We introduce a robust classification method based on the Bayesian predictive distribution (Bayesian Predictive Classification, referred to as BPC) for speech recognition. We and others have recently proposed a total Bayesian framework named Variational Bayesian Estimation and Clustering for speech recognition (VBEC). VBEC includes the practical computation of approximate posterior distributions that are essential for BPC, based on variational Bayes (VB). BPC using VB posterior distributions (VB-BPC) provides an analytical solution for the predictive distribution as the Student's t-distribution, which can mitigate the over-training effects by marginalizing the model parameters of an output distribution. We address the sparse data problem in speech recognition, and show experimentally that VB-BPC is robust against data sparseness.

A Shared-State Hidden Markov Model (SS-HMM) has been widely used as an acoustic model in speech recognition. In this paper, we propose a method for constructing SS-HMMs within a practical Bayesian framework. Our method derives the Bayesian model selection criterion for the SS-HMM based on the variational Bayesian approach. The appropriate phonetic decision tree structure of the SS-HMM is found by using the Bayesian criterion. Unlike the conventional asymptotic criteria, this criterion is applicable even in the case of an insufficient amount of training data. The experimental results on isolated word recognition demonstrate that the proposed method does not require the tuning parameter that must be tuned according to the amount of training data, and is useful for selecting the appropriate SS-HMM structure for practical use.