arXiv research

A new method uses nearest neighbors for importance weighting.

Integrates nearest neighbors with neural networks for more accurate treatment effect estimation.

In the era of deep learning, understanding over-fitting phenomenon becomes increasingly important. It is observed that carefully designed deep neural networks achieve small testing error even when the training error is close to zero. One possible explanation is that for many modern machine learning algorithms, over-fit…

Estimating entropy and mutual information consistently is important for many machine learning applications. The Kozachenko-Leonenko (KL) estimator (Kozachenko & Leonenko, 1987) is a widely used nonparametric estimator for the entropy of multivariate continuous random variables, as well as the basis of the mutual inform…

New estimator handles covariate shift with closed-form solution and super-efficiency.

Study proves NN matching is equivalent to Riesz regression for debiased machine learning.

Biased sampling and missing data complicates statistical problems ranging from causal inference to reinforcement learning. We often correct for biased sampling of summary statistics with matching methods and importance weighting. In this paper, we study nearest neighbor matching (NNM), which makes estimates of populati…

New method quantifies feature interactions in machine learning models.

Estimating Kullback-Leibler divergence from identical and independently distributed samples is an important problem in various domains. One simple and effective estimator is based on the k nearest neighbor distances between these samples. In this paper, we analyze the convergence rates of the bias and variance of this …

The method of random projections has become a standard tool for machine learning, data mining, and search with massive data at Web scale. The effective use of random projections requires efficient coding schemes for quantizing (real-valued) projected data into integers. In this paper, we focus on a simple 2-bit coding …

In the last decades the estimation of the intrinsic dimensionality of a dataset has gained considerable importance. Despite the great deal of research work devoted to this task, most of the proposed solutions prove to be unreliable when the intrinsic dimensionality of the input dataset is high and the manifold where th…

Improved multi-task averaging reduces mean squared error in high-dimensional data.

Paper tackles NNS under uncertainty with improved algorithms.

Nearest neighbor methods are a popular class of nonparametric estimators with several desirable properties, such as adaptivity to different distance scales in different regions of space. Prior work on convergence rates for nearest neighbor classification has not fully reflected these subtle properties. We analyze the b…

The estimation of optimal treatment regimes is of considerable interest to precision medicine. In this work, we propose a causal $k$-nearest neighbor method to estimate the optimal treatment regime. The method roots in the framework of causal inference, and estimates the causal treatment effects within the nearest neig…

Locally adaptive nearest neighbors improve automated systems' performance and are easier to interpret.

Improved nearest neighbors for missing data in latent factor models.

The conditional mutual information I(X;Y|Z) measures the average information that X and Y contain about each other given Z. This is an important primitive in many learning problems including conditional independence testing, graphical model inference, causal strength estimation and time-series problems. In several appl…

We demonstrate that a popular class of nonparametric mutual information (MI) estimators based on k-nearest-neighbor graphs requires number of samples that scales exponentially with the true MI. Consequently, accurate estimation of MI between two strongly dependent variables is possible only for prohibitively large samp…

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have recently received wide attentions, due to their successful applications in different graph tasks and different domains. Training GCNs for a large graph, however, is still a challenge. Original full-batch GCN training requires calculating the representation of all the nodes in th…

We establish the first nonasymptotic error bounds for Kaplan-Meier-based nearest neighbor and kernel survival probability estimators where feature vectors reside in metric spaces. Our bounds imply rates of strong consistency for these nonparametric estimators and, up to a log factor, match an existing lower bound for c…

Algorithms often carry out equally many computations for "easy" and "hard" problem instances. In particular, algorithms for finding nearest neighbors typically have the same running time regardless of the particular problem instance. In this paper, we consider the approximate k-nearest-neighbor problem, which is the pr…

A new approach to $L_2$-consistent estimation of a general density functional using $k$-nearest neighbor distances is proposed, where the functional under consideration is in the form of the expectation of some function $f$ of the densities at each point. The estimator is designed to be asymptotically unbiased, using t…

Deep neural networks (DNNs) enable innovative applications of machine learning like image recognition, machine translation, or malware detection. However, deep learning is often criticized for its lack of robustness in adversarial settings (e.g., vulnerability to adversarial inputs) and general inability to rationalize…

New methods use vector search and nearest-neighbor matching for policy learning in causal inference.

