Uncertainty
Unifying Probabilistic Models for Time-Frequency Analysis
Wilkinson, William J., Andersen, Michael Riis, Reiss, Joshua D., Stowell, Dan, Solin, Arno
In audio signal processing, probabilistic time-frequency models have many benefits over their non-probabilistic counterparts. They adapt to the incoming signal, quantify uncertainty, and measure correlation between the signal's amplitude and phase information, making time domain resynthesis straightforward. However, these models are still not widely used since they come at a high computational cost, and because they are formulated in such a way that it can be difficult to interpret all the modelling assumptions. By showing their equivalence to Spectral Mixture Gaussian processes, we illuminate the underlying model assumptions and provide a general framework for constructing more complex models that better approximate real-world signals. Our interpretation makes it intuitive to inspect, compare, and alter the models since all prior knowledge is encoded in the Gaussian process kernel functions. We utilise a state space representation to perform efficient inference via Kalman smoothing, and we demonstrate how our interpretation allows for efficient parameter learning in the frequency domain.
Confidence Calibration in Deep Neural Networks through Stochastic Inferences
Seo, Seonguk, Seo, Paul Hongsuck, Han, Bohyung
We propose a generic framework to calibrate accuracy and confidence (score) of a prediction through stochastic inferences in deep neural networks. We first analyze relation between variation of multiple model parameters for a single example inference and variance of the corresponding prediction scores by Bayesian modeling of stochastic regularization. Our empirical observation shows that accuracy and score of a prediction are highly correlated with variance of multiple stochastic inferences given by stochastic depth or dropout. Motivated by these facts, we design a novel variance-weighted confidence-integrated loss function that is composed of two cross-entropy loss terms with respect to ground-truth and uniform distribution, which are balanced by variance of stochastic prediction scores. The proposed loss function enables us to learn deep neural networks that predict confidence calibrated scores using a single inference. Our algorithm presents outstanding confidence calibration performance and improves classification accuracy with two popular stochastic regularization techniques---stochastic depth and dropout---in multiple models and datasets; it alleviates overconfidence issue in deep neural networks significantly by training networks to achieve prediction accuracy proportional to confidence of prediction.
Finding All Bayesian Network Structures within a Factor of Optimal
Liao, Zhenyu A., Sharma, Charupriya, Cussens, James, van Beek, Peter
A Bayesian network is a widely used probabilistic graphical model with applications in knowledge discovery and prediction. Learning a Bayesian network (BN) from data can be cast as an optimization problem using the well-known score-and-search approach. However, selecting a single model (i.e., the best scoring BN) can be misleading or may not achieve the best possible accuracy. An alternative to committing to a single model is to perform some form of Bayesian or frequentist model averaging, where the space of possible BNs is sampled or enumerated in some fashion. Unfortunately, existing approaches for model averaging either severely restrict the structure of the Bayesian network or have only been shown to scale to networks with fewer than 30 random variables. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to model averaging inspired by performance guarantees in approximation algorithms. Our approach has two primary advantages. First, our approach only considers credible models in that they are optimal or near-optimal in score. Second, our approach is more efficient and scales to significantly larger Bayesian networks than existing approaches.
Universal Marginalizer for Amortised Inference and Embedding of Generative Models
Walecki, Robert, Buchard, Albert, Gourgoulias, Kostis, Hart, Chris, Lomeli, Maria, Navarro, A. K. W., Zwiessele, Max, Perov, Yura, Johri, Saurabh
Probabilistic graphical models are powerful tools which allow us to formalise our knowledge about the world and reason about its inherent uncertainty. There exist a considerable number of methods for performing inference in probabilistic graphical models; however, they can be computationally costly due to significant time burden and/or storage requirements; or they lack theoretical guarantees of convergence and accuracy when applied to large scale graphical models. To this end, we propose the Universal Marginaliser Importance Sampler (UM-IS) -- a hybrid inference scheme that combines the flexibility of a deep neural network trained on samples from the model and inherits the asymptotic guarantees of importance sampling. We show how combining samples drawn from the graphical model with an appropriate masking function allows us to train a single neural network to approximate any of the corresponding conditional marginal distributions, and thus amortise the cost of inference. We also show that the graph embeddings can be applied for tasks such as: clustering, classification and interpretation of relationships between the nodes. Finally, we benchmark the method on a large graph (>1000 nodes), showing that UM-IS outperforms sampling-based methods by a large margin while being computationally efficient.
Multi-Source Neural Variational Inference
Kurle, Richard, Guennemann, Stephan, van der Smagt, Patrick
Learning from multiple sources of information is an important problem in machine-learning research. The key challenges are learning representations and formulating inference methods that take into account the complementarity and redundancy of various information sources. In this paper we formulate a variational autoencoder based multi-source learning framework in which each encoder is conditioned on a different information source. This allows us to relate the sources via the shared latent variables by computing divergence measures between individual source's posterior approximations. We explore a variety of options to learn these encoders and to integrate the beliefs they compute into a consistent posterior approximation. We visualise learned beliefs on a toy dataset and evaluate our methods for learning shared representations and structured output prediction, showing trade-offs of learning separate encoders for each information source. Furthermore, we demonstrate how conflict detection and redundancy can increase robustness of inference in a multi-source setting.
