Bayesian Inference
Parameter estimation from an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with measurement noise
Carter, Simon, Strey, Helmut H.
This article aims to investigate the impact of noise on parameter fitting for an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, focusing on the effects of multiplicative and thermal noise on the accuracy of signal separation. To address these issues, we propose algorithms and methods that can effectively distinguish between thermal and multiplicative noise and improve the precision of parameter estimation for optimal data analysis. Specifically, we explore the impact of both multiplicative and thermal noise on the obfuscation of the actual signal and propose methods to resolve them. Firstly, we present an algorithm that can effectively separate thermal noise with comparable performance to Hamilton Monte Carlo (HMC) but with significantly improved speed. Subsequently, we analyze multiplicative noise and demonstrate that HMC is insufficient for isolating thermal and multiplicative noise. However, we show that, with additional knowledge of the ratio between thermal and multiplicative noise, we can accurately distinguish between the two types of noise when provided with a sufficiently large sampling rate or an amplitude of multiplicative noise smaller than thermal noise. This finding results in a situation that initially seems counterintuitive. When multiplicative noise dominates the noise spectrum, we can successfully estimate the parameters for such systems after adding additional white noise to shift the noise balance.
Non-equilibrium physics: from spin glasses to machine and neural learning
Disordered many-body systems exhibit a wide range of emergent phenomena across different scales. These complex behaviors can be utilized for various information processing tasks such as error correction, learning, and optimization. Despite the empirical success of utilizing these systems for intelligent tasks, the underlying principles that govern their emergent intelligent behaviors remain largely unknown. In this thesis, we aim to characterize such emergent intelligence in disordered systems through statistical physics. We chart a roadmap for our efforts in this thesis based on two axes: learning mechanisms (long-term memory vs. working memory) and learning dynamics (artificial vs. natural). Throughout our journey, we uncover relationships between learning mechanisms and physical dynamics that could serve as guiding principles for designing intelligent systems. We hope that our investigation into the emergent intelligence of seemingly disparate learning systems can expand our current understanding of intelligence beyond neural systems and uncover a wider range of computational substrates suitable for AI applications.
Not All Actions Are Created Equal: Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design for Safe and Optimal Nonlinear System Identification
Ewen, Parker, Gunjal, Gitesh, Wilson, Joey, Liu, Jinsun, Adu, Challen Enninful, Vasudevan, Ram
Uncertainty in state or model parameters is common in robotics and typically handled by acquiring system measurements that yield information about the uncertain quantities of interest. Inputs to a nonlinear dynamical system yield outcomes that produce varying amounts of information about the underlying uncertain parameters of the system. To maximize information gained with respect to these uncertain parameters we present a Bayesian approach to data collection for system identification called Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design (BOED). The formulation uses parameterized trajectories and cubature to compute maximally informative system trajectories which obtain as much information as possible about unknown system parameters while also ensuring safety under mild assumptions. The proposed method is applicable to non-linear and non-Gaussian systems and is applied to a high-fidelity vehicle model from the literature. It is shown the proposed approach requires orders of magnitude fewer samples compared to state-of-the-art BOED algorithms from the literature while simultaneously providing safety guarantees.
A Global Transport Capacity Risk Prediction Method for Rail Transit Based on Gaussian Bayesian Network
Zhengyang, Zhang, Wei, Dong, jun, Liu, Xinya, Sun, Yindong, Ji
Rail transit plays an increasingly important role in modern Since transport capacity risks at the rail transit network level urban transportation with its advantages of large capacity, good have a large influence surface and propagation inertia, different punctuality, high safety, environmental friendliness and low cost, passenger flow conditions will also have different impacts on the and has become the backbone and important support of modern safety of the network, if effective preventive measures are not transportation. Although the safety of rail transit is higher than taken, once the risk propagation starts, it can easily lead to a that of conventional road traffic, due to the large scale of rail rapid decline in the safety of the whole network and eventually transit network, heavy transportation tasks and close coupling lead to safety accidents. Therefore, the prediction of transport between lines, once a failure or safety accident occurs, it will capacity risk on the basis of transport capacity risk assessment have a great impact on urban transportation. For example, on has important practical significance for the safe operation of rail December 22, 2009, around 7:00 a.m., a collision occurred on transit network.
Causal Discovery from Temporal Data: An Overview and New Perspectives
Gong, Chang, Yao, Di, Zhang, Chuzhe, Li, Wenbin, Bi, Jingping
Temporal data, representing chronological observations of complex systems, has always been a typical data structure that can be widely generated by many domains, such as industry, medicine and finance. Analyzing this type of data is extremely valuable for various applications. Thus, different temporal data analysis tasks, eg, classification, clustering and prediction, have been proposed in the past decades. Among them, causal discovery, learning the causal relations from temporal data, is considered an interesting yet critical task and has attracted much research attention. Existing causal discovery works can be divided into two highly correlated categories according to whether the temporal data is calibrated, ie, multivariate time series causal discovery, and event sequence causal discovery. However, most previous surveys are only focused on the time series causal discovery and ignore the second category. In this paper, we specify the correlation between the two categories and provide a systematical overview of existing solutions. Furthermore, we provide public datasets, evaluation metrics and new perspectives for temporal data causal discovery.
