionals and random combination weights.…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
Gradient boosting is a sequential ensemble method that fits a new weaker learner to pseudo residuals at each iteration. We propose Wasserstein gradient boosting, a novel extension of gradient boosting that fits a new weak learner to…
It seems that in the current age, computers, computation, and data have an increasingly important role to play in scientific research and discovery. This is reflected in part by the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence,…
Estimating the mixing density of a mixture distribution remains an interesting problem in statistics literature. Using a stochastic approximation method, Newton and Zhang (1999) introduced a fast recursive algorithm for estimating the…
Variational autoencoders have been widely applied for natural language generation, however, there are two long-standing problems: information under-representation and posterior collapse. The former arises from the fact that only the last…
Learning models with categorical variables requires optimizing expectations over discrete distributions, a setting in which stochastic gradient-based optimization is challenging due to the non-differentiability of categorical sampling. A…
We study the problem of learning a mixture model of non-parametric product distributions. The problem of learning a mixture model is that of finding the component distributions along with the mixing weights using observed samples generated…