Incomplete data are a common feature in many domains, from clinical trials to industrial applications. Bayesian networks (BNs) are often used in these domains because of their graphical and causal interpretations. BN parameter learning from incomplete data is usually implemented with the Expectation-Maximisation algorithm (EM), which computes the relevant sufficient statistics ("soft EM") using belief propagation. Similarly, the Structural Expectation-Maximisation algorithm (Structural EM) learns the network structure of the BN from those sufficient statistics using algorithms designed for complete data. However, practical implementations of parameter and structure learning often impute missing data ("hard EM") to compute sufficient statistics instead of using belief propagation, for both ease of implementation and computational speed. In this paper, we investigate the question: what is the impact of using imputation instead of belief propagation on the quality of the resulting BNs? From a simulation study using synthetic data and reference BNs, we find that it is possible to recommend one approach over the other in several scenarios based on the characteristics of the data. We then use this information to build a simple decision tree to guide practitioners in choosing the EM algorithm best suited to their problem.

The problem of multimodal clustering arises whenever the data are gathered with several physically different sensors. Observations from different modalities are not necessarily aligned in the sense there there is no obvious way to associate or to compare them in some common space. A solution may consist in considering multiple clustering tasks independently for each modality. The main difficulty with such an approach is to guarantee that the unimodal clusterings are mutually consistent. In this paper we show that multimodal clustering can be addressed within a novel framework, namely conjugate mixture models. These models exploit the explicit transformations that are often available between an unobserved parameter space (objects) and each one of the observation spaces (sensors). We formulate the problem as a likelihood maximization task and we derive the associated conjugate expectation-maximization algorithm. The convergence properties of the proposed algorithm are thoroughly investigated. Several local/global optimization techniques are proposed in order to increase its convergence speed. Two initialization strategies are proposed and compared. A consistent model-selection criterion is proposed. The algorithm and its variants are tested and evaluated within the task of 3D localization of several speakers using both auditory and visual data.

This paper considers parameter estimation for nonlinear state-space models, which is an important but challenging problem. We address this challenge by employing a variational inference (VI) approach, which is a principled method that has deep connections to maximum likelihood estimation. This VI approach ultimately provides estimates of the model as solutions to an optimisation problem, which is deterministic, tractable and can be solved using standard optimisation tools. A specialisation of this approach for systems with additive Gaussian noise is also detailed. The proposed method is examined numerically on a range of simulation and real examples with a focus on robustness to parameter initialisations; we additionally perform favourable comparisons against state-of-the-art alternatives.

Thompson sampling (TS) has emerged as a robust technique for contextual bandit problems. However, TS requires posterior inference and optimization for action generation, prohibiting its use in many internet applications where latency and ease of deployment are of concern. We propose a novel imitation-learning-based algorithm that distills a TS policy into an explicit policy representation by performing posterior inference and optimization offline. The explicit policy representation enables fast online decision-making and easy deployment in mobile and server-based environments. Our algorithm iteratively performs offline batch updates to the TS policy and learns a new imitation policy. Since we update the TS policy with observations collected under the imitation policy, our algorithm emulates an off-policy version of TS. Our imitation algorithm guarantees Bayes regret comparable to TS, up to the sum of single-step imitation errors. We show these imitation errors can be made arbitrarily small when unlabeled contexts are cheaply available, which is the case for most large-scale internet applications. Empirically, we show that our imitation policy achieves comparable regret to TS, while reducing decision-time latency by over an order of magnitude.

We develop data-driven methods for incorporating physical information for priors to learn parsimonious representations of nonlinear systems arising from parameterized PDEs and mechanics. Our approach is based on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) for learning from observations nonlinear state space models. We develop ways to incorporate geometric and topological priors through general manifold latent space representations. We investigate the performance of our methods for learning low dimensional representations for the nonlinear Burgers equation and constrained mechanical systems.

