UAI 2022poster0 citations

Multistate analysis with infinite mixtures of Markov chains

Lucas Maystre, Tiffany Wu, Roberto Sanchis-Ojeda, Tony Jebara

Abstract

Driven by applications in clinical medicine and business, we address the problem of modeling trajectories over multiple states. We build on well-known methods from survival analysis and introduce a family of sequence models based on localized Bayesian Markov chains. We develop inference and prediction algorithms, and we apply the model to real-world data, demonstrating favorable empirical results. Our approach provides a practical and effective alternative to plain Markov chains and to existing (finite) mixture models; It retains the simplicity and computational benefits of the former while matching or exceeding the predictive performance of the latter.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v180-maystre22a,
  title = 	 {Multistate analysis with infinite mixtures of {Markov} chains},
  author =       {Maystre, Lucas and Wu, Tiffany and Sanchis-Ojeda, Roberto and Jebara, Tony},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence},
  pages = 	 {1350--1359},
  year = 	 {2022},
  editor = 	 {Cussens, James and Zhang, Kun},
  volume = 	 {180},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {01--05 Aug},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v180/maystre22a/maystre22a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v180/maystre22a.html},
  abstract = 	 {Driven by applications in clinical medicine and business, we address the problem of modeling trajectories over multiple states. We build on well-known methods from survival analysis and introduce a family of sequence models based on localized Bayesian Markov chains. We develop inference and prediction algorithms, and we apply the model to real-world data, demonstrating favorable empirical results. Our approach provides a practical and effective alternative to plain Markov chains and to existing (finite) mixture models; It retains the simplicity and computational benefits of the former while matching or exceeding the predictive performance of the latter.}
}