We develop a general variational inference method that preserves dependency among the latent variables. Our method uses copulas to augment the families of distributions used in mean-field and structured approximations. Copulas model the dependency that is not captured by the original variational distribution, and thus the augmented variational family guarantees better approximations to the posterior. With stochastic optimization, inference on the augmented distribution is scalable. Furthermore, our strategy is generic: it can be applied to any inference procedure that currently uses the mean-field or structured approach. Copula variational inference has many advantages: it reduces bias; it is less sensitive to local optima; it is less sensitive to hyperparameters; and it helps characterize and interpret the dependency among the latent variables.

We present Blitzkriging, a new approach to fast inference for Gaussian processes, applicable to regression, optimisation and classification. State-of-the-art (stochastic) inference for Gaussian processes on very large datasets scales cubically in the number of 'inducing inputs', variables introduced to factorise the model. Blitzkriging shares state-of-the-art scaling with data, but reduces the scaling in the number of inducing points to approximately linear. Further, in contrast to other methods, Blitzkriging: does not force the data to conform to any particular structure (including grid-like); reduces reliance on error-prone optimisation of inducing point locations; and is able to learn rich (covariance) structure from the data. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on real data in regression, time-series prediction and signal-interpolation experiments.

In this paper, we propose a model-based clustering method (TVClust) that robustly incorporates noisy side information as soft-constraints and aims to seek a consensus between side information and the observed data. Our method is based on a nonparametric Bayesian hierarchical model that combines the probabilistic model for the data instance and the one for the side-information. An efficient Gibbs sampling algorithm is proposed for posterior inference. Using the small-variance asymptotics of our probabilistic model, we then derive a new deterministic clustering algorithm (RDP-means). It can be viewed as an extension of K-means that allows for the inclusion of side information and has the additional property that the number of clusters does not need to be specified a priori. Empirical studies have been carried out to compare our work with many constrained clustering algorithms from the literature on both a variety of data sets and under a variety of conditions such as using noisy side information and erroneous k values. The results of our experiments show strong results for our probabilistic and deterministic approaches under these conditions when compared to other algorithms in the literature.

This paper presents an efficient Bayesian framework for solving nonlinear, high-dimensional model calibration problems. It is based on a Variational Bayesian formulation that aims at approximating the exact posterior by means of solving an optimization problem over an appropriately selected family of distributions. The goal is two-fold. Firstly, to find lower-dimensional representations of the unknown parameter vector that capture as much as possible of the associated posterior density, and secondly to enable the computation of the approximate posterior density with as few forward calls as possible. We discuss how these objectives can be achieved by using a fully Bayesian argumentation and employing the marginal likelihood or evidence as the ultimate model validation metric for any proposed dimensionality reduction. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed methodology for problems in nonlinear elastography where the identification of the mechanical properties of biological materials can inform non-invasive, medical diagnosis. An Importance Sampling scheme is finally employed in order to validate the results and assess the efficacy of the approximations provided.

In many statistical problems, a more coarse-grained model may be suitable for population-level behaviour, whereas a more detailed model is appropriate for accurate modelling of individual behaviour. This raises the question of how to integrate both types of models. Methods such as posterior regularization follow the idea of generalized moment matching, in that they allow matching expectations between two models, but sometimes both models are most conveniently expressed as latent variable models. We propose latent Bayesian melding, which is motivated by averaging the distributions over populations statistics of both the individual-level and the population-level models under a logarithmic opinion pool framework. In a case study on electricity disaggregation, which is a type of single-channel blind source separation problem, we show that latent Bayesian melding leads to significantly more accurate predictions than an approach based solely on generalized moment matching.

Gaussian processes have been successful in both supervised and unsupervised machine learning tasks, but their computational complexity has constrained practical applications. We introduce a new approximation for large-scale Gaussian processes, the Gaussian Process Random Field (GPRF), in which local GPs are coupled via pairwise potentials. The GPRF likelihood is a simple, tractable, and parallelizeable approximation to the full GP marginal likelihood, enabling latent variable modeling and hyperparameter selection on large datasets. We demonstrate its effectiveness on synthetic spatial data as well as a real-world application to seismic event location.

