4 research outputs found
Exchangeable Variable Models
A sequence of random variables is exchangeable if its joint distribution is
invariant under variable permutations. We introduce exchangeable variable
models (EVMs) as a novel class of probabilistic models whose basic building
blocks are partially exchangeable sequences, a generalization of exchangeable
sequences. We prove that a family of tractable EVMs is optimal under zero-one
loss for a large class of functions, including parity and threshold functions,
and strictly subsumes existing tractable independence-based model families.
Extensive experiments show that EVMs outperform state of the art classifiers
such as SVMs and probabilistic models which are solely based on independence
assumptions.Comment: ICML 201
Revisiting the limits of MAP inference by MWSS on perfect graphs
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from MIT Press via http://jmlr.org/proceedings/papers/v38/weller15.pdfA recent, promising approach to identifying a configuration of a discrete graphical model with highest probability (termed MAP inference) is to reduce the problem to finding a maximum weight stable set (MWSS) in a derived weighted graph, which, if perfect, allows a solution to be found in polynomial time. Weller and Jebara (2013) investigated the class of binary pairwise models where this method may be applied. However, their analysis made a seemingly innocuous assumption which simplifies analysis but led to only a subset of possible reparameterizations being considered. Here we introduce novel techniques and consider all cases, demonstrating that this greatly expands the set of tractable models. We provide a simple, exact characterization of the new, enlarged set and show how such models may be efficiently identified, thus settling the power of the approach on this class