12,018 research outputs found
Nonparametric Bayes Modeling of Populations of Networks
Replicated network data are increasingly available in many research fields.
In connectomic applications, inter-connections among brain regions are
collected for each patient under study, motivating statistical models which can
flexibly characterize the probabilistic generative mechanism underlying these
network-valued data. Available models for a single network are not designed
specifically for inference on the entire probability mass function of a
network-valued random variable and therefore lack flexibility in characterizing
the distribution of relevant topological structures. We propose a flexible
Bayesian nonparametric approach for modeling the population distribution of
network-valued data. The joint distribution of the edges is defined via a
mixture model which reduces dimensionality and efficiently incorporates network
information within each mixture component by leveraging latent space
representations. The formulation leads to an efficient Gibbs sampler and
provides simple and coherent strategies for inference and goodness-of-fit
assessments. We provide theoretical results on the flexibility of our model and
illustrate improved performance --- compared to state-of-the-art models --- in
simulations and application to human brain networks
Conditional Spectral Analysis of Replicated Multiple Time Series with Application to Nocturnal Physiology
This article considers the problem of analyzing associations between power
spectra of multiple time series and cross-sectional outcomes when data are
observed from multiple subjects. The motivating application comes from sleep
medicine, where researchers are able to non-invasively record physiological
time series signals during sleep. The frequency patterns of these signals,
which can be quantified through the power spectrum, contain interpretable
information about biological processes. An important problem in sleep research
is drawing connections between power spectra of time series signals and
clinical characteristics; these connections are key to understanding biological
pathways through which sleep affects, and can be treated to improve, health.
Such analyses are challenging as they must overcome the complicated structure
of a power spectrum from multiple time series as a complex positive-definite
matrix-valued function. This article proposes a new approach to such analyses
based on a tensor-product spline model of Cholesky components of
outcome-dependent power spectra. The approach flexibly models power spectra as
nonparametric functions of frequency and outcome while preserving geometric
constraints. Formulated in a fully Bayesian framework, a Whittle likelihood
based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is developed for automated
model fitting and for conducting inference on associations between outcomes and
spectral measures. The method is used to analyze data from a study of sleep in
older adults and uncovers new insights into how stress and arousal are
connected to the amount of time one spends in bed
Kernel Belief Propagation
We propose a nonparametric generalization of belief propagation, Kernel
Belief Propagation (KBP), for pairwise Markov random fields. Messages are
represented as functions in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), and
message updates are simple linear operations in the RKHS. KBP makes none of the
assumptions commonly required in classical BP algorithms: the variables need
not arise from a finite domain or a Gaussian distribution, nor must their
relations take any particular parametric form. Rather, the relations between
variables are represented implicitly, and are learned nonparametrically from
training data. KBP has the advantage that it may be used on any domain where
kernels are defined (Rd, strings, groups), even where explicit parametric
models are not known, or closed form expressions for the BP updates do not
exist. The computational cost of message updates in KBP is polynomial in the
training data size. We also propose a constant time approximate message update
procedure by representing messages using a small number of basis functions. In
experiments, we apply KBP to image denoising, depth prediction from still
images, and protein configuration prediction: KBP is faster than competing
classical and nonparametric approaches (by orders of magnitude, in some cases),
while providing significantly more accurate results
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