Topic models are probabilistic models for discovering topical themes in collections of documents. In real world applications, these models provide us with the means of organizing what would otherwise be unstructured collections. They can help us cluster a huge collection into different topics or find a subset of the collection that resembles the topical theme found in an article at hand. The first wave of topic models developed were able to discover the prevailing topics in a big collection of documents spanning a period of time. It was later realized that these time-invariant models were not capable of modeling 1) the time varying number of topics they discover and 2) the time changing structure of these topics. Few models were developed to address this two deficiencies. The online-hierarchical Dirichlet process models the documents with a time varying number of topics. It varies the structure of the topics over time as well. However, it relies on document order, not timestamps to evolve the model over time. The continuous-time dynamic topic model evolves topic structure in continuous-time. However, it uses a fixed number of topics over time. In this dissertation, I present a model, the continuous-time infinite dynamic topic model, that combines the advantages of these two models 1) the online-hierarchical Dirichlet process, and 2) the continuous-time dynamic topic model. More specifically, the model I present is a probabilistic topic model that does the following: 1) it changes the number of topics over continuous time, and 2) it changes the topic structure over continuous-time. I compared the model I developed with the two other models with different setting values. The results obtained were favorable to my model and showed the need for having a model that has a continuous-time varying number of topics and topic structure.

While decision theory provides an appealing normative framework for representing rich preference structures, eliciting utility or value functions typically incurs a large cost. For many applications involving interactive systems this overhead precludes the use of formal decision-theoretic models of preference. Instead of performing elicitation in a vacuum, it would be useful if we could augment directly elicited preferences with some appropriate default information. In this paper we propose a case-based approach to alleviating the preference elicitation bottleneck. Assuming the existence of a population of users from whom we have elicited complete or incomplete preference structures, we propose eliciting the preferences of a new user interactively and incrementally, using the closest existing preference structures as potential defaults. Since a notion of closeness demands a measure of distance among preference structures, this paper takes the first step of studying various distance measures over fully and partially specified preference structures. We explore the use of Euclidean distance, Spearman's footrule, and define a new measure, the probabilistic distance. We provide computational techniques for all three measures.

The need to help people choose among large numbers of items and to filter through large amounts of information has led to a flood of research in construction of personal' recommendation agents. One of the central issues in constructing such agents is the representation and elicitation of user preferences or interests. This topic has long been studied in Decision Theory, but surprisingly little work in the area of recommender systems has made use of formal decision-theoretic techniques. This paper describes DIVA, a decision-theoretic agent for recommending movies that contains a number of novel features. DIVA represents user preferences using pairwise comparisons among items, rather than numeric ratings. It uses a novel similarity measure based on the concept of the probability of conflict between two orderings of items. The system has a rich representation of preference, distinguishing between a user's general taste in movies and his immediate interests. It takes an incremental approach to preference elicitation in which the user can provide feedback if not satisfied with the recommendation Jist. We empirically evaluate the performance of the system using the EachMovie collaborative filtering database.

We treat collaborative filtering as a univariate time series problem: given a user's previous votes, predict the next vote. We describe two families of methods for transforming data to encode time order in ways amenable to off-the-shelf classification and density estimation tools. Using a decision-tree learning tool and two real-world data sets, we compare the results of these approaches to the results of collaborative filtering without ordering information. The improvements in both predictive accuracy and in recommendation quality that we realize advocate the use of predictive algorithms exploiting the temporal order of data.

A method is presented for the rhythmic parsing problem: Given a sequence of observed musical note onset times, we estimate the corresponding notated rhythm and tempo process. A graphical model is developed that represents the simultaneous evolution of tempo and rhythm and relates these hidden quantities to observations. The rhythm variables are discrete and the tempo and observation variables are continuous. We show how to compute the globally most likely configuration of the tempo and rhythm variables given an observation of note onset times. Preliminary experiments are presented on a small data set. A generalization to arbitrary conditional Gaussian distributions is outlined.

Recommender systems leverage product and community information to target products to consumers. Researchers have developed collaborative recommenders, content-based recommenders, and (largely ad-hoc) hybrid systems. We propose a unified probabilistic framework for merging collaborative and content-based recommendations. We extend Hofmann's [1999] aspect model to incorporate three-way co-occurrence data among users, items, and item content. The relative influence of collaboration data versus content data is not imposed as an exogenous parameter, but rather emerges naturally from the given data sources. Global probabilistic models coupled with standard Expectation Maximization (EM) learning algorithms tend to drastically overfit in sparse-data situations, as is typical in recommendation applications. We show that secondary content information can often be used to overcome sparsity. Experiments on data from the ResearchIndex library of Computer Science publications show that appropriate mixture models incorporating secondary data produce significantly better quality recommenders than k-nearest neighbors (k-NN). Global probabilistic models also allow more general inferences than local methods like k-NN.

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.

A large number of online services provide automated recommendations to help users to navigate through a large collection of items. New items (products, videos, songs, advertisements) are suggested on the basis of the user's past history and --when available-- her demographic profile. Recommendations have to satisfy the dual goal of helping the user to explore the space of available items, while allowing the system to probe the user's preferences. We model this trade-off using linearly parametrized multi-armed bandits, propose a policy and prove upper and lower bounds on the cumulative "reward" that coincide up to constants in the data poor (high-dimensional) regime. Prior work on linear bandits has focused on the data rich (low-dimensional) regime and used cumulative "risk" as the figure of merit. For this data rich regime, we provide a simple modification for our policy that achieves near-optimal risk performance under more restrictive assumptions on the geometry of the problem. We test (a variation of) the scheme used for establishing achievability on the Netflix and MovieLens datasets and obtain good agreement with the qualitative predictions of the theory we develop.

Many businesses are using recommender systems for marketing outreach. Recommendation algorithms can be either based on content or driven by collaborative filtering. We study different ways to incorporate content information directly into the matrix factorization approach of collaborative filtering. These content-boosted matrix factorization algorithms not only improve recommendation accuracy, but also provide useful insights about the contents, as well as make recommendations more easily interpretable.

Following a brief overview discussing why we prefer listening to expressive music instead of lifeless synthesized music, we examine a representative selection of well-known approaches to expressive computer music performance with an emphasis on AI-related approaches. In the main part of the paper we focus on the existing CBR approaches to the problem of synthesizing expressive music, and particularly on TempoExpress, a case-based reasoning system developed at our Institute, for applying musically acceptable tempo transformations to monophonic audio recordings of musical performances. Finally we briefly describe an ongoing extension of our previous work consisting on complementing audio information with information of the gestures of the musician. Music is played through our bodies, therefore capturing the gesture of the performer is a fundamental aspect that has to be taken into account in future expressive music renderings.