Several machine learning applications involve the optimization of higher-order derivatives(e.g., gradients ofgradients) during training, which can beexpensive with respect to memory and computation even with automatic differentiation.

In this paper, we propose a novel parameter estimator for probabilistic models on discrete space. The proposed estimator is derived from minimization of homogeneous divergence and can be constructed without calculation of the normalization constant, which is frequently infeasible for models in the discrete space. We investigate statistical properties of the proposed estimator such as consistency and asymptotic normality, and reveal a relationship with the information geometry. Some experiments show that the proposed estimator attains comparable performance to the maximum likelihood estimator with drastically lower computational cost.

In this paper, we propose a novel parameter estimator for probabilistic models on discrete space. The proposed estimator is derived from minimization of homogeneous divergence and can be constructed without calculation of the normalization constant, which is frequently infeasible for models in the discrete space. We investigate statistical properties of the proposed estimator such as consistency and asymptotic normality, and reveal a relationship with the information geometry. Some experiments show that the proposed estimator attains comparable performance to the maximum likelihood estimator with drastically lower computational cost.

We introduce two synthetic likelihood methods for Simulation-Based Inference (SBI), to conduct either amortized or targeted inference from experimental observations when a high-fidelity simulator is available. Both methods learn a conditional energy-based model (EBM) of the likelihood using synthetic data generated by the simulator, conditioned on parameters drawn from a proposal distribution. The learned likelihood can then be combined with any prior to obtain a posterior estimate, from which samples can be drawn using MCMC. Our methods uniquely combine a flexible Energy-Based Model and the minimization of a KL loss: this is in contrast to other synthetic likelihood methods, which either rely on normalizing flows, or minimize score-based objectives; choices that come with known pitfalls. We demonstrate the properties of both methods on a range of synthetic datasets, and apply them to a neuroscience model of the pyloric network in the crab, where our method outperforms prior art for a fraction of the simulation budget.

Classical quickest change detection algorithms require modeling pre-change and post-change distributions. Such an approach may not be feasible for various machine learning models because of the complexity of computing the explicit distributions. Additionally, these methods may suffer from a lack of robustness to model mismatch and noise. This paper develops a new variant of the classical Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) algorithm for the quickest change detection. This variant is based on Fisher divergence and the Hyv\"arinen score and is called the Score-based CUSUM (SCUSUM) algorithm. The SCUSUM algorithm allows the applications of change detection for unnormalized statistical models, i.e., models for which the probability density function contains an unknown normalization constant. The asymptotic optimality of the proposed algorithm is investigated by deriving expressions for average detection delay and the mean running time to a false alarm. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.

We present a new method for evaluating and training unnormalized density models. Our approach only requires access to the gradient of the unnormalized model's log-density. We estimate the Stein discrepancy between the data density p(x) and the model density q(x) defined by a vector function of the data. We parameterize this function with a neural network and fit its parameters to maximize the discrepancy. This yields a novel goodness-of-fit test which outperforms existing methods on high dimensional data. Furthermore, optimizing $q(x)$ to minimize this discrepancy produces a novel method for training unnormalized models which scales more gracefully than existing methods. The ability to both learn and compare models is a unique feature of the proposed method.

We propose estimation methods for unnormalized models with missing data. The key concept is to combine a modern imputation technique with estimators for unnormalized models including noise contrastive estimation and score matching. Further, we derive asymptotic distributions of the proposed estimators and construct the confidence intervals. The application to truncated Gaussian graphical models with missing data shows the validity of the proposed methods.

Parameter estimation of unnormalized models is a challenging problem because normalizing constants are not calculated explicitly and maximum likelihood estimation is computationally infeasible. Although some consistent estimators have been proposed earlier, the problem of statistical efficiency does remain. In this study, we propose a unified, statistically efficient estimation framework for unnormalized models and several novel efficient estimators with reasonable computational time regardless of whether the sample space is discrete or continuous. The loss functions of the proposed estimators are derived by combining the following two methods: (1) density-ratio matching using Bregman divergence, and (2) plugging-in nonparametric estimators. We also analyze the properties of the proposed estimators when the unnormalized model is misspecified. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our method over existing approaches.

In this paper, we propose a novel parameter estimator for probabilistic models on discrete space. The proposed estimator is derived from minimization of homogeneous divergenceand can be constructed without calculation of the normalization constant, which is frequently infeasible for models in the discrete space. We investigate statisticalproperties of the proposed estimator such as consistency and asymptotic normality, and reveal a relationship with the information geometry. Some experiments show that the proposed estimator attains comparable performance tothe maximum likelihood estimator with drastically lower computational cost.

We show that the Bregman divergence provides a rich framework to estimate unnormalized statistical models for continuous or discrete random variables, that is, models which do not integrate or sum to one, respectively. We prove that recent estimation methods such as noise-contrastive estimation, ratio matching, and score matching belong to the proposed framework, and explain their interconnection based on supervised learning. Further, we discuss the role of boosting in unsupervised learning.