Algorithms involving Gaussian processes or determinantal point processes typically require computing the determinant of a kernel matrix. Frequently, the latter is computed from the Cholesky decomposition, an algorithm of cubic complexity in the size
of the matrix. We show that, under mild assumptions, it is possible to estimate the determinant from only a sub-matrix, with probabilistic guarantee on the relative error. We present an augmentation of the Cholesky decomposition that stops under certain conditions before processing the whole matrix. Experiments demonstrate that this can save a considerable amount of time while having an overhead of less than $5%$ when not stopping early. More generally, we present a probabilistic stopping strategy for the approximation of a sum of known length where addends are revealed sequentially. We do not assume independence between addends, only that they are bounded from below and decrease in conditional expectation.
Deep generative models have been demonstrated as state-of-the-art density estimators. Yet, recent work has found that they often assign a higher likelihood to data from outside the training distribution. This seemingly paradoxical behavior has caused
concerns over the quality of the attained density estimates. In the context of hierarchical variational autoencoders, we provide evidence to explain this behavior by out-of-distribution data having in-distribution low-level features. We argue that this is both expected and desirable behavior. With this insight in hand, we develop a fast, scalable and fully unsupervised likelihood-ratio score for OOD detection that requires data to be in-distribution across all feature-levels. We benchmark the method on a vast set of data and model combinations and achieve state-of-the-art results on out-of-distribution detection.
We introduce the sequential neural posterior and likelihood approximation (SNPLA) algorithm. SNPLA is a normalizing flows-based algorithm for inference in implicit models, and therefore is a simulation-based inference method that only requires simula
tions from a generative model. SNPLA avoids Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling and correction-steps of the parameter proposal function that are introduced in similar methods, but that can be numerically unstable or restrictive. By utilizing the reverse KL divergence, SNPLA manages to learn both the likelihood and the posterior in a sequential manner. Over four experiments, we show that SNPLA performs competitively when utilizing the same number of model simulations as used in other methods, even though the inference problem for SNPLA is more complex due to the joint learning of posterior and likelihood function. Due to utilizing normalizing flows SNPLA generates posterior draws much faster (4 orders of magnitude) than MCMC-based methods.
When a missing process depends on the missing values themselves, it needs to be explicitly modelled and taken into account while doing likelihood-based inference. We present an approach for building and fitting deep latent variable models (DLVMs) in
cases where the missing process is dependent on the missing data. Specifically, a deep neural network enables us to flexibly model the conditional distribution of the missingness pattern given the data. This allows for incorporating prior information about the type of missingness (e.g. self-censoring) into the model. Our inference technique, based on importance-weighted variational inference, involves maximising a lower bound of the joint likelihood. Stochastic gradients of the bound are obtained by using the reparameterisation trick both in latent space and data space. We show on various kinds of data sets and missingness patterns that explicitly modelling the missing process can be invaluable.
We consider the problem of handling missing data with deep latent variable models (DLVMs). First, we present a simple technique to train DLVMs when the training set contains missing-at-random data. Our approach, called MIWAE, is based on the importan
ce-weighted autoencoder (IWAE), and maximises a potentially tight lower bound of the log-likelihood of the observed data. Compared to the original IWAE, our algorithm does not induce any additional computational overhead due to the missing data. We also develop Monte Carlo techniques for single and multiple imputation using a DLVM trained on an incomplete data set. We illustrate our approach by training a convolutional DLVM on a static binarisation of MNIST that contains 50% of missing pixels. Leveraging multiple imputation, a convolutional network trained on these incomplete digits has a test performance similar to one trained on complete data. On various continuous and binary data sets, we also show that MIWAE provides accurate single imputations, and is highly competitive with state-of-the-art methods.
Deep latent variable models (DLVMs) combine the approximation abilities of deep neural networks and the statistical foundations of generative models. Variational methods are commonly used for inference; however, the exact likelihood of these models h
as been largely overlooked. The purpose of this work is to study the general properties of this quantity and to show how they can be leveraged in practice. We focus on important inferential problems that rely on the likelihood: estimation and missing data imputation. First, we investigate maximum likelihood estimation for DLVMs: in particular, we show that most unconstrained models used for continuous data have an unbounded likelihood function. This problematic behaviour is demonstrated to be a source of mode collapse. We also show how to ensure the existence of maximum likelihood estimates, and draw useful connections with nonparametric mixture models. Finally, we describe an algorithm for missing data imputation using the exact conditional likelihood of a deep latent variable model. On several data sets, our algorithm consistently and significantly outperforms the usual imputation scheme used for DLVMs.
In this paper, we study the trade-offs of different inference approaches for Bayesian matrix factorisation methods, which are commonly used for predicting missing values, and for finding patterns in the data. In particular, we consider Bayesian nonne
gative variants of matrix factorisation and tri-factorisation, and compare non-probabilistic inference, Gibbs sampling, variational Bayesian inference, and a maximum-a-posteriori approach. The variational approach is new for the Bayesian nonnegative models. We compare their convergence, and robustness to noise and sparsity of the data, on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Furthermore, we extend the models with the Bayesian automatic relevance determination prior, allowing the models to perform automatic model selection, and demonstrate its efficiency.
We present a fast variational Bayesian algorithm for performing non-negative matrix factorisation and tri-factorisation. We show that our approach achieves faster convergence per iteration and timestep (wall-clock) than Gibbs sampling and non-probabi
listic approaches, and do not require additional samples to estimate the posterior. We show that in particular for matrix tri-factorisation convergence is difficult, but our variational Bayesian approach offers a fast solution, allowing the tri-factorisation approach to be used more effectively.
Circular variables arise in a multitude of data-modelling contexts ranging from robotics to the social sciences, but they have been largely overlooked by the machine learning community. This paper partially redresses this imbalance by extending some
standard probabilistic modelling tools to the circular domain. First we introduce a new multivariate distribution over circular variables, called the multivariate Generalised von Mises (mGvM) distribution. This distribution can be constructed by restricting and renormalising a general multivariate Gaussian distribution to the unit hyper-torus. Previously proposed multivariate circular distributions are shown to be special cases of this construction. Second, we introduce a new probabilistic model for circular regression, that is inspired by Gaussian Processes, and a method for probabilistic principal component analysis with circular hidden variables. These models can leverage standard modelling tools (e.g. covariance functions and methods for automatic relevance determination). Third, we show that the posterior distribution in these models is a mGvM distribution which enables development of an efficient variational free-energy scheme for performing approximate inference and approximate maximum-likelihood learning.
