We present a formalization of nested Monte Carlo (NMC) estimation, whereby terms in an outer estimator themselves involve calculation of separate, nested, Monte Carlo (MC) estimators. We demonstrate that, under mild conditions, NMC can provide consistent estimates of nested expectations, including cases involving arbitrary levels of nesting; establish corresponding rates of convergence; and provide empirical evidence that these rates are observed in practice. We further establish a number of pitfalls that can arise from naïve nesting of MC estimators, provide guidelines about how these can be avoided, and lay out novel methods for reformulating certain classes of nested expectation problems into single expectations, leading to improved convergence rates. Finally, we use one of these reformulations to derive a new estimator for use in discrete Bayesian experimental design problems which has a better convergence rate than existing methods. Our results have implications for a wide range of fields from probabilistic programming to deep generative models and serve both as an invitation for further inquiry and a caveat against careless use.

We address the problem of bootstrapping language acquisition for an artificial system similarly to what is observed in experiments with human infants. Our method works by associating meanings to words in manipulation tasks, as a robot interacts with objects and listens to verbal descriptions of the interactions. The model is based on an affordance network, i.e., a mapping between robot actions, robot perceptions, and the perceived effects of these actions upon objects. We extend the affordance model to incorporate spoken words, which allows us to ground the verbal symbols to the execution of actions and the perception of the environment. The model takes verbal descriptions of a task as the input and uses temporal co-occurrence to create links between speech utterances and the involved objects, actions, and effects. We show that the robot is able form useful word-to-meaning associations, even without considering grammatical structure in the learning process and in the presence of recognition errors. These word-to-meaning associations are embedded in the robot's own understanding of its actions. Thus, they can be directly used to instruct the robot to perform tasks and also allow to incorporate context in the speech recognition task. We believe that the encouraging results with our approach may afford robots with a capacity to acquire language descriptors in their operation's environment as well as to shed some light as to how this challenging process develops with human infants.

Today's Web-enabled deluge of electronic data calls for automated methods of data analysis. Machine learning provides these, developing methods that can automatically detect patterns in data and then use the uncovered patterns to predict future data. This textbook offers a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to the field of machine learning, based on a unified, probabilistic approach. The coverage combines breadth and depth, offering necessary background material on such topics as probability, optimization, and linear algebra as well as discussion of recent developments in the field, including conditional random fields, L1 regularization, and deep learning. The book is written in an informal, accessible style, complete with pseudo-code for the most important algorithms.

The proposal to open Café fellatio, an establishment in Geneva, Switzerland where men would be able to get oral sex while drinking their coffee, was met with no uncertain outrage. And city authorities have decided it's also against Swiss law. It's not clear what the robots would look like or what they'd be able to do. The Geneva authorities have also yet to make up their mind whether that's an acceptable solution. On the one hand, you could argue that these sorts of robots, presumably looking as human-like as possible, are nothing more than technologically advanced sex toys--the dildos and fleshlights of the digital age.

This paper proposes the continuous semantic topic embedding model (CSTEM) which finds latent topic variables in documents using continuous semantic distance function between the topics and the words by means of the vari-ational autoencoder(V AE). The semantic distance could be represented by any symmetric bell-shaped geometric distance function on the Euclidean space, for which the Mahalanobis distance is used in this paper. In order for the semantic distance to perform more properly, we newly introduce an additional model parameter for each word to take out the global factor from this distance indicating how likely it occurs regardless of its topic. It certainly improves the problem that the Gaussian distribution which is used in previous topic model with continuous word embedding could not explain the semantic relation correctly and helps to obtain the higher topic coherence. Through the experiments with the dataset of 20 Newsgroup, NIPS papers and CNN/Dailymail corpus, the performance of the recent state-of-the-art models is accomplished by our model as well as generating topic embedding vectors which makes possible to observe where the topic vectors are embedded with the word vectors in the real Euclidean space and how the topics are related each other semantically.

KNN can easily be mapped to our real lives. If you want to learn about a person, of whom you have no information, you might like to find out about his close friends and the circles he moves in and gain access to his/her information!

To address three important issues involved in latent variable models (LVMs), including capturing infrequent patterns, achieving small-sized but expressive models and alleviating overfitting, several studies have been devoted to "diversifying" LVMs, which aim at encouraging the components in LVMs to be diverse. Most existing studies fall into a frequentist-style regularization framework, where the components are learned via point estimation. In this paper, we investigate how to "diversify" LVMs in the paradigm of Bayesian learning. We propose two approaches that have complementary advantages. One is to define a diversity-promoting mutual angular prior which assigns larger density to components with larger mutual angles and use this prior to affect the posterior via Bayes' rule. We develop two efficient approximate posterior inference algorithms based on variational inference and MCMC sampling. The other approach is to impose diversity-promoting regularization directly over the post-data distribution of components. We also extend our approach to "diversify" Bayesian nonparametric models where the number of components is infinite. A sampling algorithm based on slice sampling and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is developed. We apply these methods to "diversify" Bayesian mixture of experts model and infinite latent feature model. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.

Bayesian Nonparametrics is a class of models with a potentially infinite number of parameters. High flexibility and expressive power of this approach enables better data modelling compared to parametric methods.

In this paper, we deal with the task of building a dynamic ensemble of chain classifiers for multi-label classification. To do so, we proposed two concepts of classifier chains algorithms that are able to change label order of the chain without rebuilding the entire model. Such modes allows anticipating the instance-specific chain order without a significant increase in computational burden. The proposed chain models are built using the Naive Bayes classifier and nearest neighbour approach as a base single-label classifiers. To take the benefits of the proposed algorithms, we developed a simple heuristic that allows the system to find relatively good label order. The heuristic sort labels according to the label-specific classification quality gained during the validation phase. The heuristic tries to minimise the phenomenon of error propagation in the chain. The experimental results showed that the proposed model based on Naive Bayes classifier the above-mentioned heuristic is an efficient tool for building dynamic chain classifiers.

Feature selection plays a critical role in data mining, driven by increasing feature dimensionality in target problems and growing interest in advanced but computationally expensive methodologies able to model complex associations. Specifically, there is a need for feature selection methods that are computationally efficient, yet sensitive to complex patterns of association, e.g. interactions, so that informative features are not mistakenly eliminated prior to downstream modeling. This paper focuses on Relief-based algorithms (RBAs), a unique family of filter-style feature selection algorithms that strike an effective balance between these objectives while flexibly adapting to various data characteristics, e.g. classification vs. regression. First, this work broadly examines types of feature selection and defines RBAs within that context. Next, we introduce the original Relief algorithm and associated concepts, emphasizing the intuition behind how it works, how feature weights generated by the algorithm can be interpreted, and why it is sensitive to feature interactions without evaluating combinations of features. Lastly, we include an expansive review of RBA methodological research beyond Relief and its popular descendant, ReliefF. In particular, we characterize branches of RBA research, and provide comparative summaries of RBA algorithms including contributions, strategies, functionality, time complexity, adaptation to key data characteristics, and software availability.