A novel procedure for learning a probabilistic model from mass spectrometry data that accounts for domain specific noise and mitigates the complexity of Bayesian structure learning is presented. We evaluate the algorithm by applying the learned probabilistic model to microorganism detection from mass spectrometry data.

A class of synchronization protocols for dense, large-scale sensor networks is presented. The protocols build on the recent work of Hong, Cheow, and Scaglione [5, 6] in which the synchronization update rules are modeled by a system of pulse-coupled oscillators. In the present work, we define a class of models that converge to a synchronized state based on the local communication topology of the sensor network only, thereby lifting the all-to-all communication requirement implicit in [5, 6]. Under some rather mild assumptions of the connectivity of the network over time, these protocols still converge to a synchronized state when the communication topology is time varying.

We describe a general technique for estimating the intractable quantities that occur in a wide variety of large-scale probabilistic models. The technique transforms intractable sums into integrals which are subsequently approximated via saddle point methods. When applied to sigmoid and noisy-OR networks, the technique yields a generic mean-field approximation as well as a second order Gaussian approximation that accounts for the pairwise correlations between random variables in the network. In two example models, we observe that our lowest order approximation is identical to expressions obtained using Plefka's approach for deriving the TAP equations.