Source separation problems are ubiquitous in the physical sciences; any situation where signals are superimposed calls for source separation to estimate the original signals. In this tutorial I will discuss the Bayesian approach to the source separation problem. This approach has a specific advantage in that it requires the designer to explicitly describe the signal model in addition to any other information or assumptions that go into the problem description. This leads naturally to the idea of informed source separation, where the algorithm design incorporates relevant information about the specific problem. This approach promises to enable researchers to design their own high-quality algorithms that are specifically tailored to the problem at hand.

We address the problem of finding the maximizer of a nonlinear smooth function, that can only be evaluated point-wise, subject to constraints on the number of permitted function evaluations. This problem is also known as fixed-budget best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit literature. We introduce a Bayesian approach for this problem and show that it empirically outperforms both the existing frequentist counterpart and other Bayesian optimization methods. The Bayesian approach places emphasis on detailed modelling, including the modelling of correlations among the arms. As a result, it can perform well in situations where the number of arms is much larger than the number of allowed function evaluation, whereas the frequentist counterpart is inapplicable. This feature enables us to develop and deploy practical applications, such as automatic machine learning toolboxes. The paper presents comprehensive comparisons of the proposed approach, Thompson sampling, classical Bayesian optimization techniques, more recent Bayesian bandit approaches, and state-of-the-art best arm identification methods. This is the first comparison of many of these methods in the literature and allows us to examine the relative merits of their different features.

We consider the problem of recovering block-sparse signals whose structures are unknown \emph{a priori}. Block-sparse signals with nonzero coefficients occurring in clusters arise naturally in many practical scenarios. However, the knowledge of the block structure is usually unavailable in practice. In this paper, we develop a new sparse Bayesian learning method for recovery of block-sparse signals with unknown cluster patterns. Specifically, a pattern-coupled hierarchical Gaussian prior model is introduced to characterize the statistical dependencies among coefficients, in which a set of hyperparameters are employed to control the sparsity of signal coefficients. Unlike the conventional sparse Bayesian learning framework in which each individual hyperparameter is associated independently with each coefficient, in this paper, the prior for each coefficient not only involves its own hyperparameter, but also the hyperparameters of its immediate neighbors. In doing this way, the sparsity patterns of neighboring coefficients are related to each other and the hierarchical model has the potential to encourage structured-sparse solutions. The hyperparameters, along with the sparse signal, are learned by maximizing their posterior probability via an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm presents uniform superiority over other existing methods in a series of experiments.

Many algorithms have been proposed for fitting network models with communities, but most of them do not scale well to large networks, and often fail on sparse networks. Here we propose a new fast pseudo-likelihood method for fitting the stochastic block model for networks, as well as a variant that allows for an arbitrary degree distribution by conditioning on degrees. We show that the algorithms perform well under a range of settings, including on very sparse networks, and illustrate on the example of a network of political blogs. We also propose spectral clustering with perturbations, a method of independent interest, which works well on sparse networks where regular spectral clustering fails, and use it to provide an initial value for pseudo-likelihood. We prove that pseudo-likelihood provides consistent estimates of the communities under a mild condition on the starting value, for the case of a block model with two communities.

We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with complex actions over a set of basic arms, where the decision maker plays a complex action rather than a basic arm in each round. The reward of the complex action is some function of the basic arms' rewards, and the feedback observed may not necessarily be the reward per-arm. For instance, when the complex actions are subsets of the arms, we may only observe the maximum reward over the chosen subset. Thus, feedback across complex actions may be coupled due to the nature of the reward function. We prove a frequentist regret bound for Thompson sampling in a very general setting involving parameter, action and observation spaces and a likelihood function over them. The bound holds for discretely-supported priors over the parameter space and without additional structural properties such as closed-form posteriors, conjugate prior structure or independence across arms. The regret bound scales logarithmically with time but, more importantly, with an improved constant that non-trivially captures the coupling across complex actions due to the structure of the rewards. As applications, we derive improved regret bounds for classes of complex bandit problems involving selecting subsets of arms, including the first nontrivial regret bounds for nonlinear MAX reward feedback from subsets.

