Poisson-Gamma Dynamical Systems with Non-Stationary Transition Dynamics

Jiahao Wang, Sikun Yang, Heinz Koeppl, Xiuzhen Cheng, Pengfei Hu, Guoming Zhang

Keywords: Bayesian non-parametrics, Negative-binomial processes, Dirichlet Markov chains

Abstract: Bayesian methodologies for handling count-valued time series have gained prominence due to their ability to infer interpretable latent structures and to estimate uncertainties, and thus are especially suitable for dealing with noisy and incomplete count data. Among these Bayesian models, Poisson-Gamma Dynamical Systems (PGDSs) are proven to be effective in capturing the evolving dynamics underlying observed count sequences. However, the state-of-the-art PGDS still falls short in capturing the time-varying transition dynamics that are commonly observed in real-world count time series. To mitigate this limitation, a non-stationary PGDS is proposed to allow the underlying transition matrices to evolve over time, and the evolving transition matrices are modeled by the specifically-designed Dirichlet Markov chains. Leveraging Dirichlet-Multinomial-Beta data augmentation techniques, a fully-conjugate and efficient Gibbs sampler is developed to perform posterior simulation. Experiments show that, in comparison with related models, the proposed non-stationary PGDS achieves improved predictive performance due to its capacity to learn non-stationary dependency structure captured by the time-evolving transition matrices.

Primary Area: Probabilistic methods (for example: variational inference, Gaussian processes)

Submission Number: 5903