Download or read book Practical Methods for Scalable Bayesian and Causal Inference with Provable Quality Guarantees written by Raj Agrawal (Computer scientist) and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many scientific and decision-making tasks require learning complex relationships between a set of p covariates and a target response, from N observed datapoints with N “p. For example, in genomics and precision medicine, there may be thousands or millions of genetic and environmental covariates but just hundreds or thousands of observed individuals. Researchers would like to (1) identify a small set of factors associated with diseases, (2) quantify these factors' effects, and (3) test for causality. Unfortunately, in this high-dimensional data regime, inference is statistically and computationally challenging due to non-linear interaction effects, unobserved confounders, and the lack of randomized experimental data. In this thesis, I start by addressing the problems of variable selection and estimation when there are non-linear interactions and fewer datapoints than covariates. Unlike previous methods whose runtimes scale at least quadratically in the number of covariates, my new method (SKIM-FA) uses a kernel trick to perform inference in linear time by exploiting special interaction structure. While SKIM-FA identifies potential risk-factors, not all of these factors need be causal. So next I aim to identify causal factors to aid in decision making. To this end, I show when we can extract causal relationships from observational data, even in the presence of unobserved confounders, non-linear effects, and a lack of randomized controlled data. In the last part of my thesis, I focus on experimental design. Specifically, if the observational data is not adequate, how do we optimally collect new experimental data to test if particular causal relationships of interest exist.
Download or read book Scaling Bayesian Inference written by Jonathan Hunter Huggins and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bayesian statistical modeling and inference allow scientists, engineers, and companies to learn from data while incorporating prior knowledge, sharing power across experiments via hierarchical models, quantifying their uncertainty about what they have learned, and making predictions about an uncertain future. While Bayesian inference is conceptually straightforward, in practice calculating expectations with respect to the posterior can rarely be done in closed form. Hence, users of Bayesian models must turn to approximate inference methods. But modern statistical applications create many challenges: the latent parameter is often high-dimensional, the models can be complex, and there are large amounts of data that may only be available as a stream or distributed across many computers. Existing algorithm have so far remained unsatisfactory because they either (1) fail to scale to large data sets, (2) provide limited approximation quality, or (3) fail to provide guarantees on the quality of inference. To simultaneously overcome these three possible limitations, I leverage the critical insight that in the large-scale setting, much of the data is redundant. Therefore, it is possible to compress data into a form that admits more efficient inference. I develop two approaches to compressing data for improved scalability. The first is to construct a coreset: a small, weighted subset of our data that is representative of the complete dataset. The second, which I call PASS-GLM, is to construct an exponential family model that approximates the original model. The data is compressed by calculating the finite-dimensional sufficient statistics of the data under the exponential family. An advantage of the compression approach to approximate inference is that an approximate likelihood substitutes for the original likelihood. I show how such approximate likelihoods lend them themselves to a priori analysis and develop general tools for proving when an approximate likelihood will lead to a high-quality approximate posterior. I apply these tools to obtain a priori guarantees on the approximate posteriors produced by PASS-GLM. Finally, for cases when users must rely on algorithms that do not have a priori accuracy guarantees, I develop a method for comparing the quality of the inferences produced by competing algorithms. The method comes equipped with provable guarantees while also being computationally efficient.
Download or read book Patterns of Scalable Bayesian Inference written by Elaine Angelino and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Datasets are growing not just in size but in complexity, creating a demand for rich models and quantification of uncertainty. Bayesian methods are an excellent fit for this demand, but scaling Bayesian inference is a challenge. In response to this challenge, there has been considerable recent work based on varying assumptions about model structure, underlying computational resources, and the importance of asymptotic correctness. As a result, there is a zoo of ideas with a wide range of assumptions and applicability. In this paper, we seek to identify unifying principles, patterns, and intuitions for scaling Bayesian inference. We review existing work on utilizing modern computing resources with both MCMC and variational approximation techniques. From this taxonomy of ideas, we characterize the general principles that have proven successful for designing scalable inference procedures and comment on the path forward.
Download or read book A Concise Introduction to Decentralized POMDPs written by Frans A. Oliehoek and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces multiagent planning under uncertainty as formalized by decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs). The intended audience is researchers and graduate students working in the fields of artificial intelligence related to sequential decision making: reinforcement learning, decision-theoretic planning for single agents, classical multiagent planning, decentralized control, and operations research.
Download or read book Personalized and Precision Medicine Informatics written by Terrence Adam and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book adopts an integrated and workflow-based treatment of the field of personalized and precision medicine (PPM). Outlined within are established, proven and mature workflows as well as emerging and highly-promising opportunities for development. Each workflow is reviewed in terms of its operation and how they are enabled by a multitude of informatics methods and infrastructures. The book goes on to describe which parts are crucial to discovery and which are essential to delivery and how each of these interface and feed into one-another. Personalized and Precision Medicine Informatics provides a comprehensive review of the integrative as well as interpretive nature of the topic and brings together a large body of literature to define the topic and ensure that this is the key reference for the topic. It is an unique contribution that is positioned to be an essential guide for both PPM experts and non-experts, and for both informatics and non-informatics professionals.
