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Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_6
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
Reviewer's response to the rebuttal
"line 308:
[10, 400] range for alpha We chose 400 because higher values of alpha
caused computational difficulties in the Gibbs sampling. This upper bound
is a bit arbitrary; however, we found the exact upper limit above about
100 had little effect on the estimates of transition probabilities.
Similarly, adjusting the lower bound below 60 or so had little effect.
While we do hope for a more well justified hyperprior for alpha in future
work, we believe our choice did not overly influence the results."
Please add this information to the paper. For someone trying to
use your approach, this information is important.
Review for
"Spike train entropy-rate...."
The paper introduces an entropy
rate estimator for binary (neural spike) events based on a hierarchical
Dirichlet process (HDP) with binomial observation models. After
surveying previous approaches and their shortcomings, the Markov chain HDP
estimator is introduced, which is designed to deal with the problem of
unknown blocklength, and sparse (relative to the number of possible
"phrases") observations. Two instantiations of this estimator are
developed: in the "empHDP", the entropy rates are estimated from the
posterior expectations of the probabilities, whereas the "HDP" version
computes the expected entropy rate approximately via Gibbs sampling. Both
estimators are compared to a range of relevant methods on simulated data,
where the authors find that their *HDP estimators exhibit a smaller
underestimation bias than current related approaches. Finally, some
retinal data are analyzed, indicating that the estimator works as
intended.
Clarity: the paper is well written.
Originality:
the proposed method is novel in the context of spike train entropy
estimation.
Significance: the paper addresses a relevant problem
in computational neuroscience.
Quality: this is high quality work,
I have only small number of remarks (see below).
line 128:
"h_{MM,k}=H_{NSB}/k" you mean H_{MM,k} ?
line 184: formula 7: "s
\in A" please say what A is.
lines 216-225: figure 1. If this is a
Bayes net, then there should be observations attached to the intermediate
nodes, too?
line 262-264: the unnumbered formula for the
transition posterior: while this is clear to readers familiar with
expectations of Beta distributions, it would improve the paper if you
said where these formulas come from.
line 269: is "..set
g_{|k|}.." really a set, or a tuple? And why the "|k|" subscript? Do you
mean just k?
line 284: "distributionand" -> distribution and
line 298: "..the conjugacy the beta ..." -> the conjugacy of
the beta...
line 308: "...100 points on [10,400]..." why this
range?
line 324-339: figure 2. One of the advantages of the
Bayesian estimator is the availability of error bars, yet you do not plot
them here. I would be interested to know if e.g. the underestimation of
the HDP estimator for larger blocklenghts is significant or not.
line 419: "...from shorter contexts.." remove one "."
I
enjoyed reading your paper, best wishes, the reviewer.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
A well written contribution to the spike train entropy
estimation problem. Very suitable for NIPS. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_7
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper introduces a way to estimate the entropy
rates (and transition probabilities) of a Markov Model from
observations, by improving the empirical bin count through a
tree-based Bayesian prior which takes into account the progress of the
probabilities through time and assigns more similar future
probabilities to observations which differ further in the past.
The paper has some interesting ideas, and the sequential
construction of the Dirichlet priors and the extraction of the
estimates is elegant. Certainly, the results look good - but in
Fig. 3(c), the superiority of convergence of the HDP estimators is
not really clear compared to the others. The text in lines 407-409
seems to insinuate that the performance of the HDP estimators is
somehow special whereas it is quite on coherence with the other
methods. The transition probability, of course, is nicely
regularized, but stronger data is required to have an idea how good
this regularization is. Fig. 2(a), for instance shows a good match
of the high-probability transitions, but the low-probability
transitions seem not as well matched. This is slightly surprising,
as there are only two possibilities for the transition, so it is not
clear why the high transition probability values should be
regularized to a higher degree than the low transition probability
values.
nevertheless, one may wish some more reference to
other reconstruction methods, such as CSSR by Shalizi et al,
suffix-tree methods (Y. Singer et al.), observable operator methods
(Jaeger). There is a lot of emphasis on the weaknesses of pure
entropy estimation in the paper, but clearly also the structure of
the reconstruction mechanism hovers in the background which deserves
mention as your construction follows the spirit of the epsilon
machine reconstruction (Shalizi & Crutchfield) and may find
relevant generalizations in that direction.
Detailed comments:
- line 124: what's e in log(e)?
