A parametrization of hypergraphs based on the geometry of points in $\mathbf{R}^d$ is developed. Informative prior distributions on hypergraphs are induced through this parametrization by priors on point configurations via spatial processes. This prior specification is used to infer conditional independence models or Markov structure of multivariate distributions. Specifically, we can recover both the junction tree factorization as well as the hyper Markov law. This approach offers greater control on the distribution of graph features than Erd\"os-R\'enyi random graphs, supports inference of factorizations that cannot be retrieved by a graph alone, and leads to new Metropolis\slash Hastings Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms with both local and global moves in graph space. We illustrate the utility of this parametrization and prior specification using simulations.

We consider the problem of Bayesian learning on sensitive datasets and present two simple but somewhat surprising results that connect Bayesian learning to "differential privacy:, a cryptographic approach to protect individual-level privacy while permiting database-level utility. Specifically, we show that that under standard assumptions, getting one single sample from a posterior distribution is differentially private "for free". We will see that estimator is statistically consistent, near optimal and computationally tractable whenever the Bayesian model of interest is consistent, optimal and tractable. Similarly but separately, we show that a recent line of works that use stochastic gradient for Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling also preserve differentially privacy with minor or no modifications of the algorithmic procedure at all, these observations lead to an "anytime" algorithm for Bayesian learning under privacy constraint. We demonstrate that it performs much better than the state-of-the-art differential private methods on synthetic and real datasets.

Knowledge reduction of dynamic covering information systems involves with the time in practical situations. In this paper, we provide incremental approaches to computing the type-1 and type-2 characteristic matrices of dynamic coverings because of varying attribute values. Then we present incremental algorithms of constructing the second and sixth approximations of sets by using characteristic matrices. We employ experimental results to illustrate that the incremental approaches are effective to calculate approximations of sets in dynamic covering information systems. Finally, we perform knowledge reduction of dynamic covering information systems with the incremental approaches.

We show that unconverged stochastic gradient descent can be interpreted as a procedure that samples from a nonparametric variational approximate posterior distribution. This distribution is implicitly defined as the transformation of an initial distribution by a sequence of optimization updates. By tracking the change in entropy over this sequence of transformations during optimization, we form a scalable, unbiased estimate of the variational lower bound on the log marginal likelihood. We can use this bound to optimize hyperparameters instead of using cross-validation. This Bayesian interpretation of SGD suggests improved, overfitting-resistant optimization procedures, and gives a theoretical foundation for popular tricks such as early stopping and ensembling. We investigate the properties of this marginal likelihood estimator on neural network models.

The article derives a novel Gram-Charlier A (GCA) Series based Extended Rule-of-Thumb (ExROT) for bandwidth selection in Kernel Density Estimation (KDE). There are existing various bandwidth selection rules achieving minimization of the Asymptotic Mean Integrated Square Error (AMISE) between the estimated probability density function (PDF) and the actual PDF. The rules differ in a way to estimate the integration of the squared second order derivative of an unknown PDF $(f(\cdot))$, identified as the roughness $R(f''(\cdot))$. The simplest Rule-of-Thumb (ROT) estimates $R(f''(\cdot))$ with an assumption that the density being estimated is Gaussian. Intuitively, better estimation of $R(f''(\cdot))$ and consequently better bandwidth selection rules can be derived, if the unknown PDF is approximated through an infinite series expansion based on a more generalized density assumption. As a demonstration and verification to this concept, the ExROT derived in the article uses an extended assumption that the density being estimated is near Gaussian. This helps use of the GCA expansion as an approximation to the unknown near Gaussian PDF. The ExROT for univariate KDE is extended to that for multivariate KDE. The required multivariate AMISE criteria is re-derived using elementary calculus of several variables, instead of Tensor calculus. The derivation uses the Kronecker product and the vector differential operator to achieve the AMISE expression in vector notations. There is also derived ExROT for kernel based density derivative estimator.

We establish bounds on the KL divergence between two multivariate Gaussian distributions in terms of the Hamming distance between the edge sets of the corresponding graphical models. We show that the KL divergence is bounded below by a constant when the graphs differ by at least one edge; this is essentially the tightest possible bound, since classes of graphs exist for which the edge discrepancy increases but the KL divergence remains bounded above by a constant. As a natural corollary to our KL lower bound, we also establish a sample size requirement for correct model selection via maximum likelihood estimation. Our results rigorize the notion that it is essential to estimate the edge structure of a Gaussian graphical model accurately in order to approximate the true distribution to close precision.

We define the beta diffusion tree, a random tree structure with a set of leaves that defines a collection of overlapping subsets of objects, known as a feature allocation. A generative process for the tree structure is defined in terms of particles (representing the objects) diffusing in some continuous space, analogously to the Dirichlet diffusion tree (Neal, 2003), which defines a tree structure over partitions (i.e., non-overlapping subsets) of the objects. Unlike in the Dirichlet diffusion tree, multiple copies of a particle may exist and diffuse along multiple branches in the beta diffusion tree, and an object may therefore belong to multiple subsets of particles. We demonstrate how to build a hierarchically-clustered factor analysis model with the beta diffusion tree and how to perform inference over the random tree structures with a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. We conclude with several numerical experiments on missing data problems with data sets of gene expression microarrays, international development statistics, and intranational socioeconomic measurements.

We introduce a simple analysis of the structural complexity of infinite-memory processes built from random samples of stationary, ergodic finite-memory component processes. Such processes are familiar from the well known multi-arm Bandit problem. We contrast our analysis with computation-theoretic and statistical inference approaches to understanding their complexity. The result is an alternative view of the relationship between predictability, complexity, and learning that highlights the distinct ways in which informational and correlational divergences arise in complex ergodic and nonergodic processes. We draw out consequences for the resource divergences that delineate the structural hierarchy of ergodic processes and for processes that are themselves hierarchical.

The Libra Toolkit is a collection of algorithms for learning and inference with discrete probabilistic models, including Bayesian networks, Markov networks, dependency networks, and sum-product networks. Compared to other toolkits, Libra places a greater emphasis on learning the structure of tractable models in which exact inference is efficient. It also includes a variety of algorithms for learning graphical models in which inference is potentially intractable, and for performing exact and approximate inference. Libra is released under a 2-clause BSD license to encourage broad use in academia and industry.

In this article, we propose new algorithms for multi-objective coordination graphs (MO-CoGs). Key to the efficiency of these algorithms is that they compute a convex coverage set (CCS) instead of a Pareto coverage set (PCS). Not only is a CCS a sufficient solution set for a large class of problems, it also has important characteristics that facilitate more efficient solutions. We propose two main algorithms for computing a CCS in MO-CoGs. Convex multi-objective variable elimination (CMOVE) computes a CCS by performing a series of agent eliminations, which can be seen as solving a series of local multi-objective subproblems. Variable elimination linear support (VELS) iteratively identifies the single weight vector, w, that can lead to the maximal possible improvement on a partial CCS and calls variable elimination to solve a scalarized instance of the problem for w. VELS is faster than CMOVE for small and medium numbers of objectives and can compute an ε-approximate CCS in a fraction of the runtime. In addition, we propose variants of these methods that employ AND/OR tree search instead of variable elimination to achieve memory efficiency. We analyze the runtime and space complexities of these methods, prove their correctness, and compare them empirically against a naive baseline and an existing PCS method, both in terms of memory-usage and runtime. Our results show that, by focusing on the CCS, these methods achieve much better scalability in the number of agents than the current state of the art.