Related papers: A general modelling framework for open wildlife po…
We propose a new data-augmentation strategy for fully Bayesian inference in models with binomial likelihoods. The approach appeals to a new class of Polya-Gamma distributions, which are constructed in detail. A variety of examples are…
Many data are naturally modeled by an unobserved hierarchical structure. In this paper we propose a flexible nonparametric prior over unknown data hierarchies. The approach uses nested stick-breaking processes to allow for trees of…
Recognizing the successes of treed Gaussian process (TGP) models as an interpretable and thrifty model for nonparametric regression, we seek to extend the model to classification. Both treed models and Gaussian processes (GPs) have,…
One of the main challenges in current systems neuroscience is the analysis of high-dimensional neuronal and behavioral data that are characterized by different statistics and timescales of the recorded variables. We propose a parametric…
Most of applied statistics involves regression analysis of data. This paper presents a stand-alone and menu-driven software package, Bayesian Regression: Nonparametric and Parametric Models. Currently, this package gives the user a choice…
1. Accurate estimates of demographic parameters are required to infer appropriate ecological relationships and inform management actions. Recently developed N-mixture models use count data from unmarked individuals to estimate demographic…
Comparing competing mathematical models of complex natural processes is a shared goal among many branches of science. The Bayesian probabilistic framework offers a principled way to perform model comparison and extract useful metrics for…
Poaching poses significant threats to wildlife and biodiversity. A valuable step in reducing poaching is to forecast poacher behavior, which can inform patrol planning and other conservation interventions. Existing poaching prediction…
Elitism, which constructs the new population by preserving best solutions out of the old population and newly-generated solutions, has been a default way for population update since its introduction into multi-objective evolutionary…
Raking is widely used in categorical data modeling and survey practice but faced with methodological and computational challenges. We develop a Bayesian paradigm for raking by incorporating the marginal constraints as a prior distribution…
We propose an iterative method to safely learn the unmodeled dynamics of a nonlinear system using Bayesian Gaussian process (GP) models with polynomial kernel functions. The method maintains safety by ensuring that the system state stays…
The study of interactions between multiple species in an ecosystem is an active and impactful direction of inquiry. This is true in particular for fragile systems in which even small perturbations of their functional parameters can produce…
Based on decision trees, many fields have arguably made tremendous progress in recent years. In simple words, decision trees use the strategy of "divide-and-conquer" to divide the complex problem on the dependency between input features and…
We propose the use of finite mixtures of continuous distributions in modelling the process by which new individuals, that arrive in groups, become part of a wildlife population. We demonstrate this approach using a data set of migrating…
Joint distributions over many variables are frequently modeled by decomposing them into products of simpler, lower-dimensional conditional distributions, such as in sparsely connected Bayesian networks. However, automatically learning such…
This article presents a new way to understand the descriptive ability of tree shape statistics. Where before tree shape statistics were chosen by their ability to distinguish between macroevolutionary models, the ``resolution'' presented in…
A decision tree is commonly restricted to use a single hyperplane to split the covariate space at each of its internal nodes. It often requires a large number of nodes to achieve high accuracy, hurting its interpretability. In this paper,…
Given i.i.d. data from an unknown distribution, we consider the problem of predicting future items. An adaptive way to estimate the probability density is to recursively subdivide the domain to an appropriate data-dependent granularity. A…
We propose Partition Tree, a novel tree-based framework for conditional density estimation over general outcome spaces that supports both continuous and categorical variables within a unified formulation. Our approach models conditional…
This work focuses on clustering populations with a hierarchical dependency structure that can be described by a tree. A particular example that is the focus of our work is the phylogenetic tree, with nodes often representing biological…