Using vocabulary knowledge in Bayesian multinomial estimation

Thomas L. Griffiths, Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Estimating the parameters of sparse multinomial distributions is an important component of many statistical learning tasks. Recent approaches have used uncertainty over the vocabulary of symbols in a multinomial distribution as a means of accounting for sparsity. We present a Bayesian approach that allows weak prior knowledge, in the form of a small set of approximate candidate vocabularies, to be used to dramatically improve the resulting estimates. We demonstrate these improvements in applications to text compression and estimating distributions over words in newsgroup data.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14 - Proceedings of the 2001 Conference, NIPS 2001
PublisherNeural information processing systems foundation
ISBN (Print)0262042088, 9780262042086
StatePublished - Jan 1 2002
Externally publishedYes
Event15th Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, NIPS 2001 - Vancouver, BC, Canada
Duration: Dec 3 2001Dec 8 2001

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
ISSN (Print)1049-5258

Other

Other15th Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, NIPS 2001
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver, BC
Period12/3/0112/8/01

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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