27,962 research outputs found
A hierarchical latent variable model for data visualization
Visualization has proven to be a powerful and widely-applicable tool the analysis and interpretation of data. Most visualization algorithms aim to find a projection from the data space down to a two-dimensional visualization space. However, for complex data sets living in a high-dimensional space it is unlikely that a single two-dimensional projection can reveal all of the interesting structure. We therefore introduce a hierarchical visualization algorithm which allows the complete data set to be visualized at the top level, with clusters and sub-clusters of data points visualized at deeper levels. The algorithm is based on a hierarchical mixture of latent variable models, whose parameters are estimated using the expectation-maximization algorithm. We demonstrate the principle of the approach first on a toy data set, and then apply the algorithm to the visualization of a synthetic data set in 12 dimensions obtained from a simulation of multi-phase flows in oil pipelines and to data in 36 dimensions derived from satellite images
Latent Causal Socioeconomic Health Index
This research develops a model-based LAtent Causal Socioeconomic Health
(LACSH) index at the national level. We build upon the latent health factor
index (LHFI) approach that has been used to assess the unobservable
ecological/ecosystem health. This framework integratively models the
relationship between metrics, the latent health, and the covariates that drive
the notion of health. In this paper, the LHFI structure is integrated with
spatial modeling and statistical causal modeling, so as to evaluate the impact
of a continuous policy variable (mandatory maternity leave days and
government's expenditure on healthcare, respectively) on a nation's
socioeconomic health, while formally accounting for spatial dependency among
the nations. A novel visualization technique for evaluating covariate balance
is also introduced for the case of a continuous policy (treatment) variable. We
apply our LACSH model to countries around the world using data on various
metrics and potential covariates pertaining to different aspects of societal
health. The approach is structured in a Bayesian hierarchical framework and
results are obtained by Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques.Comment: 31 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1911.0051
Dimensionality reduction of clustered data sets
We present a novel probabilistic latent variable model to perform linear dimensionality reduction on data sets which contain clusters. We prove that the maximum likelihood solution of the model is an unsupervised generalisation of linear discriminant analysis. This provides a completely new approach to one of the most established and widely used classification algorithms. The performance of the model is then demonstrated on a number of real and artificial data sets
Feature discovery and visualization of robot mission data using convolutional autoencoders and Bayesian nonparametric topic models
The gap between our ability to collect interesting data and our ability to
analyze these data is growing at an unprecedented rate. Recent algorithmic
attempts to fill this gap have employed unsupervised tools to discover
structure in data. Some of the most successful approaches have used
probabilistic models to uncover latent thematic structure in discrete data.
Despite the success of these models on textual data, they have not generalized
as well to image data, in part because of the spatial and temporal structure
that may exist in an image stream.
We introduce a novel unsupervised machine learning framework that
incorporates the ability of convolutional autoencoders to discover features
from images that directly encode spatial information, within a Bayesian
nonparametric topic model that discovers meaningful latent patterns within
discrete data. By using this hybrid framework, we overcome the fundamental
dependency of traditional topic models on rigidly hand-coded data
representations, while simultaneously encoding spatial dependency in our topics
without adding model complexity. We apply this model to the motivating
application of high-level scene understanding and mission summarization for
exploratory marine robots. Our experiments on a seafloor dataset collected by a
marine robot show that the proposed hybrid framework outperforms current
state-of-the-art approaches on the task of unsupervised seafloor terrain
characterization.Comment: 8 page
Recruitment Market Trend Analysis with Sequential Latent Variable Models
Recruitment market analysis provides valuable understanding of
industry-specific economic growth and plays an important role for both
employers and job seekers. With the rapid development of online recruitment
services, massive recruitment data have been accumulated and enable a new
paradigm for recruitment market analysis. However, traditional methods for
recruitment market analysis largely rely on the knowledge of domain experts and
classic statistical models, which are usually too general to model large-scale
dynamic recruitment data, and have difficulties to capture the fine-grained
market trends. To this end, in this paper, we propose a new research paradigm
for recruitment market analysis by leveraging unsupervised learning techniques
for automatically discovering recruitment market trends based on large-scale
recruitment data. Specifically, we develop a novel sequential latent variable
model, named MTLVM, which is designed for capturing the sequential dependencies
of corporate recruitment states and is able to automatically learn the latent
recruitment topics within a Bayesian generative framework. In particular, to
capture the variability of recruitment topics over time, we design hierarchical
dirichlet processes for MTLVM. These processes allow to dynamically generate
the evolving recruitment topics. Finally, we implement a prototype system to
empirically evaluate our approach based on real-world recruitment data in
China. Indeed, by visualizing the results from MTLVM, we can successfully
reveal many interesting findings, such as the popularity of LBS related jobs
reached the peak in the 2nd half of 2014, and decreased in 2015.Comment: 11 pages, 30 figure, SIGKDD 201
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