Download or read book Discovering Causal Structure written by Clark Glymour and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discovering Causal Structure: Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Science, and Statistical Modeling provides information pertinent to the fundamental aspects of a computer program called TETRAD. This book discusses the version of the TETRAD program, which is designed to assist in the search for causal explanations of statistical data. or alternative models. This text then examines the notion of applying artificial intelligence methods to problems of statistical model specification. Other chapters consider how the TETRAD program can help to find god alternative models where they exist, and how it can help detect the existence of important neglected variables. This book discusses as well the procedures for specifying a model or models to account for non-experimental or quasi-experimental data. The final chapter presents a description of the format of input files and a description of each command. This book is a valuable resource for social scientists and researchers.
Download or read book Statistical Learning with Sparsity written by Trevor Hastie and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover New Methods for Dealing with High-Dimensional DataA sparse statistical model has only a small number of nonzero parameters or weights; therefore, it is much easier to estimate and interpret than a dense model. Statistical Learning with Sparsity: The Lasso and Generalizations presents methods that exploit sparsity to help recover the underl
Download or read book Regression and Other Stories written by Andrew Gelman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical approach to using regression and computation to solve real-world problems of estimation, prediction, and causal inference.
Download or read book Richly Parameterized Linear Models written by James S. Hodges and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A First Step toward a Unified Theory of Richly Parameterized Linear ModelsUsing mixed linear models to analyze data often leads to results that are mysterious, inconvenient, or wrong. Further compounding the problem, statisticians lack a cohesive resource to acquire a systematic, theory-based understanding of models with random effects.Richly Param
Download or read book Decision Making Under Uncertainty written by Mykel J. Kochenderfer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective, covering both theory and applications ranging from speech recognition to airborne collision avoidance. Many important problems involve decision making under uncertainty—that is, choosing actions based on often imperfect observations, with unknown outcomes. Designers of automated decision support systems must take into account the various sources of uncertainty while balancing the multiple objectives of the system. This book provides an introduction to the challenges of decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective. It presents both the theory behind decision making models and algorithms and a collection of example applications that range from speech recognition to aircraft collision avoidance. Focusing on two methods for designing decision agents, planning and reinforcement learning, the book covers probabilistic models, introducing Bayesian networks as a graphical model that captures probabilistic relationships between variables; utility theory as a framework for understanding optimal decision making under uncertainty; Markov decision processes as a method for modeling sequential problems; model uncertainty; state uncertainty; and cooperative decision making involving multiple interacting agents. A series of applications shows how the theoretical concepts can be applied to systems for attribute-based person search, speech applications, collision avoidance, and unmanned aircraft persistent surveillance. Decision Making Under Uncertainty unifies research from different communities using consistent notation, and is accessible to students and researchers across engineering disciplines who have some prior exposure to probability theory and calculus. It can be used as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in fields including computer science, aerospace and electrical engineering, and management science. It will also be a valuable professional reference for researchers in a variety of disciplines.
Download or read book Heuristics Probability and Casuality written by Rina Dechter and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of Artificial Intelligence has changed a great deal since the 80s, and arguably no one has played a larger role in that change than Judea Pearl. Judea Pearl's work made probability the prevailing language of modern AI and, perhaps more significantly, it placed the elaboration of crisp and meaningful models, and of effective computational mechanisms, at the center of AI research. This book is a collection of articles in honor of Judea Pearl, written by close colleagues and former students. Its three main parts, heuristics, probabilistic reasoning, and causality, correspond to the titles of the three ground-breaking books authored by Judea, and are followed by a section of short reminiscences. In this volume, leading authors look at the state of the art in the fields of heuristic, probabilistic, and causal reasoning, in light of Judea's seminal contributors. The authors list include Blai Bonet, Eric Hansen, Robert Holte, Jonathan Schaeffer, Ariel Felner, Richard Korf, Austin Parker, Dana Nau, V. S. Subrahmanian, Hector Geffner, Ira Pohl, Adnan Darwiche, Thomas Dean, Rina Dechter, Bozhena Bidyuk, Robert Matescu, Emma Rollon, Michael I. Jordan, Michael Kearns, Daphne Koller, Brian Milch, Stuart Russell, Azaria Paz, David Poole, Ingrid Zukerman, Carlos Brito, Philip Dawid, Felix Elwert, Christopher Winship, Michael Gelfond, Nelson Rushton, Moises Goldszmidt, Sander Greenland, Joseph Y. Halpern, Christopher Hitchcock, David Heckerman, Ross Shachter, Vladimir Lifschitz, Thomas Richardson, James Robins, Yoav Shoham, Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, Richard Scheines, Robert Tillman, Wolfgang Spohn, Jian Tian, Ilya Shpitser, Nils Nilsson, Edward T. Purcell, and David Spiegelhalter.
