Related papers: A Tutorial on the Expectation-Maximization Algorit…
We study maximum likelihood estimation in log-linear models under conditional Poisson sampling schemes. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the model parameters and…
Parameter estimation in logistic regression is a well-studied problem with the Newton-Raphson method being one of the most prominent optimization techniques used in practice. A number of monotone optimization methods including…
Intelligent systems sometimes need to infer the probable goals of people, cars, and robots, based on partial observations of their motion. This paper introduces a class of probabilistic programs for formulating and solving these problems.…
This paper has two purposes. One is to demonstrate contextuality analysis of systems of epistemic random variables. The other is to evaluate the performance of a new, hierarchical version of the measure of (non)contextuality introduced in…
In this paper, we will provide an introduction to the derivative-free optimization algorithms which can be potentially applied to train deep learning models. Existing deep learning model training is mostly based on the back propagation…
Probabilistic programming is a growing area that strives to make statistical analysis more accessible, by separating probabilistic modelling from probabilistic inference. In practice this decoupling is difficult. No single inference…
In recent years there has been a flurry of works on learning Bayesian networks from data. One of the hard problems in this area is how to effectively learn the structure of a belief network from incomplete data- that is, in the presence of…
We investigate methods for parameter learning from incomplete data that is not missing at random. Likelihood-based methods then require the optimization of a profile likelihood that takes all possible missingness mechanisms into account.…
Estimators derived from an EM algorithm are not robust since they are based on the maximization of the likelihood function. We propose a proximal-point algorithm based on the EM algorithm which aim to minimize a divergence criterion.…
We perform detailed theoretical analysis of an expectation-maximization-based algorithm recently proposed in for solving a variation of the 3D registration problem, named multi-model 3D registration. Despite having shown superior empirical…
Finding a maximum cut is a fundamental task in many computational settings. Surprisingly, it has been insufficiently studied in the classic distributed settings, where vertices communicate by synchronously sending messages to their…
Various problems in Engineering and Statistics require the computation of the likelihood ratio function of two probability densities. In classical approaches the two densities are assumed known or to belong to some known parametric family.…
We study the problem of computing the probability that a given stochastic context-free grammar (SCFG), G, generates a string in a given regular language L(D) (given by a DFA, D). This basic problem has a number of applications in…
Machine learning with density operators, the mathematical foundation of quantum mechanics, is gaining prominence with rapid advances in quantum computing. Generative models based on density operators cannot yet handle tasks that are…
We study learning contextual MDPs using a function approximation for both the rewards and the dynamics. We consider both the case that the dynamics dependent or independent of the context. For both models we derive polynomial sample and…
We present a novel static analysis technique to derive higher moments for program variables for a large class of probabilistic loops with potentially uncountable state spaces. Our approach is fully automatic, meaning it does not rely on…
The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is a powerful computational technique for finding the maximum likelihood estimates for parametric models when the data are not fully observed. The EM is best suited for situations where the…
Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis is a novel statistical technique for the analysis of two-mode and co-occurrence data, which has applications in information retrieval and filtering, natural language processing, machine learning from…
In this paper, we address the probabilistic error quantification of a general class of prediction methods. We consider a given prediction model and show how to obtain, through a sample-based approach, a probabilistic upper bound on the…
Training the parameters of statistical models to describe a given data set is a central task in the field of data mining and machine learning. A very popular and powerful way of parameter estimation is the method of maximum likelihood…