Foundations of Graphical Models
Fall 2018
Columbia University


Course information

Assignments

Topics and readings

Below are the topics of the class and some readings about each. (Some readings are not yet set.) The readings from Blei (2018) will be made available to the class.

The readings are at different levels: some are basic and some are advanced. We chose them to provide interesting and fundamental material about the topics; the lectures will not necessarily cover or follow all of this material.

  1. Introduction
  2. The ingredients of probabilistic models
  3. Bayesian mixture models and the Gibbs sampler
  4. Mixed-membership models, topic models, and variational inference
  5. Matrix factorization and efficient MAP inference
  6. Deep generative models and black box variational inference
  7. Exponential families, conjugate priors, and generalized linear models
  8. Hierarchical models, robust models, and empirical Bayes
  9. The theory of graphical models
  10. Advanced topics in variational inference
  11. Model checking and model diagnosis
  12. An introduction to causality