We propose an approach to reduce both computational complexity and data storage requirements for the online positioning stage of a fingerprinting-based indoor positioning system (FIPS) by introducing segmentation of the region of interest (RoI) into sub-regions, sub-region selection using a modified Jaccard index, and feature selection based on randomized least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO). We implement these steps into a Bayesian framework of position estimation using the maximum a posteriori (MAP) principle. An additional benefit of these steps is that the time for estimating the position, and the required data storage are virtually independent of the size of the RoI and of the total number of available features within the RoI. Thus the proposed steps facilitate application of FIPS to large areas. Results of an experimental analysis using real data collected in an office building using a Nexus 6P smart phone as user device and a total station for providing position ground truth corroborate the expected performance of the proposed approach. The positioning accuracy obtained by only processing 10 automatically identified features instead of all available ones and limiting position estimation to 10 automatically identified sub-regions instead of the entire RoI is equivalent to processing all available data. In the chosen example, 50% of the errors are less than 1.8 m and 90% are less than 5 m. However, the computation time using the automatically identified subset of data is only about 1% of that required for processing the entire data set.

The quest for biologically plausible deep learning is driven, not just by the desire to explain experimentally-observed properties of biological neural networks, but also by the hope of discovering more efficient methods for training artificial networks. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm named Variational Probably Flow (VPF), an extension of minimum probability flow for training binary Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBMs). We show that weight updates in VPF are local, depending only on the states and firing rates of the adjacent neurons. Unlike contrastive divergence, there is no need for Gibbs confabulations; and unlike backpropagation, alternating feedforward and feedback phases are not required. Moreover, the learning algorithm is effective for training DBMs with intra-layer connections between the hidden nodes. Experiments with MNIST and Fashion MNIST demonstrate that VPF learns reasonable features quickly, reconstructs corrupted images more accurately, and generates samples with a high estimated log-likelihood. Lastly, we note that, interestingly, if an asymmetric version of VPF exists, the weight updates directly explain experimental results in Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP).

Both scientists and children make important structural discoveries, yet their computational underpinnings are not well understood. Structure discovery has previously been formalized as probabilistic inference about the right structural form --- where form could be a tree, ring, chain, grid, etc. [Kemp & Tenenbaum (2008). The discovery of structural form. PNAS, 105(3), 10687-10692]. While this approach can learn intuitive organizations, including a tree for animals and a ring for the color circle, it assumes a strong inductive bias that considers only these particular forms, and each form is explicitly provided as initial knowledge. Here we introduce a new computational model of how organizing structure can be discovered, utilizing a broad hypothesis space with a preference for sparse connectivity. Given that the inductive bias is more general, the model's initial knowledge shows little qualitative resemblance to some of the discoveries it supports. As a consequence, the model can also learn complex structures for domains that lack intuitive description, as well as predict human property induction judgments without explicit structural forms. By allowing form to emerge from sparsity, our approach clarifies how both the richness and flexibility of human conceptual organization can coexist.

Predicting epidemic dynamics is of great value in understanding and controlling diffusion processes, such as infectious disease spread and information propagation. This task is intractable, especially when surveillance resources are very limited. To address the challenge, we study the problem of active surveillance, i.e., how to identify a small portion of system components as sentinels to effect monitoring, such that the epidemic dynamics of an entire system can be readily predicted from the partial data collected by such sentinels. We propose a novel measure, the gamma value, to identify the sentinels by modeling a sentinel network with row sparsity structure. We design a flexible group sparse Bayesian learning algorithm to mine the sentinel network suitable for handling both linear and non-linear dynamical systems by using the expectation maximization method and variational approximation. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is theoretically analyzed and empirically validated using both synthetic and real-world data.

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A major target of linguistics and cognitive science has been to understand what class of learning systems can acquire the key structures of natural language. Until recently, the computational requirements of language have been used to argue that learning is impossible without a highly constrained hypothesis space. Here, we describe a learning system that is maximally unconstrained, operating over the space of all computations, and is able to acquire several of the key structures present natural language from positive evidence alone. The model successfully acquires regular (e.g. $(ab)^n$), context-free (e.g. $a^n b^n$, $x x^R$), and context-sensitive (e.g. $a^nb^nc^n$, $a^nb^mc^nd^m$, $xx$) formal languages. Our approach develops the concept of factorized programs in Bayesian program induction in order to help manage the complexity of representation. We show in learning, the model predicts several phenomena empirically observed in human grammar acquisition experiments.

We study a classification problem where each feature can be acquired for a cost and the goal is to optimize the trade-off between classification precision and the total feature cost. We frame the problem as a sequential decision-making problem, where we classify one sample in each episode. At each step, an agent can use values of acquired features to decide whether to purchase another one or whether to classify the sample. We use vanilla Double Deep Q-learning, a standard reinforcement learning technique, to find a classification policy. We show that this generic approach outperforms Adapt-Gbrt, currently the best-performing algorithm developed specifically for classification with costly features.

The partially observable hidden Markov model is an extension of the hidden Markov Model in which the hidden state is conditioned on an independent Markov chain. This structure is motivated by the presence of discrete metadata, such as an event type, that may partially reveal the hidden state but itself emanates from a separate process. Such a scenario is encountered in keystroke dynamics whereby a user's typing behavior is dependent on the text that is typed. Under the assumption that the user can be in either an active or passive state of typing, the keyboard key names are event types that partially reveal the hidden state due to the presence of relatively longer time intervals between words and sentences than between letters of a word. Using five public datasets, the proposed model is shown to consistently outperform other anomaly detectors, including the standard HMM, in biometric identification and verification tasks and is generally preferred over the HMM in a Monte Carlo goodness of fit test.

Variational inference for latent variable models is prevalent in various machine learning problems, typically solved by maximizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) of the true data likelihood with respect to a variational distribution. However, freely enriching the family of variational distribution is challenging since the ELBO requires variational likelihood evaluations of the latent variables. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to enrich the variational family based on an alternative lower bound, by introducing auxiliary random variables to the variational distribution only. While offering a much richer family of complex variational distributions, the resulting inference network is likelihood almost free in the sense that only the latent variables require evaluations from simple likelihoods and samples from all the auxiliary variables are sufficient for maximum likelihood inference. We show that the proposed approach is essentially optimizing a probabilistic mixture of ELBOs, thus enriching modeling capacity and enhancing robustness. It outperforms state-of-the-art methods in our experiments on several density estimation tasks.

This is a technical report which explores the estimation methodologies on hyper-parameters in Markov Random Field and Gaussian Hidden Markov Random Field. In first section, we briefly investigate a theoretical framework on Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Next, by using MH algorithm, we simulate the data from Ising model, and study on how hyper-parameter estimation in Ising model is enabled through MCMC algorithm using pseudo-likelihood approximation. Following section deals with an issue on parameters estimation process of Gaussian Hidden Markov Random Field using MAP estimation and EM algorithm, and also discusses problems, found through several experiments. In following section, we expand this idea on estimating parameters in Gaussian Hidden Markov Spatial-Temporal Random Field, and display results on two performed experiments.