Uncertainty
Bayesian Physics-Informed Extreme Learning Machine for Forward and Inverse PDE Problems with Noisy Data
Liu, Xu, Yao, Wen, Peng, Wei, Zhou, Weien
Physics-informed extreme learning machine (PIELM) has recently received significant attention as a rapid version of physics-informed neural network (PINN) for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). The key characteristic is to fix the input layer weights with random values and use Moore-Penrose generalized inverse for the output layer weights. The framework is effective, but it easily suffers from overfitting noisy data and lacks uncertainty quantification for the solution under noise scenarios.To this end, we develop the Bayesian physics-informed extreme learning machine (BPIELM) to solve both forward and inverse linear PDE problems with noisy data in a unified framework. In our framework, a prior probability distribution is introduced in the output layer for extreme learning machine with physic laws and the Bayesian method is used to estimate the posterior of parameters. Besides, for inverse PDE problems, problem parameters considered as new output layer weights are unified in a framework with forward PDE problems. Finally, we demonstrate BPIELM considering both forward problems, including Poisson, advection, and diffusion equations, as well as inverse problems, where unknown problem parameters are estimated. The results show that, compared with PIELM, BPIELM quantifies uncertainty arising from noisy data and provides more accurate predictions. In addition, BPIELM is considerably cheaper than PINN in terms of the computational cost.
Change-point Detection and Segmentation of Discrete Data using Bayesian Context Trees
Lungu, Valentinian, Papageorgiou, Ioannis, Kontoyiannis, Ioannis
A new Bayesian modelling framework is introduced for piece-wise homogeneous variable-memory Markov chains, along with a collection of effective algorithmic tools for change-point detection and segmentation of discrete time series. Building on the recently introduced Bayesian Context Trees (BCT) framework, the distributions of different segments in a discrete time series are described as variable-memory Markov chains. Inference for the presence and location of change-points is then performed via Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. The key observation that facilitates effective sampling is that, using one of the BCT algorithms, the prior predictive likelihood of the data can be computed exactly, integrating out all the models and parameters in each segment. This makes it possible to sample directly from the posterior distribution of the number and location of the change-points, leading to accurate estimates and providing a natural quantitative measure of uncertainty in the results. Estimates of the actual model in each segment can also be obtained, at essentially no additional computational cost. Results on both simulated and real-world data indicate that the proposed methodology performs better than or as well as state-of-the-art techniques.
A Probabilistic Generative Model of Free Categories
Sennesh, Eli, Xu, Tom, Maruyama, Yoshihiro
Applied category theory has recently developed libraries for computing with morphisms in interesting categories, while machine learning has developed ways of learning programs in interesting languages. Taking the analogy between categories and languages seriously, this paper defines a probabilistic generative model of morphisms in free monoidal categories over domain-specific generating objects and morphisms. The paper shows how acyclic directed wiring diagrams can model specifications for morphisms, which the model can use to generate morphisms. Amortized variational inference in the generative model then enables learning of parameters (by maximum likelihood) and inference of latent variables (by Bayesian inversion). A concrete experiment shows that the free category prior achieves competitive reconstruction performance on the Omniglot dataset.
