Negative-Binomial Randomized Gamma Dynamical Systems for Heterogeneous Overdispersed Count Time Sequences

Negative-Binomial Randomized Gamma Dynamical Systems for Heterogeneous Overdispersed Count Time Sequences

Rui Huang, Sikun Yang, Heinz Koeppl

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4174-4182. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/461

Modeling count-valued time sequences has been receiving growing interests because count time sequences naturally arise in physical and social domains. Poisson gamma dynamical systems (PGDSs) are newly-developed methods, which can well capture the expressive latent transition structure and bursty dynamics behind count sequences. In particular, PGDSs demonstrate superior performance in terms of data imputation and prediction, compared with canonical linear dynamical system (LDS) based methods. Despite these advantages, PGDS cannot capture the heterogeneous overdispersed behaviours of the underlying dynamic processes. To mitigate this defect, we propose a negative-binomial-randomized gamma Markov process, which not only significantly improves the predictive performance of the proposed dynamical system, but also facilitates the fast convergence of the inference algorithm. Moreover, we develop methods to estimate both factor-structured and graph-structured transition dynamics, which enable us to infer more explainable latent structure, compared with PGDSs. Finally, we demonstrate the explainable latent structure learned by the proposed method, and show its superior performance in imputing missing data and forecasting future observations, compared with the related models.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Time series and data streams
Machine Learning: ML: Bayesian learning
Machine Learning: ML: Probabilistic machine learning
Uncertainty in AI: UAI: Tractable probabilistic models