Discrete Bayesian nonparametric models whose expectation is a convex linear combination of a point mass at some point of the support and a diffuse probability distribution allow to incorporate strong prior information, while still being extremely flexible. Recent contributions in the statistical literature have successfully implemented such a modelling strategy in a variety of applications, including density estimation, nonparametric regression and model-based clustering. We provide a thorough study of a large class of nonparametric models we call inner spike and slab hNRMI models, which are obtained by considering homogeneous normalized random measures with independent increments (hNRMI) with base measure given by a convex linear combination of a point mass and a diffuse probability distribution. In this paper we investigate the distributional properties of these models and our results include: i) the exchangeable partition probability function they induce, ii) the distribution of the number of distinct values in an exchangeable sample, iii) the posterior predictive distribution, and iv) the distribution of the number of elements that coincide with the only point of the support with positive probability. Our findings are the main building block for an actual implementation of Bayesian inner spike and slab hNRMI models by means of a generalized P\'olya urn scheme.
We propose a new semi-parametric model based on Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART). In our approach, the response variable is approximated by a linear predictor and a BART model, where the first component is responsible for estimating the main effects and BART accounts for the non-specified interactions and non-linearities. The novelty in our approach lies in the way we change tree generation moves in BART to deal with confounding between the parametric and non-parametric components when they have covariates in common. Through synthetic and real-world examples, we demonstrate that the performance of the new semi-parametric BART is competitive when compared to regression models and other tree-based methods. The implementation of the proposed method is available at //github.com/ebprado/SP-BART.
Various nonparametric approaches for Bayesian spectral density estimation of stationary time series have been suggested in the literature, mostly based on the Whittle likelihood approximation. A generalization of this approximation has been proposed in Kirch et al. who prove posterior consistency for spectral density estimation in combination with the Bernstein-Dirichlet process prior for Gaussian time series. In this paper, we will extend the posterior consistency result to non-Gaussian time series by employing a general consistency theorem of Shalizi for dependent data and misspecified models. As a special case, posterior consistency for the spectral density under the Whittle likelihood as proposed by Choudhuri, Ghosal and Roy is also extended to non-Gaussian time series. Small sample properties of this approach are illustrated with several examples of non-Gaussian time series.
The estimation of information measures of continuous distributions based on samples is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. In this paper, we analyze estimates of differential entropy in $K$-dimensional Euclidean space, computed from a finite number of samples, when the probability density function belongs to a predetermined convex family $\mathcal{P}$. First, estimating differential entropy to any accuracy is shown to be infeasible if the differential entropy of densities in $\mathcal{P}$ is unbounded, clearly showing the necessity of additional assumptions. Subsequently, we investigate sufficient conditions that enable confidence bounds for the estimation of differential entropy. In particular, we provide confidence bounds for simple histogram based estimation of differential entropy from a fixed number of samples, assuming that the probability density function is Lipschitz continuous with known Lipschitz constant and known, bounded support. Our focus is on differential entropy, but we provide examples that show that similar results hold for mutual information and relative entropy as well.
In this paper, we consider several efficient data structures for the problem of sampling from a dynamically changing discrete probability distribution, where some prior information is known on the distribution of the rates, in particular the maximum and minimum rate, and where the number of possible outcomes N is large. We consider three basic data structures, the Acceptance-Rejection method, the Complete Binary Tree and the Alias method. These can be used as building blocks in a multi-level data structure, where at each of the levels, one of the basic data structures can be used, with the top level selecting a group of events, and the bottom level selecting an element from a group. Depending on assumptions on the distribution of the rates of outcomes, different combinations of the basic structures can be used. We prove that for particular data structures the expected time of sampling and update is constant when the rate distribution follows certain conditions. We show that for any distribution, combining a tree structure with the Acceptance-Rejection method, we have an expected time of sampling and update of $O\left(\log\log{r_{max}}/{r_{min}}\right)$ is possible, where $r_{max}$ is the maximum rate and $r_{min}$ the minimum rate. We also discuss an implementation of a Two Levels Acceptance-Rejection data structure, that allows expected constant time for sampling, and amortized constant time for updates, assuming that $r_{max}$ and $r_{min}$ are known and the number of events is sufficiently large. We also present an experimental verification, highlighting the limits given by the constraints of a real-life setting.
Inference of latent feature models in the Bayesian nonparametric setting is generally difficult, especially in high dimensional settings, because it usually requires proposing features from some prior distribution. In special cases, where the integration is tractable, we can sample new feature assignments according to a predictive likelihood. We present a novel method to accelerate the mixing of latent variable model inference by proposing feature locations based on the data, as opposed to the prior. First, we introduce an accelerated feature proposal mechanism that we show is a valid MCMC algorithm for posterior inference. Next, we propose an approximate inference strategy to perform accelerated inference in parallel. A two-stage algorithm that combines the two approaches provides a computationally attractive method that can quickly reach local convergence to the posterior distribution of our model, while allowing us to exploit parallelization.