- line 128: second H_NSB
has wrong subscript
- line 177: it is not clear what the bold
characters mean - throughout the paper, until quite late, I was
confused whether the new symbol appears at the *right* or the *left*
end of the string, and my confusion was caused mainly by this
illustration. Why does 010 transitionf to 101? If the new symbol
is on the right, where does the 0 at the left end disappear to? Do
we have a 2-time step memory system only here?
- line 227:
similar issue - "g_0011 should be similar to g_011" - which one is the
latest symbol. Here it seems it may be the first one. Later in the
text you seem to refer to the latest symbol at the right. Please
clarify.
- line 249: "whose sample paths are each probability
distributions" - this sentence is unclear, information seems
missing; what condition do the probability distributions
associated with the paths have to fulfil?
- line 264: there is
information missing here - it seems that when you start with a fresh
distribution (p_0), you still seem to assume existence of N
observations (the length of your data string). How come you do not
start with the empty string straight away and build up your Dirichlet
prior as you go through the first N entries?
- line 269: I do
not understand the structure of the posterior predictive distribution.
You state the set g_{|k|}, but I do not see the connection between the
set and the required structure of the distribution. Reformulate. Also
the rest of the paragraph below line 272 is unclear. Please fix that,
maybe it is a consequence that I did not understand your construction
of g_pr.
- line 294: I have the impression that the line contains
an error: the Beta function for the g_{0s} and the g_{1s} terms
probably need an \alpha_{|s|+1} instead of \alpha_{|s|}
- line
301: "each \alpha as fixed hyperparameters" - elide the "s"
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
Interesting technique; some more reference to existing
process reconstruction methods required. Unsure about expressiveness
of results. Some encouraging features, but achievements need to be
more explicit, with a few statements about comparison to the other
methods, which is not so clear, especially in
3(c). Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_8
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The authors propose a method to estimate the entropy
rate of a stationary binary process by approximating the process by a
depth-k Markov process and then using the fact that the entropy rate
of a Markov process can be calculated analytically. So what they need
to do is approximating the transition probabilities for the Markov
process. They use a Bayesian estimator of entropy rate based on
depth-k Markov model and assume that they are given an appropriate
prior. The entropy rate estimate obtained from this approach is a good
one when k is large but the problem is by increasing k, estimating the
transition probabilities become more difficult. So the main idea of
this paper is that they assume that removing the more distant bit of
the context does not change the a priori probabilities by much. They
use Beta distribution to model the prior. It is not however explained
how the parameter \alpha is estimated.
The authors also show that
their method can be generalized it to non-binary data in which case
Dirichlet distribution is to be used, hence the name hierarchical
Dirichlet. In Section 5, the authors suggest an approach to
estimate the transition probabilities, p(1|s) but why is that
consistent with equation (3)? Section 6 to perform the Gibbs sampling
the posterior conditional distribution of each g_s is needed, and it
is obtained using the fact that g_s is conditionally independent of
all given its neighbors in the tree. The conditional distribution for of
\alpha_is given g_s; g_0s; g_1s, is assumed to be a beta distribution, but
why is that?
In Section 7 simulation result for a simulated
data with known entropy rate and neural data with an unknown entropy
rate are presented and are compared against LZ, plug in, context tree
weighting, NSB, and MM. I find the comparison somewhat unfair because
because the simulated data was generated from a Markov model. As the
method is designed for Markov sources, a better performance is not
surprising. It would be nice if the authors compared the
aforementioned methods for a non-Markov data for sake of completeness even
if they approach was not always the best.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
Overall, The idea is good, but the execution could
have improved.There are some typos here and there for instance page 5,
paragraph 2. A careful reread of the paper is recommended.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
We thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and
suggestions.
Reviewer 1
-lines 128, 284, 298, 419
Reviewer is correct. Thank you.
-line 184 A is the set of
states in the Markov chain (line 181). The formula applies to any ergodic
Markov chain, so we make no assumption about what the states of the chain
are. In the case of present interest, they are strings of 0s and 1s.
-line 262-664: formula for posterior transition We appreciate
the suggestion and will include and a relevant reference for the
derivation.
-Figure 1 We do not attach observations to the
intermediate nodes, but just use them as part of the structure of the
hierarchical prior, where at the bottom level of the hierarchy sit the
parameters responsible for generating the data.
