On the Efficient Marginalization of Probabilistic Sequence Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Boyd, Alex
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913256583462912
author Boyd, Alex
author_facet Boyd, Alex
contents Real-world data often exhibits sequential dependence, across diverse domains such as human behavior, medicine, finance, and climate modeling. Probabilistic methods capture the inherent uncertainty associated with prediction in these contexts, with autoregressive models being especially prominent. This dissertation focuses on using autoregressive models to answer complex probabilistic queries that go beyond single-step prediction, such as the timing of future events or the likelihood of a specific event occurring before another. In particular, we develop a broad class of novel and efficient approximation techniques for marginalization in sequential models that are model-agnostic. These techniques rely solely on access to and sampling from next-step conditional distributions of a pre-trained autoregressive model, including both traditional parametric models as well as more recent neural autoregressive models. Specific approaches are presented for discrete sequential models, for marked temporal point processes, and for stochastic jump processes, each tailored to a well-defined class of informative, long-range probabilistic queries.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_04005
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Efficient Marginalization of Probabilistic Sequence Models
Boyd, Alex
Machine Learning
Real-world data often exhibits sequential dependence, across diverse domains such as human behavior, medicine, finance, and climate modeling. Probabilistic methods capture the inherent uncertainty associated with prediction in these contexts, with autoregressive models being especially prominent. This dissertation focuses on using autoregressive models to answer complex probabilistic queries that go beyond single-step prediction, such as the timing of future events or the likelihood of a specific event occurring before another. In particular, we develop a broad class of novel and efficient approximation techniques for marginalization in sequential models that are model-agnostic. These techniques rely solely on access to and sampling from next-step conditional distributions of a pre-trained autoregressive model, including both traditional parametric models as well as more recent neural autoregressive models. Specific approaches are presented for discrete sequential models, for marked temporal point processes, and for stochastic jump processes, each tailored to a well-defined class of informative, long-range probabilistic queries.
title On the Efficient Marginalization of Probabilistic Sequence Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04005