The two parameter Poisson-Dirichlet Process (PDP), a generalisation of the Dirichlet Process, is increasingly being used for probabilistic modelling in discrete areas such as language technology, bioinformatics, and image analysis. There is a rich literature about the PDP and its derivative distributions such as the Chinese Restaurant Process (CRP). This article reviews some of the basic theory and then the major results needed for Bayesian modelling of discrete problems including details of priors, posteriors and computation.
The PDP allows one to build distributions over countable partitions. The PDP has two other remarkable properties: first it is partially conjugate to itself, which allows one to build hierarchies of PDPs, and second using a marginalised relative the CRP, one gets fragmentation and clustering properties that lets one layer partitions to build trees. This article presents the basic theory for understanding the notion of partitions and distributions over them, the PDP and the CRP, and the important properties of conjugacy, fragmentation and clustering, as well as some key related properties such as consistency and convergence. This article also presents a Bayesian interpretation of the Poisson-Dirichlet process based on an improper and infinite dimensional Dirichlet distribution. This means we can understand the process as just another Dirichlet and thus all its sampling properties emerge naturally.
The theory of PDPs is usually presented for continuous distributions (more generally referred to as non-atomic distributions), however, when applied to discrete distributions its remarkable conjugacy property emerges. This context and basic results are also presented, as well as techniques for computing the second order Stirling numbers that occur in the posteriors for discrete distributions.
This paper explores large sample properties of the two-parameter $(α,θ)$ Poisson--Dirichlet Process in two contexts. In a Bayesian context of estimating an unknown probability measure, viewing this process as a natural extension of the Dirichlet process, we explore the consistency and weak convergence of the the two-parameter Poisson--Dirichlet posterior process. We also establish the weak convergence of properly centered two-parameter Poisson--Dirichlet processes for large $θ+nα.$ This latter result complements large $θ$ results for the Dirichlet process and Poisson--Dirichlet sequences, and …
We present an alternative approach to the Bayesian nonparametric analysis of conditional species richness under two-parameter Poisson Dirichlet priors. We rely on a known characterization by deletion of classes property and on results for Beta-Binomial distributions. Besides leading to simplified and much more direct proofs, our proposal provides a new scale mixture representation of the conditional asymptotic law.
The present paper provides exact expressions for the probability distributions of linear functionals of the two-parameter Poisson--Dirichlet process $\operatorname {PD}(α,θ)$. We obtain distributional results yielding exact forms for density functions of these functionals. Moreover, several interesting integral identities are obtained by exploiting a correspondence between the mean of a Poisson--Dirichlet process and the mean of a suitable Dirichlet process. Finally, some distributional characterizations in terms of mixture representations are proved. The usefulness of the results contained in…
Time series data may exhibit clustering over time and, in a multiple time series context, the clustering behavior may differ across the series. This paper is motivated by the Bayesian non--parametric modeling of the dependence between the clustering structures and the distributions of different time series. We follow a Dirichlet process mixture approach and introduce a new class of multivariate dependent Dirichlet processes (DDP). The proposed DDP are represented in terms of vector of stick-breaking processes with dependent weights. The weights are beta random vectors that determine different …
In this paper, we develop simple, yet efficient, procedures for sampling approximations of the two-Parameter Poisson-Dirichlet Process and the normalized inverse-Gaussian process. We compare the efficiency of the new approximations to the corresponding stick-breaking approximations, in which we demonstrate a substantial improvement.
