We study parameter inference in large-scale latent variable models. We first propose an unified treatment of online inference for latent variable models from a non-canonical exponential family, and draw explicit links between several previously proposed frequentist or Bayesian methods. We then propose a novel inference method for the frequentist estimation of parameters, that adapts MCMC method...

We propose a novel method for inferring whether X causes Y or vice versa from joint observations of X and Y . The basic idea is to model the observed data using probabilistic latent variable models, which incorporate the effects of unobserved noise. To this end, we consider the hypothetical effect variable to be a function of the hypothetical cause variable and an independent noise term (not ne...

Abstract Latent class analysis (LCA) for categorical data is a model-based clustering and classification technique applied in a wide range of fields including the social sciences, machine learning, psychiatry, public health, and epidemiology. Its central assumption is conditional independence of the indicators given the latent class, i.e. “local independence”; violations can appear as model mis...

For building flexible and appealing high-quality speech synthesisers, it is desirable to be able to accommodate and reproduce fine variations in vocal expression present in natural speech. Synthesisers can enable control over such output properties by adding adjustable control parameters in parallel to their text input. If not annotated in training data, the values of these control inputs can b...

Describing the dimension reduction (DR) techniques by means of probabilistic models has recently been given special attention. Probabilistic models, in addition to a better interpretability of the DR methods, provide a framework for further extensions of such algorithms. One of the new approaches to the probabilistic DR methods is to preserving the internal structure of data. It is meant that i...

The conference that this book builds upon contained many different special topics within the general area of modeling with categorical latent variables, also referred to as mixture modeling. The many different models addressed at that conference and within this volume may overwhelm a newcomer to the field. In fact, however, there are really only a small number of variations on a common theme. T...

Modern machine learning tasks often deal with high-dimensional data. One typically makes some assumption on structure, like sparsity, to make learning tractable over high-dimensional instances. Another common assumption on structure is that of latent variables in the generative model. In latent variable models, one attempts to perform inference not only on observed variables, but also on unobse...

Syntactic reordering on the source-side is an effective way of handling word order differences. The { (DE) construction is a flexible and ubiquitous syntactic structure in Chinese which is a major source of error in translation quality. In this paper, we propose a new classifier model — discriminative latent variable model (DPLVM) — to classify the DE construction to improve the accuracy of the...

We use a generative history-based model to predict the most likely derivation of a dependency parse. Our probabilistic model is based on Incremental Sigmoid Belief Networks, a recently proposed class of latent variable models for structure prediction. Their ability to automatically induce features results in multilingual parsing which is robust enough to achieve accuracy well above the average ...

May 11, 2010 Title Latent Variable Analysis Version 0.3-1 Author Yves Rosseel Maintainer Yves Rosseel Description Fit a variety of latent variable models, including confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and latent growth curve models. Depends R (>= 2.10.1), methods License GPL-2 LazyLoad yes LazyData yes URL http://lavaan.org ...