arXiv subjects

Naoki Awaya

Publications and source records attributed to Naoki Awaya.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Two-sample comparison through additive tree models for density ratios

The ratio of two densities provides a direct characterization of their differences. We consider the two-sample comparison problem by estimating this ratio given i.i.d. observations from two distributions. To this end, we propose additive tree models for density ratio estimation along with efficient algorithms using a new loss function, the balancing loss. The loss allows tree-based models to be trained using several algorithms originally designed for supervised learning, such as forward-stagewise optimization and gradient boosting. Moreover, the balancing loss resembles an exponential family kernel, and it can serve as a pseudo-likelihood with conjugate priors. This property enables generalized Bayesian inference on the density ratio using backfitting samplers designed for Bayesian additive regression trees (BART). Our Bayesian strategy provides uncertainty quantification for the inferred density ratio, which is critical for applications involving high-dimensional and data-limited distributions with potentially substantial uncertainty. We further show connections of the balancing loss to the exponential loss in binary classification and to the variational form of f-divergence, particularly the squared Hellinger distance. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method achieves both accuracy and computational efficiency, while uniquely providing uncertainty quantification. Finally, we demonstrate its application to assessing the quality of generative models for microbiome compositional data.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

Tree-Embedded Bayesian Factor Models for Multidimensional Categorical Distributions

Analyzing data collected from multiple observational units to estimate common and heterogeneous structures through a hierarchical model is a central task in Bayesian inference, and to this end, Bayesian factor models are one of the most widely used tools for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a novel Bayesian latent factor model for categorical distributions from grouped data, providing a parsimonious model for describing many observed distributions through lower-dimensional structures. Grouped data arise in a wide range of applications in social science, for example, distributions of age composition and income observed across locations. In these contexts, standard mixture models can be inefficient because the distributions do not necessarily exhibit clear clustering structures, and the distributions can be more accurately approximated as a combination of lower-dimensional characteristics. To analyze distribution-valued data with the Bayesian factor analysis, we adopt a tree-based transformation that embeds distributions into a Euclidean space and construct a Bayesian latent factor model in the transformed space. We develop the hierarchical model by incorporating the infinite factor model, which can adaptively estimate the number of effective factors. In addition, we propose its generalization by incorporating a spatial dependence by introducing a prior based on a SAR model. The proposed model provides smooth estimates of multivariate distributional structures, because once a tree-based transformation is applied, both univariate and multivariate distributions are essentially treated as the same Euclidean vectors. Through numerical experiments using real population data, we demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing parametric and Bayesian nonparametric models in various scenarios involving smooth spatial variations, especially under small sample sizes.

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arXiv2024

Generative modeling of density regression through tree flows

A common objective in the analysis of tabular data is estimating the conditional distribution (in contrast to only producing predictions) of a set of "outcome" variables given a set of "covariates", which is sometimes referred to as the "density regression" problem. Beyond estimation on the conditional distribution, the generative ability of drawing synthetic samples from the learned conditional distribution is also desired as it further widens the range of applications. We propose a flow-based generative model tailored for the density regression task on tabular data. Our flow applies a sequence of tree-based piecewise-linear transforms on initial uniform noise to eventually generate samples from complex conditional densities of (univariate or multivariate) outcomes given the covariates and allows efficient analytical evaluation of the fitted conditional density on any point in the sample space. We introduce a training algorithm for fitting the tree-based transforms using a divide-and-conquer strategy that transforms maximum likelihood training of the tree-flow into training a collection of binary classifiers--one at each tree split--under cross-entropy loss. We assess the performance of our method under out-of-sample likelihood evaluation and compare it with a variety of state-of-the-art conditional density learners on a range of simulated and real benchmark tabular datasets. Our method consistently achieves comparable or superior performance at a fraction of the training and sampling budget. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our method's generative ability through an application to generating synthetic longitudinal microbiome compositional data based on training our flow on a publicly available microbiome study.

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arXiv2023

Unsupervised tree boosting for learning probability distributions

We propose an unsupervised tree boosting algorithm for inferring the underlying sampling distribution of an i.i.d. sample based on fitting additive tree ensembles in a fashion analogous to supervised tree boosting. Integral to the algorithm is a new notion of "addition" on probability distributions that leads to a coherent notion of "residualization", i.e., subtracting a probability distribution from an observation to remove the distributional structure from the sampling distribution of the latter. We show that these notions arise naturally for univariate distributions through cumulative distribution function (CDF) transforms and compositions due to several "group-like" properties of univariate CDFs. While the traditional multivariate CDF does not preserve these properties, a new definition of multivariate CDF can restore these properties, thereby allowing the notions of "addition" and "residualization" to be formulated for multivariate settings as well. This then gives rise to the unsupervised boosting algorithm based on forward-stagewise fitting of an additive tree ensemble, which sequentially reduces the Kullback-Leibler divergence from the truth. The algorithm allows analytic evaluation of the fitted density and outputs a generative model that can be readily sampled from. We enhance the algorithm with scale-dependent shrinkage and a two-stage strategy that separately fits the marginals and the copula. The algorithm then performs competitively to state-of-the-art deep-learning approaches in multivariate density estimation on multiple benchmark data sets.

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arXiv2021

Hidden Markov Pólya trees for high-dimensional distributions

The Pólya tree (PT) process is a general-purpose Bayesian nonparametric model that has found wide application in a range of inference problems. It has a simple analytic form and the posterior computation boils down to beta-binomial conjugate updates along a partition tree over the sample space. Recent development in PT models shows that performance of these models can be substantially improved by (i) allowing the partition tree to adapt to the structure of the underlying distributions and (ii) incorporating latent state variables that characterize local features of the underlying distributions. However, important limitations of the PT remain, including (i) the sensitivity in the posterior inference with respect to the choice of the partition tree, and (ii) the lack of scalability with respect to dimensionality of the sample space. We consider a modeling strategy for PT models that incorporates a flexible prior on the partition tree along with latent states with Markov dependency. We introduce a hybrid algorithm combining sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and recursive message passing for posterior sampling that can scale up to 100 dimensions. While our description of the algorithm assumes a single computer environment, it has the potential to be implemented on distributed systems to further enhance the scalability. Moreover, we investigate the large sample properties of the tree structures and latent states under the posterior model. We carry out extensive numerical experiments in density estimation and two-group comparison, which show that flexible partitioning can substantially improve the performance of PT models in both inference tasks. We demonstrate an application to a mass cytometry data set with 19 dimensions and over 200,000 observations.

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arXiv2021

Particle rolling MCMC with double-block sampling

An efficient simulation-based methodology is proposed for the rolling window estimation of state space models, called particle rolling Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) with double block sampling. In our method, which is based on Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), particles are sequentially updated to approximate the posterior distribution for each window by learning new information and discarding old information from observations. Th particles are refreshed with an MCMC algorithm when the importance weights degenerate. To avoid degeneracy, which is crucial for reducing the computation time, we introduce a block sampling scheme and generate multiple candidates by the algorithm based on the conditional SMC. The theoretical discussion shows that the proposed methodology with a nested structure is expressed as SMC sampling for the augmented space to provide the justification. The computational performance is evaluated in illustrative examples, showing that the posterior distributions of the model parameters are accurately estimated. The proofs and additional discussions (algorithms and experimental results) are provided in the Supplementary Material.

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