We introduce the Gaussian Process Convolution Model (GPCM), a two-stage nonparametric generative procedure to model stationary signals as the convolution between a continuous-time white-noise process and a continuous-time linear filter drawn from Gaussian process. The GPCM is a continuous-time nonparametric-window moving average process and, conditionally, is itself a Gaussian process with a nonparametric kernel defined in a probabilistic fashion. The generative model can be equivalently considered in the frequency domain, where the power spectral density of the signal is specified using a Gaussian process. One of the main contributions of the paper is to develop a novel variational free-energy approach based on inter-domain inducing variables that efficiently learns the continuous-time linear filter and infers the driving white-noise process. In turn, this scheme provides closed-form probabilistic estimates of the covariance kernel and the noise-free signal both in denoising and prediction scenarios. Additionally, the variational inference procedure provides closed-form expressions for the approximate posterior of the spectral density given the observed data, leading to new Bayesian nonparametric approaches to spectrum estimation. The proposed GPCM is validated using synthetic and real-world signals.

We introduce the Gaussian Process Convolution Model (GPCM), a two-stage nonparametric generative procedure to model stationary signals as the convolution between a continuous-time white-noise process and a continuous-time linear filter drawn from Gaussian process. The GPCM is a continuous-time nonparametricwindow moving average process and, conditionally, is itself a Gaussian process with a nonparametric kernel defined in a probabilistic fashion. The generative model can be equivalently considered in the frequency domain, where the power spectral density of the signal is specified using a Gaussian process. One of the main contributions of the paper is to develop a novel variational freeenergy approach based on inter-domain inducing variables that efficiently learns the continuous-time linear filter and infers the driving white-noise process. In turn, this scheme provides closed-form probabilistic estimates of the covariance kernel and the noise-free signal both in denoising and prediction scenarios. Additionally, the variational inference procedure provides closed-form expressions for the approximate posterior of the spectral density given the observed data, leading to new Bayesian nonparametric approaches to spectrum estimation. The proposed GPCM is validated using synthetic and real-world signals.

The Gaussian Process Convolution Model (GPCM; Tobar et al., 2015a) is a model for signals with complex spectral structure. A significant limitation of the GPCM is that it assumes a rapidly decaying spectrum: it can only model smooth signals. Moreover, inference in the GPCM currently requires (1) a mean-field assumption, resulting in poorly calibrated uncertainties, and (2) a tedious variational optimisation of large covariance matrices. We redesign the GPCM model to induce a richer distribution over the spectrum with relaxed assumptions about smoothness: the Causal Gaussian Process Convolution Model (CGPCM) introduces a causality assumption into the GPCM, and the Rough Gaussian Process Convolution Model (RGPCM) can be interpreted as a Bayesian nonparametric generalisation of the fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We also propose a more effective variational inference scheme, going beyond the mean-field assumption: we design a Gibbs sampler which directly samples from the optimal variational solution, circumventing any variational optimisation entirely. The proposed variations of the GPCM are validated in experiments on synthetic and real-world data, showing promising results.

We introduce the Gaussian Process Convolution Model (GPCM), a two-stage nonparametric generative procedure to model stationary signals as the convolution between a continuous-time white-noise process and a continuous-time linear filter drawn from Gaussian process. The GPCM is a continuous-time nonparametric-window moving average process and, conditionally, is itself a Gaussian process with a nonparametric kernel defined in a probabilistic fashion. The generative model can be equivalently considered in the frequency domain, where the power spectral density of the signal is specified using a Gaussian process. One of the main contributions of the paper is to develop a novel variational free-energy approach based on inter-domain inducing variables that efficiently learns the continuous-time linear filter and infers the driving white-noise process. In turn, this scheme provides closed-form probabilistic estimates of the covariance kernel and the noise-free signal both in denoising and prediction scenarios. Additionally, the variational inference procedure provides closed-form expressions for the approximate posterior of the spectral density given the observed data, leading to new Bayesian nonparametric approaches to spectrum estimation. The proposed GPCM is validated using synthetic and real-world signals.

Item response theory (IRT) models for categorical response data are widely used in the analysis of educational data, computerized adaptive testing, and psychological surveys. However, most IRT models rely on both the assumption that categories are strictly ordered and the assumption that this ordering is known a priori. These assumptions are impractical in many real-world scenarios, such as multiple-choice exams where the levels of incorrectness for the distractor categories are often unknown. While a number of results exist on IRT models for unordered categorical data, they tend to have restrictive modeling assumptions that lead to poor data fitting performance in practice. Furthermore, existing unordered categorical models have parameters that are difficult to interpret. In this work, we propose a novel methodology for unordered categorical IRT that we call SPRITE (short for stochastic polytomous response item model) that: (i) analyzes both ordered and unordered categories, (ii) offers interpretable outputs, and (iii) provides improved data fitting compared to existing models. We compare SPRITE to existing item response models and demonstrate its efficacy on both synthetic and real-world educational datasets.