2,259 research outputs found
Probabilistic Programming Concepts
A multitude of different probabilistic programming languages exists today,
all extending a traditional programming language with primitives to support
modeling of complex, structured probability distributions. Each of these
languages employs its own probabilistic primitives, and comes with a particular
syntax, semantics and inference procedure. This makes it hard to understand the
underlying programming concepts and appreciate the differences between the
different languages. To obtain a better understanding of probabilistic
programming, we identify a number of core programming concepts underlying the
primitives used by various probabilistic languages, discuss the execution
mechanisms that they require and use these to position state-of-the-art
probabilistic languages and their implementation. While doing so, we focus on
probabilistic extensions of logic programming languages such as Prolog, which
have been developed since more than 20 years
Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives
The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data
representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different
representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory
factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be
used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be
used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful
representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews
recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning,
covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning,
and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the
appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing
representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between
representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning
Economic Complexity Unfolded: Interpretable Model for the Productive Structure of Economies
Economic complexity reflects the amount of knowledge that is embedded in the
productive structure of an economy. It resides on the premise of hidden
capabilities - fundamental endowments underlying the productive structure. In
general, measuring the capabilities behind economic complexity directly is
difficult, and indirect measures have been suggested which exploit the fact
that the presence of the capabilities is expressed in a country's mix of
products. We complement these studies by introducing a probabilistic framework
which leverages Bayesian non-parametric techniques to extract the dominant
features behind the comparative advantage in exported products. Based on
economic evidence and trade data, we place a restricted Indian Buffet Process
on the distribution of countries' capability endowment, appealing to a culinary
metaphor to model the process of capability acquisition. The approach comes
with a unique level of interpretability, as it produces a concise and
economically plausible description of the instantiated capabilities
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