Bayesian optimization usually assumes that a Bayesian prior is given.

Estimating uncertainty in a model's predictions is important, as

Solomonoff's general theory of inference (Solomonoff, 1964) and the Minimum Description Length principle (Grünwald, 2007; Rissanen, 2007) formalize Occam's razor, and hold that a good model of data is a model that is good at losslessly compressing the data, including the cost of describing the model itself. Deep neural networks might seem to go against this principle given the large number of parameters to be encoded. We demonstrate experimentally the ability of deep neural networks to compress the training data even when accounting for parameter encoding. The compression viewpoint originally motivated the use of variational methods in neural networks (Hinton and V an Camp, 1993; Schmidhuber, 1997). Unexpectedly, we found that these variational methods provide surprisingly poor compression bounds, despite being explicitly built to minimize such bounds. This might explain the relatively poor practical performance of variational methods in deep learning. On the other hand, simple incremental encoding methods yield excellent compression values on deep networks, vindicating Solomonoff's approach.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We propose a Bayesian decision making framework for control of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with unknown dynamics and large, possibly continuous, state, action, and parameter spaces in data-poor environments. Most of the existing adaptive controllers for MDPs with unknown dynamics are based on the reinforcement learning framework and rely on large data sets acquired by sustained direct interaction with the system or via a simulator. This is not feasible in many applications, due to ethical, economic, and physical constraints. The proposed framework addresses the data poverty issue by decomposing the problem into an offline planning stage that does not rely on sustained direct interaction with the system or simulator and an online execution stage. In the offline process, parallel Gaussian process temporal difference (GPTD) learning techniques are employed for near-optimal Bayesian approximation of the expected discounted reward over a sample drawn from the prior distribution of unknown parameters. In the online stage, the action with the maximum expected return with respect to the posterior distribution of the parameters is selected. This is achieved by an approximation of the posterior distribution using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, followed by constructing multiple Gaussian processes over the parameter space for efficient prediction of the means of the expected return at the MCMC sample. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated using a simple dynamical system model with continuous state and action spaces, as well as a more complex model for a metastatic melanoma gene regulatory network observed through noisy synthetic gene expression data.

AIS is asymptotically optimal, i.e., learning the sampling policy has no cost asymptotically.

We present a novel model architecture which leverages deep learning tools to perform exact Bayesian inference on sets of high dimensional, complex observations.

We also provide an algorithm for sampling CPDAGs efficiently from their posterior given the learned tree. That is, not from the full posterior, but from a reduced space of CPDAGs encoded in the learned tree.

Unlike classical graphical models, QGMs represent uncertainty with density matrices in complex Hilbert spaces.

Apart from modeling the time to event, in the presence of competing risks, it is also important to model the event type, or under which risk the event is likely to occur first. Though one can censor subjects with an occurrence of the event under a competing risk other than the risk of special interest, so that every survival model that can handle censoring is able to model competing risks, it is problematic to violate the principle of non-informative censoring [18, 19].