412 research outputs found
Efficient Bayesian Model Selection in PARAFAC via Stochastic Thermodynamic Integration
International audienceParallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) is one of the most popular tensor factorization models. Even though it has proven successful in diverse application fields, the performance of PARAFAC usually hinges up on the rank of the factorization, which is typically specified manually by the practitioner. In this study, we develop a novel parallel and distributed Bayesian model selection technique for rank estimation in large-scale PARAFAC models. The proposed approach integrates ideas from the emerging field of stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo, statistical physics, and distributed stochastic optimization. As opposed to the existing methods, which are based on some heuristics, our method has a clear mathematical interpretation, and has significantly lower computational requirements, thanks to data subsampling and parallelization. We provide formal theoretical analysis on the bias induced by the proposed approach. Our experiments on synthetic and large-scale real datasets show that our method is able to find the optimal model order while being significantly faster than the state-of-the-art
Patterns of Scalable Bayesian Inference
Datasets are growing not just in size but in complexity, creating a demand
for rich models and quantification of uncertainty. Bayesian methods are an
excellent fit for this demand, but scaling Bayesian inference is a challenge.
In response to this challenge, there has been considerable recent work based on
varying assumptions about model structure, underlying computational resources,
and the importance of asymptotic correctness. As a result, there is a zoo of
ideas with few clear overarching principles.
In this paper, we seek to identify unifying principles, patterns, and
intuitions for scaling Bayesian inference. We review existing work on utilizing
modern computing resources with both MCMC and variational approximation
techniques. From this taxonomy of ideas, we characterize the general principles
that have proven successful for designing scalable inference procedures and
comment on the path forward
Distributed Bayesian Matrix Factorization with Limited Communication
Bayesian matrix factorization (BMF) is a powerful tool for producing low-rank
representations of matrices and for predicting missing values and providing
confidence intervals. Scaling up the posterior inference for massive-scale
matrices is challenging and requires distributing both data and computation
over many workers, making communication the main computational bottleneck.
Embarrassingly parallel inference would remove the communication needed, by
using completely independent computations on different data subsets, but it
suffers from the inherent unidentifiability of BMF solutions. We introduce a
hierarchical decomposition of the joint posterior distribution, which couples
the subset inferences, allowing for embarrassingly parallel computations in a
sequence of at most three stages. Using an efficient approximate
implementation, we show improvements empirically on both real and simulated
data. Our distributed approach is able to achieve a speed-up of almost an order
of magnitude over the full posterior, with a negligible effect on predictive
accuracy. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art embarrassingly parallel MCMC
methods in accuracy, and achieves results competitive to other available
distributed and parallel implementations of BMF.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figures. The paper is published in Machine Learning
journal. An implementation of the method is is available in SMURFF software
on github (bmfpp branch): https://github.com/ExaScience/smurf
Langevin and Hamiltonian based Sequential MCMC for Efficient Bayesian Filtering in High-dimensional Spaces
Nonlinear non-Gaussian state-space models arise in numerous applications in
statistics and signal processing. In this context, one of the most successful
and popular approximation techniques is the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)
algorithm, also known as particle filtering. Nevertheless, this method tends to
be inefficient when applied to high dimensional problems. In this paper, we
focus on another class of sequential inference methods, namely the Sequential
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SMCMC) techniques, which represent a promising
alternative to SMC methods. After providing a unifying framework for the class
of SMCMC approaches, we propose novel efficient strategies based on the
principle of Langevin diffusion and Hamiltonian dynamics in order to cope with
the increasing number of high-dimensional applications. Simulation results show
that the proposed algorithms achieve significantly better performance compared
to existing algorithms
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