Learning the Structure of Deep Sparse Graphical Models

Deep belief networks are a powerful way to model complex probability distributions. However, learning the structure of a belief network, particularly one with hidden units, is difficult. The Indian buffet process has been used as a nonparametric Bayesian prior on the directed structure of a belief network with a single infinitely wide hidden layer. In this paper, we introduce the cascading Indian buffet process (CIBP), which provides a nonparametric prior on the structure of a layered, directed belief network that is unbounded in both depth and width, yet allows tractable inference. We use the CIBP prior with the nonlinear Gaussian belief network so each unit can additionally vary its behavior between discrete and continuous representations. We provide Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for inference in these belief networks and explore the structures learned on several image data sets.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, AISTATS 2010, Revise

Social optimality in quantum Bayesian games

A significant aspect of the study of quantum strategies is the exploration of the game-theoretic solution concept of the Nash equilibrium in relation to the quantization of a game. Pareto optimality is a refinement on the set of Nash equilibria. A refinement on the set of Pareto optimal outcomes is known as social optimality in which the sum of players' payoffs are maximized. This paper analyzes social optimality in a Bayesian game that uses the setting of generalized Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiments for its physical implementation. We show that for the quantum Bayesian game a direct connection appears between the violation of Bell's inequality and the social optimal outcome of the game and that it attains a superior socially optimal outcome.Comment: 12 pages, revise

Bounds on the number of inference functions of a graphical model

Directed and undirected graphical models, also called Bayesian networks and Markov random fields, respectively, are important statistical tools in a wide variety of fields, ranging from computational biology to probabilistic artificial intelligence. We give an upper bound on the number of inference functions of any graphical model. This bound is polynomial on the size of the model, for a fixed number of parameters, thus improving the exponential upper bound given by Pachter and Sturmfels. We also show that our bound is tight up to a constant factor, by constructing a family of hidden Markov models whose number of inference functions agrees asymptotically with the upper bound. Finally, we apply this bound to a model for sequence alignment that is used in computational biology.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figure