Related papers: Inverse Ising inference from high-temperature re-w…
Maximum likelihood estimation is a popular method in statistical inference. As a way of assessing the accuracy of the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE), the calculation of the covariance matrix of the MLE is of great interest in practice.…
We present a new statistical learning paradigm for Boltzmann machines based on a new inference principle we have proposed: the latent maximum entropy principle (LME). LME is different both from Jaynes maximum entropy principle and from…
The methods of statistical physics are widely used for modelling complex networks. Building on the recently proposed Equilibrium Expectation approach, we derive a simple and efficient algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of…
This paper develops a unified estimation framework, the Maximum Ideal Likelihood Estimation (MILE), for general parametric models with latent variables. Unlike traditional approaches relying on the marginal likelihood of the observed data,…
Every student in statistics or data science learns early on that when the sample size largely exceeds the number of variables, fitting a logistic model produces estimates that are approximately unbiased. Every student also learns that there…
The method of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a widely used statistical approach for estimating the values of one or more unknown parameters of a probabilistic model based on observed data. In this tutorial, I briefly review the…
Success in modeling complex phenomena such as human perception hinges critically on the availability of data and computational power. Significant progress has been made in modeling such phenomena using probabilistic methods, particularly in…
We describe $k$-MLE, a fast and efficient local search algorithm for learning finite statistical mixtures of exponential families such as Gaussian mixture models. Mixture models are traditionally learned using the expectation-maximization…
Suppose we are given observations, where each observation is drawn independently from one of $k$ known distributions. The goal is to match each observation to the distribution from which it was drawn. We observe that the maximum likelihood…
In this work, we propose an infinite restricted Boltzmann machine~(RBM), whose maximum likelihood estimation~(MLE) corresponds to a constrained convex optimization. We consider the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve the program, which provides…
Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of latent variable models is often recast as the minimization of a free energy functional over an extended space of parameters and probability distributions. This perspective was recently combined with…
Generative models offer a direct way of modeling complex data. Energy-based models attempt to encode the statistical correlations observed in the data at the level of the Boltzmann weight associated with an energy function in the form of a…
Efficient sampling from the Boltzmann distribution given its energy function is a key challenge for modeling complex physical systems such as molecules. Boltzmann Generators address this problem by leveraging continuous normalizing flows to…
We advocate for a practical Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) approach towards designing loss functions for regression and forecasting, as an alternative to the typical approach of direct empirical risk minimization on a specific target…
Combining discrete probability distributions and combinatorial optimization problems with neural network components has numerous applications but poses several challenges. We propose Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (I-MLE), a…
Maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) is arguably the most important tool for statisticians, and many methods have been developed to find the MLE. We present a new inequality involving posterior distributions of a latent variable that holds…
We consider the problem of inferring the probability distribution of flux configurations in metabolic network models from empirical flux data. For the simple case in which experimental averages are to be retrieved, data are described by a…
Boltzmann machines (BMs) are a class of binary neural networks for which there have been numerous proposed methods of estimation. Recently, it has been shown that in the fully visible case of the BM, the method of maximum pseudolikelihood…
Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are energy-based models analogous to the Ising model and are widely applied in statistical machine learning. The standard inverse Ising problem with a complete dataset requires computing both data and…
When an expert operates a perilous dynamic system, ideal constraint information is tacitly contained in their demonstrated trajectories and controls. The likelihood of these demonstrations can be computed, given the system dynamics and task…