Providing transport users and operators with accurate forecasts on travel times is challenging due to a highly stochastic traffic environment. Public transport users are particularly sensitive to unexpected waiting times, which negatively affect their perception on the system’s reliability. In this paper we develop a robust model for real-time bus travel time prediction that departs from Gaussian assumptions by using Student-terrors. The proposed approach uses spatiotemporal characteristics from the route and previous bus trips to model short-term effects, and date/time variables and Gaussian processes for long-run forecasts. The model allows for flexible modeling of mean, variance and kurtosis spaces. We propose algorithms for Bayesian inference and for computing probabilistic forecast distributions. Experiments are performed using data from high-frequency buses in Stockholm, Sweden. Results show that Student-tmodels outperform Gaussian ones in terms of log-posterior predictive power to forecast bus delays at specific stops, which reveals the importance of accounting for predictive uncertainty in model selection. Estimated Student-tregressions capture typical temporal variability between within-day hours and different weekdays. Strong spatiotemporal effects are detected for incoming buses from immediately previous stops, which is in line with many recently developed models. We finally show how Bayesian inference naturally allows for predictive uncertainty quantification, e.g. by returning the predictive probability that the delay of an incoming bus exceeds a given threshold.

Bayesian inference using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) on large datasets has developed rapidly in recent years. However, the underlying methods are generally limited to relatively simple settings where the data have specific forms of independence. We propose a novel technique for speeding up MCMC for time series data by efficient data subsampling in the frequency domain. For several challenging time series models, we demonstrate a speedup of up to two orders of magnitude while incurring negligible bias compared to MCMC on the full dataset. We also propose alternative control variates for variance reduction based on data grouping and coreset constructions.

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) samples efficiently from high-dimensional posterior distributions with proposed parameter draws obtained by iterating on a discretized version of the Hamiltonian dynamics. The iterations make HMC computationally costly, especially in problems with large data sets, since it is necessary to compute posterior densities and their derivatives with respect to the parameters. Naively computing the Hamiltonian dynamics on a subset of the data causes HMC to lose its key ability to generate distant parameter proposals with high acceptance probability. The key insight in our article is that efficient subsampling HMC for the parameters is possible if both the dynamics and the acceptance probability are computed from the same data subsample in each complete HMC iteration. We show that this is possible to do in a principled way in a HMC-within-Gibbs framework where the subsample is updated using a pseudo marginal MH step and the parameters are then updated using an HMC step, based on the current subsample. We show that our subsampling methods are fast and compare favorably to two popular sampling algorithms that use gradient estimates from data subsampling. We also explore the current limitations of subsampling HMC algorithms by varying the quality of the variance reducing control variates used in the estimators of the posterior density and its gradients.

We suggest a Bayesian approach to the problem of reducing bug turn-around time in large software development organizations. Our approach is to use classification to predict where bugs are located in components. This classification is a form of automatic fault localization (AFL) at the component level. The approach only relies on historical bug reports and does not require detailed analysis of source code or detailed test runs. Our approach addresses two problems identified in user studies of AFL tools. The first problem concerns the trust in which the user can put in the results of the tool. The second problem concerns understanding how the results were computed. The proposed model quantifies the uncertainty in its predictions and all estimated model parameters. Additionally, the output of the model explains why a result was suggested. We evaluate the approach on more than 50000 bugs.

Modern mobile devices provide ultra-high resolutions in their display panels. This imposes ever increasing workload on the GPU leading to high power consumption and shortened battery life. In this paper, we first show that resolution scaling leads to significant power savings. Second, we propose a perception-aware adaptive scheme that sets the resolution during game play. We exploit the fact that game players are often willing to trade quality for longer battery life. Our scheme uses decision theory, where the predicted user perception is combined with a novel asymmetric loss function that encodes users' alterations in their willingness to save power.

We present a framework for the analysis of process variation across semiconductor wafers. The framework is capable of quantifying the primary parameters affected by process variation, e.g., the effective channel length, which is in contrast with the former techniques wherein only secondary parameters were considered, e.g., the leakage current. Instead of taking direct measurements of the quantity of interest, we employ Bayesian inference to draw conclusions based on indirect observations, e.g., on temperature. The proposed approach has low costs since no deployment of expensive test structures might be needed or only a small subset of the test equipments already deployed for other purposes might need to be activated. The experimental results present an assessment of our framework for a wide range of configurations.