Related papers: Efficient Sample-optimal Learning of Gaussian Tree…
We present an integrated approach for structure and parameter estimation in latent tree graphical models. Our overall approach follows a "divide-and-conquer" strategy that learns models over small groups of variables and iteratively merges…
Mutual information is fundamentally important for measuring statistical dependence between variables and for quantifying information transfer by signaling and communication mechanisms. It can, however, be challenging to evaluate for…
Implicit stochastic models, where the data-generation distribution is intractable but sampling is possible, are ubiquitous in the natural sciences. The models typically have free parameters that need to be inferred from data collected in…
Neural Networks and Decision Trees: two popular techniques for supervised learning that are seemingly disconnected in their formulation and optimization method, have recently been combined in a single construct. The connection pivots on…
We consider the following basic learning task: given independent draws from an unknown distribution over a discrete support, output an approximation of the distribution that is as accurate as possible in $\ell_1$ distance (i.e. total…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning one-dimensional Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) with a specific focus on estimating both the model order and the mixing distribution from independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.)…
We revisit the replica method for analyzing inference and learning in parametric models, considering situations where the data-generating distribution is unknown or analytically intractable. Instead of assuming idealized distributions to…
Gaussian state space models have been used for decades as generative models of sequential data. They admit an intuitive probabilistic interpretation, have a simple functional form, and enjoy widespread adoption. We introduce a unified…
Mutual information is a general statistical dependency measure which has found applications in representation learning, causality, domain generalization and computational biology. However, mutual information estimators are typically…
This paper reviews recent developments in statistical structure learning; namely, Bayesian model reduction. Bayesian model reduction is a method for rapidly computing the evidence and parameters of probabilistic models that differ only in…
We study the problem of performing automated experiment design for drug screening through Bayesian inference and optimisation. In particular, we compare and contrast the behaviour of linear-Gaussian models and Gaussian processes, when used…
A novel information-theoretic approach is proposed to assess the global practical identifiability of Bayesian statistical models. Based on the concept of conditional mutual information, an estimate of information gained for each model…
Latent Gaussian models and boosting are widely used techniques in statistics and machine learning. Tree-boosting shows excellent prediction accuracy on many data sets, but potential drawbacks are that it assumes conditional independence of…
We present a fairly general framework for reducing $(\varepsilon, \delta)$ differentially private (DP) statistical estimation to its non-private counterpart. As the main application of this framework, we give a polynomial time and…
Conditional distribution is a fundamental quantity for describing the relationship between a response and a predictor. We propose a Wasserstein generative approach to learning a conditional distribution. The proposed approach uses a…
Model-based reinforcement learning refers to a set of approaches capable of sample-efficient decision making, which create an explicit model of the environment. This model can subsequently be used for learning optimal policies. In this…
Despite the availability of ever more data enabled through modern sensor and computer technology, it still remains an open problem to learn dynamical systems in a sample-efficient way. We propose active learning strategies that leverage…
Reinforcement learning provides a framework for learning to control which actions to take towards completing a task through trial-and-error. In many applications observing interactions is costly, necessitating sample-efficient learning. In…
We provide high-probability sample complexity guarantees for exact structure recovery and accurate predictive learning using noise-corrupted samples from an acyclic (tree-shaped) graphical model. The hidden variables follow a…
We study contextual stochastic optimization problems, where we leverage rich auxiliary observations (e.g., product characteristics) to improve decision making with uncertain variables (e.g., demand). We show how to train forest decision…