A Tale of Two Flows: Cooperative Learning of Langevin Flow and Normalizing Flow Toward Energy-Based Model
Xie, Jianwen, Zhu, Yaxuan, Li, Jun, Li, Ping
This paper studies the cooperative learning of two generative flow models, in which the two models are iteratively updated based on the jointly synthesized examples. The first flow model is a normalizing flow that transforms an initial simple density into a target density by applying a sequence of invertible transformations. The second flow model is a Langevin flow that runs finite steps of gradient-based MCMC toward an energy-based model. We start from proposing a generative framework that trains an energy-based model with a normalizing flow as an amortized sampler to initialize the MCMC chains of the energy-based model. In each learning iteration, we generate synthesized examples by using a normalizing flow initialization followed by a short-run Langevin flow revision toward the current energy-based model. Then we treat the synthesized examples as fair samples from the energy-based model and update the model parameters with the maximum likelihood learning gradient, while the normalizing flow directly learns from the synthesized examples by maximizing the tractable likelihood. Under the short-run non-mixing MCMC scenario, the estimation of the energy-based model is shown to follow the perturbation of maximum likelihood, and the short-run Langevin flow and the normalizing flow form a two-flow generator that we call CoopFlow. We provide an understating of the CoopFlow algorithm by information geometry and show that it is a valid generator as it converges to a moment matching estimator. We demonstrate that the trained CoopFlow is capable of synthesizing realistic images, reconstructing images, and interpolating between images. Normalizing flows (Dinh et al., 2015; 2017; Kingma & Dhariwal, 2018) are a family of generative models that construct a complex distribution by transforming a simple probability density, such as Gaussian distribution, through a sequence of invertible and differentiable mappings. Due to the tractability of the exact log-likelihood and the efficiency of the inference and synthesis, normalizing flows have gained popularity in density estimation (Kingma & Dhariwal, 2018; Ho et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2019; Prenger et al., 2019; Kumar et al., 2020) and variational inference (Rezende & Mohamed, 2015; Kingma et al., 2016).
NR-RRT: Neural Risk-Aware Near-Optimal Path Planning in Uncertain Nonconvex Environments
Meng, Fei, Chen, Liangliang, Ma, Han, Wang, Jiankun, Meng, Max Q. -H.
Abstract--Balancing the trade-off between safety and efficiency paths in uncertain environments, especially under nonconvex and is of significant importance for path planning under uncertainty. The initial paths are often of poor Many risk-aware path planners have been developed to explicitly quality as well. Therefore, we propose the NR-RRT algorithm limit the probability of collision to an acceptable bound in to rapidly find near-optimal solutions with guaranteed bounded uncertain environments. It utilizes an informed bidirectional search strategy after uncertainties are usually assumed to make the problem tractable having past experiences in those challenging environments. These assumptions limit the generalization RRT can be applied in not only seen but also unseen uncertain and application of path planners in real-world implementations. However, the algorithm cannot handle entirely unseen In this article, we propose to apply deep learning methods to environments that contain new or additional obstacles. In future the sampling-based planner, developing a novel risk bounded research, we will address the problem of planning under robot near-optimal path planning algorithm named neural risk-aware model uncertainty. Specifically, a deterministic risk contours map is Index Terms--Planning under uncertainty, Sampling-based maintained by perceiving the probabilistic nonconvex obstacles, path planning, Learning from demonstration. and a neural network sampler is proposed to predict the next most-promising safe state.
Fast Conditional Network Compression Using Bayesian HyperNetworks
Nguyen, Phuoc, Tran, Truyen, Le, Ky, Gupta, Sunil, Rana, Santu, Nguyen, Dang, Nguyen, Trong, Ryan, Shannon, Venkatesh, Svetha
We introduce a conditional compression problem and propose a fast framework for tackling it. The problem is how to quickly compress a pretrained large neural network into optimal smaller networks given target contexts, e.g. a context involving only a subset of classes or a context where only limited compute resource is available. To solve this, we propose an efficient Bayesian framework to compress a given large network into much smaller size tailored to meet each contextual requirement. We employ a hypernetwork to parameterize the posterior distribution of weights given conditional inputs and minimize a variational objective of this Bayesian neural network. To further reduce the network sizes, we propose a new input-output group sparsity factorization of weights to encourage more sparseness in the generated weights. Our methods can quickly generate compressed networks with significantly smaller sizes than baseline methods.
Comments on: "Hybrid Semiparametric Bayesian Networks"
This is an interesting paper that distils structure learning in Bayesian networks (BNs) and kernel methods in a quest to produce more flexible distributional assumptions. Conditional (linear) Gaussian Bayesian networks (CGBNs) have been well explored in the literature for some time, to the point that they now appear in many recent textbooks [1-3]. The authors address one of the key limitations of CGBNS, that they can only capture linear dependencies between the continuous variables they contain, and remove it by replacing (mixtures of) linear regression models with more general kernel densities. Dependencies between discrete variables were already flexible, because the conditional probability tables that parametrise them essentially act as a saturated model[4]. It is not obvious that more flexibility will produce better models for whatever task we have in mind: it can also lead to overfitting, instability and hyperparameter tuning problems.
