We establish minimax optimal rates of convergence for estimation in a high dimensional additive model assuming that it is approximately sparse. Our results reveal an interesting phase transition behavior universal to this class of high dimensional problems. In the {\it sparse regime} when the components are sufficiently smooth or the dimensionality is sufficiently large, the optimal rates are identical to those for high dimensional linear regression, and therefore there is no additional cost to entertain a nonparametric model. Otherwise, in the so-called {\it smooth regime}, the rates coincide with the optimal rates for estimating a univariate function, and therefore they are immune to the "curse of dimensionality".

The recently proposed Minimal Complexity Machine (MCM) finds a hyperplane classifier by minimizing an exact bound on the Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension. The VC dimension measures the capacity of a learning machine, and a smaller VC dimension leads to improved generalization. On many benchmark datasets, the MCM generalizes better than SVMs and uses far fewer support vectors than the number used by SVMs. In this paper, we describe a neural network based on a linear dynamical system, that converges to the MCM solution. The proposed MCM dynamical system is conducive to an analogue circuit implementation on a chip or simulation using Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solvers. Numerical experiments on benchmark datasets from the UCI repository show that the proposed approach is scalable and accurate, as we obtain improved accuracies and fewer number of support vectors (upto 74.3% reduction) with the MCM dynamical system.

Despite having various attractive qualities such as high prediction accuracy and the ability to quantify uncertainty and avoid over-fitting, Bayesian Matrix Factorization has not been widely adopted because of the prohibitive cost of inference. In this paper, we propose a scalable distributed Bayesian matrix factorization algorithm using stochastic gradient MCMC. Our algorithm, based on Distributed Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics, can not only match the prediction accuracy of standard MCMC methods like Gibbs sampling, but at the same time is as fast and simple as stochastic gradient descent. In our experiments, we show that our algorithm can achieve the same level of prediction accuracy as Gibbs sampling an order of magnitude faster. We also show that our method reduces the prediction error as fast as distributed stochastic gradient descent, achieving a 4.1% improvement in RMSE for the Netflix dataset and an 1.8% for the Yahoo music dataset.

Probabilistic programming languages can simplify the development of machine learning techniques, but only if inference is sufficiently scalable. Unfortunately, Bayesian parameter estimation for highly coupled models such as regressions and state-space models still scales poorly; each MCMC transition takes linear time in the number of observations. This paper describes a sublinear-time algorithm for making Metropolis-Hastings (MH) updates to latent variables in probabilistic programs. The approach generalizes recently introduced approximate MH techniques: instead of subsampling data items assumed to be independent, it subsamples edges in a dynamically constructed graphical model. It thus applies to a broader class of problems and interoperates with other general-purpose inference techniques. Empirical results, including confirmation of sublinear per-transition scaling, are presented for Bayesian logistic regression, nonlinear classification via joint Dirichlet process mixtures, and parameter estimation for stochastic volatility models (with state estimation via particle MCMC). All three applications use the same implementation, and each requires under 20 lines of probabilistic code.

We develop an efficient sampling method by simulating Langevin dynamics with an artificial force rather than a natural force by using the gradient of the potential energy. The standard technique for sampling following the predetermined distribution such as the Gibbs-Boltzmann one is performed under the detailed balance condition. In the present study, we propose a modified Langevin dynamics violating the detailed balance condition on the transition-probability formulation. We confirm that the numerical implementation of the proposed method actually demonstrates two major beneficial improvements: acceleration of the relaxation to the predetermined distribution and reduction of the correlation time between two different realizations in the steady state.

Multivariate categorical data occur in many applications of machine learning. One of the main difficulties with these vectors of categorical variables is sparsity. The number of possible observations grows exponentially with vector length, but dataset diversity might be poor in comparison. Recent models have gained significant improvement in supervised tasks with this data. These models embed observations in a continuous space to capture similarities between them. Building on these ideas we propose a Bayesian model for the unsupervised task of distribution estimation of multivariate categorical data. We model vectors of categorical variables as generated from a non-linear transformation of a continuous latent space. Non-linearity captures multi-modality in the distribution. The continuous representation addresses sparsity. Our model ties together many existing models, linking the linear categorical latent Gaussian model, the Gaussian process latent variable model, and Gaussian process classification. We derive inference for our model based on recent developments in sampling based variational inference. We show empirically that the model outperforms its linear and discrete counterparts in imputation tasks of sparse data.

Computer vision is hard because of a large variability in lighting, shape, and texture; in addition the image signal is non-additive due to occlusion. Generative models promised to account for this variability by accurately modelling the image formation process as a function of latent variables with prior beliefs. Bayesian posterior inference could then, in principle, explain the observation. While intuitively appealing, generative models for computer vision have largely failed to deliver on that promise due to the difficulty of posterior inference. As a result the community has favoured efficient discriminative approaches. We still believe in the usefulness of generative models in computer vision, but argue that we need to leverage existing discriminative or even heuristic computer vision methods. We implement this idea in a principled way with an "informed sampler" and in careful experiments demonstrate it on challenging generative models which contain renderer programs as their components. We concentrate on the problem of inverting an existing graphics rendering engine, an approach that can be understood as "Inverse Graphics". The informed sampler, using simple discriminative proposals based on existing computer vision technology, achieves significant improvements of inference.

However, model calibration and the learning is critical for many prediction and decision-making of well-calibrated probabilistic models have not been tasks in artificial intelligence. In this paper we present a new studied in the machine learning literature as extensively as nonparametric calibration method called Bayesian Binning for example discriminative machine learning models that into Quantiles (BBQ) which addresses key limitations of existing are built to achieve the best possible discrimination among calibration methods. The method post processes the classes of objects. One way to achieve a high level of model output of a binary classification algorithm; thus, it can be calibration is to develop methods for learning probabilistic readily combined with many existing classification algorithms.

Online learning algorithms require to often recompute least squares regression estimates of parameters. We study improving the computational complexity of such algorithms by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) type schemes in place of classic regression solvers. We show that SGD schemes efficiently track the true solutions of the regression problems, even in the presence of a drift. This finding coupled with an $O(d)$ improvement in complexity, where $d$ is the dimension of the data, make them attractive for implementation in the \textit{big data} settings. In the case when strong convexity in the regression problem is guaranteed, we provide bounds on the error both in expectation and high probability (the latter is often needed to provide theoretical guarantees for higher level algorithms), despite the drifting least squares solution. As an example of this case we prove that the regret performance of an SGD version of the PEGE linear bandit algorithm is worse than that of PEGE itself only by a factor of $O(\log^4 n)$. When strong convexity of the regression problem cannot be guaranteed, we investigate using an adaptive regularisation. We make an empirical study of an adaptively regularised, SGD version of LinUCB in a news article recommendation application, which uses the large scale news recommendation dataset from Yahoo! front page. These experiments show a large gain in computational complexity and a consistently low tracking error.

We propose SoF (Soft-cluster matrix Factorization), a probabilistic clustering algorithm which softly assigns each data point into clusters. Unlike model-based clustering algorithms, SoF does not make assumptions about the data density distribution. Instead, we take an axiomatic approach to define 4 properties that the probability of co-clustered pairs of points should satisfy. Based on the properties, SoF utilizes a distance measure between pairs of points to induce the conditional co-cluster probabilities. The objective function in our framework establishes an important connection between probabilistic clustering and constrained symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF), hence providing a theoretical interpretation for NMF-based clustering algorithms. To optimize the objective, we derive a sequential minimization algorithm using a penalty method. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that SoF significantly outperforms previous NMF-based algorithms and that it is able to detect non-convex patterns as well as cluster boundaries.