Joaquin Quinonero Candela

Research Scientist

Alumni

Empirical Inference

Publications

5 results (BibTeX)

2006

Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Challenge

Quinonero Candela, J., Rasmussen, C., Sinz, F., Bousquet, O., Schölkopf, B.

In Machine Learning Challenges: Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty, Visual Object Classification, and Recognising Tectual Entailment, pages: 1-27, (Editors: J Quiñonero Candela and I Dagan and B Magnini and F d’Alché-Buc), Springer, Berlin, Germany, First PASCAL Machine Learning Challenges Workshop (MLCW), April 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract

This Chapter presents the PASCAL Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Challenge, introduces the contributed Chapters by the participants who obtained outstanding results, and provides a discussion with some lessons to be learnt. The Challenge was set up to evaluate the ability of Machine Learning algorithms to provide good “probabilistic predictions”, rather than just the usual “point predictions” with no measure of uncertainty, in regression and classification problems. Parti-cipants had to compete on a number of regression and classification tasks, and were evaluated by both traditional losses that only take into account point predictions and losses we proposed that evaluate the quality of the probabilistic predictions.

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2006

Quinonero Candela, J., Rasmussen, C., Sinz, F., Bousquet, O., Schölkopf, B. Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Challenge In Machine Learning Challenges: Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty, Visual Object Classification, and Recognising Tectual Entailment, pages: 1-27, (Editors: J Quiñonero Candela and I Dagan and B Magnini and F d’Alché-Buc), Springer, Berlin, Germany, First PASCAL Machine Learning Challenges Workshop (MLCW), April 2006 (inproceedings)

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Machine Learning Challenges: evaluating predictive uncertainty, visual object classification and recognising textual entailment

Quinonero Candela, J., Dagan, I., Magnini, B., Lauria, F.

Proceedings of the First Pascal Machine Learning Challenges Workshop on Machine Learning Challenges, Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty, Visual Object Classification and Recognizing Textual Entailment (MLCW 2005), pages: 462, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, First Pascal Machine Learning Challenges Workshop (MLCW), 2006 (proceedings)

Abstract

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First PASCAL (pattern analysis, statistical modelling and computational learning) Machine Learning Challenges Workshop, MLCW 2005, held in Southampton, UK in April 2005. The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from about 50 submissions. The papers reflect the concepts of three challenges dealt with in the workshop: finding an assessment base on the uncertainty of predictions using classical statistics, Bayesian inference, and statistical learning theory; the second challenge was to recognize objects from a number of visual object classes in realistic scenes; the third challenge of recognizing textual entailment addresses semantic analysis of language to form a generic framework for applied semantic inference in text understanding.

Web DOI [BibTex]

Quinonero Candela, J., Dagan, I., Magnini, B., Lauria, F. Machine Learning Challenges: evaluating predictive uncertainty, visual object classification and recognising textual entailment Proceedings of the First Pascal Machine Learning Challenges Workshop on Machine Learning Challenges, Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty, Visual Object Classification and Recognizing Textual Entailment (MLCW 2005), pages: 462, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, First Pascal Machine Learning Challenges Workshop (MLCW), 2006 (proceedings)

Web DOI [BibTex]

2005

A Unifying View of Sparse Approximate Gaussian Process Regression

Quinonero Candela, J., Rasmussen, C.

Journal of Machine Learning Research, 6, pages: 1935-1959, December 2005 (article)

Abstract

We provide a new unifying view, including all existing proper probabilistic sparse approximations for Gaussian process regression. Our approach relies on expressing the effective prior which the methods are using. This allows new insights to be gained, and highlights the relationship between existing methods. It also allows for a clear theoretically justified ranking of the closeness of the known approximations to the corresponding full GPs. Finally we point directly to designs of new better sparse approximations, combining the best of the existing strategies, within attractive computational constraints.

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2005

Quinonero Candela, J., Rasmussen, C. A Unifying View of Sparse Approximate Gaussian Process Regression Journal of Machine Learning Research, 6, pages: 1935-1959, December 2005 (article)

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Analysis of Some Methods for Reduced Rank Gaussian Process Regression

Quinonero Candela, J., Rasmussen, C.

In Switching and Learning in Feedback Systems, pages: 98-127, (Editors: Murray Smith, R. , R. Shorten), Springer, Berlin, Germany, European Summer School on Multi-Agent Control, 2005 (inproceedings)

Abstract

While there is strong motivation for using Gaussian Processes (GPs) due to their excellent performance in regression and classification problems, their computational complexity makes them impractical when the size of the training set exceeds a few thousand cases. This has motivated the recent proliferation of a number of cost-effective approximations to GPs, both for classification and for regression. In this paper we analyze one popular approximation to GPs for regression: the reduced rank approximation. While generally GPs are equivalent to infinite linear models, we show that Reduced Rank Gaussian Processes (RRGPs) are equivalent to finite sparse linear models. We also introduce the concept of degenerate GPs and show that they correspond to inappropriate priors. We show how to modify the RRGP to prevent it from being degenerate at test time. Training RRGPs consists both in learning the covariance function hyperparameters and the support set. We propose a method for learning hyperparameters for a given support set. We also review the Sparse Greedy GP (SGGP) approximation (Smola and Bartlett, 2001), which is a way of learning the support set for given hyperparameters based on approximating the posterior. We propose an alternative method to the SGGP that has better generalization capabilities. Finally we make experiments to compare the different ways of training a RRGP. We provide some Matlab code for learning RRGPs.

PDF PDF DOI [BibTex]

Quinonero Candela, J., Rasmussen, C. Analysis of Some Methods for Reduced Rank Gaussian Process Regression In Switching and Learning in Feedback Systems, pages: 98-127, (Editors: Murray Smith, R. , R. Shorten), Springer, Berlin, Germany, European Summer School on Multi-Agent Control, 2005 (inproceedings)

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2003

Incremental Gaussian Processes

Quinonero Candela, J., Winther, O.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15, pages: 1001-1008, (Editors: Becker, S. , S. Thrun, K. Obermayer), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Sixteenth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), October 2003 (inproceedings)

Abstract

In this paper, we consider Tipping‘s relevance vector machine (RVM) and formalize an incremental training strategy as a variant of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm that we call subspace EM. Working with a subset of active basis functions, the sparsity of the RVM solution will ensure that the number of basis functions and thereby the computational complexity is kept low. We also introduce a mean field approach to the intractable classification model that is expected to give a very good approximation to exact Bayesian inference and contains the Laplace approximation as a special case. We test the algorithms on two large data sets with O(10^3-10^4) examples. The results indicate that Bayesian learning of large data sets, e.g. the MNIST database is realistic.

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2003

Quinonero Candela, J., Winther, O. Incremental Gaussian Processes In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15, pages: 1001-1008, (Editors: Becker, S. , S. Thrun, K. Obermayer), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Sixteenth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), October 2003 (inproceedings)

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