Determinantal point processes (DPPs) are elegant probabilistic models of repulsion that arise in quantum physics and random matrix theory. In contrast to traditional structured models like Markov random fields, which become intractable and hard to approximate in the presence of negative correlations, DPPs offer efficient and exact algorithms for sampling, marginalization, conditioning, and other inference tasks. We provide a gentle introduction to DPPs, focusing on the intuitions, algorithms, and extensions that are most relevant to the machine learning community, and show how DPPs can be applied to real-world applications like finding diverse sets of high-quality search results, building informative summaries by selecting diverse sentences from documents, modeling non-overlapping human poses in images or video, and automatically building timelines of important news stories.

This paper investigates domain generalization: How to take knowledge acquired from an arbitrary number of related domains and apply it to previously unseen domains? We propose Domain-Invariant Component Analysis (DICA), a kernel-based optimization algorithm that learns an invariant transformation by minimizing the dissimilarity across domains, whilst preserving the functional relationship between input and output variables. A learning-theoretic analysis shows that reducing dissimilarity improves the expected generalization ability of classifiers on new domains, motivating the proposed algorithm. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that DICA successfully learns invariant features and improves classifier performance in practice.

The problem of finding groups in data (cluster analysis) has been extensively studied by researchers from the fields of Statistics and Computer Science, among others. However, despite its popularity it is widely recognized that the investigation of some theoretical aspects of clustering has been relatively sparse. One of the main reasons for this lack of theoretical results is surely the fact that, unlike the situation with other statistical problems as regression or classification, for some of the cluster methodologies it is quite difficult to specify a population goal to which the data-based clustering algorithms should try to get close. This paper aims to provide some insight into the theoretical foundations of the usual nonparametric approach to clustering, which understands clusters as regions of high density, by presenting an explicit formulation for the ideal population clustering.

The currently most efficient algorithm for inference with a probabilistic network builds upon a triangulation of a network's graph. In this paper, we show that pre-processing can help in finding good triangulations forprobabilistic networks, that is, triangulations with a minimal maximum clique size. We provide a set of rules for stepwise reducing a graph, without losing optimality. This reduction allows us to solve the triangulation problem on a smaller graph. From the smaller graph's triangulation, a triangulation of the original graph is obtained by reversing the reduction steps. Our experimental results show that the graphs of some well-known real-life probabilistic networks can be triangulated optimally just by preprocessing; for other networks, huge reductions in their graph's size are obtained.

In this paper we compare three different architectures for the evaluation of influence diagrams: HUGIN, Shafer-Shenoy, and Lazy Evaluation architecture. The computational complexity of the architectures are compared on the LImited Memory Influence Diagram (LIMID): a diagram where only the requiste information for the computation of the optimal policies are depicted. Because the requsite information is explicitly represented in the LIMID the evaluation can take advantage of it, and significant savings in computational can be obtained. In this paper we show how the obtained savings is considerably increased when the computations performed on the LIMID is according to the Lazy Evaluation scheme.

With the advance of efficient analytical methods for sensitivity analysis ofprobabilistic networks, the interest in the sensitivities revealed by real-life networks is rekindled. As the amount of data resulting from a sensitivity analysis of even a moderately-sized network is alreadyoverwhelming, methods for extracting relevant information are called for. One such methodis to study the derivative of the sensitivity functions yielded for a network's parameters. We further propose to build upon the concept of admissible deviation, that is, the extent to which a parameter can deviate from the true value without inducing a change in the most likely outcome. We illustrate these concepts by means of a sensitivity analysis of a real-life probabilistic network in oncology.

We present probabilistic logic programming under inheritance with overriding. This approach is based on new notions of entailment for reasoning with conditional constraints, which are obtained from the classical notion of logical entailment by adding the principle of inheritance with overriding. This is done by using recent approaches to probabilistic default reasoning with conditional constraints. We analyze the semantic properties of the new entailment relations. We also present algorithms for probabilistic logic programming under inheritance with overriding, and program transformations for an increased efficiency.

This paper presents a novel approach based on variable forgetting, which is a useful tool in resolving contradictory by filtering some given variables, to merging multiple knowledge bases. This paper first builds a relationship between belief merging and variable forgetting by using dilation. Variable forgetting is applied to capture belief merging operation. Finally, some new merging operators are developed by modifying candidate variables to amend the shortage of traditional merging operators. Different from model selection of traditional merging operators, as an alternative approach, variable selection in those new operators could provide intuitive information about an atom variable among whole knowledge bases.

Possibility theory offers either a qualitive, or a numerical framework for representing uncertainty, in terms of dual measures of possibility and necessity. This leads to the existence of two kinds of possibilistic causal graphs where the conditioning is either based on the minimum, or the product operator. Benferhat et al. (1999) have investigated the connections between min-based graphs and possibilistic logic bases (made of classical formulas weighted in terms of certainty). This paper deals with a more difficult issue : the product-based graphical representations of possibilistic bases, which provides an easy structural reading of possibilistic bases. Moreover, this paper also provides another reading of possibilistic bases in terms of comparative preferences of the form "in the context p, q is preferred to not q". This enables us to explicit preferences underlying a set of goals with different levels of priority.

This volume contains the papers presented at the fifth workshop on Answer Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP 2012) held on September 4th, 2012 in Budapest, co-located with the 28th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2012). It thus continues a series of previous events co-located with ICLP, aiming at facilitating the discussion about crossing the boundaries of current ASP techniques in theory, solving, and applications, in combination with or inspired by other computing paradigms.