Related papers: The Optimal 'AND'
The mutual information of two random variables i and j with joint probabilities t_ij is commonly used in learning Bayesian nets as well as in many other fields. The chances t_ij are usually estimated by the empirical sampling frequency…
In a recent paper [1] we introduced the Fuzzy Bayesian Learning (FBL) paradigm where expert opinions can be encoded in the form of fuzzy rule bases and the hyper-parameters of the fuzzy sets can be learned from data using a Bayesian…
We study the problem of data integration from sources that contain probabilistic uncertain information. Data is modeled by possible-worlds with probability distribution, compactly represented in the probabilistic relation model. Integration…
Given an intractable distribution $p$, the problem of variational inference (VI) is to find the best approximation from some more tractable family $Q$. Commonly, one chooses $Q$ to be a family of factorized distributions (i.e., the…
Lower bounds for the average probability of error of estimating a hidden variable X given an observation of a correlated random variable Y, and Fano's inequality in particular, play a central role in information theory. In this paper, we…
Mutual information between particle positions before and after mixing provides a universal assumption-free measure of mixing efficiency at low Reynolds number which accounts for the kinematic reversibility of the Stokes equation. For a…
The principle of complementarity is quantified in two ways: by a universal uncertainty relation valid for arbitrary joint estimates of any two observables from a given measurement setup, and by a general uncertainty relation valid for…
In the "correlated sampling" problem, two players are given probability distributions $P$ and $Q$, respectively, over the same finite set, with access to shared randomness. Without any communication, the two players are each required to…
This paper proposes a new family of lower and upper bounds on the minimum mean squared error (MMSE). The key idea is to minimize/maximize the MMSE subject to the constraint that the joint distribution of the input-output statistics lies in…
We consider the problem of maximizing submodular functions; while this problem is known to be NP-hard, several numerically efficient local search techniques with approximation guarantees are available. In this paper, we propose a novel…
The following problem is considered: given a joint distribution $P_{XY}$ and an event $E$, bound $P_{XY}(E)$ in terms of $P_XP_Y(E)$ (where $P_XP_Y$ is the product of the marginals of $P_{XY}$) and a measure of dependence of $X$ and $Y$.…
In this work, the probability of an event under some joint distribution is bounded by measuring it with the product of the marginals instead (which is typically easier to analyze) together with a measure of the dependence between the two…
We study multi-marginal optimal transport problems from a probabilistic graphical model perspective. We point out an elegant connection between the two when the underlying cost for optimal transport allows a graph structure. In particular,…
The prior distribution for the unknown model parameters plays a crucial role in the process of statistical inference based on Bayesian methods. However, specifying suitable priors is often difficult even when detailed prior knowledge is…
In prediction problems with more predictors than observations, it can sometimes be helpful to use a joint probability model, $\pi(Y,X)$, rather than a purely conditional model, $\pi(Y \mid X)$, where $Y$ is a scalar response variable and…
When inferring parameters from a Gaussian-distributed data set by computing a likelihood, a covariance matrix is needed that describes the data errors and their correlations. If the covariance matrix is not known a priori, it may be…
Optimization seeks extremal points in a function. When there are superextensively many optima, optimization algorithms are liable to get stuck. Under these conditions, generic algorithms tend to find marginal optima, which have many nearly…
In distributed detection, there does not exist an automatic way of generating optimal decision strategies for non-affine decision functions. Consequently, in a detection problem based on a non-affine decision function, establishing…
When multiple forecasts are available for a probability distribution, forecast combining enables a pragmatic synthesis of the information to extract the wisdom of the crowd. The linear opinion pool has been widely used, whereby the…
In this paper, we are concerned with estimating the joint probability of random variables $X$ and $Y$, given $N$ independent observation blocks $(\boldsymbol{x}^i,\boldsymbol{y}^i)$, $i=1,\ldots,N$, each of $M$ samples…