Journal of Machine Learning Research最新文献

We develop an approach for Bayesian learning of spatiotemporal dynamical mechanistic models. Such learning consists of statistical emulation of the mechanistic system that can efficiently interpolate the output of the system from arbitrary inputs. The emulated learner can then be used to train the system from noisy data achieved by melding information from observed data with the emulated mechanistic system. This joint melding of mechanistic systems employ hierarchical state-space models with Gaussian process regression. Assuming the dynamical system is controlled by a finite collection of inputs, Gaussian process regression learns the effect of these parameters through a number of training runs, driving the stochastic innovations of the spatiotemporal state-space component. This enables efficient modeling of the dynamics over space and time. This article details exact inference with analytically accessible posterior distributions in hierarchical matrix-variate Normal and Wishart models in designing the emulator. This step obviates expensive iterative algorithms such as Markov chain Monte Carlo or variational approximations. We also show how emulation is applicable to large-scale emulation by designing a dynamic Bayesian transfer learning framework. Inference on $\eta$ proceeds using Markov chain Monte Carlo as a post-emulation step using the emulator as a regression component. We demonstrate this framework through solving inverse problems arising in the analysis of ordinary and partial nonlinear differential equations and, in addition, to a black-box computer model generating spatiotemporal dynamics across a graphical model.

Gaussian processes are pervasive in functional data analysis, machine learning, and spatial statistics for modeling complex dependencies. Scientific data are often heterogeneous in their inputs and contain multiple known discrete groups of samples; thus, it is desirable to leverage the similarity among groups while accounting for heterogeneity across groups. We propose multi-group Gaussian processes (MGGPs) defined over $R^p\times 𝒞$ , where $𝒞$ is a finite set representing the group label, by developing general classes of valid (positive definite) covariance functions on such domains. MGGPs are able to accurately recover relationships between the groups and efficiently share strength across samples from all groups during inference, while capturing distinct group-specific behaviors in the conditional posterior distributions. We demonstrate inference in MGGPs through simulation experiments, and we apply our proposed MGGP regression framework to gene expression data to illustrate the behavior and enhanced inferential capabilities of multi-group Gaussian processes by jointly modeling continuous and categorical variables.

High-dimensional healthcare data, such as electronic health records (EHR) data and claims data, present two primary challenges due to the large number of variables and the need to consolidate data from multiple clinical sites. The third key challenge is the potential existence of heterogeneity in terms of covariate shift. In this paper, we propose a distributed learning algorithm accounting for covariate shift to estimate the average treatment effect (ATE) for high-dimensional data, named DisC²o-HD. Leveraging the surrogate likelihood method, our method calibrates the estimates of the propensity score and outcome models to approximately attain the desired covariate balancing property, while accounting for the covariate shift across multiple clinical sites. We show that our distributed covariate balancing propensity score estimator can approximate the pooled estimator, which is obtained by pooling the data from multiple sites together. The proposed estimator remains consistent if either the propensity score model or the outcome regression model is correctly specified. The semiparametric efficiency bound is achieved when both the propensity score and the outcome models are correctly specified. We conduct simulation studies to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm; additionally, we apply the algorithm to a real-world data set to present the readiness of implementation and validity.

Varying coefficient models are popular for estimating nonlinear regression functions in functional data models. Their Bayesian variants have received limited attention in large data applications, primarily due to prohibitively slow posterior computations using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. We introduce Bayesian data sketching for varying coefficient models to obviate computational challenges presented by large sample sizes. To address the challenges of analyzing large data, we compress the functional response vector and predictor matrix by a random linear transformation to achieve dimension reduction and conduct inference on the compressed data. Our approach distinguishes itself from several existing methods for analyzing large functional data in that it requires neither the development of new models or algorithms, nor any specialized computational hardware while delivering fully model-based Bayesian inference. Well-established methods and algorithms for varying coefficient regression models can be applied to the compressed data. We establish posterior contraction rates for estimating the varying coefficients and predicting the outcome at new locations with the randomly compressed data model. We use simulation experiments and analyze remote sensed vegetation data to empirically illustrate the inferential and computational efficiency of our approach.

A notable challenge of leveraging Electronic Health Records (EHR) for treatment effect assessment is the lack of precise information on important clinical variables, including the treatment received and the response. Both treatment information and response cannot be accurately captured by readily available EHR features in many studies and require labor-intensive manual chart review to precisely annotate, which limits the number of available gold standard labels on these key variables. We considered average treatment effect (ATE) estimation when 1) exact treatment and outcome variables are only observed together in a small labeled subset and 2) noisy surrogates of treatment and outcome, such as relevant prescription and diagnosis codes, along with potential confounders are observed for all subjects. We derived the efficient influence function for ATE and used it to construct a semi-supervised multiple machine learning (SMMAL) estimator. We justified that our SMMAL ATE estimator is semi-parametric efficient with B-spline regression under low-dimensional smooth models. We developed the adaptive sparsity/model doubly robust estimation under high-dimensional logistic propensity score and outcome regression models. Results from simulation studies demonstrated the validity of our SMMAL method and its superiority over supervised and unsupervised benchmarks. We applied SMMAL to the assessment of targeted therapies for metastatic colorectal cancer in comparison to chemotherapy.

