Latent Dirichlet conditional naive-Bayes models

In spite of the popularity of probabilistic mixture models for latent structure discovery from data, mixture models do not have a natural mechanism for handling sparsity, where each data point only has a few non-zero observations. In this paper, we introduce conditional naive-Bayes (CNB) models, which generalize naive-Bayes mixture models to naturally handle sparsity by conditioning the model on observed features. Further, we present latent Dirichlet conditional naive-Bayes (LD-CNB) models, which constitute a family of powerful hierarchical Bayesian models for latent structure discovery from sparse data. The proposed family of models are quite general and can work with arbitrary regular exponential family conditional distributions. We present a variational inference based EM algorithm for learning along with special case analyses for Gaussian and discrete distributions. The efficacy of the proposed models are demonstrated by extensive experiments on a wide variety of different datasets.