Efficient optimisation of black-box problems that comprise both continuous and categorical inputs is important, yet poses significant challenges. We propose a new approach, Continuous and Categorical Bayesian Optimisation (CoCaBO), which combines the strengths of multi-armed bandits and Bayesian optimisation to select …
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48 results for “continuous categorical”
Paper introduces Categorical Normalizing Flows for better handling of categorical data.
problem Limited application of normalizing flows on categorical data due to lack of intrinsic order.
method Categorical Normalizing Flows use continuous transformations to model latent relations in categorical data, optimizing both continuous representation and model likelihood.
result GraphCNF, a permutation-invariant generative model, outperforms state-of-the-art on molecule generation.
Researchers study the normalizing constant of a continuous categorical distribution.
problem Understanding the normalizing constant of the continuous categorical distribution.
method Characterize numerical behavior and present theoretical and methodological advances.
result The normalizing constant can be written in closed form using elementary functions.
A new method for Gaussian Processes handles mixed continuous and categorical inputs.
problem Modeling cross-correlations between continuous and categorical data.
method Low-Rank Correlation (LRC) method for Gaussian Processes with flexible rank approximation.
result LRC outperforms existing methods in estimating cross-correlations and predicting response surfaces.
Unified Bayesian Optimisation for mixed variables improves performance.
problem Efficient optimisation of problems with both categorical and continuous variables.
method Derive value proposals from the Expected Improvement criterion to optimise both categorical and continuous variables under a single acquisition metric.
result Unified approach significantly outperforms existing methods across mixed-variable tasks.
New GP kernel handles mixed-categorical data, improving model accuracy.
problem Improving Gaussian process models for mixed-categorical data.
method Extends continuous exponential kernels to handle mixed-categorical variables.
result The proposed GP model gives higher likelihood and smaller residual error.
Novel simplex-valued distribution improves on existing models.
problem Limitations of existing simplex-valued distributions like Dirichlet.
method Introducing continuous categorical distribution.
result Continuous categorical resolves limitations of Dirichlet.
Bayesian optimisation tackles high-dimensional categorical and mixed search spaces.
problem Bayesian optimisation on high-dimensional categorical and mixed search spaces is challenging.
method Combining local optimisation with a tailored kernel design.
result Empirically outperforms current baselines in performance and computational costs.
Multivariate categorical data occur in many applications of machine learning. One of the main difficulties with these vectors of categorical variables is sparsity. The number of possible observations grows exponentially with vector length, but dataset diversity might be poor in comparison. Recent models have gained sig…
Paper introduces new methods for modeling categorical data.
problem Training generative models on categorical data like text and segmentation.
method Argmax Flows and Multinomial Diffusion models.
result Models outperform existing methods in log-likelihood.
AdaCat improves density estimation and planning in autoregressive models.
problem Efficiently modeling sharp density changes in continuous data.
method Adaptive Categorical Discretization (AdaCat) for autoregressive models.
result Improves density estimation and planning in various data types.
VAIOM models financial returns using continuous input and categorical output.
problem Modeling continuous, noisy, and heterogeneous financial data.
method VAIOM is a decoder-only Transformer that separates input representation from output likelihood.
result VAIOM models outperform fixed single-bar LightGBM baseline in both Test halves.
A method for representing and comparing categorical trajectories using multivariate functional principal components.
problem Statistical description and comparison of categorical trajectories.
method Transforming categorical trajectories into binary indicator functions and applying multivariate functional principal components analysis.
result Consistent estimators of mean trajectories and covariance functions are obtained under weak regularity assumptions.
WE constructs GP kernels for mixed inputs using weighted EDMs.
problem Limitation of standard GP models in handling categorical variables.
method WEGP constructs kernel function using weighted EDMs for categorical inputs.
result WEGP improves GP model accuracy in both synthetic and real-world optimization problems.
New gradient estimators for discrete variables improve model training.
problem Training models with discrete latent variables is challenging due to high gradient variance.
method Introduced novel gradient estimators based on importance sampling and statistical couplings, extending to categorical variables.
result Proposed gradient estimators outperform previous methods in systematic experiments.
Researchers propose better probabilistic models for deep learning.
problem Using cross-entropy loss for non-categorical data.
method Introducing continuous-categorical distribution and proposing probabilistic alternatives.
result Potential for outperformance in deep learning models with proper probabilistic treatment.
Categorical d-separation criterion simplifies probability graph analysis.
problem Detecting causal relationships in probability distributions.
method Introducing categorical definitions for causal models and d-separation.
result Abstract version of d-separation criterion applies to various probability theories.