We consider the problem of causal discovery from longitudinal observational data. We develop a novel framework that simultaneously discovers the time-lagged causality and the possibly cyclic instantaneous causality. Under common causal discovery assumptions, combined with additional instrumental information typically available in longitudinal data, we prove the proposed model is generally identifiable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first causal identification theory for directed graphs with general cyclic patterns that achieves unique causal identifiability. Structural learning is carried out in a fully Bayesian fashion. Through extensive simulations and an application to the Women's Interagency HIV Study, we demonstrate the identifiability, utility, and superiority of the proposed model against state-of-the-art alternative methods.

Bayesian non-parametric methods based on Dirichlet process mixtures have seen tremendous success in various domains and are appealing in being able to borrow information by clustering samples that share identical parameters. However, such methods can face hurdles in heterogeneous settings where objects are expected to cluster only along a subset of axes or where clusters of samples share only a subset of identical parameters. We overcome such limitations by developing a novel class of product of Dirichlet process location-scale mixtures that enables independent clustering at multiple scales, which results in varying levels of information sharing across samples. First, we develop the approach for independent multivariate data. Subsequently we generalize it to multivariate time-series data under the framework of multi-subject Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models that is our primary focus, which go beyond parametric single-subject VAR models. We establish posterior consistency and develop efficient posterior computation for implementation. Extensive numerical studies involving VAR models show distinct advantages over competing methods in terms of estimation, clustering, and feature selection accuracy. Our resting state fMRI analysis from the Human Connectome Project reveals biologically interpretable connectivity differences between distinct intelligence groups, while another air pollution application illustrates the superior forecasting accuracy compared to alternate methods.

Quantifying spatial and/or temporal associations in multivariate geolocated data of different types is achievable via spatial random effects in a Bayesian hierarchical model, but severe computational bottlenecks arise when spatial dependence is encoded as a latent Gaussian process (GP) in the increasingly common large scale data settings on which we focus. The scenario worsens in non-Gaussian models because the reduced analytical tractability leads to additional hurdles to computational efficiency. In this article, we introduce Bayesian models of spatially referenced data in which the likelihood or the latent process (or both) are not Gaussian. First, we exploit the advantages of spatial processes built via directed acyclic graphs, in which case the spatial nodes enter the Bayesian hierarchy and lead to posterior sampling via routine Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Second, motivated by the possible inefficiencies of popular gradient-based sampling approaches in the multivariate contexts on which we focus, we introduce the simplified manifold preconditioner adaptation (SiMPA) algorithm which uses second order information about the target but avoids expensive matrix operations. We demostrate the performance and efficiency improvements of our methods relative to alternatives in extensive synthetic and real world remote sensing and community ecology applications with large scale data at up to hundreds of thousands of spatial locations and up to tens of outcomes. Software for the proposed methods is part of R package meshed, available on CRAN.

Policy learning is an important component of many real-world learning systems. A major challenge in policy learning is how to adapt efficiently to unseen environments or tasks. Recently, it has been suggested to exploit invariant conditional distributions to learn models that generalize better to unseen environments. However, assuming invariance of entire conditional distributions (which we call full invariance) may be too strong of an assumption in practice. In this paper, we introduce a relaxation of full invariance called effect-invariance (e-invariance for short) and prove that it is sufficient, under suitable assumptions, for zero-shot policy generalization. We also discuss an extension that exploits e-invariance when we have a small sample from the test environment, enabling few-shot policy generalization. Our work does not assume an underlying causal graph or that the data are generated by a structural causal model; instead, we develop testing procedures to test e-invariance directly from data. We present empirical results using simulated data and a mobile health intervention dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

In recent years, there has been an exponentially increased amount of point clouds collected with irregular shapes in various areas. Motivated by the importance of solid modeling for point clouds, we develop a novel and efficient smoothing tool based on multivariate splines over the triangulation to extract the underlying signal and build up a 3D solid model from the point cloud. The proposed method can denoise or deblur the point cloud effectively, provide a multi-resolution reconstruction of the actual signal, and handle sparse and irregularly distributed point clouds to recover the underlying trajectory. In addition, our method provides a natural way of numerosity data reduction. We establish the theoretical guarantees of the proposed method, including the convergence rate and asymptotic normality of the estimator, and show that the convergence rate achieves optimal nonparametric convergence. We also introduce a bootstrap method to quantify the uncertainty of the estimators. Through extensive simulation studies and a real data example, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over traditional smoothing methods in terms of estimation accuracy and efficiency of data reduction.