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.
This paper proposes a novel stochastic process that represents the arbitrary rectangular partitioning of an infinite-dimensional matrix as the conditional projective limit. Rectangular partitioning is used in relational data analysis, and is classified into three types: regular grid, hierarchical, and arbitrary. Conventionally, a variety of probabilistic models have been advanced for the first two, including the product of Chinese restaurant processes and the Mondrian process. However, existing models for arbitrary partitioning are too complicated to permit the analysis of the statistical behaviors of models, which places very severe capability limits on relational data analysis. In this paper, we propose a new probabilistic model of arbitrary partitioning called the rectangular tiling process (RTP). Our model has a sound mathematical base in projective systems and infinite extension of conditional probabilities, and is capable of representing partitions of infinite elements as found in ordinary Bayesian nonparametric models. We propose a new probabilistic model for analyzing dynamic evolutions of relational data, such as additions, deletions and split & merge, of relation clusters like communities in social networks. Our proposed model abstracts observed time-varying object-object relationships into relationships between object clusters. We extend the infinite Hidden Markov model to follow dynamic and time-sensitive changes in the structure of the relational data and to estimate a number of clusters simultaneously. We show the usefulness of the model through experiments with synthetic and real-world data sets.  Relationships between concepts account for a large proportion of semantic knowledge. We present a nonparametric Bayesian model that discovers systems of related concepts. Given data involving several sets of entities, our model discovers the kinds of entities in each set and the relations between kinds that are possible or likely. We apply our approach to four problems: clustering objects and features, learning ontologies, discovering kinship systems, and discovering structure in political data.  Modeling structure in complex networks using Bayesian nonparametrics makes it possible to specify flexible model structures and infer the adequate model complexity from the observed data. This article provides a gentle introduction to nonparametric Bayesian modeling of complex networks: Using an infinite mixture model as running example, we go through the steps of deriving the model as an infinite limit of a finite parametric model, inferring the model parameters by Markov chain Monte Carlo, and checking the model?s fit and predictive performance. We explain how advanced nonparametric models for complex networks can be derived and point out relevant literature. Consider data consisting of pairwise measurements, such as presence or absence of links between pairs of objects. These data arise, for instance, in the analysis of protein interactions and gene regulatory networks, collections of author-recipient email, and social networks. Analyzing pairwise measurements with probabilistic models requires special assumptions, since the usual independence or exchangeability assumptions no longer hold. Here we introduce a class of variance allocation models for pairwise measurements: mixed membership stochastic blockmodels. These models combine global parameters that instantiate dense patches of connectivity (blockmodel) with local parameters that instantiate node-specific variability in the connections (mixed membership). We develop a general variational inference algorithm for fast approximate posterior inference. We demonstrate the advantages of mixed membership stochastic blockmodels with applications to social networks and protein interaction networks. 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.