-line 269 Yes,
absolute value bars in the |k| subscript are unnecessary. We have g_k
consisting of one scalar value for each of the 2^k binary words of length
k. It matters which value goes with which word, so perhaps the ordering of
a tuple is the easiest way to keep this structure intact, as the reviewer
suggests.
line 308: [10, 400] range for alpha We chose 400
because higher values of alpha caused computational difficulties in the
Gibbs sampling. This upper bound is a bit arbitrary; however, we found the
exact upper limit above about 100 had little effect on the estimates of
transition probabilities. Similarly, adjusting the lower bound below 60 or
so had little effect. While we do hope for a more well justified
hyperprior for alpha in future work, we believe our choice did not overly
influence the results.
Figure 2: Error bars We did examine
error bars, and consider their availability one of the advantages of our
method. We ultimately omitted error bars from the figure for the sake of
readability, but recognize that this left out potentially interesting
information. The underestimation of the HDP estimator for larger block
lengths was not significant.
Reviewer 2
-lines 128, 294,
301 Reviewer is correct. Thank you.
-Fig 3c We agree that
the superiority of the HDP in figure 3c is not clear. We will redo this
figure with more data so that the relative performances of the methods are
clearer.
-References to other reconstruction methods, epsilon
machine reconstruction We thank the reviewer for the suggestions, and
will add these.
-line 124: log(e) Here, e is Euler’s constant,
and log(e) looks trivial, but is actually necessary because we are
computing entropy in bits, and all logarithms in the paper are base 2
(line 77).
-lines 177, 227 The newest (latest in time) 0 or 1
is always rightmost. On line 177, we are explaining the transitions in a
Markov model, which has finite memory. The example on line 177 is for a
Markov model where states consist of 3-symbol sequences. Thus when 010
transitions to 101, a new 1 is added to the right of 010, and the leftmost
0 of 010 disappears into the past and is ‘forgotten’. Similarly on line
227, g_0011 is similar to g_011 because the contexts 0011 and 011 are
identical in the 3 most recent symbols.
-line 249: sample paths
We intended just to point out that draws from the DP are probability
distributions, and that the DP provides a distribution over distributions.
We used the language of paths simply to clarify how the DP is in fact a
stochastic process.
-line 264 N in the expression
corresponding to s =\empty is correct as written. In the corresponding
expression for a nonempty s, the denominator includes c_s, the number of
observations of the context s, or the number of symbols preceded by
context s. When the context is the empty string, we consider all N symbols
to be preceded by \empty. We can include a reference to the derivation to
make this clearer.
-line 269 We apologize if the notation was
unclear. To specify a posterior predictive distribution given a model
of depth k, we need the posterior values of p(1|s) for all s of length
k. Line 264 gives a method for finding these probabilities from the
data. Hence, we have specified a recursive method for recovering the
posterior predictive probabilities, and have an easily computable point
estimate for each transition probability g_s. However, the point estimate
does not provide information about the distribution of each g_s, and so
while we gain speed with this method, we lose other desirable qualities,
which is the point of the discussion in the next paragraph.
Reviewer 3
-Estimating the p(1|s) in section 5: why
consistent with eq 3? We agree that this is unclear. The derivation
would not fit here, but we should have pointed the reader to Teh et al.,
2006 and provided some intuition; we can do this in the final version of
the paper
-Section 6: conditional distribution for alpha_i We
put a uniform prior on the alpha_i, and so the conditional distribution
given comes from Bayes theorem and is equal to the product, over all
contexts s of length i-1, of p(g_0s|g_s, alpha_i) and p(g_1s|g_s,
alpha_i). We modeled both p(g_0s | g_s , alpha_i)and p(g_1s | g_s,
alpha_i) as beta distributions, so the conditional probability of alpha_i
is a product of beta distributions. On line 305, Beta in the denominator
indicates the beta function, not the beta distribution, and it provides
the normalization constant for each of the beta distributions. There is a
typo here- the denominator should be squared, and the product should be
over the whole fraction, not just the denominator. Perhaps this typo was
the source of the confusion-we apologize.
-comparison to
non-Markov data We understand the reviewer's concern. However, we are
designing the model with the task at hand in mind: we expect neural data
to have the property that very distant symbols matter little. The neural
data not truly Markovian, though, and so we considered performance on this
data to be one test of the model’s performance on non-Markov data. We plan
to redo figure 3c with more data so that the results will be
clearer.
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