Machine learning models are usually developed from data as deterministic machines that map input to output using a point estimate of parameter weights calculated by maximum-likelihood methods. However, there is a lot of statistical fluke going on in the background. For instance, a dataset itself is a finite random set of points of arbitrary size from a unknown distribution superimposed by additive noise, and for such a particular collection of points, different models (i.e. Hence, there is some uncertainty about the parameters and predictions being made. Bayesian statistics provides a framework to deal with the so-called aleoteric and epistemic uncertainty, and with the release of TensorFlow Probability, probabilistic modeling has been made a lot easier, as I shall demonstrate with this post.

More personal consumer loan products are emerging in mobile banking APP. For ease of use, application process is always simple, which means that few application information is requested for user to fill when applying for a loan, which is not conducive to construct users' credit profile. Thus, the simple application process brings huge challenges to the overdue risk detection, as higher overdue rate will result in greater economic losses to the bank. In this paper, we propose a model named HUIHEN (Hierarchical User Intention-Habit Extract Network) that leverages the users' behavior information in mobile banking APP. Due to the diversity of users' behaviors, we divide behavior sequences into sessions according to the time interval, and use the field-aware method to extract the intra-field information of behaviors. Then, we propose a hierarchical network composed of time-aware GRU and user-item-aware GRU to capture users' short-term intentions and users' long-term habits, which can be regarded as a supplement to user profile. The proposed model can improve the accuracy without increasing the complexity of the original online application process. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of HUIHEN and show that HUIHEN outperforms other state-of-art models on all datasets.

Latent variables may lead to spurious relationships that can be misinterpreted as causal relationships. In Bayesian Networks (BNs), this challenge is known as learning under causal insufficiency. Structure learning algorithms that assume causal insufficiency tend to reconstruct the ancestral graph of a BN, where bi-directed edges represent confounding and directed edges represent direct or ancestral relationships. This paper describes a hybrid structure learning algorithm, called CCHM, which combines the constraint-based part of cFCI with hill-climbing score-based learning. The score-based process incorporates Pearl s do-calculus to measure causal effects and orientate edges that would otherwise remain undirected, under the assumption the BN is a linear Structure Equation Model where data follow a multivariate Gaussian distribution. Experiments based on both randomised and well-known networks show that CCHM improves the state-of-the-art in terms of reconstructing the true ancestral graph.

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is typically based on the assumption of an underlying canonical symplectic structure. Numerical integrators designed for the canonical structure are incompatible with motion generated by non-canonical dynamics. These non-canonical dynamics, motivated by examples in physics and symplectic geometry, correspond to techniques such as preconditioning which are routinely used to improve algorithmic performance. Indeed, recently, a special case of non-canonical structure, magnetic Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, was demonstrated to provide advantageous sampling properties. We present a framework for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo using non-canonical symplectic structures. Our experimental results demonstrate sampling advantages associated to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo with non-canonical structure. To summarize our contributions: (i) we develop non-canonical HMC from foundations in symplectic geomtry; (ii) we construct an HMC procedure using implicit integration that satisfies the detailed balance; (iii) we propose to accelerate the sampling using an {\em approximate} explicit methodology; (iv) we study two novel, randomly-generated non-canonical structures: magnetic momentum and the coupled magnet structure, with implicit and explicit integration.

The goal of text generation models is to fit the underlying real probability distribution of text. For performance evaluation, quality and diversity metrics are usually applied. However, it is still not clear to what extend can the quality-diversity evaluation reflect the distribution-fitting goal. In this paper, we try to reveal such relation in a theoretical approach. We prove that under certain conditions, a linear combination of quality and diversity constitutes a divergence metric between the generated distribution and the real distribution. We also show that the commonly used BLEU/Self-BLEU metric pair fails to match any divergence metric, thus propose CR/NRR as a substitute for quality/diversity metric pair.

Estimation of causal effects is fundamental in situations were the underlying system will be subject to active interventions. Part of building a causal inference engine is defining how variables relate to each other, that is, defining the functional relationship between variables given conditional dependencies. In this paper, we deviate from the common assumption of linear relationships in causal models by making use of neural autoregressive density estimators and use them to estimate causal effects within the Pearl's do-calculus framework. Using synthetic data, we show that the approach can retrieve causal effects from non-linear systems without explicitly modeling the interactions between the variables.

A method to predict time-series using multiple deep learners and a Bayesian network is proposed. In this study, the input explanatory variables are Bayesian network nodes that are associated with learners. Training data are divided using K-means clustering, and multiple deep learners are trained depending on the cluster. A Bayesian network is used to determine which deep learner is in charge of predicting a time-series. We determine a threshold value and select learners with a posterior probability equal to or greater than the threshold value, which could facilitate more robust prediction. The proposed method is applied to financial time-series data, and the predicted results for the Nikkei 225 index are demonstrated.

Uncertainty quantification in neural networks gained a lot of attention in the past years. The most popular approaches, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs), Monte Carlo dropout, and deep ensembles have one thing in common: they are all based on some kind of mixture model. While the BNNs build infinite mixture models and are derived via variational inference, the latter two build finite mixtures trained with the maximum likelihood method. In this work we investigate the effect of training an infinite mixture distribution with the maximum likelihood method instead of variational inference. We find that the proposed objective leads to stochastic networks with an increased predictive variance, which improves uncertainty based identification of miss-classification and robustness against adversarial attacks in comparison to a standard BNN with equivalent network structure. The new model also displays higher entropy on out-of-distribution data.

Communication changes the beliefs of the listener and of the speaker. The value of a communicative act stems from the valuable belief states which result from this act. To model this we build on the Interactive POMDP (IPOMDP) framework, which extends POMDPs to allow agents to model others in multi-agent settings, and we include communication that can take place between the agents to formulate Communicative IPOMDPs (CIPOMDPs). We treat communication as a type of action and therefore, decisions regarding communicative acts are based on decision-theoretic planning using the Bellman optimality principle and value iteration, just as they are for all other rational actions. As in any form of planning, the results of actions need to be precisely specified. We use the Bayes' theorem to derive how agents update their beliefs in CIPOMDPs; updates are due to agents' actions, observations, messages they send to other agents, and messages they receive from others. The Bayesian decision-theoretic approach frees us from the commonly made assumption of cooperative discourse - we consider agents which are free to be dishonest while communicating and are guided only by their selfish rationality. We use a simple Tiger game to illustrate the belief update, and to show that the ability to rationally communicate allows agents to improve efficiency of their interactions.

Recently I came across an interesting Paper named, "Deep Ensembles: A Loss Landscape Perspective" by a Laxshminarayan et al.In this article, I will break down the paper, summarise it's findings and delve into some of the techniques and strategies they used that will be useful for delving into understanding models and their learning process. It will also go over some possible extensions to the paper. You can also find my annotations on the paper down below. The authors conjectured (correctly) that Deep Ensembles (an ensemble of Deep learning models) outperform Bayesian Neural Networks because "popular scalable variational Bayesian methods tend to focus on a single mode, whereas deep ensembles tend to explore diverse modes in function space." In simple words, when running a Bayesian Network at a single initialization it will reach one of the peaks and stop.