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arXiv research

A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.

168,657 papers · 148 categories

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23477093 · May 202619922001200920172026
48 results for Finite-data posteriors

Improves Laplace approximation for Bayesian inference on Riemannian manifolds.

problem Inaccurate Gaussian approximations for complex targets and finite-data posteriors.
method Develops alternative variants of the Laplace approximation using a Riemannian metric.
result Exact approximations at the limit of infinite data, improving practical performance.

Many modern data analysis problems involve inferences from streaming data. However, streaming data is not easily amenable to the standard probabilistic modeling approaches, which assume that we condition on finite data. We develop population variational Bayes, a new approach for using Bayesian modeling to analyze strea…

2015-07-19abs ↗pdf ↗

Meta-learning improves Bayesian causal discovery by sampling from the posterior.

problem Difficulty in estimating the full posterior over causal structures due to large number of possible graphs and functional relationships.
method Proposes a Bayesian meta-learning model that encodes key properties of the posterior and allows for sampling causal structures.
result Meta-Bayesian causal discovery allows for reliable sampling from the posterior over causal structures.

Estimates causal effects in Gaussian Linear SCMs with finite data.

problem Estimating causal effects from observational data with latent confounders.
method Centralized Gaussian Linear SCMs (CGL-SCMs) and EM-based estimation algorithm.
result Learned CGL-SCM parameters accurately recover causal distributions from finite observational samples.

Variational Causal Networks approximate Bayesian inference over causal structures.

problem Quantifying uncertainty in causal structure inference from finite data.
method Parametric variational family over DAGs, using Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) for tractable learning.
result Approximation of the true posterior over DAGs is demonstrated to be good.

Measuring mutual information from finite data is difficult. Recent work has considered variational methods maximizing a lower bound. In this paper, we prove that serious statistical limitations are inherent to any method of measuring mutual information. More specifically, we show that any distribution-free high-confide…

2018-11-10abs ↗pdf ↗

The Bellman error is a poor proxy for value function accuracy, even with all state-action pairs.

problem The Bellman error is a poor proxy for the accuracy of the value function.
method Study of the Bellman equation as a surrogate objective for value prediction accuracy.
result The magnitude of the Bellman error is only weakly related to the distance to the true value function, even with all state-action pairs.

We identify linear models from nonlinear systems with initialization constraints.

problem Identifying linear models from nonlinear systems with initialization constraints.
method Multiple trajectories-based deterministic data acquisition algorithm followed by regularized least squares.
result We provide a finite sample error bound on the learned linearized dynamics.

Feature selection aims to select the smallest subset of features for a specified level of performance. The optimal achievable classification performance on a feature subset is summarized by its Receiver Operating Curve (ROC). When infinite data is available, the Neyman- Pearson (NP) design procedure provides the most e…

2013-01-16abs ↗pdf ↗

Finite resources limit false discovery rate control in structured hypothesis spaces.

problem Controlling false discovery rate in hypothesis testing with finite data and structured hypothesis spaces.
method Framework for exact FDR control and adaptive power maximization.
result Exact FDR control and adaptive power maximization.

We study the problem of distinguishing between two distributions on a metric space; i.e., given metric measure spaces (X,d,μ1)({\mathbb X}, d, μ_1) and (X,d,μ2)({\mathbb X}, d, μ_2), we are interested in the problem of determining from finite data whether or not μ1μ_1 is μ2μ_2. The key is to use pairwise distances between observat…

2018-02-04abs ↗pdf ↗

We propose a novel method for clustering data which is grounded in information-theoretic principles and requires no parametric assumptions. Previous attempts to use information theory to define clusters in an assumption-free way are based on maximizing mutual information between data and cluster labels. We demonstrate …

2013-10-15abs ↗pdf ↗

The development of a metric for structural data is a long-term problem in pattern recognition and machine learning. In this paper, we develop a general metric for comparing nonlinear dynamical systems that is defined with Perron-Frobenius operators in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Our metric includes the existing …