In this paper, we describe a Bayesian nonparametric approach to make inference for a bivariate spherically symmetric distribution. We consider a Dirichlet invariant process prior on the set of all bivariate spherically symmetric distributions and we derive the Dirichlet invariant process posterior. Indeed, our approach is an extension of Dirichlet invariant process for the symmetric distributions on the real line to a bivariate spherically symmetric distribution where the underlying distribution is invariant under a finite group of rotations. Moreover, we obtain the Dirichlet invariant process…
We consider nonparametric Bayesian estimation and prediction for nonhomogeneous Poisson process models with unknown intensity functions. We propose a class of improper priors for intensity functions. Nonparametric Bayesian inference with kernel mixture based on the class improper priors is shown to be useful, although improper priors have not been widely used for nonparametric Bayes problems. Several theorems corresponding to those for finite-dimensional independent Poisson models hold for nonhomogeneous Poisson process models with infinite-dimensional parameter spaces. Bayesian estimation and…
In his 1986 book, Aitchison explains that compositional data is regularly mishandled in statistical analyses, a pattern that continues to this day. The Dirichlet Type I distribution is a multivariate distribution commonly used to model a set of proportions that sum to one. Aitchinson goes on to lament the difficulties of Dirichlet modelling and the scarcity of alternatives. While he addresses the second of these issues, we address the first. The Dirichlet Type II distribution is a transformation of the Dirichlet Type I distribution and is a multivariate distribution on the positive real number…
We show that rate-adaptive multivariate density estimation can be performed using Bayesian methods based on Dirichlet mixtures of normal kernels with a prior distribution on the kernel's covariance matrix parameter. We derive sufficient conditions on the prior specification that guarantee convergence to a true density at a rate that is optimal minimax for the smoothness class to which the true density belongs. No prior knowledge of smoothness is assumed. The sufficient conditions are shown to hold for the Dirichlet location mixture of normals prior with a Gaussian base measure and an inverse-W…
A Poisson mixture is one of the practically important models in computer science, biology, and sociology. However, the theoretical property has not been studied because the posterior distribution can not be approximated by any normal distribution. Such a model is called singular and it is known that Real Log Canonical Threshold (RLCT) is equal to the coefficient of the asymptotically main term of the Bayesian generalization error. In this paper, we derive RLCT of a simplex Vandermonde matrix type singularity which is equal to that of a Poisson mixture in general cases.
For extreme value estimation we propose to use a model with a Dirichlet process mixture of gamma densities in the center and generalized Pareto densities for the tails. Due to the randomness in the center and a heavy tailed density in the tails density estimation and posterior inference for high quantiles are possible. The approach can be used in a "default" manner on the positive reals because it works when prior information is unavailable. The proposed model can be easy to implement and a sensitivity analysis is provided. We applied the proposed model for simulated and real data sets.
We consider a continuous time two-armed bandit problem in which incomes are described by Poissonian processes. We develop Bayesian approach with arbitrary prior distribution. We present two versions of recursive equation for determination of Bayesian piece-wise constant strategy and Bayesian risk and partial differential equation in the limiting case. Unlike the previously considered Bayesian settings our description uses current history of the process and not evolution of the posterior distribution.
In recent years, infinite-dimensional methods have been introduced for the Gaussian channels estimation. The aim of this paper is to study the application of similar methods to Poisson channels. In particular we compute the Bayesian estimator of a Poisson channel using the likelihood ratio and the discrete Malliavin gradient. This algorithm is suitable for numerical implementation via the Monte-Carlo scheme. As an application we provide an new proof of the formula obtained recently by Guo, Shamai and Verduú relating some derivatives of the input-output mutual information of a time-continuous P…
This article develops, and describes how to use, results concerning disintegrations of Poisson random measures. These results are fashioned as simple tools that can be tailor-made to address inferential questions arising in a wide range of Bayesian nonparametric and spatial statistical models. The Poisson disintegration method is based on the formal statement of two results concerning a Laplace functional change of measure and a Poisson Palm/Fubini calculus in terms of random partitions of the integers {1,...,n}. The techniques are analogous to, but much more general than, techniques for the D…
In the Bayesian approach to structure learning of graphical models, the equivalent sample size (ESS) in the Dirichlet prior over the model parameters was recently shown to have an important effect on the maximum-a-posteriori estimate of the Bayesian network structure. In our first contribution, we theoretically analyze the case of large ESS-values, which complements previous work: among other results, we find that the presence of an edge in a Bayesian network is favoured over its absence even if both the Dirichlet prior and the data imply independence, as long as the conditional empirical dist…
It is shown that a simple Dirichlet process mixture of multivariate normals offers Bayesian density estimation with adaptive posterior convergence rates. Toward this, a novel sieve for non-parametric mixture densities is explored, and its rate adaptability to various smoothness classes of densities in arbitrary dimension is demonstrated. This sieve construction is expected to offer a substantial technical advancement in studying Bayesian non-parametric mixture models based on stick-breaking priors.
