This paper addresses the problem of filtering with a state-space model. Standard approaches for filtering assume that a probabilistic model for observations (i.e. the observation model) is given explicitly or at least parametrically. We consider a setting where this assumption is not satisfied; we assume that the knowledge of the observation model is only provided by examples of state-observation pairs. This setting is important and appears when state variables are defined as quantities that are very different from the observations. We propose Kernel Monte Carlo Filter, a novel filtering method that is focused on this setting. Our approach is based on the framework of kernel mean embeddings, which enables nonparametric posterior inference using the state-observation examples. The proposed method represents state distributions as weighted samples, propagates these samples by sampling, estimates the state posteriors by Kernel Bayes' Rule, and resamples by Kernel Herding. In particular, the sampling and resampling procedures are novel in being expressed using kernel mean embeddings, so we theoretically analyze their behaviors. We reveal the following properties, which are similar to those of corresponding procedures in particle methods: (1) the performance of sampling can degrade if the effective sample size of a weighted sample is small; (2) resampling improves the sampling performance by increasing the effective sample size. We first demonstrate these theoretical findings by synthetic experiments. Then we show the effectiveness of the proposed filter by artificial and real data experiments, which include vision-based mobile robot localization.
Another related setting is that the observation model itself is given and sampling is possible, but computation of its values is expensive or even impossible. Therefore ordinary Bayes' rule cannot be used for filtering. To overcome this limitation, @cite_14 and @cite_10 proposed to apply approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods. For each iteration of filtering, these methods generate state-observation pairs from the observation model. Then they pick some pairs that have close observations to the test observation, and regard the states in these pairs as samples from a posterior. Note that these methods are not applicable to our setting, since we do not assume that the observation model is provided. That said, our method may be applied to their setting, by generating state-observation examples from the observation model. While such a comparison would be interesting, this paper focuses on comparison among the methods applicable to our setting.
@cite_14 @cite_10
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Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has become a popular technique to facilitate Bayesian inference from complex models. In this article we present an ABC approximation designed to perform biased filtering for a Hidden Markov Model when the likelihood function is intractable. We use a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm to both fit and sample from our ABC approximation of the target probability density. This approach is shown to, empirically, be more accurate w.r.t. the original filter than competing methods. The theoretical bias of our method is investigated; it is shown that the bias goes to zero at the expense of increased computational effort. Our approach is illustrated on a constrained sequential lasso for portfolio allocation to 15 constituents of the FTSE 100 share index. Bayesian single-target tracking techniques can be extended to a multiple-target environment by viewing the multiple-target state as a random finite set, but evaluating the multiple-target posterior distribution is currently computationally intractable for real-time applications. A practical alternative to the optimal Bayes multitarget filter is the probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter, which propagates the first-order moment of the multitarget posterior instead of the posterior distribution itself. It has been shown that the PHD is the best-fit approximation of the multitarget posterior in an information-theoretic sense. The method avoids the need for explicit data association, as the target states are viewed as a single global target state, and the identities of the targets are not part of the tracking framework. Sequential Monte Carlo approximations of the PHD using particle filter techniques have been implemented, showing the potential of this technique for real-time tracking applications. This paper presents mathematical proofs of convergence for the particle filtering algorithm and gives bounds for the mean-square error A Bayesian model of learning to learn by sampling from multiple tasks is presented. The multiple tasks are themselves generated by sampling from a distribution over an environment of related tasks. Such an environment is shown to be naturally modelled within a Bayesian context by the concept of an objective prior distribution. It is argued that for many common machine learning problems, although in general we do not know the true (objective) prior for the problem, we do have some idea of a set of possible priors to which the true prior belongs. It is shown that under these circumstances a learner can use Bayesian inference to learn the true prior by learning sufficiently many tasks from the environment. In addition, bounds are given on the amount of information required to learn a task when it is simultaneously learnt with several other tasks. The bounds show that if the learner has little knowledge of the true prior, but the dimensionality of the true prior is small, then sampling multiple tasks is highly advantageous. The theory is applied to the problem of learning a common feature set or equivalently a low-dimensional-representation (LDR) for an environment of related tasks. We extend variational autoencoders (VAEs) to collaborative filtering for implicit feedback. This non-linear probabilistic model enables us to go beyond the limited modeling capacity of linear factor models which still largely dominate collaborative filtering research.We introduce a generative model with multinomial likelihood and use Bayesian inference for parameter estimation. Despite widespread use in language modeling and economics, the multinomial likelihood receives less attention in the recommender systems literature. We introduce a different regularization parameter for the learning objective, which proves to be crucial for achieving competitive performance. Remarkably, there is an efficient way to tune the parameter using annealing. The resulting model and learning algorithm has information-theoretic connections to maximum entropy discrimination and the information bottleneck principle. Empirically, we show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines, including two recently-proposed neural network approaches, on several real-world datasets. We also provide extended experiments comparing the multinomial likelihood with other commonly used likelihood functions in the latent factor collaborative filtering literature and show favorable results. Finally, we identify the pros and cons of employing a principled Bayesian inference approach and characterize settings where it provides the most significant improvements.