IDS.190 - Topics in Bayesian Modeling and Computation Abstract: Many algorithms take prohibitively long to run on modern, large datasets. But even in complex data sets, many data points may be at least partially redundant for some task of interest. So one might instead construct and use a weighted subset of the data (called a "coreset") that is much smaller than the original dataset. Typically running algorithms on a much smaller data set will take much less computing time, but…

IDS.190 - Topics in Bayesian Modeling and Computation Speaker: Brian Patton (Google AI) Abstract: TensorFlow Probability provides a toolkit to enable researchers and practitioners to integrate uncertainty with gradient-based deep learning on modern accelerators. In this talk we'll walk through some practical problems addressed using TFP; discuss the high-level interfaces, goals, and principles of the library; and touch on some recent innovations in describing probabilistic graphical models. Time-permitting, we may touch on a couple areas of research interest for the…

IDS.190 Topics in Bayesian Modeling and Computation *Note:  The speaker this week will give two shorter talks within the usual session Title:   Behavior of the Gibbs sampler in the imbalanced case Abstract:   Many modern applications collect highly imbalanced categorical data, with some categories relatively rare. Bayesian hierarchical models combat data sparsity by borrowing information, while also quantifying uncertainty. However, posterior computation presents a fundamental barrier to routine use; a single class of algorithms does not work well in all settings and…

IDS.190 – Topics in Bayesian Modeling and Computation Abstract: Probabilistic programming is an emerging field at the intersection of programming languages, probability theory, and artificial intelligence. This talk will show how to use recently developed probabilistic programming languages to build systems for robust 3D computer vision, without requiring any labeled training data; for automatic modeling of complex real-world time series; and for machine-assisted analysis of experimental data that is too small and/or messy for standard approaches from machine learning and…

IDS.190 – Topics in Bayesian Modeling and Computation Abstract: MCMC methods yield approximations that converge to quantities of interest in the limit of the number of iterations. This iterative asymptotic justification is not ideal: it stands at odds with current trends in computing hardware. Namely, it would often be computationally preferable to run many short chains in parallel, but such an approach is flawed because of the so-called "burn-in" bias.  This talk will first describe that issue and some known…