In nonlinear latent variable models or dynamic models, if we consider the latent variables as confounders (common causes), the noise dependencies imply further relations between the observed variables. Such models are then closely related to causal discovery in the presence of nonlinear confounders, which is a challenging problem. However, generally in such models the observation noise is assum...

We present a new latent-variable model employing a Gaussian mixture integrated with a feature selection procedure (the Bernoulli part of the model) which together form a ”Latent Bernoulli-Gauss” distribution. The model is applied to MAP estimation, clustering, feature selection and collaborative filtering and fares favorably with the state-of-theart latent-variable models.

This paper presents a family of probabilistic latent variable models that can be used for analysis of nonnegative data. We show that there are strong ties between nonnegative matrix factorization and this family, and provide some straightforward extensions which can help in dealing with shift invariances, higher-order decompositions and sparsity constraints. We argue through these extensions th...

Independent Factor Analysis (IFA) has recently been proposed in the signal processing literature as a way to model a set of observed variables through linear combinations of hidden independent ones plus a noise term. Despite the peculiarity of its origin the method can be framed within the latent variable model domain and some parallels with the ordinary Factor Analysis can be drawn. If no prio...

The familiar logit and probit models provide convenient settings for many binary response applications, but a larger class of link functions may be occasionally desirable. Two parametric families of link functions are investigated: the Gosset link based on the Student t latent variable model with the degrees of freedom parameter controlling the tail behavior, and the Pregibon link based on the ...

Multiple outcomes are often used to properly characterize an effect of interest. This paper proposes a latent variable model for the situation where repeated measures over time are obtained on each outcome. These outcomes are assumed to measure an underlying quantity of main interest from different perspectives. We relate the observed outcomes using regression models to a latent variable, which...

Coactive learning describes the interaction between an online structured learner and a human user who corrects the learner by responding with weak feedback, that is, with an improved, but not necessarily optimal, structure. We apply this framework to discriminative learning in interactive machine translation. We present a generalization to latent variable models and give regret and generalizati...

Sentence Similarity [SS] computes a similarity score between two sentences. The SS task differs from document level semantics tasks in that it features the sparsity of words in a data unit, i.e. a sentence. Accordingly it is crucial to robustly model each word in a sentence to capture the complete semantic picture of the sentence. In this paper, we hypothesize that by better modeling lexical se...

This work presents simple and fast structured Bayesian learning for matrix and tensor factorization models. An unblocked Gibbs sampler is proposed for factorization machines (FM) which are a general class of latent variable models subsuming matrix, tensor and many other factorization models. We empirically show on the large Netflix challenge dataset that Bayesian FM are fast, scalable and more ...

In this paper, we aim to reconstruct free-form 3D models from only one or few silhouettes by learning the priorknowledge of a specific class of objects. Instead of heuristically proposing specific regularities and defining parametricmodels as previous research, our shape prior is learned directly from existing 3D models under a framework based onthe Gaussian Process Latent Variable ...