Hierarchical structure is ubiquitous in data across many domains. There are many hierarchical clustering methods, frequently used by domain experts, which strive to discover this structure. However, most of these methods limit discoverable hierarchies to those with binary branching structure. This limitation, while computationally convenient, is often undesirable. In this paper we explore a Bayesian hierarchical clustering algorithm that can produce trees with arbitrary branching structure at each node, known as rose trees. We interpret these trees as mixtures over partitions of a data set, and use a computationally efficient, greedy agglomerative algorithm to find the rose trees which have high marginal likelihood given the data. Lastly, we perform experiments which demonstrate that rose trees are better models of data than the typical binary trees returned by other hierarchical clustering algorithms.

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full Bayesian planning is intractable. Planning with the mean MDP is a common myopic approximation of Bayesian planning. We derive a novel reward bonus that is a function of the posterior distribution over environments, which, when added to the reward in planning with the mean MDP, results in an agent which explores efficiently and effectively. Although our method is similar to existing methods when given an uninformative or unstructured prior, unlike existing methods, our method can exploit structured priors. We prove that our method results in a polynomial sample complexity and empirically demonstrate its advantages in a structured exploration task.

We introduce a new family of estimators for unnormalized statistical models. Our family of estimators is parameterized by two nonlinear functions and uses a single sample from an auxiliary distribution, generalizing Maximum Likelihood Monte Carlo estimation of Geyer and Thompson (1992). The family is such that we can estimate the partition function like any other parameter in the model. The estimation is done by optimizing an algebraically simple, well defined objective function, which allows for the use of dedicated optimization methods. We establish consistency of the estimator family and give an expression for the asymptotic covariance matrix, which enables us to further analyze the influence of the nonlinearities and the auxiliary density on estimation performance. Some estimators in our family are particularly stable for a wide range of auxiliary densities. Interestingly, a specific choice of the nonlinearity establishes a connection between density estimation and classification by nonlinear logistic regression. Finally, the optimal amount of auxiliary samples relative to the given amount of the data is considered from the perspective of computational efficiency.

Recent reports have described that the equivalent sample size (ESS) in a Dirichlet prior plays an important role in learning Bayesian networks. This paper provides an asymptotic analysis of the marginal likelihood score for a Bayesian network. Results show that the ratio of the ESS and sample size determine the penalty of adding arcs in learning Bayesian networks. The number of arcs increases monotonically as the ESS increases; the number of arcs monotonically decreases as the ESS decreases. Furthermore, the marginal likelihood score provides a unified expression of various score metrics by changing prior knowledge.

We study the problem of learning Bayesian network structures from data. We develop an algorithm for finding the k-best Bayesian network structures. We propose to compute the posterior probabilities of hypotheses of interest by Bayesian model averaging over the k-best Bayesian networks. We present empirical results on structural discovery over several real and synthetic data sets and show that the method outperforms the model selection method and the state of-the-art MCMC methods.

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods are drawing great interest after yielding breakthrough results in computer Go. This paper proposes a Bayesian approach to MCTS that is inspired by distributionfree approaches such as UCT [13], yet significantly differs in important respects. The Bayesian framework allows potentially much more accurate (Bayes-optimal) estimation of node values and node uncertainties from a limited number of simulation trials. We further propose propagating inference in the tree via fast analytic Gaussian approximation methods: this can make the overhead of Bayesian inference manageable in domains such as Go, while preserving high accuracy of expected-value estimates. We find substantial empirical outperformance of UCT in an idealized bandit-tree test environment, where we can obtain valuable insights by comparing with known ground truth. Additionally we rigorously prove on-policy and off-policy convergence of the proposed methods.

We present a Dirichlet process mixture model over discrete incomplete rankings and study two Gibbs sampling inference techniques for estimating posterior clusterings. The first approach uses a slice sampling subcomponent for estimating cluster parameters. The second approach marginalizes out several cluster parameters by taking advantage of approximations to the conditional posteriors. We empirically demonstrate (1) the effectiveness of this approximation for improving convergence, (2) the benefits of the Dirichlet process model over alternative clustering techniques for ranked data, and (3) the applicability of the approach to exploring large realworld ranking datasets.

We consider learning continuous probabilistic graphical models in the face of missing data. For non-Gaussian models, learning the parameters and structure of such models depends on our ability to perform efficient inference, and can be prohibitive even for relatively modest domains. Recently, we introduced the Copula Bayesian Network (CBN) density model - a flexible framework that captures complex high-dimensional dependency structures while offering direct control over the univariate marginals, leading to improved generalization. In this work we show that the CBN model also offers significant computational advantages when training data is partially observed. Concretely, we leverage on the specialized form of the model to derive a computationally amenable learning objective that is a lower bound on the log-likelihood function. Importantly, our energy-like bound circumvents the need for costly inference of an auxiliary distribution, thus facilitating practical learning of highdimensional densities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for learning the structure and parameters of a CBN model for two reallife continuous domains.

Bayesian structure learning is the NP-hard problem of discovering a Bayesian network that optimally represents a given set of training data. In this paper we study the computational worst-case complexity of exact Bayesian structure learning under graph theoretic restrictions on the super-structure. The super-structure (a concept introduced by Perrier, Imoto, and Miyano, JMLR 2008) is an undirected graph that contains as subgraphs the skeletons of solution networks. Our results apply to several variants of score-based Bayesian structure learning where the score of a network decomposes into local scores of its nodes. Results: We show that exact Bayesian structure learning can be carried out in non-uniform polynomial time if the super-structure has bounded treewidth and in linear time if in addition the super-structure has bounded maximum degree. We complement this with a number of hardness results. We show that both restrictions (treewidth and degree) are essential and cannot be dropped without loosing uniform polynomial time tractability (subject to a complexity-theoretic assumption). Furthermore, we show that the restrictions remain essential if we do not search for a globally optimal network but we aim to improve a given network by means of at most k arc additions, arc deletions, or arc reversals (k-neighborhood local search).

We propose a new method for estimating the intrinsic dimension of a dataset by applying the principle of regularized maximum likelihood to the distances between close neighbors. We propose a regularization scheme which is motivated by divergence minimization principles. We derive the estimator by a Poisson process approximation, argue about its convergence properties and apply it to a number of simulated and real datasets. We also show it has the best overall performance compared with two other intrinsic dimension estimators.