The Kernel Beta Process Lu Ren∗ Yingjian Wang∗ Electrical & Computer Engineering Dept. Electrical & Computer Engineering Dept. Duke University Duke University Durham, NC 27708 Durham, NC 27708
[email protected] [email protected] David Dunson Lawrence Carin Department of Statistical Science Electrical & Computer Engineering Dept. Duke University Duke University Durham, NC 27708 Durham, NC 27708
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract A new Levy´ process prior is proposed for an uncountable collection of covariate- dependent feature-learning measures; the model is called the kernel beta process (KBP). Available covariates are handled efficiently via the kernel construction, with covariates assumed observed with each data sample (“customer”), and latent covariates learned for each feature (“dish”). Each customer selects dishes from an infinite buffet, in a manner analogous to the beta process, with the added constraint that a customer first decides probabilistically whether to “consider” a dish, based on the distance in covariate space between the customer and dish. If a customer does consider a particular dish, that dish is then selected probabilistically as in the beta process. The beta process is recovered as a limiting case of the KBP. An efficient Gibbs sampler is developed for computations, and state-of-the-art results are presented for image processing and music analysis tasks. 1 Introduction Feature learning is an important problem in statistics and machine learning, characterized by the goal of (typically) inferring a low-dimensional set of features for representation of high-dimensional data. It is desirable to perform such analysis in a nonparametric manner, such that the number of features may be learned, rather than a priori set.