In the first part of this work, we develop a novel scheme for solving nonparametric regression problems. That is the approximation of possibly low regular and noised functions from the knowledge of their approximate values given at some random points. Our proposed scheme is based on the use of the pseudo-inverse of a random projection matrix, combined with some specific properties of the Jacobi polynomials system, as well as some properties of positive definite random matrices. This scheme has the advantages to be stable, robust, accurate and fairly fast in terms of execution time. Moreover and unlike most of the existing nonparametric regression estimators, no extra regularization step is required by our proposed estimator. Although, this estimator is initially designed to work with random sampling set of uni-variate i.i.d. random variables following a Beta distribution, we show that it is still work for a wide range of sampling distribution laws. Moreover, we briefly describe how our estimator can be adapted in order to handle the multivariate case of random sampling sets. In the second part of this work, we extend the random pseudo-inverse scheme technique to build a stable and accurate estimator for solving linear functional regression (LFR) problems. A dyadic decomposition approach is used to construct this last stable estimator for the LFR problem. The performance of the two proposed estimators are illustrated by various numerical simulations. In particular, a real dataset is used to illustrate the performance of our nonparametric regression estimator.
We provide a flexible framework for selecting among a class of additive partial linear models that allows both linear and nonlinear additive components. In practice, it is challenging to determine which additive components should be excluded from the model while simultaneously determining whether nonzero additive components should be represented as linear or non-linear components in the final model. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian model selection method that is facilitated by a carefully specified class of models, including the choice of a prior distribution and the nonparametric model used for the nonlinear additive components. We employ a series of latent variables that determine the effect of each variable among the three possibilities (no effect, linear effect, and nonlinear effect) and that simultaneously determine the knots of each spline for a suitable penalization of smooth functions. The use of a pseudo-prior distribution along with a collapsing scheme enables us to deploy well-behaved Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers, both for model selection and for fitting the preferred model. Our method and algorithm are deployed on a suite of numerical studies and are applied to a nutritional epidemiology study. The numerical results show that the proposed methodology outperforms previously available methods in terms of effective sample sizes of the Markov chain samplers and the overall misclassification rates.
This work focuses on combining nonparametric topic models with Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes (AEVB). Specifically, we first propose iTM-VAE, where the topics are treated as trainable parameters and the document-specific topic proportions are obtained by a stick-breaking construction. The inference of iTM-VAE is modeled by neural networks such that it can be computed in a simple feed-forward manner. We also describe how to introduce a hyper-prior into iTM-VAE so as to model the uncertainty of the prior parameter. Actually, the hyper-prior technique is quite general and we show that it can be applied to other AEVB based models to alleviate the {\it collapse-to-prior} problem elegantly. Moreover, we also propose HiTM-VAE, where the document-specific topic distributions are generated in a hierarchical manner. HiTM-VAE is even more flexible and can generate topic distributions with better variability. Experimental results on 20News and Reuters RCV1-V2 datasets show that the proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art baselines significantly. The advantages of the hyper-prior technique and the hierarchical model construction are also confirmed by experiments.
Large margin nearest neighbor (LMNN) is a metric learner which optimizes the performance of the popular $k$NN classifier. However, its resulting metric relies on pre-selected target neighbors. In this paper, we address the feasibility of LMNN's optimization constraints regarding these target points, and introduce a mathematical measure to evaluate the size of the feasible region of the optimization problem. We enhance the optimization framework of LMNN by a weighting scheme which prefers data triplets which yield a larger feasible region. This increases the chances to obtain a good metric as the solution of LMNN's problem. We evaluate the performance of the resulting feasibility-based LMNN algorithm using synthetic and real datasets. The empirical results show an improved accuracy for different types of datasets in comparison to regular LMNN.
Discrete random structures are important tools in Bayesian nonparametrics and the resulting models have proven effective in density estimation, clustering, topic modeling and prediction, among others. In this paper, we consider nested processes and study the dependence structures they induce. Dependence ranges between homogeneity, corresponding to full exchangeability, and maximum heterogeneity, corresponding to (unconditional) independence across samples. The popular nested Dirichlet process is shown to degenerate to the fully exchangeable case when there are ties across samples at the observed or latent level. To overcome this drawback, inherent to nesting general discrete random measures, we introduce a novel class of latent nested processes. These are obtained by adding common and group-specific completely random measures and, then, normalising to yield dependent random probability measures. We provide results on the partition distributions induced by latent nested processes, and develop an Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler for Bayesian inferences. A test for distributional homogeneity across groups is obtained as a by product. The results and their inferential implications are showcased on synthetic and real data.