This work explores non-negative low-rank matrix factorization based on regularized Poisson models (PF or "Poisson factorization" for short) for recommender systems with implicit-feedback data. The properties of Poisson likelihood allow a shortcut for very fast computations over zero-valued inputs, and oftentimes results in very sparse factors for both users and items. Compared to HPF (a popular Bayesian formulation of the problem with hierarchical priors), the frequentist optimization-based approach presented here tends to produce better top-N recommendations with significantly shorter fitting…
Simultaneous predictive distributions for independent Poisson observables are investigated. A class of improper prior distributions for Poisson means is introduced. The Bayesian predictive distributions based on priors from the introduced class are shown to be admissible under the Kullback-Leibler loss. A Bayesian predictive distribution based on a prior in this class dominates the Bayesian predictive distribution based on the Jeffreys prior.
One-step ahead prediction for the multinomial model is considered. The performance of a predictive density is evaluated by the average Kullback-Leibler divergence from the true density to the predictive density. Asymptotic approximations of risk functions of Bayesian predictive densities based on Dirichlet priors are obtained. It is shown that a Bayesian predictive density based on a specific Dirichlet prior is asymptotically minimax. The asymptotically minimax prior is different from known objective priors such as the Jeffreys prior or the uniform prior.
A classic approach for learning Bayesian networks from data is to identify a maximum a posteriori (MAP) network structure. In the case of discrete Bayesian networks, MAP networks are selected by maximising one of several possible Bayesian Dirichlet (BD) scores; the most famous is the Bayesian Dirichlet equivalent uniform (BDeu) score from Heckerman et al (1995). The key properties of BDeu arise from its uniform prior over the parameters of each local distribution in the network, which makes structure learning computationally efficient; it does not require the elicitation of prior knowledge fro…
We consider an acoustic obstacle reconstruction problem with Poisson data. Due to the stochastic nature of the data, we tackle this problem in the framework of Bayesian inversion. The unknown obstacle is parameterized in its angular form. The prior for the parameterized unknown plays key role in the Bayes reconstruction algorithm. The most popular used prior is the Gaussian. Under the Gaussian prior assumption, we further suppose that the unknown satisfies the total variation prior. With the hybrid prior, the well-posedness of the posterior distribution is discussed. The numerical examples ver…
In this article we propose novel Bayesian nonparametric methods using Dirichlet Process Mixture (DPM) models for detecting pairwise dependence between random variables while accounting for uncertainty in the form of the underlying distributions. A key criteria is that the procedures should scale to large data sets. In this regard we find that the formal calculation of the Bayes factor for a dependent-vs.-independent DPM joint probability measure is not feasible computationally. To address this we present Bayesian diagnostic measures for characterising evidence against a "null model" of pairwis…
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) can account for both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. However, in BNNs the priors are often specified over the weights which rarely reflects true prior knowledge in large and complex neural network architectures. We present a simple approach to incorporate prior knowledge in BNNs based on external summary information about the predicted classification probabilities for a given dataset. The available summary information is incorporated as augmented data and modeled with a Dirichlet process, and we derive the corresponding \emph{Summary Evidence Lower BOund}. …
For an observed response that is composed by a set - or vector - of positive values that sum up to 1, the Dirichlet distribution (Bol'shev, 2018) is a helpful mathematical construction for the quantification of the data-generating mechanics underlying this process. In applications, these response-sets are usually denoted as proportions, or compositions of proportions, and by means of covariates, one wishes to manifest the underlying signal - by changes in the value of these covariates - leading to differently distributed response compositions. This article gives a brief introduction into this …
In this paper we propose a model with a Dirichlet process mixture of gamma densities in the bulk part below threshold and a generalized Pareto density in the tail for extreme value estimation. The proposed model is simple and flexible allowing us posterior density estimation and posterior inference for high quantiles. The model works well even for small sample sizes and in the absence of prior information. We evaluate the performance of the proposed model through a simulation study. Finally, the proposed model is applied to a real environmental data.