2018-05-31abs ↗pdf ↗

While adversarial training can improve robust accuracy (against an adversary), it sometimes hurts standard accuracy (when there is no adversary). Previous work has studied this tradeoff between standard and robust accuracy, but only in the setting where no predictor performs well on both objectives in the infinite data…

2019-06-14abs ↗pdf ↗

Our goal in this paper is to develop an effective estimator of fractal dimension. We survey existing ideas in dimension estimation, with a focus on the currently popular method of Grassberger and Procaccia for the estimation of correlation dimension. There are two major difficulties in estimation based on this method. …

2013-12-09abs ↗pdf ↗

Study reveals how high-dimensional models are vulnerable to consistent adversarial attacks.

problem Understanding the vulnerability of high-dimensional linear classifiers to adversarial attacks.
method Introducing a new error metric to quantify model vulnerability, and rigorously characterizing these metrics in asymptotic settings.
result As models become more overparameterized, their vulnerability to label-preserving perturbations increases.

Gradient descent converges geometrically to optimal self-attention parameters.

problem Training softmax self-attention layers for linear regression.
method Structure-aware gradient descent with preconditioner and regularizer.
result Gradient descent converges geometrically to global minima.

New method reduces over-parametrization in neural networks, ensuring sparsity and finite network size.

problem Over-parametrization leads to too many active neurons in neural networks, especially with large data.
method Investigates a nonconvex regularization method for shallow ReLU networks.
result Locally optimal networks are finite even with infinite data, maintaining approximation guarantees and network size bounds.

FP-BMA improves generalization by encouraging flat posteriors in Bayesian Model Averaging.

problem Lack of flat posterior in approximate Bayesian inference methods hinders effective Bayesian Model Averaging.
method Proposes Flat Posterior-aware Bayesian Model Averaging (FP-BMA) and Flat Posterior-aware Bayesian Transfer Learning schemes.
result FP-BMA successfully captures flat posteriors, improving generalization performance.

Theoretical framework for M-posteriors connects Bayesian and frequentist statistics.

problem Connecting Bayesian and frequentist approaches in statistical inference.
method Developed a theoretical framework for M-posteriors, showing asymptotic normality and frequentist consistency.
result M-posteriors are robust and contract around M-estimators under mild conditions.

New method improves generative model performance by fully conditioning variational posteriors.

problem Inaccurate inference due to partial conditioning of variational posteriors in sequential LVMs.
method Introduces fully-conditioned approximate posteriors to improve generative model performance.
result Improves generative modelling and multi-step prediction performance.

PVI seeks a posterior that makes predictions closer to true data, not approximating the Bayesian posterior.

problem Finding meaningful posterior distributions under model misspecification.
method Predictive variational inference (PVI) seeks an optimal posterior density for close predictive matching to true data.
result PVI learns a posterior that is not the same as the Bayesian posterior, but is closer to the true data generating process.

Optimized α\alpha-posteriors reduce KL divergence from true posterior in parametric misspecification.

problem Reduction of KL divergence from true posterior in parametric model misspecification.
method Derivation of Bernstein-von Mises theorem and optimization of α\alpha-posteriors.
result Optimized α\alpha-posteriors minimize KL divergence from true posterior, especially in severe misspecification.

This work explores how overparametrization and priors affect Bayesian neural network posteriors.

problem Symmetries, non-identifiabilities, and weight-space priors fragment and inflate BNN posteriors.
method We study the interplay between overparametrization and priors in BNN posteriors, deriving key phenomena and validating through experiments.
result Overparametrization induces structured, prior-aligned weight posterior distributions.

The representation of the approximate posterior is a critical aspect of effective variational autoencoders (VAEs). Poor choices for the approximate posterior have a detrimental impact on the generative performance of VAEs due to the mismatch with the true posterior. We extend the class of posterior models that may be l…

2019-01-11abs ↗pdf ↗