The problem of probabilistic inference concerns answering queries about conditional and marginal probabilities in graphical models. Consider two disjoint subsets E and F of the nodes in a graphical model G. A query regarding marginal distribution p(xF ) can be calculated by the marginalization operation ∑ G\F p(x). A query regarding conditional distribution p(xF |xE) can be calculated by p(xF |...

Graphical models are widely used to encode conditional independence constraints and causal assumptions, the directed acyclic graph (DAG) being one of the most common types of models. However, DAGs are not closed under marginalization: that is, a chosen marginal of a distribution Markov to a DAG might not be representable with another DAG, unless one discards some of the structural independencie...

My participant-observation with O-Môi, a support group for Vietnamese lesbians, bisexual women and female-to-male transgenders, and interviews with members, focusing on how different identity issues are negotiated, suggest that despite O-Môi's claim of supporting its members' multiple marginalized identities, group processes in everyday pragmatic interactions construct a hierarchy that centers ...

Within the context of continuous-density HMM speech recognition in noise, we report on imputation of missing time-frequency regions using emission state probability distributions. Spectral subtraction and local signal–to– noise estimation based criteria are used to separate the present from the missing components. We consider two approaches to the problem of classification with missing data: ma...

We formalize the pair-wise registration problem in a maximum a posteriori (MAP) framework that employs a multinomial model of joint intensities with parameters for which we only have a prior distribution. To obtain an MAP estimate of the aligning transformation alone, we treat the multinomial parameters as nuisance parameters, and marginalize them out. If the prior on those is uninformative, th...

The Effect of Ethnic Identity on the Employment of Immigrants This study evaluates the effect of ethnic identity on the employment level of immigrants in Greece. Treating ethnic identity as a composite of key cultural elements the estimations suggest that employment is positively associated with assimilation and integration and negatively associated with separation and marginalization. In all c...

This paper addresses the problem of non-cooperative patent pool formation by owners of patents related to a standard. We develop a model in which competing manufacturers must license several patents to produce standard-compliant goods. Separate licensing creates a double-marginalization problem. Moreover manufacturers must sink a fixed cost to enter the product market, and thus face a hold-up p...

Marginal MAP inference involves making MAP predictions in systems defined with latent variables or missing information. It is significantly more difficult than pure marginalization and MAP tasks, for which a large class of efficient and convergent variational algorithms, such as dual decomposition, exist. In this work, we generalize dual decomposition to a generic power sum inference task, whic...