Download or read book Learning Bayesian Networks written by Richard E. Neapolitan and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 2004 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first edition book, methods are discussed for doing inference in Bayesian networks and inference diagrams. Hundreds of examples and problems allow readers to grasp the information. Some of the topics discussed include Pearl's message passing algorithm, Parameter Learning: 2 Alternatives, Parameter Learning r Alternatives, Bayesian Structure Learning, and Constraint-Based Learning. For expert systems developers and decision theorists.
Download or read book Causal Inference in Econometrics written by Van-Nam Huynh and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-28 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is devoted to the analysis of causal inference which is one of the most difficult tasks in data analysis: when two phenomena are observed to be related, it is often difficult to decide whether one of them causally influences the other one, or whether these two phenomena have a common cause. This analysis is the main focus of this volume. To get a good understanding of the causal inference, it is important to have models of economic phenomena which are as accurate as possible. Because of this need, this volume also contains papers that use non-traditional economic models, such as fuzzy models and models obtained by using neural networks and data mining techniques. It also contains papers that apply different econometric models to analyze real-life economic dependencies.
Download or read book Neural Approaches to Conversational AI Question Answering Task Oriented Dialogues and Social Chatbots written by Jianfeng Gao and published by Foundations and Trends(r) in I. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph is the first survey of neural approaches to conversational AI that targets Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval audiences. It provides a comprehensive survey of the neural approaches to conversational AI that have been developed in the last few years, covering QA, task-oriented and social bots with a unified view of optimal decision making.The authors draw connections between modern neural approaches and traditional approaches, allowing readers to better understand why and how the research has evolved and to shed light on how they can move forward. They also present state-of-the-art approaches to training dialogue agents using both supervised and reinforcement learning. Finally, the authors sketch out the landscape of conversational systems developed in the research community and released in industry, demonstrating via case studies the progress that has been made and the challenges that are still being faced.Neural Approaches to Conversational AI is a valuable resource for students, researchers, and software developers. It provides a unified view, as well as a detailed presentation of the important ideas and insights needed to understand and create modern dialogue agents that will be instrumental to making world knowledge and services accessible to millions of users in ways that seem natural and intuitive.
Download or read book Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments written by Ron Kohavi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Getting numbers is easy; getting numbers you can trust is hard. This practical guide by experimentation leaders at Google, LinkedIn, and Microsoft will teach you how to accelerate innovation using trustworthy online controlled experiments, or A/B tests. Based on practical experiences at companies that each run more than 20,000 controlled experiments a year, the authors share examples, pitfalls, and advice for students and industry professionals getting started with experiments, plus deeper dives into advanced topics for practitioners who want to improve the way they make data-driven decisions. Learn how to • Use the scientific method to evaluate hypotheses using controlled experiments • Define key metrics and ideally an Overall Evaluation Criterion • Test for trustworthiness of the results and alert experimenters to violated assumptions • Build a scalable platform that lowers the marginal cost of experiments close to zero • Avoid pitfalls like carryover effects and Twyman's law • Understand how statistical issues play out in practice.
Download or read book Optimization for Machine Learning written by Suvrit Sra and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An up-to-date account of the interplay between optimization and machine learning, accessible to students and researchers in both communities. The interplay between optimization and machine learning is one of the most important developments in modern computational science. Optimization formulations and methods are proving to be vital in designing algorithms to extract essential knowledge from huge volumes of data. Machine learning, however, is not simply a consumer of optimization technology but a rapidly evolving field that is itself generating new optimization ideas. This book captures the state of the art of the interaction between optimization and machine learning in a way that is accessible to researchers in both fields. Optimization approaches have enjoyed prominence in machine learning because of their wide applicability and attractive theoretical properties. The increasing complexity, size, and variety of today's machine learning models call for the reassessment of existing assumptions. This book starts the process of reassessment. It describes the resurgence in novel contexts of established frameworks such as first-order methods, stochastic approximations, convex relaxations, interior-point methods, and proximal methods. It also devotes attention to newer themes such as regularized optimization, robust optimization, gradient and subgradient methods, splitting techniques, and second-order methods. Many of these techniques draw inspiration from other fields, including operations research, theoretical computer science, and subfields of optimization. The book will enrich the ongoing cross-fertilization between the machine learning community and these other fields, and within the broader optimization community.
Download or read book Federated Learning written by Qiang Yang and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to federated learning, ranging from the basic knowledge and theories to various key applications. Privacy and incentive issues are the focus of this book. It is timely as federated learning is becoming popular after the release of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Since federated learning aims to enable a machine model to be collaboratively trained without each party exposing private data to others. This setting adheres to regulatory requirements of data privacy protection such as GDPR. This book contains three main parts. Firstly, it introduces different privacy-preserving methods for protecting a federated learning model against different types of attacks such as data leakage and/or data poisoning. Secondly, the book presents incentive mechanisms which aim to encourage individuals to participate in the federated learning ecosystems. Last but not least, this book also describes how federated learning can be applied in industry and business to address data silo and privacy-preserving problems. The book is intended for readers from both the academia and the industry, who would like to learn about federated learning, practice its implementation, and apply it in their own business. Readers are expected to have some basic understanding of linear algebra, calculus, and neural network. Additionally, domain knowledge in FinTech and marketing would be helpful.”