We consider the problem of learning causal networks with interventions, when each intervention is limited in size under Pearl's Structural Equation Model with independent errors (SEM-IE). The objective is to minimize the number of experiments to discover the causal directions of all the edges in a causal graph. Previous work has focused on the use of separating systems for complete graphs for this task. We prove that any deterministic adaptive algorithm needs to be a separating system in order to learn complete graphs in the worst case. In addition, we present a novel separating system construction, whose size is close to optimal and is arguably simpler than previous work in combinatorics. We also develop a novel information theoretic lower bound on the number of interventions that applies in full generality, including for randomized adaptive learning algorithms. For general chordal graphs, we derive worst case lower bounds on the number of interventions. Building on observations about induced trees, we give a new deterministic adaptive algorithm to learn directions on any chordal skeleton completely. In the worst case, our achievable scheme is an $\alpha$-approximation algorithm where $\alpha$ is the independence number of the graph. We also show that there exist graph classes for which the sufficient number of experiments is close to the lower bound. In the other extreme, there are graph classes for which the required number of experiments is multiplicatively $\alpha$ away from our lower bound. In simulations, our algorithm almost always performs very close to the lower bound, while the approach based on separating systems for complete graphs is significantly worse for random chordal graphs.

The principal submatrix localization problem deals with recovering a $K\times K$ principal submatrix of elevated mean $\mu$ in a large $n\times n$ symmetric matrix subject to additive standard Gaussian noise. This problem serves as a prototypical example for community detection, in which the community corresponds to the support of the submatrix. The main result of this paper is that in the regime $\Omega(\sqrt{n}) \leq K \leq o(n)$, the support of the submatrix can be weakly recovered (with $o(K)$ misclassification errors on average) by an optimized message passing algorithm if $\lambda = \mu^2K^2/n$, the signal-to-noise ratio, exceeds $1/e$. This extends a result by Deshpande and Montanari previously obtained for $K=\Theta(\sqrt{n}).$ In addition, the algorithm can be extended to provide exact recovery whenever information-theoretically possible and achieve the information limit of exact recovery as long as $K \geq \frac{n}{\log n} (\frac{1}{8e} + o(1))$. The total running time of the algorithm is $O(n^2\log n)$. Another version of the submatrix localization problem, known as noisy biclustering, aims to recover a $K_1\times K_2$ submatrix of elevated mean $\mu$ in a large $n_1\times n_2$ Gaussian matrix. The optimized message passing algorithm and its analysis are adapted to the bicluster problem assuming $\Omega(\sqrt{n_i}) \leq K_i \leq o(n_i)$ and $K_1\asymp K_2.$ A sharp information-theoretic condition for the weak recovery of both clusters is also identified.

This paper presents a methodology for creating streaming, distributed inference algorithms for Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) models. In the proposed framework, processing nodes receive a sequence of data minibatches, compute a variational posterior for each, and make asynchronous streaming updates to a central model. In contrast to previous algorithms, the proposed framework is truly streaming, distributed, asynchronous, learning-rate-free, and truncation-free. The key challenge in developing the framework, arising from the fact that BNP models do not impose an inherent ordering on their components, is finding the correspondence between minibatch and central BNP posterior components before performing each update. To address this, the paper develops a combinatorial optimization problem over component correspondences, and provides an efficient solution technique. The paper concludes with an application of the methodology to the DP mixture model, with experimental results demonstrating its practical scalability and performance.

For the last few years, the amount of data has significantly increased in the companies. It is the reason why data analysis methods have to evolve to meet new demands. In this article, we introduce a practical analysis of a large database from a telecommunication operator. The problem is to segment a territory and characterize the retrieved areas owing to their inhabitant behavior in terms of mobile telephony. We have call detail records collected during five months in France. We propose a two stages analysis. The first one aims at grouping source antennas which originating calls are similarly distributed on target antennas and conversely for target antenna w.r.t. source antenna. A geographic projection of the data is used to display the results on a map of France. The second stage discretizes the time into periods between which we note changes in distributions of calls emerging from the clusters of source antennas. This enables an analysis of temporal changes of inhabitants behavior in every area of the country.