60,588 research outputs found
Network Psychometrics
This chapter provides a general introduction of network modeling in
psychometrics. The chapter starts with an introduction to the statistical model
formulation of pairwise Markov random fields (PMRF), followed by an
introduction of the PMRF suitable for binary data: the Ising model. The Ising
model is a model used in ferromagnetism to explain phase transitions in a field
of particles. Following the description of the Ising model in statistical
physics, the chapter continues to show that the Ising model is closely related
to models used in psychometrics. The Ising model can be shown to be equivalent
to certain kinds of logistic regression models, loglinear models and
multi-dimensional item response theory (MIRT) models. The equivalence between
the Ising model and the MIRT model puts standard psychometrics in a new light
and leads to a strikingly different interpretation of well-known latent
variable models. The chapter gives an overview of methods that can be used to
estimate the Ising model, and concludes with a discussion on the interpretation
of latent variables given the equivalence between the Ising model and MIRT.Comment: In Irwing, P., Hughes, D., and Booth, T. (2018). The Wiley Handbook
of Psychometric Testing, 2 Volume Set: A Multidisciplinary Reference on
Survey, Scale and Test Development. New York: Wile
Bayesian Learning of Sum-Product Networks
Sum-product networks (SPNs) are flexible density estimators and have received
significant attention due to their attractive inference properties. While
parameter learning in SPNs is well developed, structure learning leaves
something to be desired: Even though there is a plethora of SPN structure
learners, most of them are somewhat ad-hoc and based on intuition rather than a
clear learning principle. In this paper, we introduce a well-principled
Bayesian framework for SPN structure learning. First, we decompose the problem
into i) laying out a computational graph, and ii) learning the so-called scope
function over the graph. The first is rather unproblematic and akin to neural
network architecture validation. The second represents the effective structure
of the SPN and needs to respect the usual structural constraints in SPN, i.e.
completeness and decomposability. While representing and learning the scope
function is somewhat involved in general, in this paper, we propose a natural
parametrisation for an important and widely used special case of SPNs. These
structural parameters are incorporated into a Bayesian model, such that
simultaneous structure and parameter learning is cast into monolithic Bayesian
posterior inference. In various experiments, our Bayesian SPNs often improve
test likelihoods over greedy SPN learners. Further, since the Bayesian
framework protects against overfitting, we can evaluate hyper-parameters
directly on the Bayesian model score, waiving the need for a separate
validation set, which is especially beneficial in low data regimes. Bayesian
SPNs can be applied to heterogeneous domains and can easily be extended to
nonparametric formulations. Moreover, our Bayesian approach is the first, which
consistently and robustly learns SPN structures under missing data.Comment: NeurIPS 2019; See conference page for supplemen
Visualizing and Understanding Sum-Product Networks
Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) are recently introduced deep tractable
probabilistic models by which several kinds of inference queries can be
answered exactly and in a tractable time. Up to now, they have been largely
used as black box density estimators, assessed only by comparing their
likelihood scores only. In this paper we explore and exploit the inner
representations learned by SPNs. We do this with a threefold aim: first we want
to get a better understanding of the inner workings of SPNs; secondly, we seek
additional ways to evaluate one SPN model and compare it against other
probabilistic models, providing diagnostic tools to practitioners; lastly, we
want to empirically evaluate how good and meaningful the extracted
representations are, as in a classic Representation Learning framework. In
order to do so we revise their interpretation as deep neural networks and we
propose to exploit several visualization techniques on their node activations
and network outputs under different types of inference queries. To investigate
these models as feature extractors, we plug some SPNs, learned in a greedy
unsupervised fashion on image datasets, in supervised classification learning
tasks. We extract several embedding types from node activations by filtering
nodes by their type, by their associated feature abstraction level and by their
scope. In a thorough empirical comparison we prove them to be competitive
against those generated from popular feature extractors as Restricted Boltzmann
Machines. Finally, we investigate embeddings generated from random
probabilistic marginal queries as means to compare other tractable
probabilistic models on a common ground, extending our experiments to Mixtures
of Trees.Comment: Machine Learning Journal paper (First Online), 24 page
- …