32,531 research outputs found
Empirical Bayes and Full Bayes for Signal Estimation
We consider signals that follow a parametric distribution where the parameter
values are unknown. To estimate such signals from noisy measurements in scalar
channels, we study the empirical performance of an empirical Bayes (EB)
approach and a full Bayes (FB) approach. We then apply EB and FB to solve
compressed sensing (CS) signal estimation problems by successively denoising a
scalar Gaussian channel within an approximate message passing (AMP) framework.
Our numerical results show that FB achieves better performance than EB in
scalar channel denoising problems when the signal dimension is small. In the CS
setting, the signal dimension must be large enough for AMP to work well; for
large signal dimensions, AMP has similar performance with FB and EB.Comment: This work was presented at the Information Theory and Application
workshop (ITA), San Diego, CA, Feb. 201
False discovery rate regression: an application to neural synchrony detection in primary visual cortex
Many approaches for multiple testing begin with the assumption that all tests
in a given study should be combined into a global false-discovery-rate
analysis. But this may be inappropriate for many of today's large-scale
screening problems, where auxiliary information about each test is often
available, and where a combined analysis can lead to poorly calibrated error
rates within different subsets of the experiment. To address this issue, we
introduce an approach called false-discovery-rate regression that directly uses
this auxiliary information to inform the outcome of each test. The method can
be motivated by a two-groups model in which covariates are allowed to influence
the local false discovery rate, or equivalently, the posterior probability that
a given observation is a signal. This poses many subtle issues at the interface
between inference and computation, and we investigate several variations of the
overall approach. Simulation evidence suggests that: (1) when covariate effects
are present, FDR regression improves power for a fixed false-discovery rate;
and (2) when covariate effects are absent, the method is robust, in the sense
that it does not lead to inflated error rates. We apply the method to neural
recordings from primary visual cortex. The goal is to detect pairs of neurons
that exhibit fine-time-scale interactions, in the sense that they fire together
more often than expected due to chance. Our method detects roughly 50% more
synchronous pairs versus a standard FDR-controlling analysis. The companion R
package FDRreg implements all methods described in the paper
Asymptotically minimax empirical Bayes estimation of a sparse normal mean vector
For the important classical problem of inference on a sparse high-dimensional
normal mean vector, we propose a novel empirical Bayes model that admits a
posterior distribution with desirable properties under mild conditions. In
particular, our empirical Bayes posterior distribution concentrates on balls,
centered at the true mean vector, with squared radius proportional to the
minimax rate, and its posterior mean is an asymptotically minimax estimator. We
also show that, asymptotically, the support of our empirical Bayes posterior
has roughly the same effective dimension as the true sparse mean vector.
Simulation from our empirical Bayes posterior is straightforward, and our
numerical results demonstrate the quality of our method compared to others
having similar large-sample properties.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 3 table
Empirical Bayes selection of wavelet thresholds
This paper explores a class of empirical Bayes methods for level-dependent
threshold selection in wavelet shrinkage. The prior considered for each wavelet
coefficient is a mixture of an atom of probability at zero and a heavy-tailed
density. The mixing weight, or sparsity parameter, for each level of the
transform is chosen by marginal maximum likelihood. If estimation is carried
out using the posterior median, this is a random thresholding procedure; the
estimation can also be carried out using other thresholding rules with the same
threshold. Details of the calculations needed for implementing the procedure
are included. In practice, the estimates are quick to compute and there is
software available. Simulations on the standard model functions show excellent
performance, and applications to data drawn from various fields of application
are used to explore the practical performance of the approach. By using a
general result on the risk of the corresponding marginal maximum likelihood
approach for a single sequence, overall bounds on the risk of the method are
found subject to membership of the unknown function in one of a wide range of
Besov classes, covering also the case of f of bounded variation. The rates
obtained are optimal for any value of the parameter p in (0,\infty],
simultaneously for a wide range of loss functions, each dominating the L_q norm
of the \sigmath derivative, with \sigma\ge0 and 0<q\le2.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053605000000345 in the
Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Efficient training algorithms for HMMs using incremental estimation
Typically, parameter estimation for a hidden Markov model (HMM) is performed using an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm with the maximum-likelihood (ML) criterion. The EM algorithm is an iterative scheme that is well-defined and numerically stable, but convergence may require a large number of iterations. For speech recognition systems utilizing large amounts of training material, this results in long training times. This paper presents an incremental estimation approach to speed-up the training of HMMs without any loss of recognition performance. The algorithm selects a subset of data from the training set, updates the model parameters based on the subset, and then iterates the process until convergence of the parameters. The advantage of this approach is a substantial increase in the number of iterations of the EM algorithm per training token, which leads to faster training. In order to achieve reliable estimation from a small fraction of the complete data set at each iteration, two training criteria are studied; ML and maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. Experimental results show that the training of the incremental algorithms is substantially faster than the conventional (batch) method and suffers no loss of recognition performance. Furthermore, the incremental MAP based training algorithm improves performance over the batch versio
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