A hybrid model for Bayesian optimization handles mixed variables using MCTS for categorical and GP for continuous.
problem Optimizing functions with mixed variable types (continuous, integer, categorical).
method Merges MCTS for categorical and GP for continuous variables, integrates UCTS search strategy, and dynamically selects kernels.
result Hybrid models outperform traditional methods in Bayesian optimization.
Kendall transformation converts continuous data into categorical vectors for robust information theory.
problem Handling small number of observations and preserving ranking in continuous data.
method Kendall transformation converts ordered features into categorical vectors of pairwise order relations.
result Kendall transformation makes information theory methods applicable to continuous data robustly.
Gradient-based adversarial attacks on categorical sequence models via traversing an embedded worldcs.LG
New methods tackle adversarial attacks on categorical sequences, improving model security.
problem Adversarial attacks on categorical sequence models, especially for money transactions and medical fraud.
method Two black-box adversarial attacks: Monte-Carlo and continuous relaxation methods.
result Generated adversarial sequences fool machine learning models but remain close to original ones.
A new method for optimizing models with categorical variables using diffusion.
problem Optimizing models with categorical variables, especially in discrete distributions.
method Introducing ReDGE, a diffusion-based soft reparameterization method for categorical distributions.
result ReDGE consistently matches or outperforms existing gradient-based methods in experiments.
Earth observation embeddings can convert discrete biome maps into continuous representations that better capture ecological variation.
problem Biome maps impose categorical boundaries that compress continuous variation in biotic communities.
method Fit a linear classifier on Earth observation embeddings to predict biome labels.
result Continuous biome representation outperforms discrete biome labels for predicting species occurrence.
Gryffin optimizes categorical variables in materials design, leveraging expert knowledge.
problem Optimizing categorical variables in complex design choices like molecule selection.
method Bayesian optimization with smooth approximations to categorical distributions, incorporating expert knowledge.
result Gryffin accelerates discovery of promising molecules and materials, highlighting relevant correlations.
We present a technique for clustering categorical data by generating many dissimilarity matrices and averaging over them. We begin by demonstrating our technique on low dimensional categorical data and comparing it to several other techniques that have been proposed. Then we give conditions under which our method shoul…
nTreeClus clusters categorical sequences using tree-based learners and k-mers.
problem Challenges in clustering categorical and sequential data.
method nTreeClus uses Tree-based Learners, k-mers, and autoregressive models for categorical time series.
result nTreeClus outperformed baseline methods in various validation metrics.
A new method clusters mixed-type data efficiently.
problem Clustering mixed-type data with continuous and categorical variables.
method Extends Information Bottleneck principle to heterogeneous data using generalised product kernels.
result DIBmix outperforms four established methods in various scenarios.
We propose a method to train generative adversarial networks on mutivariate feature vectors representing multiple categorical values. In contrast to the continuous domain, where GAN-based methods have delivered considerable results, GANs struggle to perform equally well on discrete data. We propose and compare several …
A new method for categorical variational inference using discrete normalizing flows.
problem Challenges in optimizing variational approximations for discrete latent variables.
method Differentiable reparameterization using a mixture of discrete normalizing flows.
result Improves optimization of evidence lower bound and reduces sensitivity to hyperparameters.
This study compares and evaluates categorical kernels for Gaussian process regression.
problem Challenges in designing effective categorical kernels for Gaussian process regression.
method Reproducible comparative study of existing kernels, new evaluation metrics, and clustering-based nested kernels.
result Nested kernels outperform other methods, especially when group structure is unknown or unknown.
Ordinal Causal Discoverystat.ME
New method uniquely identifies causal structure from ordinal data.
problem Challenges in causal discovery for categorical data, especially direction of relationships.
method Exploits ordinal information to uniquely identify causal structure.
result Favorable and robust performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
We propose Dirichlet Process mixtures of Generalized Linear Models (DP-GLM), a new method of nonparametric regression that accommodates continuous and categorical inputs, and responses that can be modeled by a generalized linear model. We prove conditions for the asymptotic unbiasedness of the DP-GLM regression mean fu…
Cluster analysis is one of the essential tasks in data mining and knowledge discovery. Each type of data poses unique challenges in achieving relatively efficient partitioning of the data into homogeneous groups. While the algorithms for numeric data are relatively well studied in the literature, there are still challe…
Paper reduces hyperparameters in mixed-categorical Gaussian processes for green aircraft optimization.
problem High-dimensional mixed-categorical Gaussian processes with many hyperparameters.
method Innovative dimension reduction algorithm using partial least squares regression.
result Significant reduction in fuel consumption (439 kg) for a green aircraft.