Langevin-gradient parallel tempering for Bayesian neural learning
Chandra, Rohitash, Jain, Konark, Deo, Ratneel V., Cripps, Sally
Bayesian neural learning feature a rigorous approach to estimation and uncertainty quantification via the posterior distribution of weights that represent knowledge of the neural network. This not only provides point estimates of optimal set of weights but also the ability to quantify uncertainty in decision making using the posterior distribution. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques are typically used to obtain sample-based estimates of the posterior distribution. However, these techniques face challenges in convergence and scalability, particularly in settings with large datasets and network architectures. This paper address these challenges in two ways. First, parallel tempering is used used to explore multiple modes of the posterior distribution and implemented in multi-core computing architecture. Second, we make within-chain sampling schemes more efficient by using Langevin gradient information in forming Metropolis-Hastings proposal distributions. We demonstrate the techniques using time series prediction and pattern classification applications. The results show that the method not only improves the computational time, but provides better prediction or decision making capabilities when compared to related methods.
New Movement and Transformation Principle of Fuzzy Reasoning and Its Application to Fuzzy Neural Network
Kwak, Chung-Jin, Kwak, Son-Il, Kang, Dae-Song, Choe, Song-Il, Kim, Jin-Ung, Chea, Hyok-Gi
In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy reasoning principle, so called Movement and Transformation Principle(MTP). This Principle is to obtain a new fuzzy reasoning result by Movement and Transformation the consequent fuzzy set in response to the Movement, Transformation, and Movement-Transformation operations between the antecedent fuzzy set and fuzzificated observation information. And then we presented fuzzy modus ponens and fuzzy modus tollens based on MTP. We compare proposed method with Mamdani fuzzy system, Sugeno fuzzy system, Wang distance type fuzzy reasoning method and Hellendoorn functional type method. And then we applied to the learning experiments of the fuzzy neural network based on MTP and compared it with the Sugeno method. Through prediction experiments of fuzzy neural network on the precipitation data and security situation data, learning accuracy and time performance are clearly improved. Consequently we show that our method based on MTP is computationally simple and does not involve nonlinear operations, so it is easy to handle mathematically.
Deep Ensemble Bayesian Active Learning : Addressing the Mode Collapse issue in Monte Carlo dropout via Ensembles
In image classification tasks, the ability of deep CNNs to deal with complex image data has proven to be unrivalled. However, they require large amounts of labeled training data to reach their full potential. In specialised domains such as healthcare, labeled data can be difficult and expensive to obtain. Active Learning aims to alleviate this problem, by reducing the amount of labelled data needed for a specific task while delivering satisfactory performance. We propose DEBAL, a new active learning strategy designed for deep neural networks. This method improves upon the current state-of-the-art deep Bayesian active learning method, which suffers from the mode collapse problem. We correct for this deficiency by making use of the expressive power and statistical properties of model ensembles. Our proposed method manages to capture superior data uncertainty, which translates into improved classification performance. We demonstrate empirically that our ensemble method yields faster convergence of CNNs trained on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets.
Reasoning From Data in the Mathematical Theory of Evidence
Mathematical Theory of Evidence (MTE) is known as a foundation for reasoning when knowledge is expressed at various levels of detail. Though much research effort has been committed to this theory since its foundation, many questions remain open. One of the most important open questions seems to be the relationship between frequencies and the Mathematical Theory of Evidence. The theory is blamed to leave frequencies outside (or aside of) its framework. The seriousness of this accusation is obvious: no experiment may be run to compare the performance of MTE-based models of real world processes against real world data. In this paper we develop a frequentist model of the MTE bringing to fall the above argument against MTE. We describe, how to interpret data in terms of MTE belief functions, how to reason from data about conditional belief functions, how to generate a random sample out of a MTE model, how to derive MTE model from data and how to compare results of reasoning in MTE model and reasoning from data. It is claimed in this paper that MTE is suitable to model some types of destructive processes
Mathematical Theory of Evidence Versus Evidence
This paper is concerned with the apparent greatest weakness of the Mathematical Theory of Evidence (MTE) of Shafer \cite{Shafer:76}, which has been strongly criticized by Wasserman \cite{Wasserman:92ijar}. Weaknesses of Shafer's proposal \cite{Shafer:90b} of probabilistic interpretation of MTE belief functions is demonstrated. Thereafter a new probabilistic interpretation of MTE conforming both to definition of belief function and to Dempster's rule of combination of independent evidence. It is shown that shaferian conditioning of belief functions on observations \cite{Shafer:90b} may be treated as selection combined with modification of data, that is data is not viewed as it is but it is casted into one's beliefs in what it should be like.