A family of parsimonious shifted asymmetric Laplace mixture models is introduced. We extend the mixture of factor analyzers model to the shifted asymmetric Laplace distribution. Imposing constraints on the constitute parts of the resulting decomposed component scale matrices leads to a family of parsimonious models. An explicit two-stage parameter estimation procedure is described, and the Bayesian information criterion and the integrated completed likelihood are compared for model selection. This novel family of models is applied to real data, where it is compared to its Gaussian analogue within clustering and classification paradigms.

This paper studies iteration convergence of Kronecker graphical lasso (KGLasso) algorithms for estimating the covariance of an i.i.d. Gaussian random sample under a sparse Kronecker-product covariance model and MSE convergence rates. The KGlasso model, originally called the transposable regularized covariance model by Allen ["Transposable regularized covariance models with an application to missing data imputation," Ann. Appl. Statist., vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 764-790, 2010], implements a pair of $\ell_1$ penalties on each Kronecker factor to enforce sparsity in the covariance estimator. The KGlasso algorithm generalizes Glasso, introduced by Yuan and Lin ["Model selection and estimation in the Gaussian graphical model," Biometrika, vol. 94, pp. 19-35, 2007] and Banerjee ["Model selection through sparse maximum likelihood estimation for multivariate Gaussian or binary data," J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 9, pp. 485-516, Mar. 2008], to estimate covariances having Kronecker product form. It also generalizes the unpenalized ML flip-flop (FF) algorithm of Dutilleul ["The MLE algorithm for the matrix normal distribution," J. Statist. Comput. Simul., vol. 64, pp. 105-123, 1999] and Werner ["On estimation of covariance matrices with Kronecker product structure," IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 478-491, Feb. 2008] to estimation of sparse Kronecker factors. We establish that the KGlasso iterates converge pointwise to a local maximum of the penalized likelihood function. We derive high dimensional rates of convergence to the true covariance as both the number of samples and the number of variables go to infinity. Our results establish that KGlasso has significantly faster asymptotic convergence than Glasso and FF. Simulations are presented that validate the results of our analysis.

The fundamental aim of clustering algorithms is to partition data points. We consider tasks where the discovered partition is allowed to vary with some covariate such as space or time. One approach would be to use fragmentation-coagulation processes, but these, being Markov processes, are restricted to linear or tree structured covariate spaces. We define a partition-valued process on an arbitrary covariate space using Gaussian processes. We use the process to construct a multitask clustering model which partitions datapoints in a similar way across multiple data sources, and a time series model of network data which allows cluster assignments to vary over time. We describe sampling algorithms for inference and apply our method to defining cancer subtypes based on different types of cellular characteristics, finding regulatory modules from gene expression data from multiple human populations, and discovering time varying community structure in a social network.

We propose a general formalism of iterated random functions with semigroup property, under which exact and approximate Bayesian posterior updates can be viewed as specific instances. A convergence theory for iterated random functions is presented. As an application of the general theory we analyze convergence behaviors of exact and approximate message-passing algorithms that arise in a sequential change point detection problem formulated via a latent variable directed graphical model. The sequential inference algorithm and its supporting theory are illustrated by simulated examples.

We present an automatic classification method for astronomical catalogs with missing data. We use Bayesian networks, a probabilistic graphical model, that allows us to perform inference to pre- dict missing values given observed data and dependency relationships between variables. To learn a Bayesian network from incomplete data, we use an iterative algorithm that utilises sampling methods and expectation maximization to estimate the distributions and probabilistic dependencies of variables from data with missing values. To test our model we use three catalogs with missing data (SAGE, 2MASS and UBVI) and one complete catalog (MACHO). We examine how classification accuracy changes when information from missing data catalogs is included, how our method compares to traditional missing data approaches and at what computational cost. Integrating these catalogs with missing data we find that classification of variable objects improves by few percent and by 15% for quasar detection while keeping the computational cost the same.