15 research outputs found
Random Tessellation Forests
Space partitioning methods such as random forests and the Mondrian process
are powerful machine learning methods for multi-dimensional and relational
data, and are based on recursively cutting a domain. The flexibility of these
methods is often limited by the requirement that the cuts be axis aligned. The
Ostomachion process and the self-consistent binary space partitioning-tree
process were recently introduced as generalizations of the Mondrian process for
space partitioning with non-axis aligned cuts in the two dimensional plane.
Motivated by the need for a multi-dimensional partitioning tree with non-axis
aligned cuts, we propose the Random Tessellation Process (RTP), a framework
that includes the Mondrian process and the binary space partitioning-tree
process as special cases. We derive a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm for
inference, and provide random forest methods. Our process is self-consistent
and can relax axis-aligned constraints, allowing complex inter-dimensional
dependence to be captured. We present a simulation study, and analyse gene
expression data of brain tissue, showing improved accuracies over other
methods.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
The Binary Space Partitioning-Tree Process
The Mondrian process represents an elegant and powerful approach for space
partition modelling. However, as it restricts the partitions to be
axis-aligned, its modelling flexibility is limited. In this work, we propose a
self-consistent Binary Space Partitioning (BSP)-Tree process to generalize the
Mondrian process. The BSP-Tree process is an almost surely right continuous
Markov jump process that allows uniformly distributed oblique cuts in a
two-dimensional convex polygon. The BSP-Tree process can also be extended using
a non-uniform probability measure to generate direction differentiated cuts.
The process is also self-consistent, maintaining distributional invariance
under a restricted subdomain. We use Conditional-Sequential Monte Carlo for
inference using the tree structure as the high-dimensional variable. The
BSP-Tree process's performance on synthetic data partitioning and relational
modelling demonstrates clear inferential improvements over the standard
Mondrian process and other related methods
Copula mixed-membership stochastic block model
The Mixed-Membership Stochastic Blockmodels (MMSB) is a popular framework for modelling social relationships by fully exploiting each individual node's participation (or membership) in a social network. Despite its powerful representations, MMSB assumes that the membership indicators of each pair of nodes (i.e., people) are distributed independently. However, such an assumption often does not hold in real-life social networks, in which certain known groups of people may correlate with each other in terms of factors such as their membership categories. To expand MMSB's ability to model such dependent relationships, a new framework - a Copula Mixed-Membership Stochastic Blockmodel - is introduced in this paper for modeling intra-group correlations, namely an individual Copula function jointly models the membership pairs of those nodes within the group of interest. This framework enables various Copula functions to be used on demand, while maintaining the membership indicator's marginal distribution needed for modelling membership indicators with other nodes outside of the group of interest. Sampling algorithms for both the finite and infinite number of groups are also detailed. Our experimental results show its superior performance in capturing group interactions when compared with the baseline models on both synthetic and real world datasets