In this paper we present Poisson mixture approaches for origin-destination (OD) modeling in transportation analysis. We introduce covariate-based models which incorporate different transport modeling phases and also allow for direct probabilistic inference on link traffic based on Bayesian predictions. Emphasis is placed on the Poisson-inverse Gaussian as an alternative to the commonly-used Poisson-gamma and Poisson-lognormal models. We present a first full Bayesian formulation and demonstrate that the Poisson-inverse Gaussian is particularly suited for OD analysis due to desirable marginal an…
Being in the era of big data, modeling and prediction of count data have become significantly important in many fields including health, finance, social, etc. Although linear Poisson regression has been widely used to model count and rate data, it might not be always suitable as it cannot capture some inherent variability within complex data. In this study, we introduce a probabilistically driven nonlinear Poisson regression model with Bayesian artificial neural networks (ANN) to model count or rate data. This new nonlinear Poisson regression model developed with Bayesian ANN provides higher p…
While Bayesian neural networks have many appealing characteristics, current priors do not easily allow users to specify basic properties such as expected lengthscale or amplitude variance. In this work, we introduce Poisson Process Radial Basis Function Networks, a novel prior that is able to encode amplitude stationarity and input-dependent lengthscale. We prove that our novel formulation allows for a decoupled specification of these properties, and that the estimated regression function is consistent as the number of observations tends to infinity. We demonstrate its behavior on synthetic an…
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（产业技术综合研究所）；Japan Science and Technology Agency（日本科学技术振兴机构）；National Institute for Materials Science（物质·材料研究机构）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
In this paper, we propose a new method of Bayesian measurement for spectral deconvolution, which regresses spectral data into the sum of unimodal basis function such as Gaussian or Lorentzian functions. Bayesian measurement is a framework for considering not only the target physical model but also the measurement model as a probabilistic model, and enables us to estimate the parameter of a physical model with its confidence interval through a Bayesian posterior distribution given a measurement data set. The measurement with Poisson noise is one of the most effective system to apply our propose…
We propose modified frequentist definition for the determination of confidence intervals for the case of Poisson statistics. Namely, we require that 1-β' \geq \sum_{n=o}^{n_{obs}+k} P(n|λ) \geq α'. We show that this definition is equivalent to the Bayesian method with prior π(λ) \sim λ^{k}. We also propose modified frequentist definition for the case of nonzero background.
In this article, we consider a non-parametric Bayesian approach to multivariate quantile regression. The collection of related conditional distributions of a response vector Y given a univariate covariate X is modeled using a Dependent Dirichlet Process (DDP) prior. The DDP is used to introduce dependence across x. As the realizations from a Dirichlet process prior are almost surely discrete, we need to convolve it with a kernel. To model the error distribution as flexibly as possible, we use a countable mixture of multidimensional normal distributions as our kernel. For posterior computations…
Let $X$ have a Generalized Poisson distribution with mean $kb$, where $b$ is a known constant in the unit interval and $k$ is a discrete, non-negative parameter. We show that if an uninformative uniform prior for $k$ is assumed, then the posterior distribution of $k$ can be approximated using the gamma distribution when $b$ is small.
