We consider the problem of using nearest neighbor methods to provide a conditional probability estimate, P(y|a), when the number of labels y is large and the labels share some underlying structure. We propose a method for learning error-correcting output codes (ECOCs) to model the similarity between labels within a nearest neighbor framework. The learned ECOCs and nearest neighbor information are used to provide conditional probability estimates. We apply these estimates to the problem of acoustic modeling for speech recognition. We demonstrate an absolute reduction in word error rate (WER) of 0.9% (a 2.5% relative reduction in WER) on a lecture recognition task over a state-of-the-art baseline GMM model.

We study unsupervised learning in a probabilistic generative model for occlusion. The model uses two types of latent variables: one indicates which objects are present in the image, and the other how they are ordered in depth. This depth order then determines how the positions and appearances of the objects present, specified in the model parameters, combine to form the image. We show that the object parameters can be learnt from an unlabelled set of images in which objects occlude one another. Exact maximum-likelihood learning is intractable. However, we show that tractable approximations to Expectation Maximization (EM) can be found if the training images each contain only a small number of objects on average. In numerical experiments it is shown that these approximations recover the correct set of object parameters. Experiments on a novel version of the bars test using colored bars, and experiments on more realistic data, show that the algorithm performs well in extracting the generating causes. Experiments based on the standard bars benchmark test for object learning show that the algorithm performs well in comparison to other recent component extraction approaches. The model and the learning algorithm thus connect research on occlusion with the research field of multiple-cause component extraction methods.

Multiple object tracking is a task commonly used to investigate the architecture of human visual attention. Human participants show a distinctive pattern of successes and failures in tracking experiments that is often attributed to limits on an object system, a tracking module, or other specialized cognitive structures. Here we use a computational analysis of the task of object tracking to ask which human failures arise from cognitive limitations and which are consequences of inevitable perceptual uncertainty in the tracking task. We find that many human performance phenomena, measured through novel behavioral experiments, are naturally produced by the operation of our ideal observer model (a Rao-Blackwelized particle filter). The tradeoff between the speed and number of objects being tracked, however, can only arise from the allocation of a flexible cognitive resource, which can be formalized as either memory or attention.

Empirical studies have documented cases of belief polarization, where two people withopposing prior beliefs both strengthen their beliefs after observing the same evidence. Belief polarization is frequently offered as evidence of human irrationality, but we demonstrate that this phenomenon is consistent with a fully Bayesian approach to belief revision. Simulation results indicate that belief polarization isnot only possible but relatively common within the set of Bayesian models that we consider. Suppose that Carol has requested a promotion at her company and has received a score of 50 on an aptitude test. Alice, one of the company's managers, began with a high opinion of Carol and became even more confident of her abilities after seeing her test score.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows.

Stochastic relational models (SRMs) [15] provide a rich family of choices for learning and predicting dyadic data between two sets of entities. The models generalize matrixfactorization to a supervised learning problem that utilizes attributes of entities in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. Previously variational Bayes inference wasapplied for SRMs, which is, however, not scalable when the size of either entity set grows to tens of thousands. In this paper, we introduce a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for equivalent models of SRMs in order to scale the computation to very large dyadic data sets. Both superior scalability and predictive accuracy are demonstrated on a collaborative filtering problem, which involves tens of thousands users and half million items.

Decision making lies at the very heart of many psychiatric diseases. It is also a central theoretical concern in a wide variety of fields and has undergone detailed, in-depth, analyses. We take as an example Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), applying insights from a Bayesian reinforcement learning framework. We focus on anhedonia and helplessness. Helplessness--a core element in the conceptualizations ofMDD that has lead to major advances in its treatment, pharmacological and neurobiological understanding--is formalized as a simple prior over the outcome entropy of actions in uncertain environments.

We consider the problem of learning the structure of Ising models (pairwise binary Markov random fields) from i.i.d. samples. While several methods have been proposed to accomplish this task, their relative merits and limitations remain somewhat obscure. By analyzing a number of concrete examples, we show that low-complexity algorithms systematically fail when the Markov random field develops long-range correlations. More precisely, this phenomenon appears to be related to the Ising model phase transition (although it does not coincide with it).

Kernel supervised learning methods can be unified by utilizing the tools from regularization theory. The duality between regularization and prior leads to interpreting regularization methods in terms of maximum a posteriori estimation and has motivated Bayesian interpretations of kernel methods. In this paper we pursue a Bayesian interpretation of sparsity in the kernel setting by making use of a mixture of a point-mass distribution and prior that we refer to as ``Silverman's g-prior.'' We provide a theoretical analysis of the posterior consistency of a Bayesian model choice procedure based on this prior. We also establish the asymptotic relationship between this procedure and the Bayesian information criterion.

Multi-level hierarchical models provide an attractive framework for incorporating correlations induced in a response variable organized in a hierarchy. Model fitting is challenging, especially for hierarchies with large number of nodes. We provide a novel algorithm based on a multi-scale Kalman filter that is both scalable and easy to implement. For non-Gaussian responses, quadratic approximation to the log-likelihood results in biased estimates. We suggest a bootstrap strategy to correct such biases. Our method is illustrated through simulation studies and analyses of real world data sets in health care and online advertising.