The errors-in-variables (EIV) regression model, being more realistic by accounting for measurement errors in both the dependent and the independent variables, is widely adopted in applied sciences. The traditional EIV model estimators, however, can be highly biased by outliers and other departures from the underlying assumptions. In this paper, we develop a novel nonparametric regression approach - the robust compound regression (RCR) analysis method for the robust estimation of EIV models. We first introduce a robust and efficient estimator called least sine squares (LSS). Taking full advantage of both the new LSS method and the compound regression analysis method developed in our own group, we subsequently propose the RCR approach as a generalization of those two, which provides a robust counterpart of the entire class of the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) solutions of the EIV model, in a 1-1 mapping. Technically, our approach gives users the flexibility to select from a class of RCR estimates the optimal one with a predefined regression efficiency criterion satisfied. Simulation studies and real-life examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the RCR approach.

We propose a globally convergent alternating minimization (AM) algorithm for image reconstruction in transmission tomography, which extends automatic relevance determination (ARD) to Poisson noise models with Beer's law. The algorithm promotes solutions that are sparse in the pixel/voxel-differences domain by introducing additional latent variables, one for each pixel/voxel, and then learning these variables from the data using a hierarchical Bayesian model. Importantly, the proposed AM algorithm is free of any tuning parameters with image quality comparable to standard penalized likelihood methods. Our algorithm exploits optimization transfer principles which reduce the problem into parallel 1D optimization tasks (one for each pixel/voxel), making the algorithm feasible for large-scale problems. This approach considerably reduces the computational bottleneck of ARD associated with the posterior variances. Positivity constraints inherent in transmission tomography problems are also enforced. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm for x-ray computed tomography using synthetic and real-world datasets. The algorithm is shown to have much better performance than prior ARD algorithms based on approximate Gaussian noise models, even for high photon flux.

It has recently been found that Bell scenarios are only a small subclass of interesting setups for studying the non-classical features of quantum theory within spacetime. We find that it is possible to talk about classical correlations, quantum correlations and other kinds of correlations on any directed acyclic graph, and this captures various extensions of Bell scenarios which have been considered in the literature. From a conceptual point of view, the main feature of our approach is its high level of unification: while the notions of source, choice of setting and measurement play all seemingly different roles in a Bell scenario, our formalism shows that they are all instances of the same concept of "event". Our work can also be understood as a contribution to the subject of causal inference with latent variables. Among other things, we introduce hidden Bayesian networks as a generalization of hidden Markov models.

This paper focuses on finding spatial and temporal criminal hotspots. It analyses two different real-world crimes datasets for Denver, CO and Los Angeles, CA and provides a comparison between the two datasets through a statistical analysis supported by several graphs. Then, it clarifies how we conducted Apriori algorithm to produce interesting frequent patterns for criminal hotspots. In addition, the paper shows how we used Decision Tree classifier and Naive Bayesian classifier in order to predict potential crime types. To further analyse crimes datasets, the paper introduces an analysis study by combining our findings of Denver crimes dataset with its demographics information in order to capture the factors that might affect the safety of neighborhoods. The results of this solution could be used to raise awareness regarding the dangerous locations and to help agencies to predict future crimes in a specific location within a particular time.

We introduce a dimension reduction method for visualizing the clustering structure obtained from a finite mixture of Gaussian densities. Information on the dimension reduction subspace is obtained from the variation on group means and, depending on the estimated mixture model, on the variation on group covariances. The proposed method aims at reducing the dimensionality by identifying a set of linear combinations, ordered by importance as quantified by the associated eigenvalues, of the original features which capture most of the cluster structure contained in the data. Observations may then be projected onto such a reduced subspace, thus providing summary plots which help to visualize the clustering structure. These plots can be particularly appealing in the case of high-dimensional data and noisy structure. The new constructed variables capture most of the clustering information available in the data, and they can be further reduced to improve clustering performance. We illustrate the approach on both simulated and real data sets.

