Much of the micro data used for epidemiological studies contain sensitive measurements on real individuals. As a result, such micro data cannot be published out of privacy concerns, rendering any published statistical analyses on them nearly impossible to reproduce. To promote the dissemination of key datasets for analysis without jeopardizing the privacy of individuals, we introduce a cohesive Bayesian framework for the generation of fully synthetic, high dimensional micro datasets of mixed categorical, binary, count, and continuous variables. This process centers around a joint Bayesian model that is simultaneously compatible with all of these data types, enabling the creation of mixed synthetic datasets through posterior predictive sampling. Furthermore, a focal point of epidemiological data analysis is the study of conditional relationships between various exposures and key outcome variables through regression analysis. We design a modified data synthesis strategy to target and preserve these conditional relationships, including both nonlinearities and interactions. The proposed techniques are deployed to create a synthetic version of a confidential dataset containing dozens of health, cognitive, and social measurements on nearly 20,000 North Carolina children.
Inspired by [4] we present a new algorithm for uniformly random generation of ordered trees in which all occuring outdegrees can be specified by a given sequence of numbers. The method can be used for random generation of binary or n-ary trees, or ones with various arities. We show that the algorithm is correct and has $O(n)$ time complexity for $n$ being the desired number of nodes in the resulting tree. In the discussion part we show how some selected formulas can be derived with the use of ideas developed in the proof of correctness of the algorithm.
Variable selection is an important statistical problem. This problem becomes more challenging when the candidate predictors are of mixed type (e.g. continuous and binary) and impact the response variable in nonlinear and/or non-additive ways. In this paper, we review existing variable selection approaches for the Bayesian additive regression trees (BART) model, a nonparametric regression model, which is flexible enough to capture the interactions between predictors and nonlinear relationships with the response. An emphasis of this review is on the capability of identifying relevant predictors. We also propose two variable importance measures which can be used in a permutation-based variable selection approach, and a backward variable selection procedure for BART. We present simulations demonstrating that our approaches exhibit improved performance in terms of the ability to recover all the relevant predictors in a variety of data settings, compared to existing BART-based variable selection methods.
Inferring the most likely configuration for a subset of variables of a joint distribution given the remaining ones - which we refer to as co-generation - is an important challenge that is computationally demanding for all but the simplest settings. This task has received a considerable amount of attention, particularly for classical ways of modeling distributions like structured prediction. In contrast, almost nothing is known about this task when considering recently proposed techniques for modeling high-dimensional distributions, particularly generative adversarial nets (GANs). Therefore, in this paper, we study the occurring challenges for co-generation with GANs. To address those challenges we develop an annealed importance sampling based Hamiltonian Monte Carlo co-generation algorithm. The presented approach significantly outperforms classical gradient based methods on a synthetic and on the CelebA and LSUN datasets.
Generating realistic images from scene graphs asks neural networks to be able to reason about object relationships and compositionality. As a relatively new task, how to properly ensure the generated images comply with scene graphs or how to measure task performance remains an open question. In this paper, we propose to harness scene graph context to improve image generation from scene graphs. We introduce a scene graph context network that pools features generated by a graph convolutional neural network that are then provided to both the image generation network and the adversarial loss. With the context network, our model is trained to not only generate realistic looking images, but also to better preserve non-spatial object relationships. We also define two novel evaluation metrics, the relation score and the mean opinion relation score, for this task that directly evaluate scene graph compliance. We use both quantitative and qualitative studies to demonstrate that our pro-posed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on this challenging task.
Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown promising performance in generating realistic images. However, they often struggle in learning complex underlying modalities in a given dataset, resulting in poor-quality generated images. To mitigate this problem, we present a novel approach called mixture of experts GAN (MEGAN), an ensemble approach of multiple generator networks. Each generator network in MEGAN specializes in generating images with a particular subset of modalities, e.g., an image class. Instead of incorporating a separate step of handcrafted clustering of multiple modalities, our proposed model is trained through an end-to-end learning of multiple generators via gating networks, which is responsible for choosing the appropriate generator network for a given condition. We adopt the categorical reparameterization trick for a categorical decision to be made in selecting a generator while maintaining the flow of the gradients. We demonstrate that individual generators learn different and salient subparts of the data and achieve a multiscale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) score of 0.2470 for CelebA and a competitive unsupervised inception score of 8.33 in CIFAR-10.
Generative models (GMs) such as Generative Adversary Network (GAN) and Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) have thrived these years and achieved high quality results in generating new samples. Especially in Computer Vision, GMs have been used in image inpainting, denoising and completion, which can be treated as the inference from observed pixels to corrupted pixels. However, images are hierarchically structured which are quite different from many real-world inference scenarios with non-hierarchical features. These inference scenarios contain heterogeneous stochastic variables and irregular mutual dependences. Traditionally they are modeled by Bayesian Network (BN). However, the learning and inference of BN model are NP-hard thus the number of stochastic variables in BN is highly constrained. In this paper, we adapt typical GMs to enable heterogeneous learning and inference in polynomial time.We also propose an extended autoregressive (EAR) model and an EAR with adversary loss (EARA) model and give theoretical results on their effectiveness. Experiments on several BN datasets show that our proposed EAR model achieves the best performance in most cases compared to other GMs. Except for black box analysis, we've also done a serial of experiments on Markov border inference of GMs for white box analysis and give theoretical results.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have shown great promise in tasks like synthetic image generation, image inpainting, style transfer, and anomaly detection. However, generating discrete data is a challenge. This work presents an adversarial training based correlated discrete data (CDD) generation model. It also details an approach for conditional CDD generation. The results of our approach are presented over two datasets; job-seeking candidates skill set (private dataset) and MNIST (public dataset). From quantitative and qualitative analysis of these results, we show that our model performs better as it leverages inherent correlation in the data, than an existing model that overlooks correlation.
In this paper, we propose an improved quantitative evaluation framework for Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on generating domain-specific images, where we improve conventional evaluation methods on two levels: the feature representation and the evaluation metric. Unlike most existing evaluation frameworks which transfer the representation of ImageNet inception model to map images onto the feature space, our framework uses a specialized encoder to acquire fine-grained domain-specific representation. Moreover, for datasets with multiple classes, we propose Class-Aware Frechet Distance (CAFD), which employs a Gaussian mixture model on the feature space to better fit the multi-manifold feature distribution. Experiments and analysis on both the feature level and the image level were conducted to demonstrate improvements of our proposed framework over the recently proposed state-of-the-art FID method. To our best knowledge, we are the first to provide counter examples where FID gives inconsistent results with human judgments. It is shown in the experiments that our framework is able to overcome the shortness of FID and improves robustness. Code will be made available.
Person Re-identification (re-id) faces two major challenges: the lack of cross-view paired training data and learning discriminative identity-sensitive and view-invariant features in the presence of large pose variations. In this work, we address both problems by proposing a novel deep person image generation model for synthesizing realistic person images conditional on pose. The model is based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) and used specifically for pose normalization in re-id, thus termed pose-normalization GAN (PN-GAN). With the synthesized images, we can learn a new type of deep re-id feature free of the influence of pose variations. We show that this feature is strong on its own and highly complementary to features learned with the original images. Importantly, we now have a model that generalizes to any new re-id dataset without the need for collecting any training data for model fine-tuning, thus making a deep re-id model truly scalable. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models, often significantly. In particular, the features learned on Market-1501 can achieve a Rank-1 accuracy of 68.67% on VIPeR without any model fine-tuning, beating almost all existing models fine-tuned on the dataset.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.