This paper presents a simple but effective density-based outlier detection approach with the local kernel density estimation (KDE). A Relative Density-based Outlier Score (RDOS) is introduced to measure the local outlierness of objects, in which the density distribution at the location of an object is estimated with a …

Nearest neighbor (k-NN) graphs are widely used in machine learning and data mining applications, and our aim is to better understand what they reveal about the cluster structure of the unknown underlying distribution of points. Moreover, is it possible to identify spurious structures that might arise due to sampling va…

Characterizes Lebesgue points using nearest neighbor methods.

Develops HCQRF for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects with censored data.

The paper studies empirical processes from nearest neighbors in regression.

A new method for covariate shift adaptation using nearest neighbors.

In the panoply of pattern classification techniques, few enjoy the intuitive appeal and simplicity of the nearest neighbor rule: given a set of samples in some metric domain space whose value under some function is known, we estimate the function anywhere in the domain by giving the value of the nearest sample per the …

GNNGuard defends Graph Neural Networks against structural perturbations.

The stability of statistical analysis is an important indicator for reproducibility, which is one main principle of scientific method. It entails that similar statistical conclusions can be reached based on independent samples from the same underlying population. In this paper, we introduce a general measure of classif…

Manifold learning now plays a very important role in machine learning and many relevant applications. Although its superior performance in dealing with nonlinear data distribution, data sparsity is always a thorny knot. There are few researches to well handle it in manifold learning. In this paper, we propose Hierarchi…

Graph Neural Network (GNN) is a powerful model to learn representations and make predictions on graph data. Existing efforts on GNN have largely defined the graph convolution as a weighted sum of the features of the connected nodes to form the representation of the target node. Nevertheless, the operation of weighted s…

We present the first sublinear memory sketch that can be queried to find the nearest neighbors in a dataset. Our online sketching algorithm compresses an N element dataset to a sketch of size $O(N^b \log^3 N)$ in $O(N^{(b+1)} \log^3 N)$ time, where $b < 1$. This sketch can correctly report the nearest neighbors of any …

Paper proposes a k-NN classifier for detecting spike-and-wave seizures in EEG.

Information-theoretic quantities, such as conditional entropy and mutual information, are critical data summaries for quantifying uncertainty. Current widely used approaches for computing such quantities rely on nearest neighbor methods and exhibit both strong performance and theoretical guarantees in certain simple sc…

Estimating mutual information from i.i.d. samples drawn from an unknown joint density function is a basic statistical problem of broad interest with multitudinous applications. The most popular estimator is one proposed by Kraskov and Stögbauer and Grassberger (KSG) in 2004, and is nonparametric and based on the distan…

We provide finite-sample analysis of a general framework for using k-nearest neighbor statistics to estimate functionals of a nonparametric continuous probability density, including entropies and divergences. Rather than plugging a consistent density estimate (which requires $k \to \infty$ as the sample size $n \to \in…

The weighted nearest neighbors (WNN) estimator has been popularly used as a flexible and easy-to-implement nonparametric tool for mean regression estimation. The bagging technique is an elegant way to form WNN estimators with weights automatically generated to the nearest neighbors; we name the resulting estimator as t…

A new method for density estimation using nearest neighbor Dirichlet mixtures.

There are few papers about the international trade of flowers, so it is believed that this paper, with this topic, could be an important contribution to the international scientific community. It is intended to analyze if the international trade flowers tendencies and policies are adapted to the actual world global con…

We analyze the Kozachenko--Leonenko (KL) nearest neighbor estimator for the differential entropy. We obtain the first uniform upper bound on its performance over Hölder balls on a torus without assuming any conditions on how close the density could be from zero. Accompanying a new minimax lower bound over the Hölder ba…

Unified theory for causal inference using various methods.

Enhanced nearest neighbor improves accuracy in crowdsourced data.

Bayesian nonparametric models improve tracking in cluttered environments.