Many practical machine learning tasks can be framed as Structured prediction problems, where several output variables are predicted and considered interdependent. Recent theoretical advances in structured prediction have focused on obtaining fast rates convergence guarantees, especially in the Implicit Loss Embedding (ILE) framework. PAC-Bayes has gained interest recently for its capacity of producing tight risk bounds for predictor distributions. This work proposes a novel PAC-Bayes perspective on the ILE Structured prediction framework. We present two generalization bounds, on the risk and excess risk, which yield insights into the behavior of ILE predictors. Two learning algorithms are derived from these bounds.

Albeit worryingly underrated in the recent literature on machine learning in general (and, on deep learning in particular), multivariate density estimation is a fundamental task in many applications, at least implicitly, and still an open issue. With a few exceptions, deep neural networks (DNNs) have seldom been applied to density estimation, mostly due to the unsupervised nature of the estimation task, and (especially) due to the need for constrained training algorithms that ended up realizing proper probabilistic models that satisfy Kolmogorov's axioms. Moreover, in spite of the well-known improvement in terms of modeling capabilities yielded by mixture models over plain single-density statistical estimators, no proper mixtures of multivariate DNN-based component densities have been investigated so far. The paper fills this gap by extending our previous work on Neural Mixture Densities (NMMs) to multivariate DNN mixtures. A maximum-likelihood (ML) algorithm for estimating Deep NMMs (DNMMs) is handed out, which satisfies numerically a combination of hard and soft constraints aimed at ensuring satisfaction of Kolmogorov's axioms. The class of probability density functions that can be modeled to any degree of precision via DNMMs is formally defined. A procedure for the automatic selection of the DNMM architecture, as well as of the hyperparameters for its ML training algorithm, is presented (exploiting the probabilistic nature of the DNMM). Experimental results on univariate and multivariate data are reported on, corroborating the effectiveness of the approach and its superiority to the most popular statistical estimation techniques.

"Computers are able to see, hear and learn. The biggest advancement that software technology has achieved in the last decade has to be the concept of artificial intelligence. Today, we encounter the perks of artificial intelligence at almost every step in our day-to-day life and also, in professional scenario. As per research, $28.5 billion has been already allocated to artificial intelligence worldwide during the first quarter of 2019. The monetary and human investment in artificial intelligence proves that it forms a core part of future technologies.

Social media popularity and importance is on the increase, due to people using it for various types of social interaction across multiple channels. This social interaction by online users includes submission of feedback, opinions and recommendations about various individuals, entities, topics, and events. This systematic review focuses on the evolving research area of Social Opinion Mining, tasked with the identification of multiple opinion dimensions, such as subjectivity, sentiment polarity, emotion, affect, sarcasm and irony, from user-generated content represented across multiple social media platforms and in various media formats, like text, image, video and audio. Therefore, through Social Opinion Mining, natural language can be understood in terms of the different opinion dimensions, as expressed by humans. This contributes towards the evolution of Artificial Intelligence, which in turn helps the advancement of several real-world use cases, such as customer service and decision making. A thorough systematic review was carried out on Social Opinion Mining research which totals 485 studies and spans a period of twelve years between 2007 and 2018. The in-depth analysis focuses on the social media platforms, techniques, social datasets, language, modality, tools and technologies, natural language processing tasks and other aspects derived from the published studies. Such multi-source information fusion plays a fundamental role in mining of people's social opinions from social media platforms. These can be utilised in many application areas, ranging from marketing, advertising and sales for product/service management, and in multiple domains and industries, such as politics, technology, finance, healthcare, sports and government. Future research directions are presented, whereas further research and development has the potential of leaving a wider academic and societal impact.

A key impediment to the use of AI is the lacking of transparency, especially in safety/security critical applications. The black-box nature of AI systems prevents humans from direct explanations on how the AI makes predictions, which stimulated Explainable AI (XAI) -- a research field that aims at improving the trust and transparency of AI systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel XAI technique, BayLIME, which is a Bayesian modification of the widely used XAI approach LIME. BayLIME exploits prior knowledge to improve the consistency in repeated explanations of a single prediction and also the robustness to kernel settings. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments are conducted to support our conclusions.