The Bayesian approach to feature extraction, known as factor analysis (FA), has been widely studied in machine learning to obtain a latent representation of the data. An adequate selection of the probabilities and priors of these bayesian models allows the model to better adapt to the data nature (i.e. heterogeneity, sparsity), obtaining a more representative latent space. The objective of this article is to propose a general FA framework capable of modelling any problem. To do so, we start from the Bayesian Inter-Battery Factor Analysis (BIBFA) model, enhancing it with new functionalities to be able to work with heterogeneous data, include feature selection, and handle missing values as well as semi-supervised problems. The performance of the proposed model, Sparse Semi-supervised Heterogeneous Interbattery Bayesian Analysis (SSHIBA) has been tested on 4 different scenarios to evaluate each one of its novelties, showing not only a great versatility and an interpretability gain, but also outperforming most of the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Modelling highly multi-modal data is a challenging problem in machine learning. Most algorithms are based on maximizing the likelihood, which corresponds to the M(oment)-projection of the data distribution to the model distribution. The M-projection forces the model to average over modes it cannot represent. In contrast, the I(information)-projection ignores such modes in the data and concentrates on the modes the model can represent. Such behavior is appealing whenever we deal with highly multi-modal data where modelling single modes correctly is more important than covering all the modes. Despite this advantage, the I-projection is rarely used in practice due to the lack of algorithms that can efficiently optimize it based on data. In this work, we present a new algorithm called Expected Information Maximization (EIM) for computing the I-projection solely based on samples for general latent variable models, where we focus on Gaussian mixtures models and Gaussian mixtures of experts. Our approach applies a variational upper bound to the I-projection objective which decomposes the original objective into single objectives for each mixture component as well as for the coefficients, allowing an efficient optimization. Similar to GANs, our approach employs discriminators but uses a more stable optimization procedure, using a tight upper bound. We show that our algorithm is much more effective in computing the I-projection than recent GAN approaches and we illustrate the effectiveness of our approach for modelling multi-modal behavior on two pedestrian and traffic prediction datasets.

Generating natural questions from an image is a semantic task that requires using vision and language modalities to learn multimodal representations. Images can have multiple visual and language cues such as places, captions, and tags. In this paper, we propose a principled deep Bayesian learning framework that combines these cues to produce natural questions. We observe that with the addition of more cues and by minimizing uncertainty in the among cues, the Bayesian network becomes more confident. We propose a Minimizing Uncertainty of Mixture of Cues (MUMC), that minimizes uncertainty present in a mixture of cues experts for generating probabilistic questions. This is a Bayesian framework and the results show a remarkable similarity to natural questions as validated by a human study. We observe that with the addition of more cues and by minimizing uncertainty among the cues, the Bayesian framework becomes more confident. Ablation studies of our model indicate that a subset of cues is inferior at this task and hence the principled fusion of cues is preferred. Further, we observe that the proposed approach substantially improves over state-of-the-art benchmarks on the quantitative metrics (BLEU-n, METEOR, ROUGE, and CIDEr). Here we provide project link for Deep Bayesian VQG \url{https://delta-lab-iitk.github.io/BVQG/}

Relational autocompletion is the problem of automatically filling out some missing fields in a relational database. We tackle this problem within the probabilistic logic programming framework of Distributional Clauses (DC), which supports both discrete and continuous probability distributions. Within this framework, we introduce Dreaml -- an approach to learn both the structure and the parameters of DC programs from databases that may contain missing information. To realize this, Dreaml integrates statistical modeling, distributional clauses with rule learning. The distinguishing features of Dreaml are that it 1) tackles relational autocompletion, 2) learns distributional clauses extended with statistical models, 3) deals with both discrete and continuous distributions, 4) can exploit background knowledge, and 5) uses an expectation-maximization based algorithm to cope with missing data.

In bipartite networks, community structures are restricted to being disassortative, in that nodes of one type are grouped according to common patterns of connection with nodes of the other type. This makes the stochastic block model (SBM), a highly flexible generative model for networks with block structure, an intuitive choice for bipartite community detection. However, typical formulations of the SBM do not make use of the special structure of bipartite networks. In this work, we introduce a Bayesian nonparametric formulation of the SBM and a corresponding algorithm to efficiently find communities in bipartite networks without overfitting. The biSBM improves community detection results over general SBMs when data are noisy, improves the model resolution limit by a factor of $\sqrt{2}$, and expands our understanding of the complicated optimization landscape associated with community detection tasks. A direct comparison of certain terms of the prior distributions in the biSBM and a related high-resolution hierarchical SBM also reveals a counterintuitive regime of community detection problems, populated by smaller and sparser networks, where non-hierarchical models outperform their more flexible counterpart.

