arXiv research

In some misspecified settings, the posterior distribution in Bayesian statistics may lead to inconsistent estimates. To fix this issue, it has been suggested to replace the likelihood by a pseudo-likelihood, that is the exponential of a loss function enjoying suitable robustness properties. In this paper, we build a ps…

StepMix estimates mixture models with covariates for social science applications.

Study higher-order spin glass models for social network behavior with peer-group effects.

Single sample estimation for hard-constrained models like SAT and coloring problems.

Unified analysis of MPLE for Ising models with bounded operator norm or infinity norm.

Sparse high dimensional graphical model selection is a popular topic in contemporary machine learning. To this end, various useful approaches have been proposed in the context of $\ell_1$-penalized estimation in the Gaussian framework. Though many of these inverse covariance estimation approaches are demonstrably scala…

There are many models, often called unnormalized models, whose normalizing constants are not calculated in closed form. Maximum likelihood estimation is not directly applicable to unnormalized models. Score matching, contrastive divergence method, pseudo-likelihood, Monte Carlo maximum likelihood, and noise contrastive…

This paper shows how to perform likelihood inference for complex graphical models efficiently.

TPSQRs model longitudinal event data, detecting ADRs from EHRs.

Estimates natural parameters of p-tensor Ising models efficiently.

The pseudo-likelihood method is one of the most popular algorithms for learning sparse binary pairwise Markov networks. In this paper, we formulate the $L_1$ regularized pseudo-likelihood problem as a sparse multiple logistic regression problem. In this way, many insights and optimization procedures for sparse logistic…

New algorithm detects communities in weighted networks, improving on binary ones.

Sparse high dimensional graphical model selection is a topic of much interest in modern day statistics. A popular approach is to apply l1-penalties to either (1) parametric likelihoods, or, (2) regularized regression/pseudo-likelihoods, with the latter having the distinct advantage that they do not explicitly assume Ga…

Many algorithms have been proposed for fitting network models with communities, but most of them do not scale well to large networks, and often fail on sparse networks. Here we propose a new fast pseudo-likelihood method for fitting the stochastic block model for networks, as well as a variant that allows for an arbitr…

Estimating statistical models within sensor networks requires distributed algorithms, in which both data and computation are distributed across the nodes of the network. We propose a general approach for distributed learning based on combining local estimators defined by pseudo-likelihood components, encompassing a num…

A new method scores contextual Markov networks without assuming chordality.

Paper proposes an end-to-end learning method for state estimation in robotics.

The Whittle likelihood is a widely used and computationally efficient pseudo-likelihood. However, it is known to produce biased parameter estimates for large classes of models. We propose a method for de-biasing Whittle estimates for second-order stationary stochastic processes. The de-biased Whittle likelihood can be …

New method improves community detection for large networks.

Pseudo-Likelihood Inference improves ABC for high-dimensional Bayesian inference.

Undirected graphical models known as Markov networks are popular for a wide variety of applications ranging from statistical physics to computational biology. Traditionally, learning of the network structure has been done under the assumption of chordality which ensures that efficient scoring methods can be used. In ge…

This work connects IRL methods from ML and economics.

Several machine learning problems arising in natural language processing can be modeled as a sequence labeling problem. We provide Gaussian process models based on pseudo-likelihood approximation to perform sequence labeling. Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a Bayesian approach to learning in a kernel based framework. …

We propose a Bayesian approximate inference method for learning the dependence structure of a Gaussian graphical model. Using pseudo-likelihood, we derive an analytical expression to approximate the marginal likelihood for an arbitrary graph structure without invoking any assumptions about decomposability. The majority…

Recently, there has been significant interest in linear regression in the situation where predictors and responses are not observed in matching pairs corresponding to the same statistical unit as a consequence of separate data collection and uncertainty in data integration. Mismatched pairs can considerably impact the …

New algorithms learn staged trees from incomplete data.

This is a technical report which explores the estimation methodologies on hyper-parameters in Markov Random Field and Gaussian Hidden Markov Random Field. In first section, we briefly investigate a theoretical framework on Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Next, by using MH algorithm, we simulate the data from Ising model…

Learning the undirected graph structure of a Markov network from data is a problem that has received a lot of attention during the last few decades. As a result of the general applicability of the model class, a myriad of methods have been developed in parallel in several research fields. Recently, as the size of the c…

Model analyzes cooccurrence data for recommender systems and item relevance.

Spatial statisticians and quantitative investors use the same mathematical object: a Schur complement, damped by one parameter.

We propose a new inferential framework for constructing confidence regions and testing hypotheses in statistical models specified by a system of high dimensional estimating equations. We construct an influence function by projecting the fitted estimating equations to a sparse direction obtained by solving a large-scale…

Applying probabilistic models to reinforcement learning (RL) enables the application of powerful optimisation tools such as variational inference to RL. However, existing inference frameworks and their algorithms pose significant challenges for learning optimal policies, e.g., the absence of mode capturing behaviour in…

Financial econometrics has become an increasingly popular research field. In this paper we review a few parametric and nonparametric models and methods used in this area. After introducing several widely used continuous-time and discrete-time models, we study in detail dependence structures of discrete samples, includi…

In this paper, we model the dependencies among the items that are recommended to a user in a collaborative-filtering problem via a Gaussian Markov Random Field (MRF). We build upon Besag's auto-normal parameterization and pseudo-likelihood, which not only enables computationally efficient learning, but also connects th…

Maximum likelihood estimation fails to be well-posed in Gaussian process regression.

Proposes a neural network method to combine nonprobability and probability survey samples.

New maximum score estimators using ReLU functions and deep neural networks.

We present a new statistical learning paradigm for Boltzmann machines based on a new inference principle we have proposed: the latent maximum entropy principle (LME). LME is different both from Jaynes maximum entropy principle and from standard maximum likelihood estimation.We demonstrate the LME principle BY deriving …

Bayesian method learns graph structures from Gaussian data efficiently.

We study bipartite community detection in networks, or more generally the network biclustering problem. We present a fast two-stage procedure based on spectral initialization followed by the application of a pseudo-likelihood classifier twice. Under mild regularity conditions, we establish the weak consistency of the p…

In this paper, we study time-varying graphical models based on data measured over a temporal grid. Such models are motivated by the needs to describe and understand evolving interacting relationships among a set of random variables in many real applications, for instance the study of how stocks interact with each other…

Paper proposes a new UCB approach for estimating maximum mean.

We propose a robust estimator to improve maximum likelihood in probabilistic models.

This paper proposes a unified framework to quantify local and global inferential uncertainty for high dimensional nonparanormal graphical models. In particular, we consider the problems of testing the presence of a single edge and constructing a uniform confidence subgraph. Due to the presence of unknown marginal trans…

Using methods of statistical physics, we analyse the error of learning couplings in large Ising models from independent data (the inverse Ising problem). We concentrate on learning based on local cost functions, such as the pseudo-likelihood method for which the couplings are inferred independently for each spin. Assum…

In this paper we present a proof of a Neumann type maximum principle for the Laplace operator on compact Riemannian manifolds. A key p oint is the simple geometric nature of the constant in the a priori estimate of this maximum principle. In particular, this maximum principle can be applied to manifolds with Ricci curv…

We investigate the accuracy of the two most common estimators for the maximum expected value of a general set of random variables: a generalization of the maximum sample average, and cross validation. No unbiased estimator exists and we show that it is non-trivial to select a good estimator without knowledge about the …

New estimate for complex Monge-Ampère equations improves previous results.