Variational inference is a powerful concept that underlies many iterative approximation algorithms; expectation propagation, mean-field methods and belief propagations were all central themes at the school that can be perceived from this unifying framework. The lectures of Manfred Opper introduce the archetypal example…
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DP-SEP privatizes EP by refining a single factor per data point.
Several numerical approximation strategies for the expectation-propagation algorithm are studied in the context of large-scale learning: the Laplace method, a faster variant of it, Gaussian quadrature, and a deterministic version of variational sampling (i.e., combining quadrature with variational approximation). Exper…
Binary classification models get more efficient predictive probabilities.
Paper proposes a new MIMO detection algorithm using Gaussian Mixture Expectation Propagation.
Efficient EP algorithm improves smoothing distribution inference in financial models.
Loss-calibrated EP improves Bayesian decision-making by focusing on utility-sensitive posterior approximations.
We propose a novel algorithm to solve the expectation propagation relaxation of Bayesian inference for continuous-variable graphical models. In contrast to most previous algorithms, our method is provably convergent. By marrying convergent EP ideas from (Opper&Winther 05) with covariance decoupling techniques (Wipf&Nag…
Unified framework for training SNNs using EP, faster convergence.
Unified framework for efficient Gaussian process inference.
EP method speeds up Bayesian probit regression in high dimensions.
Exponential family distributions are highly useful in machine learning since their calculation can be performed efficiently through natural parameters. The exponential family has recently been extended to the t-exponential family, which contains Student-t distributions as family members and thus allows us to handle noi…
Many inference problems involving questions of optimality ask for the maximum or the minimum of a finite set of unknown quantities. This technical report derives the first two posterior moments of the maximum of two correlated Gaussian variables and the first two posterior moments of the two generating variables (corre…
Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) are multi-layer hierarchical generalisations of Gaussian processes (GPs) and are formally equivalent to neural networks with multiple, infinitely wide hidden layers. DGPs are probabilistic and non-parametric and as such are arguably more flexible, have a greater capacity to generalise, an…
This paper makes two contributions to Bayesian machine learning algorithms. Firstly, we propose stochastic natural gradient expectation propagation (SNEP), a novel alternative to expectation propagation (EP), a popular variational inference algorithm. SNEP is a black box variational algorithm, in that it does not requi…
A new method for Bayesian neural networks using probabilistic backpropagation.
Expectation propagation (EP) is a powerful approximate inference algorithm. However, a critical barrier in applying EP is that the moment matching in message updates can be intractable. Handcrafting approximations is usually tricky, and lacks generalizability. Importance sampling is very expensive. While Laplace propag…
A new method for inferring latent states in Markov jump processes.
A method for converting NIW parameters for better estimation.
We propose to learn a kernel-based message operator which takes as input all expectation propagation (EP) incoming messages to a factor node and produces an outgoing message. In ordinary EP, computing an outgoing message involves estimating a multivariate integral which may not have an analytic expression. Learning suc…
A method for large scale Gaussian process classification has been recently proposed based on expectation propagation (EP). Such a method allows Gaussian process classifiers to be trained on very large datasets that were out of the reach of previous deployments of EP and has been shown to be competitive with related tec…
Variational methods have been recently considered for scaling the training process of Gaussian process classifiers to large datasets. As an alternative, we describe here how to train these classifiers efficiently using expectation propagation. The proposed method allows for handling datasets with millions of data insta…
We consider the problem of joint modelling of metabolic signals and gene expression in systems biology applications. We propose an approach based on input-output factorial hidden Markov models and propose a structured variational inference approach to infer the structure and states of the model. We start from the class…
New EP variants improve inference stability and efficiency.
Expectation propagation (EP) is a deterministic approximation algorithm that is often used to perform approximate Bayesian parameter learning. EP approximates the full intractable posterior distribution through a set of local approximations that are iteratively refined for each datapoint. EP can offer analytic and comp…
Two EP frameworks ensure integrable beliefs in Bayesian estimation problems.
