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We investigate the problem of truth discovery based on opinions from multiple agents who may be unreliable or biased. We consider the case where agents' reliabilities or biases are correlated if they belong to the same community, which…
Community detection is an important task in network analysis, in which we aim to learn a network partition that groups together vertices with similar community-level connectivity patterns. By finding such groups of vertices with similar…
We propose an efficient meta-algorithm for Bayesian estimation problems that is based on low-degree polynomials, semidefinite programming, and tensor decomposition. The algorithm is inspired by recent lower bound constructions for…
In statistical network analysis, we often assume either the full network is available or multiple subgraphs can be sampled to estimate various global properties of the network. However, in a real social network, people frequently make…
Black-box variational inference (BBVI) scales poorly to high-dimensional problems when it is used to estimate a multivariate Gaussian approximation with a full covariance matrix. In this paper, we extend the batch-and-match (BaM) framework…
Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…
We highlight a pitfall when applying stochastic variational inference to general Bayesian networks. For global random variables approximated by an exponential family distribution, natural gradient steps, commonly starting from a unit length…
A sparse stochastic block model (SBM) with two communities is defined by the community probability $\pi_0,\pi_1$, and the connection probability between communities $a,b\in\{0,1\}$, namely $q_{ab} = \frac{\alpha_{ab}}{n}$. When $q_{ab}$ is…
This article addresses the problem of efficient Bayesian inference in dynamic systems using particle methods and makes a number of contributions. First, we develop a correlated pseudo-marginal (CPM) approach for Bayesian inference in state…
Stochastic blockmodels provide a convenient representation of relations between communities of nodes in a network. However, they imply a notion of stochastic equivalence that is often unrealistic for real networks, and they comprise large…
As a computational alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches, variational inference (VI) is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in large-scale Bayesian models due to its comparable…
In this paper we prove the strong consistency of several methods based on the spectral clustering techniques that are widely used to study the community detection problem in stochastic block models (SBMs). We show that under some weak…
Identifying edge-dense communities that are also well-connected is an important aspect of understanding community structure. Prior work has shown that community detection methods can produce poorly connected communities, and some can even…
Modeling relations between individuals is a classical question in social sciences and clustering individuals according to the observed patterns of interactions allows to uncover a latent structure in the data. Stochastic block model (SBM)…
We consider the problem of recovering a binary rating matrix as well as clusters of users and items based on a partially observed matrix together with side-information in the form of social and item similarity graphs. These two graphs are…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…
Stochastic blockmodels and variants thereof are among the most widely used approaches to community detection for social networks and relational data. A stochastic blockmodel partitions the nodes of a network into disjoint sets, called…
The contextual stochastic block model (cSBM) was proposed for unsupervised community detection on attributed graphs where both the graph and the high-dimensional node information correlate with node labels. In the context of machine…
Community detection is one of the most critical problems in modern network science. Its applications can be found in various fields, from protein modeling to social network analysis. Recently, many papers appeared studying the problem of…
Variational inference algorithms have proven successful for Bayesian analysis in large data settings, with recent advances using stochastic variational inference (SVI). However, such methods have largely been studied in independent or…