In probability theory and statistics, the exponential distribution or negative exponential distribution is the probability distribution of the distance between events in a Poisson point process, i.e., a process in which events occur continuously and independently at a constant average rate; the distance parameter could be any meaningful mono-dimensional measure of the process, such as time between production errors, or length along a roll of fabric in the weaving manufacturing process. It is a particular case of the gamma distribution. It is the continuous analogue of the geometric distribution, and it has the key property of being memoryless. In addition to being used for the analysis of Poisson point processes it is found in various other contexts.
Unsupervised learning is a method in machine learning where, in contrast to supervised learning, algorithms learn patterns exclusively from unlabeled data. The hope is that through mimicry, which is an important mode of learning in people, the machine is forced to build a concise representation of its world and then generate imaginative content from it.
In probability theory and information theory, the mutual information (MI) of two random variables is a measure of the mutual dependence between the two variables. More specifically, it quantifies the "amount of information" obtained about one random variable by observing the other random variable. The concept of mutual information is intimately linked to that of entropy of a random variable, a fundamental notion in information theory that quantifies the expected "amount of information" held in a random variable.
The information bottleneck method is a technique in information theory introduced by Naftali Tishby, Fernando C. Pereira, and William Bialek. It is designed for finding the best tradeoff between accuracy and complexity (compression) when summarizing a random variable X, given a joint probability distribution p(X,Y) between X and an observed relevant variable Y - and self-described as providing "a surprisingly rich framework for discussing a variety of problems in signal processing and learning".
Belief propagation, also known as sum–product message passing, is a message-passing algorithm for performing inference on graphical models, such as Bayesian networks and Markov random fields. It calculates the marginal distribution for each unobserved node, conditional on any observed nodes. Belief propagation is commonly used in artificial intelligence and information theory, and has demonstrated empirical success in numerous applications, including low-density parity-check codes, turbo codes, free energy approximation, and satisfiability.
In probability and statistics, the Dirichlet distribution (after Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet), often denoted , is a family of continuous multivariate probability distributions parameterized by a vector of positive reals. It is a multivariate generalization of the beta distribution, hence its alternative name of multivariate beta distribution (MBD). Dirichlet distributions are commonly used as prior distributions in Bayesian statistics, and in fact, the Dirichlet distribution is the conjugate prior of the categorical distribution and multinomial distribution.
A Boltzmann machine, named after Ludwig Boltzmann is a stochastic spin-glass model with an external field, i.e., a Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model, that is a stochastic Ising model. It is a statistical physics technique applied in the context of cognitive science. It is also classified as a Markov random field.
Variational Bayesian methods are a family of techniques for approximating intractable integrals arising in Bayesian inference and machine learning. They are typically used in complex statistical models consisting of observed variables as well as unknown parameters and latent variables, with various sorts of relationships among the three types of random variables, as might be described by a graphical model. As typical in Bayesian inference, the parameters and latent variables are grouped together as "unobserved variables". Variational Bayesian methods are primarily used for two purposes:
- To provide an analytical approximation to the posterior probability of the unobserved variables, in order to do statistical inference over these variables.
- To derive a lower bound for the marginal likelihood of the observed data. This is typically used for performing model selection, the general idea being that a higher marginal likelihood for a given model indicates a better fit of the data by that model and hence a greater probability that the model in question was the one that generated the data.
Particle filters, or sequential Monte Carlo methods, are a set of Monte Carlo algorithms used to find approximate solutions for filtering problems for nonlinear state-space systems, such as signal processing and Bayesian statistical inference. The filtering problem consists of estimating the internal states in dynamical systems when partial observations are made and random perturbations are present in the sensors as well as in the dynamical system. The objective is to compute the posterior distributions of the states of a Markov process, given the noisy and partial observations. The term "particle filters" was first coined in 1996 by Pierre Del Moral about mean-field interacting particle methods used in fluid mechanics since the beginning of the 1960s. The term "Sequential Monte Carlo" was coined by Jun S. Liu and Rong Chen in 1998.
In information theory, the cross-entropy between two probability distributions and over the same underlying set of events measures the average number of bits needed to identify an event drawn from the set if a coding scheme used for the set is optimized for an estimated probability distribution , rather than the true distribution .
In statistics and information theory, a maximum entropy probability distribution has entropy that is at least as great as that of all other members of a specified class of probability distributions. According to the principle of maximum entropy, if nothing is known about a distribution except that it belongs to a certain class, then the distribution with the largest entropy should be chosen as the least-informative default. The motivation is twofold: first, maximizing entropy minimizes the amount of prior information built into the distribution; second, many physical systems tend to move towards maximal entropy configurations over time.
A factor graph is a bipartite graph representing the factorization of a function. In probability theory and its applications, factor graphs are used to represent factorization of a probability distribution function, enabling efficient computations, such as the computation of marginal distributions through the sum–product algorithm. One of the important success stories of factor graphs and the sum–product algorithm is the decoding of capacity-approaching error-correcting codes, such as LDPC and turbo codes.
In probability theory, statistics, and machine learning, recursive Bayesian estimation, also known as a Bayes filter, is a general probabilistic approach for estimating an unknown probability density function (PDF) recursively over time using incoming measurements and a mathematical process model. The process relies heavily upon mathematical concepts and models that are theorized within a study of prior and posterior probabilities known as Bayesian statistics.
The softmax function, also known as softargmax or normalized exponential function, converts a vector of K real numbers into a probability distribution of K possible outcomes. It is a generalization of the logistic function to multiple dimensions, and used in multinomial logistic regression. The softmax function is often used as the last activation function of a neural network to normalize the output of a network to a probability distribution over predicted output classes.
An autoencoder is a type of artificial neural network used to learn efficient codings of unlabeled data. An autoencoder learns two functions: an encoding function that transforms the input data, and a decoding function that recreates the input data from the encoded representation. The autoencoder learns an efficient representation (encoding) for a set of data, typically for dimensionality reduction.
A restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is a generative stochastic artificial neural network that can learn a probability distribution over its set of inputs.
t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) is a statistical method for visualizing high-dimensional data by giving each datapoint a location in a two or three-dimensional map. It is based on Stochastic Neighbor Embedding originally developed by Geoffrey Hinton and Sam Roweis, where Laurens van der Maaten proposed the t-distributed variant. It is a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique for embedding high-dimensional data for visualization in a low-dimensional space of two or three dimensions. Specifically, it models each high-dimensional object by a two- or three-dimensional point in such a way that similar objects are modeled by nearby points and dissimilar objects are modeled by distant points with high probability.
In machine learning, a deep belief network (DBN) is a generative graphical model, or alternatively a class of deep neural network, composed of multiple layers of latent variables, with connections between the layers but not between units within each layer.
Mixture of experts (MoE) is a machine learning technique where multiple expert networks (learners) are used to divide a problem space into homogeneous regions. It differs from ensemble techniques in that for MoE, typically only one or a few expert models are run for each input, whereas in ensemble techniques, all models are run on every input.
An energy-based model (EBM) (Canonical Ensemble Learning(CEL) or Learning via Canonical Ensemble (LCE)) is an application of canonical ensemble formulation of statistical physics for learning from data problems. The approach prominently appears in generative models.