While Gaussian probability densities are omnipresent in applied mathematics, Gaussian cumulative probabilities are hard to calculate in any but the univariate case. We study the utility of Expectation Propagation (EP) as an approximate integration method for this problem. For rectangular integration regions, the approx…
Bayesian learning is often hampered by large computational expense. As a powerful generalization of popular belief propagation, expectation propagation (EP) efficiently approximates the exact Bayesian computation. Nevertheless, EP can be sensitive to outliers and suffer from divergence for difficult cases. To address t…
We present a Bayesian method for feature selection in the presence of grouping information with sparsity on the between- and within group level. Instead of using a stochastic algorithm for parameter inference, we employ expectation propagation, which is a deterministic and fast algorithm. Available methods for feature …
Exact inference in the linear regression model with spike and slab priors is often intractable. Expectation propagation (EP) can be used for approximate inference. However, the regular sequential form of EP (R-EP) may fail to converge in this model when the size of the training set is very small. As an alternative, we …
We develop a framework for approximating collapsed Gibbs sampling in generative latent variable cluster models. Collapsed Gibbs is a popular MCMC method, which integrates out variables in the posterior to improve mixing. Unfortunately for many complex models, integrating out these variables is either analytically or co…
VAR-GPs solve continual learning by updating posteriors sequentially.
Combines VI and EP for better Gaussian process hyperparameter learning.
Rich and complex time-series data, such as those generated from engineering systems, financial markets, videos or neural recordings, are now a common feature of modern data analysis. Explaining the phenomena underlying these diverse data sets requires flexible and accurate models. In this paper, we promote Gaussian pro…
EP algorithm for efficient feature selection in binary classification.
LDTA expands LDA's topic modeling capacity with tree-structured priors.
In this work we propose a heteroscedastic generalization to RVM, a fast Bayesian framework for regression, based on some recent similar works. We use variational approximation and expectation propagation to tackle the problem. The work is still under progress and we are examining the results and comparing with the prev…
In this paper a new Bayesian model for sparse linear regression with a spatio-temporal structure is proposed. It incorporates the structural assumptions based on a hierarchical Gaussian process prior for spike and slab coefficients. We design an inference algorithm based on Expectation Propagation and evaluate the mode…
Improves hyperparameter learning in GP models with non-conjugate likelihoods.
This paper describes an expectation propagation (EP) method for multi-class classification with Gaussian processes that scales well to very large datasets. In such a method the estimate of the log-marginal-likelihood involves a sum across the data instances. This enables efficient training using stochastic gradients an…
Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) are multi-layer hierarchical generalisations of Gaussian processes (GPs) and are formally equivalent to neural networks with multiple, infinitely wide hidden layers. DGPs are nonparametric probabilistic models and as such are arguably more flexible, have a greater capacity to generalise, …
Bayesian methods improve inference for cumulative probit models on large datasets.
We propose an efficient nonparametric strategy for learning a message operator in expectation propagation (EP), which takes as input the set of incoming messages to a factor node, and produces an outgoing message as output. This learned operator replaces the multivariate integral required in classical EP, which may not…
We consider probabilistic multinomial probit classification using Gaussian process (GP) priors. The challenges with the multiclass GP classification are the integration over the non-Gaussian posterior distribution, and the increase of the number of unknown latent variables as the number of target classes grows. Expecta…
We propose a novel approach for nonlinear regression using a two-layer neural network (NN) model structure with sparsity-favoring hierarchical priors on the network weights. We present an expectation propagation (EP) approach for approximate integration over the posterior distribution of the weights, the hierarchical s…
A new method discovers equations from data using Bayesian and kernel techniques.
Many interesting problems in fields ranging from telecommunications to computational biology can be formalized in terms of large underdetermined systems of linear equations with additional constraints or regularizers. One of the most studied ones, the Compressed Sensing problem (CS), consists in finding the solution wi…
Gaussian processes (GPs) are flexible distributions over functions that enable high-level assumptions about unknown functions to be encoded in a parsimonious, flexible and general way. Although elegant, the application of GPs is limited by computational and analytical intractabilities that arise when data are sufficien…