556 research outputs found
Tractable nonparametric Bayesian inference in Poisson processes with Gaussian process intensities
The inhomogeneous Poisson process is a point process that has varying intensity across its domain (usually time or space). For nonparametric Bayesian modeling, the Gaussian process is a useful way to place a prior distribution on this intensity. The combination of an Poisson process and GP is known as a Gaussian Cox process, or doubly-stochastic Poisson process. Likelihood-based inference in these models requires an intractable integral over an infinite-dimensional random function. In this paper we present the first approach to Gaussian Cox processes in which it is possible to perform inference without introducing approximations or finite-dimensional proxy distributions. We call our method the Sigmoidal Gaussian Cox Process, which uses a generative model for Poisson data to enable tractable inference via Markov chain Monte Carlo. We compare our methods to competing methods on synthetic data and also apply it to several real-world data sets
Efficient Bayesian Nonparametric Modelling of Structured Point Processes
This paper presents a Bayesian generative model for dependent Cox point
processes, alongside an efficient inference scheme which scales as if the point
processes were modelled independently. We can handle missing data naturally,
infer latent structure, and cope with large numbers of observed processes. A
further novel contribution enables the model to work effectively in higher
dimensional spaces. Using this method, we achieve vastly improved predictive
performance on both 2D and 1D real data, validating our structured approach.Comment: Presented at UAI 2014. Bibtex: @inproceedings{structcoxpp14_UAI,
Author = {Tom Gunter and Chris Lloyd and Michael A. Osborne and Stephen J.
Roberts}, Title = {Efficient Bayesian Nonparametric Modelling of Structured
Point Processes}, Booktitle = {Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI)},
Year = {2014}
Modeling for seasonal marked point processes: An analysis of evolving hurricane occurrences
Seasonal point processes refer to stochastic models for random events which
are only observed in a given season. We develop nonparametric Bayesian
methodology to study the dynamic evolution of a seasonal marked point process
intensity. We assume the point process is a nonhomogeneous Poisson process and
propose a nonparametric mixture of beta densities to model dynamically evolving
temporal Poisson process intensities. Dependence structure is built through a
dependent Dirichlet process prior for the seasonally-varying mixing
distributions. We extend the nonparametric model to incorporate time-varying
marks, resulting in flexible inference for both the seasonal point process
intensity and for the conditional mark distribution. The motivating application
involves the analysis of hurricane landfalls with reported damages along the
U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coasts from 1900 to 2010. We focus on studying the
evolution of the intensity of the process of hurricane landfall occurrences,
and the respective maximum wind speed and associated damages. Our results
indicate an increase in the number of hurricane landfall occurrences and a
decrease in the median maximum wind speed at the peak of the season.
Introducing standardized damage as a mark, such that reported damages are
comparable both in time and space, we find that there is no significant rising
trend in hurricane damages over time.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOAS796 in the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Optimality of Poisson processes intensity learning with Gaussian processes
In this paper we provide theoretical support for the so-called "Sigmoidal
Gaussian Cox Process" approach to learning the intensity of an inhomogeneous
Poisson process on a -dimensional domain. This method was proposed by Adams,
Murray and MacKay (ICML, 2009), who developed a tractable computational
approach and showed in simulation and real data experiments that it can work
quite satisfactorily. The results presented in the present paper provide
theoretical underpinning of the method. In particular, we show how to tune the
priors on the hyper parameters of the model in order for the procedure to
automatically adapt to the degree of smoothness of the unknown intensity and to
achieve optimal convergence rates
Rate-optimal Bayesian intensity smoothing for inhomogeneous Poisson processes
We apply nonparametric Bayesian methods to study the problem of estimating
the intensity function of an inhomogeneous Poisson process. We exhibit a prior
on intensities which both leads to a computationally feasible method and enjoys
desirable theoretical optimality properties. The prior we use is based on
B-spline expansions with free knots, adapted from well-established methods used
in regression, for instance. We illustrate its practical use in the Poisson
process setting by analyzing count data coming from a call centre.
Theoretically we derive a new general theorem on contraction rates for
posteriors in the setting of intensity function estimation. Practical choices
that have to be made in the construction of our concrete prior, such as
choosing the priors on the number and the locations of the spline knots, are
based on these theoretical findings. The results assert that when properly
constructed, our approach yields a rate-optimal procedure that automatically
adapts to the regularity of the unknown intensity function
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