Generative modelIn statistical classification, two main approaches are called the generative approach and the discriminative approach. These compute classifiers by different approaches, differing in the degree of statistical modelling. Terminology is inconsistent, but three major types can be distinguished, following : A generative model is a statistical model of the joint probability distribution on given observable variable X and target variable Y; A discriminative model is a model of the conditional probability of the target Y, given an observation x; and Classifiers computed without using a probability model are also referred to loosely as "discriminative".
Mixture modelIn statistics, a mixture model is a probabilistic model for representing the presence of subpopulations within an overall population, without requiring that an observed data set should identify the sub-population to which an individual observation belongs. Formally a mixture model corresponds to the mixture distribution that represents the probability distribution of observations in the overall population.
Facial recognition systemA facial recognition system is a technology potentially capable of matching a human face from a or a video frame against a database of faces. Such a system is typically employed to authenticate users through ID verification services, and works by pinpointing and measuring facial features from a given image. Development began on similar systems in the 1960s, beginning as a form of computer application. Since their inception, facial recognition systems have seen wider uses in recent times on smartphones and in other forms of technology, such as robotics.
Robust statisticsRobust statistics are statistics with good performance for data drawn from a wide range of probability distributions, especially for distributions that are not normal. Robust statistical methods have been developed for many common problems, such as estimating location, scale, and regression parameters. One motivation is to produce statistical methods that are not unduly affected by outliers. Another motivation is to provide methods with good performance when there are small departures from a parametric distribution.
Robust regressionIn robust statistics, robust regression seeks to overcome some limitations of traditional regression analysis. A regression analysis models the relationship between one or more independent variables and a dependent variable. Standard types of regression, such as ordinary least squares, have favourable properties if their underlying assumptions are true, but can give misleading results otherwise (i.e. are not robust to assumption violations).
Diffusion modelIn machine learning, diffusion models, also known as diffusion probabilistic models or score-based generative models, are a class of latent variable models. They are Markov chains trained using variational inference. The goal of diffusion models is to learn the latent structure of a dataset by modeling the way in which data points diffuse through the latent space. In computer vision, this means that a neural network is trained to denoise images blurred with Gaussian noise by learning to reverse the diffusion process.
Discriminative modelDiscriminative models, also referred to as conditional models, are a class of logistical models used for classification or regression. They distinguish decision boundaries through observed data, such as pass/fail, win/lose, alive/dead or healthy/sick. Typical discriminative models include logistic regression (LR), conditional random fields (CRFs) (specified over an undirected graph), decision trees, and many others. Typical generative model approaches include naive Bayes classifiers, Gaussian mixture models, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks and others.
Face IDFace ID is a facial recognition system designed and developed by Apple Inc. for the iPhone and iPad Pro. The system allows biometric authentication for unlocking a device, making payments, accessing sensitive data, providing detailed facial expression tracking for Animoji, as well as six degrees of freedom (6DOF) head-tracking, eye-tracking, and other features. Initially released in November 2017 with the iPhone X, it has since been updated and introduced to several new iPhone models, and all iPad Pro models.
Generative adversarial networkA generative adversarial network (GAN) is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. The concept was initially developed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in June 2014. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. Given a training set, this technique learns to generate new data with the same statistics as the training set.
Maximum likelihood estimationIn statistics, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a method of estimating the parameters of an assumed probability distribution, given some observed data. This is achieved by maximizing a likelihood function so that, under the assumed statistical model, the observed data is most probable. The point in the parameter space that maximizes the likelihood function is called the maximum likelihood estimate. The logic of maximum likelihood is both intuitive and flexible, and as such the method has become a dominant means of statistical inference.
Text-to-image modelA text-to-image model is a machine learning model which takes an input natural language description and produces an image matching that description. Such models began to be developed in the mid-2010s, as a result of advances in deep neural networks. In 2022, the output of state of the art text-to-image models, such as OpenAI's DALL-E 2, Google Brain's , StabilityAI's Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney began to approach the quality of real photographs and human-drawn art.
M-estimatorIn statistics, M-estimators are a broad class of extremum estimators for which the objective function is a sample average. Both non-linear least squares and maximum likelihood estimation are special cases of M-estimators. The definition of M-estimators was motivated by robust statistics, which contributed new types of M-estimators. However, M-estimators are not inherently robust, as is clear from the fact that they include maximum likelihood estimators, which are in general not robust.
Estimating equationsIn statistics, the method of estimating equations is a way of specifying how the parameters of a statistical model should be estimated. This can be thought of as a generalisation of many classical methods—the method of moments, least squares, and maximum likelihood—as well as some recent methods like M-estimators. The basis of the method is to have, or to find, a set of simultaneous equations involving both the sample data and the unknown model parameters which are to be solved in order to define the estimates of the parameters.
Face detectionFace detection is a computer technology being used in a variety of applications that identifies human faces in digital images. Face detection also refers to the psychological process by which humans locate and attend to faces in a visual scene. Face detection can be regarded as a specific case of object-class detection. In object-class detection, the task is to find the locations and sizes of all objects in an image that belong to a given class. Examples include upper torsos, pedestrians, and cars.
Generative artificial intelligenceGenerative artificial intelligence (AI) is artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images, or other media, using generative models. Generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data and then generate new data that has similar characteristics. In the early 2020s, advances in transformer-based deep neural networks enabled a number of generative AI systems notable for accepting natural language prompts as input.
Gaussian processIn probability theory and statistics, a Gaussian process is a stochastic process (a collection of random variables indexed by time or space), such that every finite collection of those random variables has a multivariate normal distribution, i.e. every finite linear combination of them is normally distributed. The distribution of a Gaussian process is the joint distribution of all those (infinitely many) random variables, and as such, it is a distribution over functions with a continuous domain, e.g.
Generalized method of momentsIn econometrics and statistics, the generalized method of moments (GMM) is a generic method for estimating parameters in statistical models. Usually it is applied in the context of semiparametric models, where the parameter of interest is finite-dimensional, whereas the full shape of the data's distribution function may not be known, and therefore maximum likelihood estimation is not applicable. The method requires that a certain number of moment conditions be specified for the model.
Transformer (machine learning model)A transformer is a deep learning architecture that relies on the parallel multi-head attention mechanism. The modern transformer was proposed in the 2017 paper titled 'Attention Is All You Need' by Ashish Vaswani et al., Google Brain team. It is notable for requiring less training time than previous recurrent neural architectures, such as long short-term memory (LSTM), and its later variation has been prevalently adopted for training large language models on large (language) datasets, such as the Wikipedia corpus and Common Crawl, by virtue of the parallelized processing of input sequence.
Generalized linear modelIn statistics, a generalized linear model (GLM) is a flexible generalization of ordinary linear regression. The GLM generalizes linear regression by allowing the linear model to be related to the response variable via a link function and by allowing the magnitude of the variance of each measurement to be a function of its predicted value. Generalized linear models were formulated by John Nelder and Robert Wedderburn as a way of unifying various other statistical models, including linear regression, logistic regression and Poisson regression.
Quasi-likelihoodIn statistics, quasi-likelihood methods are used to estimate parameters in a statistical model when exact likelihood methods, for example maximum likelihood estimation, are computationally infeasible. Due to the wrong likelihood being used, quasi-likelihood estimators lose asymptotic efficiency compared to, e.g., maximum likelihood estimators. Under broadly applicable conditions, quasi-likelihood estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal. The asymptotic covariance matrix can be obtained using the so-called sandwich estimator.
