Principal geodesic analysis (PGA) is a generalization of principal component analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction of data on a Riemannian manifold. Currently PGA is defined as a geometric fit to the data, rather than as a probabilistic model. Inspired by probabilistic PCA, we present a latent variable model for PGA that provides a probabilistic framework for factor analysis on manifolds. To compute maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters in our model, we develop a Monte Carlo Expectation Maximization algorithm, where the expectation is approximated by Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling of the latent variables. We demonstrate the ability of our method to recover the ground truth parameters in simulated sphere data, as well as its effectiveness in analyzing shape variability of a corpus callosum data set from human brain images.

Discovering hierarchical regularities in data is a key problem in interacting with large datasets, modeling cognition, and encoding knowledge. A previous Bayesian solution---Kingman's coalescent---provides a convenient probabilistic model for data represented as a binary tree. Unfortunately, this is inappropriate for data better described by bushier trees. We generalize an existing belief propagation framework of Kingman's coalescent to the beta coalescent, which models a wider range of tree structures. Because of the complex combinatorial search over possible structures, we develop new sampling schemes using sequential Monte Carlo and Dirichlet process mixture models, which render inference efficient and tractable.

We propose an approximate inference algorithm for continuous time Gaussian-Markov process models with both discrete and continuous time likelihoods. We show that the continuous time limit of the expectation propagation algorithm exists and results in a hybrid fixed point iteration consisting of (1) expectation propagation updates for the discrete time terms and (2) variational updates for the continuous time term. We introduce corrections methods that improve on the marginals of the approximation. This approach extends the classical Kalman-Bucy smoothing procedure to non-Gaussian observations, enabling continuous-time inference in a variety of models, including spiking neuronal models (state-space models with point process observations) and box likelihood models. Experimental results on real and simulated data demonstrate high distributional accuracy and significant computational savings compared to discrete-time approaches in a neural application.

We study a class of non-parametric density estimators under Bayesian settings. The estimators are obtained by adaptively partitioning the sample space. Under a suitable prior, we analyze the concentration rate of the posterior distribution, and demonstrate that the rate does not directly depend on the dimension of the problem in several special cases. Another advantage of this class of Bayesian density estimators is that it can adapt to the unknown smoothness of the true density function, thus achieving the optimal convergence rate without artificial conditions on the density. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

We study the problem of reconstructing low-rank matrices from their noisy observations. We formulate the problem in the Bayesian framework, which allows us to exploit structural properties of matrices in addition to low-rankedness, such as sparsity. We propose an efficient approximate message passing algorithm, derived from the belief propagation algorithm, to perform the Bayesian inference for matrix reconstruction. We have also successfully applied the proposed algorithm to a clustering problem, by formulating the problem of clustering as a low-rank matrix reconstruction problem with an additional structural property. Numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms Lloyd's K-means algorithm.

We investigate a subclass of exponential family graphical models of which the sufficient statistics are defined by arbitrary additive forms. We propose two $\ell_{2,1}$-norm regularized maximum likelihood estimators to learn the model parameters from i.i.d. The first one is a joint MLE estimator which estimates all the parameters simultaneously. The second one is a node-wise conditional MLE estimator which estimates the parameters for each node individually. For both estimators, statistical analysis shows that under mild conditions the extra flexibility gained by the additive exponential family models comes at almost no cost of statistical efficiency.

Random projections have been increasingly adopted for a diverse set of tasks in machine learning involving dimensionality reduction. One specific line of research on this topic has investigated the use of quantization subsequent to projection with the aim of additional data compression. Motivated by applications in nearest neighbor search and linear learning, we revisit the problem of recovering inner products (respectively cosine similarities) in such setting. We show that even under coarse scalar quantization with 3 to 5 bits per projection, the loss in accuracy tends to range from negligible'' to moderate''. One implication is that in most scenarios of practical interest, there is no need for a sophisticated recovery approach like maximum likelihood estimation as considered in previous work on the subject.

The use of Bayesian methods in large-scale data settings is attractive because of the rich hierarchical models, uncertainty quantification, and prior specification they provide. Standard Bayesian inference algorithms are computationally expensive, however, making their direct application to large datasets difficult or infeasible. Recent work on scaling Bayesian inference has focused on modifying the underlying algorithms to, for example, use only a random data subsample at each iteration. We leverage the insight that data is often redundant to instead obtain a weighted subset of the data (called a coreset) that is much smaller than the original dataset. We can then use this small coreset in any number of existing posterior inference algorithms without modification.

We consider tractable representations of probability distributions and the polytime operations they support. In particular, we consider a recently proposed arithmetic circuit representation, the Probabilistic Sentential Decision Diagram (PSDD). We show that PSDD supports a polytime multiplication operator, while they do not support a polytime operator for summing-out variables. A polytime multiplication operator make PSDDs suitable for a broader class of applications compared to arithmetic circuits, which do not in general support multiplication. As one example, we show that PSDD multiplication leads to a very simple but effective compilation algorithm for probabilistic graphical models: represent each model factor as a PSDD, and then multiply them.

Probabilistic inference serves as a popular model for neural processing. It is still unclear, however, how approximate probabilistic inference can be accurate and scalable to very high-dimensional continuous latent spaces. Especially as typical posteriors for sensory data can be expected to exhibit complex latent dependencies including multiple modes. Here, we study an approach that can efficiently be scaled while maintaining a richly structured posterior approximation under these conditions. As example model we use spike-and-slab sparse coding for V1 processing, and combine latent subspace selection with Gibbs sampling (select-and-sample).