Related papers: A Tutorial on the Expectation-Maximization Algorit…
Statistical inference for discrete time observations of an affine stochastic delay differential equation is considered. The main focus is on maximum pseudo-likelihood estimators, which are easy to calculate in practice. A more general class…
A key prerequisite to optimal reasoning under uncertainty in intelligent systems is to start with good class probability estimates. This paper improves on the current best probability estimation trees (Bagged-PETs) and also presents a new…
Mixture models serve as one fundamental tool with versatile applications. However, their training techniques, like the popular Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, are notoriously sensitive to parameter initialization and often suffer…
We study a class of weakly identifiable location-scale mixture models for which the maximum likelihood estimates based on $n$ i.i.d. samples are known to have lower accuracy than the classical $n^{- \frac{1}{2}}$ error. We investigate…
Finite-precision floating point arithmetic unavoidably introduces rounding errors which are traditionally bounded using a worst-case analysis. However, worst-case analysis might be overly conservative because worst-case errors can be…
Mini-batch algorithms have become increasingly popular due to the requirement for solving optimization problems, based on large-scale data sets. Using an existing online expectation-{}-maximization (EM) algorithm framework, we demonstrate…
Clustering algorithms are a cornerstone of machine learning applications. Recently, a quantum algorithm for clustering based on the k-means algorithm has been proposed by Kerenidis, Landman, Luongo and Prakash. Based on their work, we…
We present techniques for decreasing the error probability of randomized algorithms and for converting randomized algorithms to deterministic (non-uniform) algorithms. Unlike most existing techniques that involve repetition of the…
Envelope method was recently proposed as a method to reduce the dimension of responses in multivariate regressions. However, when there exists missing data, the envelope method using the complete case observations may lead to biased and…
We consider probabilistic topic models and more recent word embedding techniques from a perspective of learning hidden semantic representations. Inspired by a striking similarity of the two approaches, we merge them and learn probabilistic…
Expectation propagation is a general prescription for approximation of integrals in statistical inference problems. Its literature is mainly concerned with Bayesian inference scenarios. However, expectation propagation can also be used to…
We develop a general framework for proving rigorous guarantees on the performance of the EM algorithm and a variant known as gradient EM. Our analysis is divided into two parts: a treatment of these algorithms at the population level (in…
We consider distributed estimation of the inverse covariance matrix, also called the concentration or precision matrix, in Gaussian graphical models. Traditional centralized estimation often requires global inference of the covariance…
Mechanistic network models specify the mechanisms by which networks grow and change, allowing researchers to investigate complex systems using both simulation and analytical techniques. Unfortunately, it is difficult to write likelihoods…
Reliable probability estimation is of crucial importance in many real-world applications where there is inherent (aleatoric) uncertainty. Probability-estimation models are trained on observed outcomes (e.g. whether it has rained or not, or…
The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm can compute the maximum-likelihood (ML) or maximum a posterior (MAP) point estimate of the mixture models or latent variable models such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), which has been one of…
Maximum likelihood estimation is a fundamental optimization problem in statistics. We study this problem on manifolds of matrices with bounded rank. These represent mixtures of distributions of two independent discrete random variables. We…
Determinantal point processes (DPPs) have wide-ranging applications in machine learning, where they are used to enforce the notion of diversity in subset selection problems. Many estimators have been proposed, but surprisingly the basic…
We build on abduction-based explanations for ma-chine learning and develop a method for computing local explanations for neural network models in natural language processing (NLP). Our explanations comprise a subset of the words of the…
Although adequate models of human language for syntactic analysis and semantic interpretation are of at least context-free complexity, for applications such as speech processing in which speed is important finite-state models are often…