The human footprint is having a unique set of ridges unmatched by any other human being, and therefore it can be used in different identity documents for example birth certificate, Indian biometric identification system AADHAR card, driving license, PAN card, and passport. There are many instances of the crime scene where an accused must walk around and left the footwear impressions as well as barefoot prints and therefore, it is very crucial to recovering the footprints from identifying the criminals. Footprint-based biometric is a considerably newer technique for personal identification. Fingerprints, retina, iris and face recognition are the methods most useful for attendance record of the person. This time the world is facing the problem of global terrorism. It is challenging to identify the terrorist because they are living as regular as the citizens do. Their soft target includes the industries of special interests such as defence, silicon and nanotechnology chip manufacturing units, pharmacy sectors. They pretend themselves as religious persons, so temples and other holy places, even in markets is in their targets. These are the places where one can obtain their footprints quickly. The gait itself is sufficient to predict the behaviour of the suspects. The present research is driven to identify the usefulness of footprint and gait as an alternative to personal identification.

This paper tackles the problem of decomposing binary data using matrix factorization. We consider the family of mean-parametrized Bernoulli models, a class of generative models that are well suited for modeling binary data and enables interpretability of the factors. We factorize the Bernoulli parameter and consider an additional Beta prior on one of the factors to further improve the model's expressive power. While similar models have been proposed in the literature, they only exploit the Beta prior as a proxy to ensure a valid Bernoulli parameter in a Bayesian setting; in practice it reduces to a uniform or uninformative prior. Besides, estimation in these models has focused on costly Bayesian inference. In this paper, we propose a simple yet very efficient majorization-minimization algorithm for maximum a posteriori estimation. Our approach leverages the Beta prior whose parameters can be tuned to improve performance in matrix completion tasks. Experiments conducted on three public binary datasets show that our approach offers an excellent trade-off between prediction performance, computational complexity, and interpretability.

Statistical Inference is the process of determining a probability distribution over the space of parameters of a model given a data set. As more data becomes available this probability distribution becomes updated via the application of Bayes' theorem. We present a treatment of this Bayesian updating process as a continuous dynamical system. Statistical inference is then governed by a first order differential equation describing a trajectory or flow in the information geometry determined by a parametric family of models. We solve this equation for some simple models and show that when the Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound is saturated the learning rate is governed by a simple $1/T$ power-law, with $T$ a time-like variable denoting the quantity of data. The presence of hidden variables can be incorporated in this setting, leading to an additional driving term in the resulting flow equation. We illustrate this with both analytic and numerical examples based on Gaussians and Gaussian Random Processes and inference of the coupling constant in the 1D Ising model. Finally we compare the qualitative behaviour exhibited by Bayesian flows to the training of various neural networks on benchmarked data sets such as MNIST and CIFAR10 and show how that for networks exhibiting small final losses the simple power-law is also satisfied.

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a general-purpose optimization-based sampling algorithm that has recently exploded in popularity, but is limited by two issues: it is known to produce biased samples, and it can be slow to converge on complicated distributions. A recently proposed stochastic variant of SVGD (sSVGD) addresses the first issue, producing unbiased samples by incorporating a special noise into the SVGD dynamics such that asymptotic convergence is guaranteed. Meanwhile, Stein variational Newton (SVN), a Newton-like extension of SVGD, dramatically accelerates the convergence of SVGD by incorporating Hessian information into the dynamics, but also produces biased samples. In this paper we derive, and provide a practical implementation of, a stochastic variant of SVN (sSVN) which is both asymptotically correct and converges rapidly. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on a difficult class of test problems -- the Hybrid Rosenbrock density -- and show that sSVN converges using three orders of magnitude fewer gradient evaluations of the log likelihood than its stochastic SVGD counterpart. Our results show that sSVN is a promising approach to accelerating high-precision Bayesian inference tasks with modest-dimension, $d\sim\mathcal{O}(10)$.

