This paper proposes a new approach to model-based clustering under prior knowledge. The proposed formulation can be interpreted from two different angles: as penalized logistic regression, where the class labels are only indirectly observed (via the probability density of each class); as finite mixture learning under a grouping prior. To estimate the parameters of the proposed model, we derive a (generalized) EM algorithm with a closed-form E-step, in contrast with other recent approaches to semi-supervised probabilistic clustering which require Gibbs sampling or suboptimal shortcuts. We show that our approach is ideally suited for image segmentation: it avoids the combinatorial nature Markov random field priors, and opens the door to more sophisticated spatial priors (e.g., wavelet-based) in a simple and computationally efficient way. Finally, we extend our formulation to work in unsupervised, semi-supervised, or discriminative modes.

In general, the problem of computing a maximum a posteriori (MAP) assignment in a Markov random field (MRF) is computationally intractable. However, in certain subclasses of MRF, an optimal or close-to-optimal assignment can be found very efficiently using combinatorial optimization algorithms: certain MRFs with mutual exclusion constraints can be solved using bipartite matching, and MRFs with regular potentials can be solved using minimum cut methods. However, these solutions do not apply to the many MRFs that contain such tractable components as sub-networks, but also other non-complying potentials.

Correlation between instances is often modelled via a kernel function using input attributes of the instances. Relational knowledge can further reveal additional pairwise correlations between variables of interest. In this paper, we develop a class of models which incorporates both reciprocal relational information and input attributes using Gaussian process techniques. This approach provides a novel nonparametric Bayesian framework with a data-dependent covariance function for supervised learning tasks. We also apply this framework to semi-supervised learning. Experimental results on several real world data sets verify the usefulness of this algorithm.

Techniques such as probabilistic topic models and latent-semantic indexing have been shown to be broadly useful at automatically extracting the topical or semantic content of documents, or more generally for dimension-reduction of sparse count data. These types of models and algorithms can be viewed as generating an abstraction from the words in a document to a lower-dimensional latent variable representation that captures what the document is generally about beyond the specific words it contains. In this paper we propose a new probabilistic model that tempers this approach by representing each document as a combination of (a) a background distribution over common words, (b) a mixture distribution over general topics, and (c) a distribution over words that are treated as being specific to that document. We illustrate how this model can be used for information retrieval by matching documents both at a general topic level and at a specific word level, providing an advantage over techniques that only match documents at a general level (such as topic models or latent-sematic indexing) or that only match documents at the specific word level (such as TF-IDF).

Despite all the attention paid to variational methods based on sum-product message passing (loopy belief propagation, tree-reweighted sum-product), these methods are still bound to inference on a small set of probabilistic models. Mean field approximations have been applied to a broader set of problems, but the solutions are often poor. We propose a new class of conditionally-specified variational approximations based on mean field theory. While not usable on their own, combined with sequential Monte Carlo they produce guaranteed improvements over conventional mean field. Moreover, experiments on a well-studied problem-- inferring the stable configurations of the Ising spin glass--show that the solutions can be significantly better than those obtained using sum-product-based methods.

We study a setting that is motivated by the problem of filtering spam messages for many users. Each user receives messages according to an individual, unknown distribution, reflected only in the unlabeled inbox. The spam filter for a user is required to perform well with respect to this distribution. Labeled messages from publicly available sources can be utilized, but they are governed by a distinct distribution, not adequately representing most inboxes. We devise a method that minimizes a loss function with respect to a user's personal distribution based on the available biased sample. A nonparametric hierarchical Bayesian model furthermore generalizes across users by learning a common prior which is imposed on new email accounts. Empirically, we observe that bias-corrected learning outperforms naive reliance on the assumption of independent and identically distributed data; Dirichlet-enhanced generalization across users outperforms a single ("one size fits all") filter as well as independent filters for all users.

We introduce a method for approximate smoothed inference in a class of switching linear dynamical systems, based on a novel form of Gaussian Sum smoother. This class includes the switching Kalman Filter and the more general case of switch transitions dependent on the continuous latent state. The method improves on the standard Kim smoothing approach by dispensing with one of the key approximations, thus making fuller use of the available future information. Whilst the only central assumption required is projection to a mixture of Gaussians, we show that an additional conditional independence assumption results in a simpler but stable and accurate alternative. Unlike the alternative unstable Expectation Propagation procedure, our method consists only of a single forward and backward pass and is reminiscent of the standard smoothing'correction' recursions in the simpler linear dynamical system. The algorithm performs well on both toy experiments and in a large scale application to noise robust speech recognition.

Linear Gaussian State-Space Models are widely used and a Bayesian treatment of parameters is therefore of considerable interest. The approximate Variational Bayesian method applied to these models is an attractive approach, used successfully in applications ranging from acoustics to bioinformatics. The most challenging aspect of implementing the method is in performing inference on the hidden state sequence of the model. We show how to convert the inference problem so that standard Kalman Filtering/Smoothing recursions from the literature may be applied. This is in contrast to previously published approaches based on Belief Propagation. Our framework both simplifies and unifies the inference problem, so that future applications may be more easily developed. We demonstrate the elegance of the approach on Bayesian temporal ICA, with an application to finding independent dynamical processes underlying noisy EEG signals.

We have developed a novel algorithm for integrating source localization and noise suppression based on a probabilistic graphical model of stimulus-evoked MEG/EEG data. Our algorithm localizes multiple dipoles while suppressing noise sources with the computational complexity equivalent to a single dipole scan, and is therefore more efficient than traditional multidipole fitting procedures. In simulation, the algorithm can accurately localize and estimate the time course of several simultaneously-active dipoles, with rotating or fixed orientation, at noise levels typical for averaged MEG data. Furthermore, the algorithm is superior to beamforming techniques, which we show to be an approximation to our graphical model, in estimation of temporally correlated sources. Success of this algorithm for localizing auditory cortex in a tumor patient and for localizing an epileptic spike source are also demonstrated.

We describe an unsupervised method for learning a probabilistic grammar of an object from a set of training examples. Our approach is invariant to the scale and rotation of the objects. We illustrate our approach using thirteen objects from the Caltech 101 database. In addition, we learn the model of a hybrid object class where we do not know the specific object or its position, scale or pose. This is illustrated by learning a hybrid class consisting of faces, motorbikes, and airplanes. The individual objects can be recovered as different aspects of the grammar for the object class.