Generalized Fast Multichannel Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Based on Gaussian Scale Mixtures for Blind Source Separation
Fontaine, Mathieu, Sekiguchi, Kouhei, Nugraha, Aditya, Bando, Yoshiaki, Yoshii, Kazuyoshi
This paper describes heavy-tailed extensions of a state-of-the-art versatile blind source separation method called fast multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization (FastMNMF) from a unified point of view. The common way of deriving such an extension is to replace the multivariate complex Gaussian distribution in the likelihood function with its heavy-tailed generalization, e.g., the multivariate complex Student's t and leptokurtic generalized Gaussian distributions, and tailor-make the corresponding parameter optimization algorithm. Using a wider class of heavy-tailed distributions called a Gaussian scale mixture (GSM), i.e., a mixture of Gaussian distributions whose variances are perturbed by positive random scalars called impulse variables, we propose GSM-FastMNMF and develop an expectationmaximization algorithm that works even when the probability density function of the impulse variables have no analytical expressions. We show that existing heavy-tailed FastMNMF extensions are instances of GSM-FastMNMF and derive a new instance based on the generalized hyperbolic distribution that include the normal-inverse Gaussian, Student's t, and Gaussian distributions as the special cases. Our experiments show that the normalinverse Gaussian FastMNMF outperforms the state-of-the-art FastMNMF extensions and ILRMA model in speech enhancement and separation in terms of the signal-to-distortion ratio.
A Unified Bayesian Framework for Pricing Catastrophe Bond Derivatives
Domfeh, Dixon, Chatterjee, Arpita, Dixon, Matthew
Catastrophe (CAT) bond markets are incomplete and hence carry uncertainty in instrument pricing. As such various pricing approaches have been proposed, but none treat the uncertainty in catastrophe occurrences and interest rates in a sufficiently flexible and statistically reliable way within a unifying asset pricing framework. Consequently, little is known empirically about the expected risk-premia of CAT bonds. The primary contribution of this paper is to present a unified Bayesian CAT bond pricing framework based on uncertainty quantification of catastrophes and interest rates. Our framework allows for complex beliefs about catastrophe risks to capture the distinct and common patterns in catastrophe occurrences, and when combined with stochastic interest rates, yields a unified asset pricing approach with informative expected risk premia. Specifically, using a modified collective risk model -- Dirichlet Prior-Hierarchical Bayesian Collective Risk Model (DP-HBCRM) framework -- we model catastrophe risk via a model-based clustering approach. Interest rate risk is modeled as a CIR process under the Bayesian approach. As a consequence of casting CAT pricing models into our framework, we evaluate the price and expected risk premia of various CAT bond contracts corresponding to clustering of catastrophe risk profiles. Numerical experiments show how these clusters reveal how CAT bond prices and expected risk premia relate to claim frequency and loss severity.
Determination of class-specific variables in nonparametric multiple-class classification
Chen, Wan-Ping Nicole, Chang, Yuan-chin Ivan
As technology advanced, collecting data via automatic collection devices become popular, thus we commonly face data sets with lengthy variables, especially when these data sets are collected without specific research goals beforehand. It has been pointed out in the literature that the difficulty of high-dimensional classification problems is intrinsically caused by too many noise variables useless for reducing classification error, which offer less benefits for decision-making, and increase complexity, and confusion in model-interpretation. A good variable selection strategy is therefore a must for using such kinds of data well; especially when we expect to use their results for the succeeding applications/studies, where the model-interpretation ability is essential. hus, the conventional classification measures, such as accuracy, sensitivity, precision, cannot be the only performance tasks. In this paper, we propose a probability-based nonparametric multiple-class classification method, and integrate it with the ability of identifying high impact variables for individual class such that we can have more information about its classification rule and the character of each class as well. The proposed method can have its prediction power approximately equal to that of the Bayes rule, and still retains the ability of "model-interpretation." We report the asymptotic properties of the proposed method, and use both synthesized and real data sets to illustrate its properties under different classification situations. We also separately discuss the variable identification, and training sample size determination, and summarize those procedures as algorithms such that users can easily implement them with different computing languages.