The Mondrian process represents an elegant and powerful approach for space partition modelling. However, as it restricts the partitions to be axis-aligned, its modelling flexibility is limited. In this work, we propose a self-consistent Binary Space Partitioning (BSP)-Tree process to generalize the Mondrian process. The BSP-Tree process is an almost surely right continuous Markov jump process that allows uniformly distributed oblique cuts in a two-dimensional convex polygon. The BSP-Tree process can also be extended using a non-uniform probability measure to generate direction differentiated cuts. The process is also self-consistent, maintaining distributional invariance under a restricted subdomain. We use Conditional-Sequential Monte Carlo for inference using the tree structure as the high-dimensional variable. The BSP-Tree process's performance on synthetic data partitioning and relational modelling demonstrates clear inferential improvements over the standard Mondrian process and other related methods.
The Mondrian process (MP) @cite_20 @cite_13 and its variant the Ostomachion process (OP) @cite_3 , can produce hierarchical partitions on a product space. The MP recursively generates axis-aligned cuts on a unit hypercube and partitions the space in a hierarchical fashion known as the @math d-tree ( @cite_2 also considers a tree-consistent partition model, but it is not a Bayesian nonparametric model). While using similar hierarchical partition structures, the OP additionally allows oblique cuts for flexible partitions, however it does not guarantee the important self-consistency property.
@cite_3 @cite_13 @cite_20 @cite_2
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Stochastic partition processes for exchangeable graphs produce axis-aligned blocks on a product space. In relational modeling, the resulting blocks uncover the underlying interactions between two sets of entities of the relational data. Although some flexible axis-aligned partition processes, such as the Mondrian process, have been able to capture complex interacting patterns in a hierarchical fashion, they are still in short of capturing dependence between dimensions. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Ostomachion process (OP), which relaxes the cutting direction by allowing for oblique cuts. The partitions generated by an OP are convex polygons that can capture inter-dimensional dependence. The OP also exhibits interesting properties: 1) Along the time line the cutting times can be characterized by a homogeneous Poisson process, and 2) on the partition space the areas of the resulting components comply with a Dirichlet distribution. We can thus control the expected number of cuts and the expected areas of components through hyper-parameters. We adapt the reversible-jump MCMC algorithm for inferring OP partition structures. The experimental results on relational modeling and decision tree classification have validated the merit of the OP. We investigate the class of computable probability distributions and explore the fundamental limitations of using this class to describe and compute conditional distributions. In addition to proving the existence of noncomputable conditional distributions, and thus ruling out the possibility of generic probabilistic inference algorithms (even inefficient ones), we highlight some positive results showing that posterior inference is possible in the presence of additional structure like exchangeability and noise, both of which are common in Bayesian hierarchical modeling. This theoretical work bears on the development of probabilistic programming languages (which enable the specification of complex probabilistic models) and their implementations (which can be used to perform Bayesian reasoning). The probabilistic programming approach is particularly well suited for defining infinite-dimensional, recursively-defined stochastic processes of the sort used in nonparametric Bayesian statistics. We present a new construction of the Mondrian process as a partition-valued Markov process in continuous time, which can be viewed as placing a distribution on an infinite kd-tree data structure. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.) We describe a novel class of distributions, called Mondrian processes, which can be interpreted as probability distributions over kd-tree data structures. Mondrian processes are multidimensional generalizations of Poisson processes and this connection allows us to construct multidimensional generalizations of the stick-breaking process described by Sethuraman (1994), recovering the Dirichlet process in one dimension. After introducing the Aldous-Hoover representation for jointly and separately exchangeable arrays, we show how the process can be used as a nonparametric prior distribution in Bayesian models of relational data. The objects in many real-world domains can be organized into hierarchies, where each internal node picks out a category of objects. Given a collection of features and relations defined over a set of objects, an annotated hierarchy includes a specification of the categories that are most useful for describing each individual feature and relation. We define a generative model for annotated hierarchies and the features and relations that they describe, and develop a Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme for learning annotated hierarchies. We show that our model discovers interpretable structure in several real-world data sets.