In this paper, we present a novel way to summarize the structure of large graphs, based on non-parametric estimation of edge density in directed multigraphs. Following coclustering approach, we use a clustering of the vertices, with a piecewise constant estimation of the density of the edges across the clusters, and address the problem of automatically and reliably inferring the number of clusters, which is the granularity of the coclustering. We use a model selection technique with data-dependent prior and obtain an exact evaluation criterion for the posterior probability of edge density estimation models. We demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that our data-dependent modeling technique is consistent, resilient to noise, valid non asymptotically and asymptotically behaves as an universal approximator of the true edge density in directed multigraphs. We evaluate our method using artificial graphs and present its practical interest on real world graphs. The method is both robust and scalable. It is able to extract insightful patterns in the unsupervised learning setting and to provide state of the art accuracy when used as a preparation step for supervised learning.

Approximate Newton methods are a standard optimization tool which aim to maintain the benefits of Newton's method, such as a fast rate of convergence, whilst alleviating its drawbacks, such as computationally expensive calculation or estimation of the inverse Hessian. In this work we investigate approximate Newton methods for policy optimization in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We first analyse the structure of the Hessian of the objective function for MDPs. We show that, like the gradient, the Hessian exhibits useful structure in the context of MDPs and we use this analysis to motivate two Gauss-Newton Methods for MDPs. Like the Gauss-Newton method for non-linear least squares, these methods involve approximating the Hessian by ignoring certain terms in the Hessian which are difficult to estimate. The approximate Hessians possess desirable properties, such as negative definiteness, and we demonstrate several important performance guarantees including guaranteed ascent directions, invariance to affine transformation of the parameter space, and convergence guarantees. We finally provide a unifying perspective of key policy search algorithms, demonstrating that our second Gauss-Newton algorithm is closely related to both the EM-algorithm and natural gradient ascent applied to MDPs, but performs significantly better in practice on a range of challenging domains.

The output scores of a neural network classifier are converted to probabilities via normalizing over the scores of all competing categories. Computing this partition function, $Z$, is then linear in the number of categories, which is problematic as real-world problem sets continue to grow in categorical types, such as in visual object recognition or discriminative language modeling. We propose three approaches for sublinear estimation of the partition function, based on approximate nearest neighbor search and kernel feature maps and compare the performance of the proposed approaches empirically.

We present a sparse knowledge gradient (SpKG) algorithm for adaptively selecting the targeted regions within a large RNA molecule to identify which regions are most amenable to interactions with other molecules. Experimentally, such regions can be inferred from fluorescence measurements obtained by binding a complementary probe with fluorescence markers to the targeted regions. We use a biophysical model which shows that the fluorescence ratio under the log scale has a sparse linear relationship with the coefficients describing the accessibility of each nucleotide, since not all sites are accessible (due to the folding of the molecule). The SpKG algorithm uniquely combines the Bayesian ranking and selection problem with the frequentist $\ell_1$ regularized regression approach Lasso. We use this algorithm to identify the sparsity pattern of the linear model as well as sequentially decide the best regions to test before experimental budget is exhausted. Besides, we also develop two other new algorithms: batch SpKG algorithm, which generates more suggestions sequentially to run parallel experiments; and batch SpKG with a procedure which we call length mutagenesis. It dynamically adds in new alternatives, in the form of types of probes, are created by inserting, deleting or mutating nucleotides within existing probes. In simulation, we demonstrate these algorithms on the Group I intron (a mid-size RNA molecule), showing that they efficiently learn the correct sparsity pattern, identify the most accessible region, and outperform several other policies.

Hierarchical latent tree analysis (HLTA) is recently proposed as a new method for topic detection. It differs fundamentally from the LDA-based methods in terms of topic definition, topic-document relationship, and learning method. It has been shown to discover significantly more coherent topics and better topic hierarchies. However, HLTA relies on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for parameter estimation and hence is not efficient enough to deal with large datasets. In this paper, we propose a method to drastically speed up HLTA using a technique inspired by recent advances in the moments method. Empirical experiments show that our method greatly improves the efficiency of HLTA. It is as efficient as the state-of-the-art LDA-based method for hierarchical topic detection and finds substantially better topics and topic hierarchies.