983 research outputs found
A Nonparametric Conjugate Prior Distribution for the Maximizing Argument of a Noisy Function
We propose a novel Bayesian approach to solve stochastic optimization
problems that involve finding extrema of noisy, nonlinear functions. Previous
work has focused on representing possible functions explicitly, which leads to
a two-step procedure of first, doing inference over the function space and
second, finding the extrema of these functions. Here we skip the representation
step and directly model the distribution over extrema. To this end, we devise a
non-parametric conjugate prior based on a kernel regressor. The resulting
posterior distribution directly captures the uncertainty over the maximum of
the unknown function. We illustrate the effectiveness of our model by
optimizing a noisy, high-dimensional, non-convex objective function.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure
Bayesian Nonparametric Unmixing of Hyperspectral Images
Hyperspectral imaging is an important tool in remote sensing, allowing for
accurate analysis of vast areas. Due to a low spatial resolution, a pixel of a
hyperspectral image rarely represents a single material, but rather a mixture
of different spectra. HSU aims at estimating the pure spectra present in the
scene of interest, referred to as endmembers, and their fractions in each
pixel, referred to as abundances. Today, many HSU algorithms have been
proposed, based either on a geometrical or statistical model. While most
methods assume that the number of endmembers present in the scene is known,
there is only little work about estimating this number from the observed data.
In this work, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric framework that jointly
estimates the number of endmembers, the endmembers itself, and their
abundances, by making use of the Indian Buffet Process as a prior for the
endmembers. Simulation results and experiments on real data demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, yielding results comparable with
state-of-the-art methods while being able to reliably infer the number of
endmembers. In scenarios with strong noise, where other algorithms provide only
poor results, the proposed approach tends to overestimate the number of
endmembers slightly. The additional endmembers, however, often simply represent
noisy replicas of present endmembers and could easily be merged in a
post-processing step
Conditionally conjugate mean-field variational Bayes for logistic models
Variational Bayes (VB) is a common strategy for approximate Bayesian
inference, but simple methods are only available for specific classes of models
including, in particular, representations having conditionally conjugate
constructions within an exponential family. Models with logit components are an
apparently notable exception to this class, due to the absence of conjugacy
between the logistic likelihood and the Gaussian priors for the coefficients in
the linear predictor. To facilitate approximate inference within this widely
used class of models, Jaakkola and Jordan (2000) proposed a simple variational
approach which relies on a family of tangent quadratic lower bounds of logistic
log-likelihoods, thus restoring conjugacy between these approximate bounds and
the Gaussian priors. This strategy is still implemented successfully, but less
attempts have been made to formally understand the reasons underlying its
excellent performance. To cover this key gap, we provide a formal connection
between the above bound and a recent P\'olya-gamma data augmentation for
logistic regression. Such a result places the computational methods associated
with the aforementioned bounds within the framework of variational inference
for conditionally conjugate exponential family models, thereby allowing recent
advances for this class to be inherited also by the methods relying on Jaakkola
and Jordan (2000)
Adaptive Low-Complexity Sequential Inference for Dirichlet Process Mixture Models
We develop a sequential low-complexity inference procedure for Dirichlet
process mixtures of Gaussians for online clustering and parameter estimation
when the number of clusters are unknown a-priori. We present an easily
computable, closed form parametric expression for the conditional likelihood,
in which hyperparameters are recursively updated as a function of the streaming
data assuming conjugate priors. Motivated by large-sample asymptotics, we
propose a novel adaptive low-complexity design for the Dirichlet process
concentration parameter and show that the number of classes grow at most at a
logarithmic rate. We further prove that in the large-sample limit, the
conditional likelihood and data predictive distribution become asymptotically
Gaussian. We demonstrate through experiments on synthetic and real data sets
that our approach is superior to other online state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 25 pages, To appear in Advances in Neural Information Processing
Systems (NIPS) 201
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