This paper introduces a novel parameter estimation method for the probability tables of Bayesian network classifiers (BNCs), using hierarchical Dirichlet processes (HDPs). The main result of this paper is to show that improved parameter estimation allows BNCs to outperform leading learning methods such as Random Forest for both 0-1 loss and RMSE, albeit just on categorical datasets. As data assets become larger, entering the hyped world of "big", efficient accurate classification requires three main elements: (1) classifiers with low-bias that can capture the fine-detail of large datasets (2) …
In this paper we consider the problem of dynamic clustering, where cluster memberships may change over time and clusters may split and merge over time, thus creating new clusters and destroying existing ones. We propose a Bayesian nonparametric approach to dynamic clustering via mixture modeling. Our approach relies on a novel time-dependent nonparametric prior defined by combining: i) a copula-based transformation of a Gaussian autoregressive process; ii) the stick-breaking construction of the Dirichlet process. Posterior inference is performed through a particle Markov chain Monte Carlo algo…
Bivariate count data arise in several different disciplines (epidemiology, marketing, sports statistics, etc., to name but a few) and the bivariate Poisson distribution which is a generalization of the Poisson distribution plays an important role in modeling such data. In this article, we consider the inferential aspect of a bivariate Poisson conditionals distribution for which both the conditionals are Poisson but the marginals are typically non-Poisson. It has Poisson marginals only in the case of independence. It appears that a simple iterative procedure under the maximum likelihood method …
In this work we introduce a semi-parametric Bayesian change-point model, defining its time dynamic as a latent Markov process based on the Dirichlet process. We treat the number of change point as a random variable and we estimate it during model fitting. Posterior inference is carried out using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm based on a marginalized version of the proposed model. The model is illustrated using simulated examples and two real datasets, namely the coal- mining disasters, that is a widely used dataset for illustrative purpose, and a dataset of indoor radon recordings. With …
We introduce Bayesian Poisson Tucker decomposition (BPTD) for modeling country--country interaction event data. These data consist of interaction events of the form "country $i$ took action $a$ toward country $j$ at time $t$." BPTD discovers overlapping country--community memberships, including the number of latent communities. In addition, it discovers directed community--community interaction networks that are specific to "topics" of action types and temporal "regimes." We show that BPTD yields an efficient MCMC inference algorithm and achieves better predictive performance than related mode…
We exploit a suitable moment-based characterization of the mixture of Poisson distribution for developing Bayesian inference for the unknown size of a finite population whose units are subject to multiple occurrences during an enumeration sampling stage. This is a particularly challenging setting for which many other attempts have been made for inferring the unknown characteristics of the population. Here we put particular emphasis on the construction of a default prior elicitation of the characteristics of the mixing distribution. We assess the comparative performance of our approach in real …
Gibbs Sampling for Bayesian Generalized Poisson Matrix Factorization
Organization for the Establishment of the Faculty of Sports Data Science and Business, Chuo University（中央大学体育数据科学与商业学部设立机构）；School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Wakayama Medical University（和歌山医科大学药学部）
Bayesian paradigm takes advantage of well fitting complicated survival models and feasible computing in survival analysis owing to the superiority in tackling the complex censoring scheme, compared with the frequentist paradigm. In this chapter, we aim to display the latest tendency in Bayesian computing, in the sense of automating the posterior sampling, through Bayesian analysis of survival modeling for multivariate survival outcomes with complicated data structure. Motivated by relaxing the strong assumption of proportionality and the restriction of a common baseline population, we propose …
The Dirichlet-multinomial (DM) distribution plays a fundamental role in modern statistical methodology development and application. Recently, the DM distribution and its variants have been used extensively to model multivariate count data generated by high-throughput sequencing technology in omics research due to its ability to accommodate the compositional structure of the data as well as overdispersion. A major limitation of the DM distribution is that it is unable to handle excess zeros typically found in practice which may bias inference. To fill this gap, we propose a novel Bayesian zero-…
Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions represents a challenging suite of problems in modern statistics. In this work we analyse the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson (COM-Poisson) distribution, a two parameter generalisation of the Poisson distribution. COM-Poisson regression modelling allows the flexibility to model dispersed count data as part of a generalised linear model (GLM) with a COM-Poisson response, where exogenous covariates control the mean and dispersion level of the response. The major difficulty with COM-Poisson regression is that the likelihood function contai…
We consider the problem of comparing two Poisson parameters from the Bayesian perspective. Kawasaki and Miyaoka (2012b) proposed the Bayesian index $P(λ_1 < λ_2 | X_1,X_2)$ and expressed it using the hypergeometric series. In this paper, under some conditions, we give four other expressions of the Bayesian index in terms of the cumulative distribution functions of beta, $F$, binomial, and negative binomial distribution. Next, we investigate the relationship between the Bayesian index and the $p$-value of the conditional test with the null hypothesis $H_0: λ_1 \geq λ_2 $ versus an alternative h…