The Bayesian information criterion (BIC), defined as the observed data log likelihood minus a penalty term based on the sample size $N$, is a popular model selection criterion for factor analysis with complete data. This definition has also been suggested for incomplete data. However, the penalty term based on the `complete' sample size $N$ is the same no matter whether in a complete or incomplete data case. For incomplete data, there are often only $N_i

In unsupervised learning, Bayesian Nonparametric (BNP) mixture models, exemplified by the Dirichlet-Process Mixture Model (DPMM), provide a principled approach for Bayesian modeling while adapting the model complexity to the data. This contrasts with finite mixture models whose complexity is determined manually or via model-selection methods. To fix ideas, an important DPMM example is the Dirichlet-Process Gaussian Mixture Model (DPGMM), a Bayesian -dimensional extension of the classical Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). Despite their potential, however, and although researchers have used them successfully in numerous applications during the last two decades, DPMMs still do not enjoy wide popularity among practitioners, largely due to computational bottlenecks that exist in current algorithms and/or implementations. In particular, one of the missing pieces is the availability of software tools that: 1) can efficiently handle DPMM inference in large datasets; 2) are user-friendly and can also be easily modified. We argue that in order for DPMMs to become a practical choice for large-scale data analysis, implementations of DPMM inference must leverage parallel-and distributed-computing resources (in an analogy, consider how advances in GPU computing and GPU software contributed to the success of deep learning). This is because of not only potential speedups but also memory and storage considerations. For example, this is especially true in distributed mobile robotic sensing applications where multiple autonomous agents working together have limited computational and communication resources. As another motivating example, consider unsupervised dataanalysis tasks in large and high-dimensional computer-vision datasets.

As a powerful statistical tool that has revolutionized modern molecular evolutionary analysis, Bayesian phylogenetic inference has been widely used for tasks ranging from genomic epidemiology [Dudas et al., 2017, du Plessis et al., 2021] to conservation genetics [DeSalle and Amato, 2004]. Given aligned sequence data (e.g., DNA, RNA or protein sequences) and a model of evolution, Bayesian phylogenetics provides principled approaches to quantify the uncertainty of the evolutionary process in terms of the posterior probabilities of phylogenetic trees [Huelsenbeck et al., 2001]. In addition to uncertainty quantification, Bayesian methods enable integrating out tree uncertainty in order to get more confident estimates of parameters of interest, such as factors in the transmission of Ebolavirus [Dudas et al., 2017]. Bayesian methods also allow complex substitution models [Lartillot and Philippe, 2004], which are important in elucidating deep phylogenetic relationships [Feuda et al., 2017]. Ever since its introduction to the phylogenetic community in the 1990s, Bayesian phylogenetic inference has been dominated by random-walk Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approaches [Yang and Rannala, 1997, Mau et al., 1999, Huelsenbeck and Ronquist, 2001, Drummond et al., 2002, 2005]. However, this approach is fundamentally limited by the complexities of tree space.

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a hybrid biomedical imaging modality based on the photoacoustic effect [6, 44, 32]. In PAT, the imaged target is illuminated with a short pulse of light. Absorption of light creates localized areas of thermal expansion, resulting in localized pressure increases within the imaged target. This pressure distribution, called the initial pressure, relaxes as broadband ultrasound waves that are measured on the boundary of the imaged target. In the inverse problem of PAT, the initial pressure distribution is estimated from a set of measured ultrasound data.

One of the most important problems in system identification and statistics is how to estimate the unknown parameters of a given model. Optimization methods and specialized procedures, such as Empirical Minimization (EM) can be used in case the likelihood function can be computed. For situations where one can only simulate from a parametric model, but the likelihood is difficult or impossible to evaluate, a technique known as the Two-Stage (TS) Approach can be applied to obtain reliable parametric estimates. Unfortunately, there is currently a lack of theoretical justification for TS. In this paper, we propose a statistical decision-theoretical derivation of TS, which leads to Bayesian and Minimax estimators. We also show how to apply the TS approach on models for independent and identically distributed samples, by computing quantiles of the data as a first step, and using a linear function as the second stage. The proposed method is illustrated via numerical simulations.

Probabilistic programming is a growing area that strives to make statistical analysis more accessible, by separating probabilistic modelling from probabilistic inference. In practice this decoupling is difficult. No single inference algorithm can be used as a probabilistic programming back-end that is simultaneously reliable, efficient, black-box, and general. Probabilistic programming languages often choose a single algorithm to apply to a given problem, thus inheriting its limitations. While substantial work has been done both to formalise probabilistic programming and to improve efficiency of inference, there has been little work that makes use of the available program structure, by formally analysing it, to better utilise the underlying inference algorithm. This dissertation presents three novel techniques (both static and dynamic), which aim to improve probabilistic programming using program analysis. The techniques analyse a probabilistic program and adapt it to make inference more efficient, sometimes in a way that would have been tedious or impossible to do by hand.