Learning the Parameters of Determinantal Point Process Kernels

Affandi, R. H., Fox, E. B., Adams, R. P., & Taskar, B. (2014). Learning the Parameters of Determinantal Point Process Kernels. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

Determinantal point processes (DPPs) are well-suited for modeling repulsion and have proven useful in many applications where diversity is desired. While DPPs have many appealing properties, such as efficient sampling, learning the parameters of a DPP is still considered a difficult problem due to the non-convex nature of the likelihood function. In this paper, we propose using Bayesian methods to learn the DPP kernel parameters. These methods are applicable in large-scale and continuous DPP settings even when the exact form of the eigendecomposition is unknown. We demonstrate the utility of our DPP learning methods in studying the progression of diabetic neuropathy based on spatial distribution of nerve fibers, and in studying human perception of diversity in images.

  @conference{affandi2014determinantal,
  year = {2014},
  author = {Affandi, Raja Hafiz and Fox, Emily B. and Adams, Ryan P. and Taskar, Ben},
  title = {Learning the Parameters of Determinantal Point Process Kernels},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  keywords = {ICML, determinantal point processes, Bayesian methods, Markov chain Monte Carlo}
}