Beam sampling for the infinite hidden Markov model

  • Authors:
  • Jurgen Van Gael;Yunus Saatci;Yee Whye Teh;Zoubin Ghahramani

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Cambridge, UK;University of Cambridge, UK;University College London, UK;University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 25th international conference on Machine learning
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The infinite hidden Markov model is a non-parametric extension of the widely used hidden Markov model. Our paper introduces a new inference algorithm for the infinite Hidden Markov model called beam sampling. Beam sampling combines slice sampling, which limits the number of states considered at each time step to a finite number, with dynamic programming, which samples whole state trajectories efficiently. Our algorithm typically outperforms the Gibbs sampler and is more robust. We present applications of iHMM inference using the beam sampler on changepoint detection and text prediction problems.