Scoring structures of undirected graphical models by means of evaluating the marginal likelihood is very hard. The main reason is the presence of the partition function which is intractable to evaluate, let alone integrate over. We propose to approximate the marginal likelihood by employing two levels of approximation: we assume normality of the posterior (the Laplace approximation) and approximate all remaining intractable quantities using belief propagation and the linear response approximation.

The additive clustering model is widely used to infer the features of a set of stimuli from their similarities, on the assumption that similarity is a weighted linear function of common features. This paper develops a fully Bayesian formulation of the additive clustering model, using methods from nonparametric Bayesian statistics to allow the number of features to vary. We use this to explore several approaches to parameter estimation, showing that the nonparametric Bayesian approach provides a straightforward way to obtain estimates of both the number of features used in producing similarity judgments and their importance.

We introduce Coherent Point Drift (CPD), a novel probabilistic method for nonrigid registration of point sets. The registration is treated as a Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation problem with motion coherence constraint over the velocity field such that one point set moves coherently to align with the second set. We formulate the motion coherence constraint and derive a solution of regularized ML estimation through the variational approach, which leads to an elegant kernel form. We also derive the EM algorithm for the penalized ML optimization with deterministic annealing. The CPD method simultaneously finds both the nonrigid transformation and the correspondence between two point sets without making any prior assumption of the transformation model except that of motion coherence. This method can estimate complex nonlinear nonrigid transformations, and is shown to be accurate on 2D and 3D examples and robust in the presence of outliers and missing points.

We introduce binary matrix factorization, a novel model for unsupervised matrix decomposition. The decomposition is learned by fitting a nonparametric Bayesian probabilistic model with binary latent variables to a matrix of dyadic data. Unlike bi-clustering models, which assign each row or column to a single cluster based on a categorical hidden feature, our binary feature model reflects the prior belief that items and attributes can be associated with more than one latent cluster at a time. We provide simple learning and inference rules for this new model and show how to extend it to an infinite model in which the number of features is not a priori fixed but is allowed to grow with the size of the data.

We present a computational Bayesian approach for Wiener diffusion models, which are prominent accounts of response time distributions in decision-making. We first develop a general closed-form analytic approximation to the response time distributions for one-dimensional diffusion processes, and derive the required Wiener diffusion as a special case. We use this result to undertake Bayesian modeling of benchmark data, using posterior sampling to draw inferences about the interesting psychological parameters. With the aid of the benchmark data, we show the Bayesian account has several advantages, including dealing naturally with the parameter variation needed to account for some key features of the data, and providing quantitative measures to guide decisions about model construction.

Many recent studies analyze how data from different modalities can be combined. Often this is modeled as a system that optimally combines several sources of information about the same variable. However, it has long been realized that this information combining depends on the interpretation of the data. Two cues that are perceived by different modalities can have different causal relationships: (1) They can both have the same cause, in this case we should fully integrate both cues into a joint estimate.

Data sets involving multiple groups with shared characteristics frequently arise in practice. In this paper we extend hierarchical Dirichlet processes to model such data. Each group is assumed to be generated from a template mixture model with group level variability in both the mixing proportions and the component parameters. Variabilities in mixing proportions across groups are handled using hierarchical Dirichlet processes, also allowing for automatic determination of the number of components. In addition, each group is allowed to have its own component parameters coming from a prior described by a template mixture model. This group-level variability in the component parameters is handled using a random effects model. We present a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithm to estimate model parameters and demonstrate the method by applying it to the problem of modeling spatial brain activation patterns across multiple images collected via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Everyday inductive reasoning draws on many kinds of knowledge, including knowledge about relationships between properties and knowledge about relationships between objects. Previous accounts of inductive reasoning generally focus on just one kind of knowledge: models of causal reasoning often focus on relationships between properties, and models of similarity-based reasoning often focus on similarity relationships between objects. We present a Bayesian model of inductive reasoning that incorporates both kinds of knowledge, and show that it accounts well for human inferences about the properties of biological species.

This paper introduces adaptor grammars, a class of probabilistic models of language that generalize probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs). Adaptor grammars augment the probabilistic rules of PCFGs with "adaptors" that can induce dependencies among successive uses. With a particular choice of adaptor, based on the Pitman-Yor process, nonparametric Bayesian models of language using Dirichlet processes and hierarchical Dirichlet processes can be written as simple grammars. We present a general-purpose inference algorithm for adaptor grammars, making it easy to define and use such models, and illustrate how several existing nonparametric Bayesian models can be expressed within this framework.

Data sets that characterize human activity over time through collections of timestamped events or counts are of increasing interest in application areas as humancomputer interaction, video surveillance, and Web data analysis. We propose a nonparametric Bayesian framework for modeling collections of such data. In particular, we use a Dirichlet process framework for learning a set of intensity functions corresponding to different categories, which form a basis set for representing individual time-periods (e.g., several days) depending on which categories the time-periods are assigned to. This allows the model to learn in a data-driven fashion what "factors" are generating the observations on a particular day, including (for example) weekday versus weekend effects or day-specific effects corresponding to unique (single-day) occurrences of unusual behavior, sharing information where appropriate to obtain improved estimates of the behavior associated with each category. Applications to real-world data sets of count data involving both vehicles and people are used to illustrate the technique.