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As the number of samples and dimensionality of optimization problems related to statistics an machine learning explode, block coordinate descent algorithms have gained popularity since they reduce the original problem to several smaller…
We study batch normalisation in the context of variational inference methods in Bayesian neural networks, such as mean-field or MC Dropout. We show that batch-normalisation does not affect the optimum of the evidence lower bound (ELBO).…
Networks, which represent agents and interactions between them, arise in myriad applications throughout the sciences, engineering, and even the humanities. To understand large-scale structure in a network, a common task is to cluster a…
In recent years there has been an increased interest in statistical analysis of data with multiple types of relations among a set of entities. Such multi-relational data can be represented as multi-layer graphs where the set of vertices…
A Bayesian network is a widely used probabilistic graphical model with applications in knowledge discovery and prediction. Learning a Bayesian network (BN) from data can be cast as an optimization problem using the well-known…
We propose a family of variational approximations to Bayesian posterior distributions, called $\alpha$-VB, with provable statistical guarantees. The standard variational approximation is a special case of $\alpha$-VB with $\alpha=1$. When…
Empirical observations suggest that in practice, community membership does not completely explain the dependency between the edges of an observation graph. The residual dependence of the graph edges are modeled in this paper, to first…
Statistical estimates can often be improved by fusion of data from several different sources. One example is so-called ensemble methods which have been successfully applied in areas such as machine learning for classification and…
The Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference scheme is a popular algorithm used to compute the mean-field approximation of a probability distribution of interest. We analyze its random scan version, under log-concavity assumptions on the…
This paper addresses the problem of community detection in networked data that combines link and content analysis. Most existing work combines link and content information by a generative model. There are two major shortcomings with the…
In the model-based clustering of networks, blockmodelling may be used to identify roles in the network. We identify a special case of the Stochastic Block Model (SBM) where we constrain the cluster-cluster interactions such that the density…
Network-based clustering methods frequently require the number of communities to be specified \emph{a priori}. Moreover, most of the existing methods for estimating the number of communities assume the number of communities to be fixed and…
In many statistical problems, a more coarse-grained model may be suitable for population-level behaviour, whereas a more detailed model is appropriate for accurate modelling of individual behaviour. This raises the question of how to…
Most recent developments on the stochastic block model (SBM) rely on the knowledge of the model parameters, or at least on the number of communities. This paper introduces efficient algorithms that do not require such knowledge and yet…
The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a commonly used method for finding the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters in a mixture model via coordinate ascent. A serious pitfall with the algorithm is that in the case of…
In the presence of heterogeneous data, where randomly rotated objects fall into multiple underlying categories, it is challenging to simultaneously classify them into clusters and synchronize them based on pairwise relations. This gives…
Stochastic variational Bayes algorithms have become very popular in the machine learning literature, particularly in the context of nonparametric Bayesian inference. These algorithms replace the true but intractable posterior distribution…
Distributed inference/estimation in Bayesian framework in the context of sensor networks has recently received much attention due to its broad applicability. The variational Bayesian (VB) algorithm is a technique for approximating…
Most functional magnetic resonance imaging studies rely on estimates of hierarchically organized functional brain networks whose segregation and integration reflect the cognitive and behavioral changes in humans. However, most existing…
We develop a Bayesian hierarchical model to identify communities in networks for which we do not observe the edges directly, but instead observe a series of interdependent signals for each of the nodes. Fitting the model provides an…