Related papers: A Deep Learning Algorithm for High-Dimensional Exp…

Training deep generative models with maximum likelihood remains a challenge. The typical workaround is to use variational inference (VI) and maximize a lower bound to the log marginal likelihood of the data. Variational auto-encoders (VAEs)…

Joint maximum likelihood (JML) estimation is one of the earliest approaches to fitting item response theory (IRT) models. This procedure treats both the item and person parameters as unknown but fixed model parameters and estimates them…

Advances in deep learning and representation learning have transformed item factor analysis (IFA) in the item response theory (IRT) literature by enabling more efficient and accurate parameter estimation. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs)…

Marginal maximum likelihood estimation (MMLE) in item response theory (IRT) is highly sensitive to aberrant responses, such as careless answering and random guessing, which can reduce estimation accuracy. To address this issue, this study…

The stochastic approximation EM algorithm (SAEM) is described for the estimation of item and person parameters given test data coded as dichotomous or ordinal variables. The method hinges upon the eigenanalysis of missing variables sampled…

The importance weighted autoencoder (IWAE) (Burda et al., 2016) is a popular variational-inference method which achieves a tighter evidence bound (and hence a lower bias) than standard variational autoencoders by optimising a multi-sample…

Several variational bounds involving importance weighting ideas generalize the Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO) for marginal likelihood optimization, such as the Importance-weighted Auto-Encoder (IWAE), Variational R\'enyi (VR) and VR-IWAE…

Factors models are routinely used to analyze high-dimensional data in both single-study and multi-study settings. Bayesian inference for such models relies on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods which scale poorly as the number of…

Survey instruments and assessments are frequently used in many domains of social science. When the constructs that these assessments try to measure become multifaceted, multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) provides a unified…

The variational auto-encoder (VAE) is a deep latent variable model that has two neural networks in an autoencoder-like architecture; one of them parameterizes the model's likelihood. Fitting its parameters via maximum likelihood (ML) is…

Variational inference (VI) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) are two main approximate approaches for learning deep generative models by maximizing marginal likelihood. In this paper, we propose using annealed importance sampling for…

Learning interpretable and disentangled representations of data is a key topic in machine learning research. Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a scalable method for learning directed latent variable models of complex data. It employs a clear…

Deep latent variable models (DLVMs) combine the approximation abilities of deep neural networks and the statistical foundations of generative models. Variational methods are commonly used for inference; however, the exact likelihood of…

Multilevel models (MLMs) are a central building block of the Bayesian workflow. They enable joint, interpretable modeling of data across hierarchical levels and provide a fully probabilistic quantification of uncertainty. Despite their…

This paper presents a machine learning approach to multidimensional item response theory (MIRT), a class of latent factor models that can be used to model and predict student performance from observed assessment data. Inspired by…

Scalable and effective exploration remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). While there are methods with optimality guarantees in the setting of discrete state and action spaces, these methods cannot be applied in…

Meta-learning leverages related source tasks to learn an initialization that can be quickly fine-tuned to a target task with limited labeled examples. However, many popular meta-learning algorithms, such as model-agnostic meta-learning…

We consider the problem of handling missing data with deep latent variable models (DLVMs). First, we present a simple technique to train DLVMs when the training set contains missing-at-random data. Our approach, called MIWAE, is based on…

We consider the infinite-horizon linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where the transition probabilities of the dynamic model can be linearly parameterized with the help of a predefined low-dimensional feature mapping. While the…

This paper presents some results on the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation from incomplete data. Finite sample properties of conditional observed information matrices are established. They possess positive definiteness and the same Loewner…