We propose to compute a sparse approximate inverse Cholesky factor $L$ of a dense covariance matrix $Θ$ by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the Gaussian distributions $\mathcal{N}(0, Θ)$ and $\mathcal{N}(0, L^{-\top} L^{-1})$, subject to a sparsity constraint. Surprisingly, this problem has a closed-form solution that can be computed efficiently, recovering the popular Vecchia approximation in spatial statistics. Based on recent results on the approximate sparsity of inverse Cholesky factors of $Θ$ obtained from pairwise evaluation of Green's functions of elliptic boundary-value problems at points $\{x_{i}\}_{1 \leq i \leq N} \subset \mathbb{R}^{d}$, we propose an elimination ordering and sparsity pattern that allows us to compute $ε$-approximate inverse Cholesky factors of such $Θ$ in computational complexity $\mathcal{O}(N \log(N/ε)^d)$ in space and $\mathcal{O}(N \log(N/ε)^{2d})$ in time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the best asymptotic complexity for this class of problems. Furthermore, our method is embarrassingly parallel, automatically exploits low-dimensional structure in the data, and can perform Gaussian-process regression in linear (in $N$) space complexity. Motivated by the optimality properties of our methods, we propose methods for applying it to the joint covariance of training and prediction points in Gaussian-process regression, greatly improving stability and computational cost. Finally, we show how to apply our method to the important setting of Gaussian processes with additive noise, sacrificing neither accuracy nor computational complexity.
We derive the Kullback-Leibler divergence for the normal-gamma distribution and show that it is identical to the Bayesian complexity penalty for the univariate general linear model with conjugate priors. Based on this finding, we provide two applications of the KL divergence, one in simulated and one in empirical data.
Positivity of the prior probability of Kullback-Leibler neighborhood around the true density, commonly known as the Kullback-Leibler property, plays a fundamental role in posterior consistency. A popular prior for Bayesian estimation is given by a Dirichlet mixture, where the kernels are chosen depending on the sample space and the class of densities to be estimated. The Kullback-Leibler property of the Dirichlet mixture prior has been shown for some special kernels like the normal density or Bernstein polynomial, under appropriate conditions. In this paper, we obtain easily verifiable suffici…
In this paper, we discuss a property of the Kullback--Leibler divergence measured between two models of the family of the location-scale distributions. We show that, if model $M_1$ and model $M_2$ are represented by location-scale distributions, then the minimum Kullback--Leibler divergence from $M_1$ to $M_2$, with respect to the parameters of $M_2$, is independent from the value of the parameters of $M_1$. Furthermore, we show that the property holds for models that can be transformed into location-scale distributions. We illustrate a possible application of the property in objective Bayesia…
Bayesian nonparametric statistics is an area of considerable research interest. While recently there has been an extensive concentration in developing Bayesian nonparametric procedures for model checking, the use of the Dirichlet process, in its simplest form, along with the Kullback-Leibler divergence is still an open problem. This is mainly attributed to the discreteness property of the Dirichlet process and that the Kullback-Leibler divergence between any discrete distribution and any continuous distribution is infinity. The approach proposed in this paper, which is based on incorporating t…
Information-theoretic measures such as the entropy, cross-entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two mixture models is a core primitive in many signal processing tasks. Since the Kullback-Leibler divergence of mixtures provably does not admit a closed-form formula, it is in practice either estimated using costly Monte-Carlo stochastic integration, approximated, or bounded using various techniques. We present a fast and generic method that builds algorithmically closed-form lower and upper bounds on the entropy, the cross-entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence of mixtures. We …
This work studies the variation in Kullback-Leibler divergence between random draws from some popular nonparametric processes and their baseline measure. In particular we focus on the Dirichlet process, the Pólya tree and the frequentist and Bayesian bootstrap. The results shed light on the support of these nonparametric processes. Of particular note are results for finite Pólya trees that are used to model continuous random probability measures. Our results provide guidance for specifying the parameterisation of the Pólya tree process that allows for greater understanding while highlighting l…
In this paper, we compare the performance of two methods for estimating Bayesian networks from data containing exogenous variables and random effects. The first method is fully Bayesian in which a prior distribution is placed on the exogenous variables, whereas the second method, which we call the residual approach, accounts for the effects of exogenous variables by using the notion of restricted maximum likelihood. We review the two score-based metrics, then study their performance by measuring the Kullback Leibler divergence, or distance, between the two resulting posterior density functions…
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT（赫尔辛基信息技术研究所（HIIT））；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）
We introduce a method, KL-LIME, for explaining predictions of Bayesian predictive models by projecting the information in the predictive distribution locally to a simpler, interpretable explanation model. The proposed approach combines the recent Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) method with ideas from Bayesian projection predictive variable selection methods. The information theoretic basis helps in navigating the trade-off between explanation fidelity and complexity. We demonstrate the method in explaining MNIST digit classifications made by a Bayesian deep convolutional…
The variational framework for learning inducing variables (Titsias, 2009a) has had a large impact on the Gaussian process literature. The framework may be interpreted as minimizing a rigorously defined Kullback-Leibler divergence between the approximating and posterior processes. To our knowledge this connection has thus far gone unremarked in the literature. In this paper we give a substantial generalization of the literature on this topic. We give a new proof of the result for infinite index sets which allows inducing points that are not data points and likelihoods that depend on all functio…
We propose a method to fuse posterior distributions learned from heterogeneous datasets. Our algorithm relies on a mean field assumption for both the fused model and the individual dataset posteriors and proceeds using a simple assign-and-average approach. The components of the dataset posteriors are assigned to the proposed global model components by solving a regularized variant of the assignment problem. The global components are then updated based on these assignments by their mean under a KL divergence. For exponential family variational distributions, our formulation leads to an efficien…
Tensor factorizations with nonnegative constraints have found application in analyzing data from cyber traffic, social networks, and other areas. We consider application data best described as being generated by a Poisson process (e.g., count data), which leads to sparse tensors that can be modeled by sparse factor matrices. In this paper we investigate efficient techniques for computing an appropriate canonical polyadic tensor factorization based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence function. We propose novel subproblem solvers within the standard alternating block variable approach. Our new me…
On The Linear Convergence of Bregman Proximal Gradient Methods with Applications to Kullback--Leibler regression
University of Toulouse, Toulouse INP, CNRS, IRIT（图卢兹大学）；MaLGa Center, DIBRIS, University of Genoa（热那亚大学）；Laboratoire J. A. Dieudonné, Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学）
A Unified Kullback--Leibler Divergence Analysis of Generative Diffusion Models via Entropy Production Rate
Department of Mathematics, The University of Hong Kong（香港大学数学系）；Materials Innovation Institute for Life Sciences and Energy (MILES), HKU-SIRI, Shenzhen（港大深圳研究院生命科学与能源材料创新研究所）
