Related papers: A Theoretical Case Study of Structured Variational…
This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…
Bayesian hierarchical linear models provide a natural framework to analyze nested and clustered data. Classical estimation with Markov chain Monte Carlo produces well calibrated posterior distributions but becomes computationally expensive…
Community structure is common in many real networks, with nodes clustered in groups sharing the same connections patterns. While many community detection methods have been developed for networks with binary edges, few of them are applicable…
In this paper, we introduce a hierarchical extension of the stochastic blockmodel to identify multilevel community structures in networks. We also present a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and a variational Bayes algorithm to fit the model…
Structural equation models are commonly used to capture the relationship between sets of observed and unobservable variables. Traditionally these models are fitted using frequentist approaches but recently researchers and practitioners have…
Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…
The mixed membership stochastic blockmodel (MMSB) is a popular framework for community detection and network generation. It learns a low-rank mixed membership representation for each node across communities by exploiting the underlying…
We develop a principled methodology to infer assortative communities in networks based on a nonparametric Bayesian formulation of the planted partition model. We show that this approach succeeds in finding statistically significant…
This paper describes an approach to simultaneously identify clusters and estimate cluster-specific regression parameters from the given data. Such an approach can be useful in learning the relationship between input and output when the…
Bipartite networks are a common type of network data in which there are two types of vertices, and only vertices of different types can be connected. While bipartite networks exhibit community structure like their unipartite counterparts,…
We consider the problem of community detection from observed interactions between individuals, in the context where multiple types of interaction are possible. We use labelled stochastic block models to represent the observed data, where…
Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…
The stochastic block model (SBM) is a fundamental tool for community detection in networks, yet the finite-sample performance of inference methods remains underexplored. We evaluate key algorithms-spectral methods, variational inference,…
Stochastic variational inference for collapsed models has recently been successfully applied to large scale topic modelling. In this paper, we propose a stochastic collapsed variational inference algorithm in the sequential data setting.…
We consider the challenging problem of statistical inference for exponential-family random graph models based on a single observation of a random graph with complex dependence. To facilitate statistical inference, we consider random graphs…
We exploit the observation that stochastic variational inference (SVI) is a form of annealing and present a modified SVI approach -- applicable to both large and small datasets -- that allows the amount of annealing done by SVI to be tuned.…
Estimating a distribution given access to its unnormalized density is pivotal in Bayesian inference, where the posterior is generally known only up to an unknown normalizing constant. Variational inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo…
This paper considers the problem of community detection on multiple potentially correlated graphs from an information-theoretical perspective. We first put forth a random graph model, called the multi-view stochastic block model (MVSBM),…
The stochastic block model (SBM) is a probabilistic model for community structure in networks. Typically, only the adjacency matrix is used to perform SBM parameter inference. In this paper, we consider circumstances in which nodes have an…
In many applications of network analysis, it is important to distinguish between observed and unobserved factors affecting network structure. To this end, we develop spectral estimators for both unobserved blocks and the effect of…