We present a framework for learning disentangled and interpretable jointly continuous and discrete representations in an unsupervised manner. By augmenting the continuous latent distribution of variational autoencoders with a relaxed discrete distribution and controlling the amount of information encoded in each latent…
Paper develops a novel approach for classifying high-dimensional mixed data.
problem Handling datasets with both categorical and continuous variables of high dimensions.
method Location model with Gaussian conditional distributions, kernel smoothing for bandwidth choice, penalized likelihood estimation.
result Competitive performance of the proposed classifier demonstrated through simulations and real data.
In this work we present Discrete Attend Infer Repeat (Discrete-AIR), a Recurrent Auto-Encoder with structured latent distributions containing discrete categorical distributions, continuous attribute distributions, and factorised spatial attention. While inspired by the original AIR model andretaining AIR model's capabi…
Improves Group Lasso for categorical data by reducing dimensionality and selecting models.
problem Sparse modelling of categorical data is challenging, especially for high dimensions.
method Two-step procedure: first, reduce dimensionality using Group Lasso; second, select final model using an information criterion on clustered levels.
result The method produces a sparse solution and performs better than state-of-the-art algorithms in prediction accuracy and model dimension.
A method for diffusion on probability simplex for generative models.
problem Tension between continuous and discrete data in diffusion models.
method Proposes using softmax function applied to Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process on probability simplex.
result Method extends to bounded image generation.
Many real-world functions are defined over both categorical and category-specific continuous variables and thus cannot be optimized by traditional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. To optimize such functions, we propose a new method that formulates the problem as a multi-armed bandit problem, wherein each category co…
This primer explains diffusion models in general state spaces.
problem Diffusion models in general state spaces are not well-introduced.
method Develops discrete-time and continuous-time views of diffusion models, deriving Fokker-Planck and master equations.
result Unified understanding of diffusion models across continuous and discrete domains.
Partition Tree estimates conditional densities for mixed continuous and categorical variables.
problem Estimating conditional densities for mixed data types.
method Tree-based framework modeling conditional distributions as piecewise-constant densities on adaptive partitions, minimizing conditional negative log-likelihood.
result Improved probabilistic prediction compared to CART-style trees and state-of-the-art methods.
Neural framework for conditional OT maps learns from categorical and continuous variables.
problem Learning conditional optimal transport maps between complex distributions.
method Hypernetwork generates adaptive transport layer parameters based on conditioning variables.
result Our method outperforms simpler conditioning methods in comprehensive ablation studies.
DPERC efficiently estimates covariance matrices for mixed data with missing values.
problem Estimating covariance matrices for datasets with missing values and mixed features.
method Direct Parameter Estimation for Randomly Missing Data with Categorical Features (DPERC).
result DPERC outperforms other methods in estimating covariance matrices for mixed data with missing values.
Unified discrete diffusion for categorical data simplifies training and sampling.
problem Training and sampling in discrete diffusion models for categorical data.
method Mathematical simplifications and elegant unification of discrete-time and continuous-time discrete diffusion.
result Unified Simplified Discrete Denoising Diffusion (USD3) outperforms SOTA baselines.
The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a generative model with continuous latent variables where a pair of probabilistic encoder (bottom-up) and decoder (top-down) is jointly learned by stochastic gradient variational Bayes. We first elaborate Gaussian VAE, approximating the local covariance matrix of the decoder as an o…
cGAP visualizes high-dimensional categorical data with interpretable geometric structure.
problem Lack of visualization tools for high-dimensional categorical data.
method cGAP uses Homogeneity Analysis (HOMALS) to embed data in a 3D space and maps it to colors.
result cGAP reveals coherent clusters, outliers, and local-to-global structure in categorical data.
cGAP visualizes high-dimensional categorical data with interpretable geometric structure.
problem Lack of visualization tools for high-dimensional categorical data.
method cGAP uses Homogeneity Analysis (HOMALS) to embed data in a 3D space and maps it to colors for visualization.
result cGAP reveals coherent clusters, outliers, and local-to-global structure in categorical data.
Low coordinate degree algorithms II: Categorical signals and generalized stochastic block modelsmath.ST
New algorithms detect categorical structures in high-dimensional data.
problem Detecting categorical structures in high-dimensional data.
method Low coordinate degree functions (LCDF) applied to categorical and stochastic block models.
result Unified analysis of LCDF performance for various SBMs and tight lower bounds.