Related papers: Discriminating between two models based on Bregman…
Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) are probabilistic generative models that can be trained by maximum likelihood in principle, but are usually trained by an approximate algorithm called Contrastive Divergence (CD) in practice. In general,…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. Recently, some VB algorithms are proposed to handle intractable likelihoods with applications such as approximate Bayesian computation. In this paper,…
We study the problem of model selection type aggregation with respect to the Kullback-Leibler divergence for various probabilistic models. Rather than considering a convex combination of the initial estimators $f_1, \ldots, f_N$, our…
Message identification (M-I) divergence is an important measure of the information distance between probability distributions, similar to Kullback-Leibler (K-L) and Renyi divergence. In fact, M-I divergence with a variable parameter can…
We propose a method for nonparametric density estimation that exhibits robustness to contamination of the training sample. This method achieves robustness by combining a traditional kernel density estimator (KDE) with ideas from classical…
Analog dynamical accelerators (DXs) are a growing sub-field in computer architecture research, offering order-of-magnitude gains in power efficiency and latency over traditional digital methods in several machine learning, optimization, and…
Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) embedding of probability distributions has proved to be an effective approach, via MMD (maximum mean discrepancy), for nonparametric hypothesis testing problems involving distributions defined over…
We study the gradient flow for a relaxed approximation to the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between a moving source and a fixed target distribution. This approximation, termed the KALE (KL approximate lower-bound estimator), solves a…
Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD) is a score-based discrepancy widely used in goodness-of-fit tests. It can be applied even when the target distribution has an unknown normalising factor, such as in Bayesian analysis. We show theoretically…
We propose a novel method for measuring the discrepancy between a set of samples and a desired posterior distribution for Bayesian inference. Classical methods for assessing sample quality like the effective sample size are not appropriate…
Despite successful use in a wide variety of disciplines for data analysis and prediction, machine learning (ML) methods suffer from a lack of understanding of the reliability of predictions due to the lack of transparency and black-box…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) enables statistical inference in simulator-based models whose likelihoods are difficult to calculate but easy to simulate from. ABC constructs a kernel-type approximation to the posterior distribution…
The Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model is one of the most widely used models for ranking a collection of items or agents based on pairwise comparisons among them. Given $n$ agents, the BTL model endows each agent $i$ with a latent skill score…
We consider the problem of constructing a least conservative estimator of the expected value $\mu$ of a non-negative heavy-tailed random variable. We require that the probability of overestimating the expected value $\mu$ is kept…
The contributions of the paper span theoretical and implementational results. First, we prove that Kd-trees can be extended to spaces in which the distance is measured with an arbitrary Bregman divergence. Perhaps surprisingly, this shows…
The log-normal distribution is one of the most common distributions used for modeling skewed and positive data. It frequently arises in many disciplines of science, specially in the biological and medical sciences. The statistical analysis…
Kernel methods provide a flexible and powerful framework for nonparametric statistical testing by embedding probability distributions into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). In this work, we study the kernel two-sample testing…
Kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) is a widely used kernel-based measure of discrepancy between probability measures. It is often employed in the scenario where a user has a collection of samples from a candidate probability measure and wishes…
In this paper a new family of minimum divergence estimators based on the Bregman divergence is proposed, where the defining convex function has an exponential nature. These estimators avoid the necessity of using an intermediate kernel…
We examine the estimation of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the use of the goodness-of-fit test for multivariate continuous distributions. Our starting point is the maximum entropy principle for Shannon entropy: among all…