A challenging problem in hierarchical classification is to leverage the hierarchical relations among classes for improving classification performance. An even greater challenge is to do so in a manner that is computationally feasible for the large scale problems usually encountered in practice. This paper proposes a set of Bayesian methods to model hierarchical dependencies among class labels using multivari- ate logistic regression. Specifically, the parent-child relationships are modeled by placing a hierarchical prior over the children nodes centered around the parame- ters of their parents; thereby encouraging classes nearby in the hierarchy to share similar model parameters. We present new, efficient variational algorithms for tractable posterior inference in these models, and provide a parallel implementa- tion that can comfortably handle large-scale problems with hundreds of thousands of dimensions and tens of thousands of classes.

We develop a Bayesian nonparametric extension of the popular Plackett-Luce choice model that can handle an infinite number of choice items. Our framework is based on the theory of random atomic measures, with the prior specified by a gamma process. We derive a posterior characterization and a simple and effective Gibbs sampler for posterior simulation. We then develop a time-varying extension of our model, and apply our model to the New York Times lists of weekly bestselling books.

How does the brain combine prior knowledge with sensory evidence when making decisions under uncertainty? Two competing descriptive models have been proposed based on experimental data. The first posits an additive offset to a decision variable, implying a static effect of the prior. However, this model is inconsistent with recent data from a motion discrimination task involving temporal integration of uncertain sensory evidence. To explain this data, a second model has been proposed which assumes a time-varying influence of the prior.

Bayesian model-based reinforcement learning is a formally elegant approach to learning optimal behaviour under model uncertainty, trading off exploration and exploitation in an ideal way. Unfortunately, finding the resulting Bayes-optimal policies is notoriously taxing, since the search space becomes enormous. In this paper we introduce a tractable, sample-based method for approximate Bayes-optimal planning which exploits Monte-Carlo tree search. Our approach outperformed prior Bayesian model-based RL algorithms by a significant margin on several well-known benchmark problems -- because it avoids expensive applications of Bayes rule within the search tree by lazily sampling models from the current beliefs. We illustrate the advantages of our approach by showing it working in an infinite state space domain which is qualitatively out of reach of almost all previous work in Bayesian exploration.

We consider the problem of learning control policies via trajectory preference queries to an expert. In particular, the learning agent can present an expert with short runs of a pair of policies originating from the same state and the expert then indicates the preferred trajectory. The agent's goal is to elicit a latent target policy from the expert with as few queries as possible. To tackle this problem we propose a novel Bayesian model of the querying process and introduce two methods that exploit this model to actively select expert queries. Experimental results on four benchmark problems indicate that our model can effectively learn policies from trajectory preference queries and that active query selection can be substantially more efficient than random selection.

We consider the problem of estimating Shannon's entropy H in the under-sampled regime, where the number of possible symbols may be unknown or countably infinite. Pitman-Yor processes (a generalization of Dirichlet processes) provide tractable prior distributions over the space of countably infinite discrete distributions, and have found major applications in Bayesian non-parametric statistics and machine learning. Here we show that they also provide natural priors for Bayesian entropy estimation, due to the remarkable fact that the moments of the induced posterior distribution over H can be computed analytically. We derive formulas for the posterior mean (Bayes' least squares estimate) and variance under such priors. Moreover, we show that a fixed Dirichlet or Pitman-Yor process prior implies a narrow prior on H, meaning the prior strongly determines the entropy estimate in the under-sampled regime.

We present a truncation-free online variational inference algorithm for Bayesian nonparametric models. Unlike traditional (online) variational inference algorithms that require truncations for the model or the variational distribution, our method adapts model complexity on the fly. Our experiments for Dirichlet process mixture models and hierarchical Dirichlet process topic models on two large-scale data sets show better performance than previous online variational inference algorithms.

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.

Sampling inference methods are computationally difficult to scale for many models in part because global dependencies can reduce opportunities for parallel computation. Without strict conditional independence structure among variables, standard Gibbs sampling theory requires sample updates to be performed sequentially, even if dependence between most variables is not strong. Empirical work has shown that some models can be sampled effectively by going Hogwild'' and simply running Gibbs updates in parallel with only periodic global communication, but the successes and limitations of such a strategy are not well understood. As a step towards such an understanding, we study the Hogwild Gibbs sampling strategy in the context of Gaussian distributions. We develop a framework which provides convergence conditions and error bounds along with simple proofs and connections to methods in numerical linear algebra.

EDML is a recently proposed algorithm for learning parameters in Bayesian networks. It was originally derived in terms of approximate inference on a meta-network, which underlies the Bayesian approach to parameter estimation. While this initial derivation helped discover EDML in the first place and provided a concrete context for identifying some of its properties (e.g., in contrast to EM), the formal setting was somewhat tedious in the number of concepts it drew on. In this paper, we propose a greatly simplified perspective on EDML, which casts it as a general approach to continuous optimization. The new perspective has several advantages.