A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Discond-VAE separates continuous and discrete factors in data.
Estimating causal models from observational data is a crucial task in data analysis. For continuous-valued data, Shimizu et al. have proposed a linear acyclic non-Gaussian model to understand the data generating process, and have shown that their model is identifiable when the number of data is sufficiently large. Howe…
Probabilistic models with discrete latent variables naturally capture datasets composed of discrete classes. However, they are difficult to train efficiently, since backpropagation through discrete variables is generally not possible. We present a novel method to train a class of probabilistic models with discrete late…
Improved hierarchical discrete VAEs for better stability and performance.
A new method reduces variance in training discrete latent variable models.
Bayesian optimization tackles mixed discrete-continuous problems with Gaussian processes.
The reparameterization trick enables optimizing large scale stochastic computation graphs via gradient descent. The essence of the trick is to refactor each stochastic node into a differentiable function of its parameters and a random variable with fixed distribution. After refactoring, the gradients of the loss propag…
Training of discrete latent variable models remains challenging because passing gradient information through discrete units is difficult. We propose a new class of smoothing transformations based on a mixture of two overlapping distributions, and show that the proposed transformation can be used for training binary lat…
New method reduces bias in estimating causal effects from discretized variables.
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…
Proposes a non-parametric method for deep discrete latent variable models.
The optimization of expensive to evaluate, black-box, mixed-variable functions, i.e. functions that have continuous and discrete inputs, is a difficult and yet pervasive problem in science and engineering. In Bayesian optimization (BO), special cases of this problem that consider fully continuous or fully discrete doma…
A new test for conditional independence in discretized data.
Generative models with both discrete and continuous latent variables are highly motivated by the structure of many real-world data sets. They present, however, subtleties in training often manifesting in the discrete latent being under leveraged. In this paper, we show that such models are more amenable to training whe…
New gradient estimators for discrete variables improve model training.
Discrete random variables are natural components of probabilistic clustering models. A number of VAE variants with discrete latent variables have been developed. Training such methods requires marginalizing over the discrete latent variables, causing training time complexity to be linear in the number clusters. By appl…
New estimators reduce variance in training variational autoencoders with discrete latent variables.
GFlowNet-EM learns complex latent variable models with discrete structures.
A new method for efficient inference in probabilistic programs with mixed support.
A new method reduces high-dimensional state space for dynamic choice models.
Reparameterization of variational auto-encoders with continuous random variables is an effective method for reducing the variance of their gradient estimates. In the discrete case, one can perform reparametrization using the Gumbel-Max trick, but the resulting objective relies on an operation and is non-dif…
New method for efficient marginalization of discrete latent variables in neural networks.
New estimator reduces variance in discrete random variables.
A new graphical model for discrete data without parametric restrictions.
We apply belief propagation to a Bayesian bipartite graph composed of discrete independent hidden variables and discrete visible variables. The network is the Discrete counterpart of Independent Component Analysis (DICA) and it is manipulated in a factor graph form for inference and learning. A full set of simulations …
Training classification models on imbalanced data tends to result in bias towards the majority class. In this paper, we demonstrate how variable discretization and cost-sensitive logistic regression help mitigate this bias on an imbalanced credit scoring dataset, and further show the application of the variable discret…
Simplified analysis of diffusion models using discrete random variables.
Low-variance gradient estimation is crucial for learning directed graphical models parameterized by neural networks, where the reparameterization trick is widely used for those with continuous variables. While this technique gives low-variance gradient estimates, it has not been directly applicable to discrete variable…
Paper proposes a new estimator for generic discrete distributions.
HiSS sampling overcomes local mode traps in rugged discrete spaces.
New JSA autoencoders tackle discrete latent variable models for semi-supervised learning.
In this paper, we face the problem of simulating discrete random variables with general and varying distributions in a scalable framework, where fully parallelizable operations should be preferred. The new paradigm is inspired by the context of discrete choice models. Compared to classical algorithms, we add paralleliz…
We introduce Network Maximal Correlation (NMC) as a multivariate measure of nonlinear association among random variables. NMC is defined via an optimization that infers transformations of variables by maximizing aggregate inner products between transformed variables. For finite discrete and jointly Gaussian random vari…
We describe discrete restricted Boltzmann machines: probabilistic graphical models with bipartite interactions between visible and hidden discrete variables. Examples are binary restricted Boltzmann machines and discrete naive Bayes models. We detail the inference functions and distributed representations arising in th…
A new CI test avoids information loss in discretized data.
Recently developed techniques have made it possible to quickly learn accurate probability density functions from data in low-dimensional continuous space. In particular, mixtures of Gaussians can be fitted to data very quickly using an accelerated EM algorithm that employs multiresolution kd-trees (Moore, 1999). In thi…
While graphical models for continuous data (Gaussian graphical models) and discrete data (Ising models) have been extensively studied, there is little work on graphical models linking both continuous and discrete variables (mixed data), which are common in many scientific applications. We propose a novel graphical mode…
Unsupervised framework captures acquisition variability in structural connectomes.
Mixed finite element methods solve a PDE using two or more variables. The theory of Discrete Exterior Calculus explains why the degrees of freedom associated to the different variables should be stored on both primal and dual domain meshes with a discrete Hodge star used to transfer information between the meshes. We s…
Improved training for VQ-VAE models with robust codebook learning.
A new method for categorical variational inference using discrete normalizing flows.
Flow based models such as Real NVP are an extremely powerful approach to density estimation. However, existing flow based models are restricted to transforming continuous densities over a continuous input space into similarly continuous distributions over continuous latent variables. This makes them poorly suited for m…
We present a semi-supervised learning algorithm for learning discrete factor analysis models with arbitrary structure on the latent variables. Our algorithm assumes that every latent variable has an "anchor", an observed variable with only that latent variable as its parent. Given such anchors, we show that it is possi…
HyBO optimizes hybrid structures using diffusion kernels.
A new method uncovers discrete and continuous factors in gene expression data.
A new method for optimizing models with categorical variables using diffusion.
CLOUD method detects causal relationships in various data types without latent variable assumptions.
We consider the problem of learning the structure of a pairwise graphical model over continuous and discrete variables. We present a new pairwise model for graphical models with both continuous and discrete variables that is amenable to structure learning. In previous work, authors have considered structure learning of…