Confident Neural Network Regression with Bootstrapped Deep Ensembles
Sluijterman, Laurens, Cator, Eric, Heskes, Tom
With the rise of the popularity and usage of neural networks, trustworthy uncertainty estimation is becoming increasingly essential. One of the most prominent uncertainty estimation methods is Deep Ensembles (Lakshminarayanan et al., 2017) . A classical parametric model has uncertainty in the parameters due to the fact that the data on which the model is build is a random sample. A modern neural network has an additional uncertainty component since the optimization of the network is random. Lakshminarayanan et al. (2017) noted that Deep Ensembles do not incorporate the classical uncertainty induced by the effect of finite data. In this paper, we present a computationally cheap extension of Deep Ensembles for the regression setting, called Bootstrapped Deep Ensembles, that explicitly takes this classical effect of finite data into account using a modified version of the parametric bootstrap. We demonstrate through an experimental study that our method significantly improves upon standard Deep Ensembles
A Probabilistic Approach to Self-Supervised Learning using Cyclical Stochastic Gradient MCMC
Javanbakhat, Masoumeh, Lippert, Christoph
In this paper we present a practical Bayesian self-supervised learning method with Cyclical Stochastic Gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (cSGHMC). Within this framework, we place a prior over the parameters of a self-supervised learning model and use cSGHMC to approximate the high dimensional and multimodal posterior distribution over the embeddings. By exploring an expressive posterior over the embeddings, Bayesian self-supervised learning produces interpretable and diverse representations. Marginalizing over these representations yields a significant gain in performance, calibration and out-of-distribution detection on a variety of downstream classification tasks. We provide experimental results on multiple classification tasks on four challenging datasets. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in out-of-distribution detection using the SVHN and CIFAR-10 datasets.
Machine Learning Small Molecule Properties in Drug Discovery
Schapin, Nikolai, Majewski, Maciej, Varela, Alejandro, Arroniz, Carlos, De Fabritiis, Gianni
Machine learning (ML) is a promising approach for predicting small molecule properties in drug discovery. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of various ML methods introduced for this purpose in recent years. We review a wide range of properties, including binding affinities, solubility, and ADMET (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity). We discuss existing popular datasets and molecular descriptors and embeddings, such as chemical fingerprints and graph-based neural networks. We highlight also challenges of predicting and optimizing multiple properties during hit-to-lead and lead optimization stages of drug discovery and explore briefly possible multi-objective optimization techniques that can be used to balance diverse properties while optimizing lead candidates. Finally, techniques to provide an understanding of model predictions, especially for critical decision-making in drug discovery are assessed. Overall, this review provides insights into the landscape of ML models for small molecule property predictions in drug discovery. So far, there are multiple diverse approaches, but their performances are often comparable. Neural networks, while more flexible, do not always outperform simpler models. This shows that the availability of high-quality training data remains crucial for training accurate models and there is a need for standardized benchmarks, additional performance metrics, and best practices to enable richer comparisons between the different techniques and models that can shed a better light on the differences between the many techniques.
Simulation-based inference using surjective sequential neural likelihood estimation
Dirmeier, Simon, Albert, Carlo, Perez-Cruz, Fernando
We present Surjective Sequential Neural Likelihood (SSNL) estimation, a novel method for simulation-based inference in models where the evaluation of the likelihood function is not tractable and only a simulator that can generate synthetic data is available. SSNL fits a dimensionality-reducing surjective normalizing flow model and uses it as a surrogate likelihood function which allows for conventional Bayesian inference using either Markov chain Monte Carlo methods or variational inference. By embedding the data in a low-dimensional space, SSNL solves several issues previous likelihood-based methods had when applied to high-dimensional data sets that, for instance, contain non-informative data dimensions or lie along a lower-dimensional manifold. We evaluate SSNL on a wide variety of experiments and show that it generally outperforms contemporary methods used in simulation-based inference, for instance, on a challenging real-world example from astrophysics which models the magnetic field strength of the sun using a solar dynamo model.
FaDIn: Fast Discretized Inference for Hawkes Processes with General Parametric Kernels
Staerman, Guillaume, Allain, Cédric, Gramfort, Alexandre, Moreau, Thomas
Temporal point processes (TPP) are a natural tool for modeling event-based data. Among all TPP models, Hawkes processes have proven to be the most widely used, mainly due to their adequate modeling for various applications, particularly when considering exponential or non-parametric kernels. Although non-parametric kernels are an option, such models require large datasets. While exponential kernels are more data efficient and relevant for specific applications where events immediately trigger more events, they are ill-suited for applications where latencies need to be estimated, such as in neuroscience. This work aims to offer an efficient solution to TPP inference using general parametric kernels with finite support. The developed solution consists of a fast $\ell_2$ gradient-based solver leveraging a discretized version of the events. After theoretically supporting the use of discretization, the statistical and computational efficiency of the novel approach is demonstrated through various numerical experiments. Finally, the method's effectiveness is evaluated by modeling the occurrence of stimuli-induced patterns from brain signals recorded with magnetoencephalography (MEG). Given the use of general parametric kernels, results show that the proposed approach leads to an improved estimation of pattern latency than the state-of-the-art.