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Nick Whiteley

7 accepted papers

2026

How high is ‘high’? Rethinking the roles of dimensionality in topological data analysis and manifold learning

ICML 2026poster

High-dimensionality of data is often regarded as a fundamental statistical impediment in Machine Learning and AI. The purpose of this paper is to clarify, on the contrary, when and how high-dimensionality may be beneficial. In the setting of a general random function model of data we delineate betwe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Conditional Distribution Compression via the Kernel Conditional Mean Embedding

NeurIPS 2025poster

Existing distribution compression methods, like Kernel Herding (KH), were originally developed for unlabelled data. However, no existing approach directly compresses the conditional distribution of *labelled* data. To address this gap, we first introduce the *Average Maximum Conditional Mean Discrep…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Hierarchical clustering with dot products recovers hidden tree structure

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

In this paper we offer a new perspective on the well established agglomerative clustering algorithm, focusing on recovery of hierarchical structure. We recommend a simple variant of the standard algorithm, in which clusters are merged by maximum average dot product and not, for example, by minimum d…

2023

Implications of sparsity and high triangle density for graph representation learning

AISTATS 2023poster

Recent work has shown that sparse graphs containing many triangles cannot be reproduced using a finite-dimensional representation of the nodes, in which link probabilities are inner products. Here, we show that such graphs can be reproduced using an infinite-dimensional inner product model, where th…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Intensity Profile Projection: A Framework for Continuous-Time Representation Learning for Dynamic Networks

NeurIPS 2023poster

We present a new representation learning framework, Intensity Profile Projection, for continuous-time dynamic network data. Given triples $(i,j,t)$, each representing a time-stamped ($t$) interaction between two entities ($i,j$), our procedure returns a continuous-time trajectory for each node, repr…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2021

Inference in Stochastic Epidemic Models via Multinomial Approximations

AISTATS 2021poster

We introduce a new method for inference in stochastic epidemic models which uses recursive multinomial approximations to integrate over unobserved variables and thus circumvent likelihood intractability. The method is applicable to a class of discrete-time, finite-population compartmental models wit…

2021

Matrix factorisation and the interpretation of geodesic distance

NeurIPS 2021poster

Given a graph or similarity matrix, we consider the problem of recovering a notion of true distance between the nodes, and so their true positions. We show that this can be accomplished in two steps: matrix factorisation, followed by nonlinear dimension reduction. This combination is effective becau…