97,517 research outputs found
Information Matrices in Estimating Function Approach: Tests for Model Misspecification and Model Selection
Estimating functions have been widely used for parameter
estimation in various statistical problems. Regular estimating
functions produce parameter estimators which have desirable
properties, such as consistency and asymptotic normality. In
quasi-likelihood inference, an important example of estimating
functions, correct specification of the first two moments of the
underlying distribution leads to the information unbiasedness, which
states that two forms of the information matrix: the negative
sensitivity matrix (negative expectation of the first order
derivative of an estimating function) and the variability matrix
(variance of an estimating function) are equal, or in other words,
the analogue of the Fisher information is equivalent to the Godambe
information. Consequently, the information unbiasedness indicates
that the model-based covariance matrix estimator and sandwich
covariance matrix estimator are equivalent. By comparing the
model-based and sandwich variance estimators, we propose information
ratio (IR) statistics for testing model misspecification of
variance/covariance structure under correctly specified mean
structure, in the context of linear regression models, generalized
linear regression models and generalized estimating equations.
Asymptotic properties of the IR statistics are discussed. In
addition, through intensive simulation studies, we show that the IR
statistics are powerful in various applications: test for
heteroscedasticity in linear regression models, test for
overdispersion in count data, and test for misspecified variance
function and/or misspecified working correlation structure.
Moreover, the IR statistics appear more powerful than the classical
information matrix test proposed by White (1982).
In the literature, model selection criteria have been intensively
discussed, but almost all of them target choosing the optimal mean
structure. In this thesis, two model selection procedures are
proposed for selecting the optimal variance/covariance structure
among a collection of candidate structures. One is based on a
sequence of the IR tests for all the competing variance/covariance
structures. The other is based on an ``information discrepancy
criterion" (IDC), which provides a measurement of discrepancy
between the negative sensitivity matrix and the variability matrix.
In fact, this IDC characterizes the relative efficiency loss when
using a certain candidate variance/covariance structure, compared
with the true but unknown structure. Through simulation studies and
analyses of two data sets, it is shown that the two proposed model
selection methods both have a high rate of detecting the
true/optimal variance/covariance structure. In particular, since the
IDC magnifies the difference among the competing structures, it is
highly sensitive to detect the most appropriate variance/covariance
structure
Topic based language models for ad hoc information retrieval
We propose a topic based approach lo language
modelling for ad-hoc Information Retrieval (IR). Many smoothed estimators used for the multinomial query model in IR rely upon the estimated background collection probabilities. In this paper, we propose a topic based language modelling approach, that uses a more informative prior based on the topical content of a document. In our experiments, the proposed model provides comparable IR performance to the standard models, but when combined in a two stage language model, it outperforms all other estimated models
Relevance-based Word Embedding
Learning a high-dimensional dense representation for vocabulary terms, also
known as a word embedding, has recently attracted much attention in natural
language processing and information retrieval tasks. The embedding vectors are
typically learned based on term proximity in a large corpus. This means that
the objective in well-known word embedding algorithms, e.g., word2vec, is to
accurately predict adjacent word(s) for a given word or context. However, this
objective is not necessarily equivalent to the goal of many information
retrieval (IR) tasks. The primary objective in various IR tasks is to capture
relevance instead of term proximity, syntactic, or even semantic similarity.
This is the motivation for developing unsupervised relevance-based word
embedding models that learn word representations based on query-document
relevance information. In this paper, we propose two learning models with
different objective functions; one learns a relevance distribution over the
vocabulary set for each query, and the other classifies each term as belonging
to the relevant or non-relevant class for each query. To train our models, we
used over six million unique queries and the top ranked documents retrieved in
response to each query, which are assumed to be relevant to the query. We
extrinsically evaluate our learned word representation models using two IR
tasks: query expansion and query classification. Both query expansion
experiments on four TREC collections and query classification experiments on
the KDD Cup 2005 dataset suggest that the relevance-based word embedding models
significantly outperform state-of-the-art proximity-based embedding models,
such as word2vec and GloVe.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of The 40th International ACM SIGIR
Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '17
Using the quantum probability ranking principle to rank interdependent documents
A known limitation of the Probability Ranking Principle (PRP) is that it does not cater for dependence between documents. Recently, the Quantum Probability Ranking Principle (QPRP) has been proposed, which implicitly captures dependencies between documents through “quantum interference”. This paper explores whether this new ranking principle leads to improved performance for subtopic retrieval, where novelty and diversity is required. In a thorough empirical investigation, models based on the PRP, as well as other recently proposed ranking strategies for subtopic retrieval (i.e. Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) and Portfolio Theory(PT)), are compared against the QPRP. On the given task, it is shown that the QPRP outperforms these other ranking strategies. And unlike MMR and PT, one of the main advantages of the QPRP is that no parameter estimation/tuning is required; making the QPRP both simple and effective. This research demonstrates that the application of quantum theory to problems within information retrieval can lead to significant improvements
Transitive probabilistic CLIR models.
Transitive translation could be a useful technique to enlarge the number of supported language pairs for a cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) system in a cost-effective manner. The paper describes several setups for transitive translation based on probabilistic translation models. The transitive CLIR models were evaluated on the CLEF test collection and yielded a retrieval effectiveness\ud
up to 83% of monolingual performance, which is significantly better than a baseline using the synonym operator
Rhetorical relations for information retrieval
Typically, every part in most coherent text has some plausible reason for its
presence, some function that it performs to the overall semantics of the text.
Rhetorical relations, e.g. contrast, cause, explanation, describe how the parts
of a text are linked to each other. Knowledge about this socalled discourse
structure has been applied successfully to several natural language processing
tasks. This work studies the use of rhetorical relations for Information
Retrieval (IR): Is there a correlation between certain rhetorical relations and
retrieval performance? Can knowledge about a document's rhetorical relations be
useful to IR? We present a language model modification that considers
rhetorical relations when estimating the relevance of a document to a query.
Empirical evaluation of different versions of our model on TREC settings shows
that certain rhetorical relations can benefit retrieval effectiveness notably
(> 10% in mean average precision over a state-of-the-art baseline)
Neural Vector Spaces for Unsupervised Information Retrieval
We propose the Neural Vector Space Model (NVSM), a method that learns
representations of documents in an unsupervised manner for news article
retrieval. In the NVSM paradigm, we learn low-dimensional representations of
words and documents from scratch using gradient descent and rank documents
according to their similarity with query representations that are composed from
word representations. We show that NVSM performs better at document ranking
than existing latent semantic vector space methods. The addition of NVSM to a
mixture of lexical language models and a state-of-the-art baseline vector space
model yields a statistically significant increase in retrieval effectiveness.
Consequently, NVSM adds a complementary relevance signal. Next to semantic
matching, we find that NVSM performs well in cases where lexical matching is
needed.
NVSM learns a notion of term specificity directly from the document
collection without feature engineering. We also show that NVSM learns
regularities related to Luhn significance. Finally, we give advice on how to
deploy NVSM in situations where model selection (e.g., cross-validation) is
infeasible. We find that an unsupervised ensemble of multiple models trained
with different hyperparameter values performs better than a single
cross-validated model. Therefore, NVSM can safely be used for ranking documents
without supervised relevance judgments.Comment: TOIS 201
Investigating the relationship between language model perplexity and IR precision-recall measures
An empirical study has been conducted investigating the relationship between the performance of an aspect based language model in terms of perplexity and the corresponding information retrieval performance obtained. It is observed, on the corpora considered, that the perplexity of the language model has a systematic relationship with the achievable precision recall performance though it is not statistically significant
- …