4,143 research outputs found
Beta-Negative Binomial Process and Poisson Factor Analysis
A beta-negative binomial (BNB) process is proposed, leading to a
beta-gamma-Poisson process, which may be viewed as a "multi-scoop"
generalization of the beta-Bernoulli process. The BNB process is augmented into
a beta-gamma-gamma-Poisson hierarchical structure, and applied as a
nonparametric Bayesian prior for an infinite Poisson factor analysis model. A
finite approximation for the beta process Levy random measure is constructed
for convenient implementation. Efficient MCMC computations are performed with
data augmentation and marginalization techniques. Encouraging results are shown
on document count matrix factorization.Comment: Appearing in AISTATS 2012 (submitted on Oct. 2011
Priors for Random Count Matrices Derived from a Family of Negative Binomial Processes
We define a family of probability distributions for random count matrices
with a potentially unbounded number of rows and columns. The three
distributions we consider are derived from the gamma-Poisson, gamma-negative
binomial, and beta-negative binomial processes. Because the models lead to
closed-form Gibbs sampling update equations, they are natural candidates for
nonparametric Bayesian priors over count matrices. A key aspect of our analysis
is the recognition that, although the random count matrices within the family
are defined by a row-wise construction, their columns can be shown to be i.i.d.
This fact is used to derive explicit formulas for drawing all the columns at
once. Moreover, by analyzing these matrices' combinatorial structure, we
describe how to sequentially construct a column-i.i.d. random count matrix one
row at a time, and derive the predictive distribution of a new row count vector
with previously unseen features. We describe the similarities and differences
between the three priors, and argue that the greater flexibility of the gamma-
and beta- negative binomial processes, especially their ability to model
over-dispersed, heavy-tailed count data, makes these well suited to a wide
variety of real-world applications. As an example of our framework, we
construct a naive-Bayes text classifier to categorize a count vector to one of
several existing random count matrices of different categories. The classifier
supports an unbounded number of features, and unlike most existing methods, it
does not require a predefined finite vocabulary to be shared by all the
categories, and needs neither feature selection nor parameter tuning. Both the
gamma- and beta- negative binomial processes are shown to significantly
outperform the gamma-Poisson process for document categorization, with
comparable performance to other state-of-the-art supervised text classification
algorithms.Comment: To appear in Journal of the American Statistical Association (Theory
and Methods). 31 pages + 11 page supplement, 5 figure
Gamma Processes, Stick-Breaking, and Variational Inference
While most Bayesian nonparametric models in machine learning have focused on
the Dirichlet process, the beta process, or their variants, the gamma process
has recently emerged as a useful nonparametric prior in its own right. Current
inference schemes for models involving the gamma process are restricted to
MCMC-based methods, which limits their scalability. In this paper, we present a
variational inference framework for models involving gamma process priors. Our
approach is based on a novel stick-breaking constructive definition of the
gamma process. We prove correctness of this stick-breaking process by using the
characterization of the gamma process as a completely random measure (CRM), and
we explicitly derive the rate measure of our construction using Poisson process
machinery. We also derive error bounds on the truncation of the infinite
process required for variational inference, similar to the truncation analyses
for other nonparametric models based on the Dirichlet and beta processes. Our
representation is then used to derive a variational inference algorithm for a
particular Bayesian nonparametric latent structure formulation known as the
infinite Gamma-Poisson model, where the latent variables are drawn from a gamma
process prior with Poisson likelihoods. Finally, we present results for our
algorithms on nonnegative matrix factorization tasks on document corpora, and
show that we compare favorably to both sampling-based techniques and
variational approaches based on beta-Bernoulli priors
Augment-and-Conquer Negative Binomial Processes
By developing data augmentation methods unique to the negative binomial (NB)
distribution, we unite seemingly disjoint count and mixture models under the NB
process framework. We develop fundamental properties of the models and derive
efficient Gibbs sampling inference. We show that the gamma-NB process can be
reduced to the hierarchical Dirichlet process with normalization, highlighting
its unique theoretical, structural and computational advantages. A variety of
NB processes with distinct sharing mechanisms are constructed and applied to
topic modeling, with connections to existing algorithms, showing the importance
of inferring both the NB dispersion and probability parameters.Comment: Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 201
Beta-Negative Binomial Process and Exchangeable Random Partitions for Mixed-Membership Modeling
The beta-negative binomial process (BNBP), an integer-valued stochastic
process, is employed to partition a count vector into a latent random count
matrix. As the marginal probability distribution of the BNBP that governs the
exchangeable random partitions of grouped data has not yet been developed,
current inference for the BNBP has to truncate the number of atoms of the beta
process. This paper introduces an exchangeable partition probability function
to explicitly describe how the BNBP clusters the data points of each group into
a random number of exchangeable partitions, which are shared across all the
groups. A fully collapsed Gibbs sampler is developed for the BNBP, leading to a
novel nonparametric Bayesian topic model that is distinct from existing ones,
with simple implementation, fast convergence, good mixing, and state-of-the-art
predictive performance.Comment: in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2014. 9 pages + 3
page appendi
A Nonparametric Bayesian Approach to Uncovering Rat Hippocampal Population Codes During Spatial Navigation
Rodent hippocampal population codes represent important spatial information
about the environment during navigation. Several computational methods have
been developed to uncover the neural representation of spatial topology
embedded in rodent hippocampal ensemble spike activity. Here we extend our
previous work and propose a nonparametric Bayesian approach to infer rat
hippocampal population codes during spatial navigation. To tackle the model
selection problem, we leverage a nonparametric Bayesian model. Specifically, to
analyze rat hippocampal ensemble spiking activity, we apply a hierarchical
Dirichlet process-hidden Markov model (HDP-HMM) using two Bayesian inference
methods, one based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and the other based on
variational Bayes (VB). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our Bayesian
approaches on recordings from a freely-behaving rat navigating in an open field
environment. We find that MCMC-based inference with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo
(HMC) hyperparameter sampling is flexible and efficient, and outperforms VB and
MCMC approaches with hyperparameters set by empirical Bayes
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