Throughout the course of the paper, we assume that y and X have been centered at 0 so there is no intercept in the model, where y is the n 1 vector of centered responses, X is the n p matrix of standardized regressors, β is the p 1 vector of coefficients to be estimated, and null is the n 1 vector of independent and identically distributed normal errors with mean 0 and variance σ 2 . Compared to traditional penalization functions that are usually symmetric about 0, continuous and nondecreasing in (0,), the rLASSO penalty functions are decreasing in (0,), discontinuous at 0, and converge to infinity when the coefficients approach zero. From a theoretical standpoint, rLASSO shares the same oracle property and same rate of estimation error with other LASSOtype penalty functions. An early reference to this class of models can be found in Song and Liang (2015), with more recent papers focusing on large sample asymptotics, along with computational strategies for frequentist estimation (Shin et al., 2018; Song, 2018). Our approach differs from this line of work in adopting a Bayesian perspective on rLASSO estimation. Ideally, a Bayesian solution can be obtained by placing appropriate priors on the regression coefficients that will mimic the effects of the rLASSO penalty. As apparent from (1), this arises in assuming a prior for β that decomposes as a product of independent inverse Laplace (double exponential) densities: π (β) p null j 1 λ 2β 2 j exp{ λ β j }I { β j null 0 }.

In the last decade, social networks became most popular medium for communication and interaction. As an example, micro-blogging service Twitter has more than 200 million registered users who exchange more than 65 million posts per day. Users express their thoughts, ideas, and even their intentions through these tweets. Most of the tweets are written informally and often in slang language, that contains misspelt and abbreviated words. This paper investigates the problem of selecting features that affect extracting user's intention from Twitter feeds based on text mining techniques. It starts by presenting the method we used to construct our own dataset from extracted Twitter feeds. Following that, we present two techniques of feature selection followed by classification. In the first technique, we use Information Gain as a one-phase feature selection, followed by supervised classification algorithms. In the second technique, we use a hybrid approach based on forward feature selection algorithm in which two feature selection techniques employed followed by classification algorithms. We examine these two techniques with four classification algorithms. We evaluate them using our own dataset, and we critically review the results.

A central tenet of probabilistic programming is that a model is specified exactly once in a canonical representation which is usable by inference algorithms. We describe JointDistributions, a family of declarative representations of directed graphical models in TensorFlow Probability.

Topic models have become popular tools for dimension reduction and exploratory analysis of text data which consists in observed frequencies of a vocabulary of $p$ words in $n$ documents, stored in a $p\times n$ matrix. The main premise is that the mean of this data matrix can be factorized into a product of two non-negative matrices: a $p\times K$ word-topic matrix $A$ and a $K\times n$ topic-document matrix $W$. This paper studies the estimation of $A$ that is possibly element-wise sparse, and the number of topics $K$ is unknown. In this under-explored context, we derive a new minimax lower bound for the estimation of such $A$ and propose a new computationally efficient algorithm for its recovery. We derive a finite sample upper bound for our estimator, and show that it matches the minimax lower bound in many scenarios. Our estimate adapts to the unknown sparsity of $A$ and our analysis is valid for any finite $n$, $p$, $K$ and document lengths. Empirical results on both synthetic data and semi-synthetic data show that our proposed estimator is a strong competitor of the existing state-of-the-art algorithms for both non-sparse $A$ and sparse $A$, and has superior performance is many scenarios of interest.

Transport demand is highly dependent on supply, especially for shared transport services where availability is often limited. As observed demand cannot be higher than available supply, historical transport data typically represents a biased, or censored, version of the true underlying demand pattern. Without explicitly accounting for this inherent distinction, predictive models of demand would necessarily represent a biased version of true demand, thus less effectively predicting the needs of service users. To counter this problem, we propose a general method for censorship-aware demand modeling, for which we devise a censored likelihood function. We apply this method to the task of shared mobility demand prediction by incorporating the censored likelihood within a Gaussian Process model, which can flexibly approximate arbitrary functional forms. Experiments on artificial and real-world datasets show how taking into account the limiting effect of supply on demand is essential in the process of obtaining an unbiased predictive model of user demand behavior.