We develop a nested hierarchical Dirichlet process (nHDP) for hierarchical topic modeling. The nHDP is a generalization of the nested Chinese restaurant process (nCRP) that allows each word to follow its own path to a topic node according to a document-specific distribution on a shared tree. This alleviates the rigid, single-path formulation of the nCRP, allowing a document to more easily express thematic borrowings as a random effect. We demonstrate our algorithm on 1.8 million documents from The New York Times.

We investigate Fano schemes of conditionally generic intersections, i.e. of hypersurfaces in projective space chosen generically up to additional conditions. Via a correspondence between generic properties of algebraic varieties and events in probability spaces that occur with probability one, we use the obtained results on Fano schemes to solve a problem in machine learning.

In this paper we present a nonparametric method for extending functional regression methodology to the situation where more than one functional covariate is used to predict a functional response. Borrowing the idea from Kadri et al. (2010a), the method, which support mixed discrete and continuous explanatory variables, is based on estimating a function-valued function in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces by virtue of positive operator-valued kernels.

This paper introduces a novel technique to track structures in time evolving graphs. The method is based on a parameter free approach for three-dimensional co-clustering of the source vertices, the target vertices and the time. All these features are simultaneously segmented in order to build time segments and clusters of vertices whose edge distributions are similar and evolve in the same way over the time segments. The main novelty of this approach lies in that the time segments are directly inferred from the evolution of the edge distribution between the vertices, thus not requiring the user to make an a priori discretization. Experiments conducted on a synthetic dataset illustrate the good behaviour of the technique, and a study of a real-life dataset shows the potential of the proposed approach for exploratory data analysis.

Although operator-valued kernels have recently received increasing interest in various machine learning and functional data analysis problems such as multi-task learning or functional regression, little attention has been paid to the understanding of their associated feature spaces. In this paper, we explore the potential of adopting an operator-valued kernel feature space perspective for the analysis of functional data. We then extend the Regularized Least Squares Classification (RLSC) algorithm to cover situations where there are multiple functions per observation. Experiments on a sound recognition problem show that the proposed method outperforms the classical RLSC algorithm.

Non-linear image reconstruction and signal analysis deal with complex inverse problems. To tackle such problems in a systematic way, I present information field theory (IFT) as a means of Bayesian, data based inference on spatially distributed signal fields. IFT is a statistical field theory, which permits the construction of optimal signal recovery algorithms even for non-linear and non-Gaussian signal inference problems. IFT algorithms exploit spatial correlations of the signal fields and benefit from techniques developed to investigate quantum and statistical field theories, such as Feynman diagrams, re-normalisation calculations, and thermodynamic potentials. The theory can be used in many areas, and applications in cosmology and numerics are presented.

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.

We propose a new class of learning algorithms that combines variational approximation and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Naive algorithms that use the variational approximation as proposal distribution can perform poorly because this approximation tends to underestimate the true variance and other features of the data. We solve this problem by introducing more sophisticated MCMC algorithms. One of these algorithms is a mixture of two MCMC kernels: a random walk Metropolis kernel and a blockMetropolis-Hastings (MH) kernel with a variational approximation as proposaldistribution. The MH kernel allows one to locate regions of high probability efficiently. The Metropolis kernel allows us to explore the vicinity of these regions. This algorithm outperforms variationalapproximations because it yields slightly better estimates of the mean and considerably better estimates of higher moments, such as covariances. It also outperforms standard MCMC algorithms because it locates theregions of high probability quickly, thus speeding up convergence. We demonstrate this algorithm on the problem of Bayesian parameter estimation for logistic (sigmoid) belief networks.

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.

Cascade classifiers are widely used in real-time object detection. Different from conventional classifiers that are designed for a low overall classification error rate, a classifier in each node of the cascade is required to achieve an extremely high detection rate and moderate false positive rate. Although there are a few reported methods addressing this requirement in the context of object detection, there is no principled feature selection method that explicitly takes into account this asymmetric node learning objective. We provide such an algorithm here. We show that a special case of the biased minimax probability machine has the same formulation as the linear asymmetric classifier (LAC) of Wu et al (2005). We then design a new boosting algorithm that directly optimizes the cost function of LAC. The resulting totally-corrective boosting algorithm is implemented by the column generation technique in convex optimization. Experimental results on object detection verify the effectiveness of the proposed boosting algorithm as a node classifier in cascade object detection, and show performance better than that of the current state-of-the-art.