arXiv research

Defines hierarchical clustering axioms for various densities.

Given $iid$ observations from an unknown absolute continuous distribution defined on some domain $Ω$, we propose a nonparametric method to learn a piecewise constant function to approximate the underlying probability density function. Our density estimate is a piecewise constant function defined on a binary partition o…

Partition Tree estimates conditional densities for mixed continuous and categorical variables.

We study the isoperimetric problem in Euclidean space endowed with a density. We first consider piecewise constant densities and examine particular cases related to the characteristic functions of half-planes, strips and balls. We also consider continuous modification of Gauss density in $\R^2$. Finally, we give a list…

New GMM models fit high-dimensional data with fewer parameters.

Given i.i.d samples from some unknown continuous density on hyper-rectangle $[0, 1]^d$, we attempt to learn a piecewise constant function that approximates this underlying density non-parametrically. Our density estimate is defined on a binary split of $[0, 1]^d$ and built up sequentially according to discrepancy crite…

This paper uses normalizing flows to approximate transport maps between densities.

In this paper, we present a novel way to summarize the structure of large graphs, based on non-parametric estimation of edge density in directed multigraphs. Following coclustering approach, we use a clustering of the vertices, with a piecewise constant estimation of the density of the edges across the clusters, and ad…

Study identifies change points in piecewise constant reward functions with fixed exploration budget.

The fused lasso is analyzed for high-dimensional piecewise-constant regression coefficients.

A new framework for flexible neural network receptive fields.

A new method for density estimation using mixture discrepancy and moments.

We show that on a two-dimensional compact nontrapping manifold with strictly convex boundary, a piecewise constant function is determined by its integrals over geodesics. In higher dimensions, we obtain a similar result if the manifold satisfies a foliation condition. These theorems are based on iterating a local uniqu…

The Heston stochastic volatility model is a standard model for valuing financial derivatives, since it can be calibrated using semi-analytical formulas and captures the most basic structure of the market for financial derivatives with simple structure in time-direction. However, extending the model to the case of time-…

We show injectivity of the geodesic X-ray transform on piecewise constant functions when the transform is weighted by a continuous matrix weight. The manifold is assumed to be compact and nontrapping of any dimension, and in dimension three and higher we assume a foliation condition. We make no assumption regarding con…

We study online optimization of smoothed piecewise constant functions over the domain [0, 1). This is motivated by the problem of adaptively picking parameters of learning algorithms as in the recently introduced framework by Gupta and Roughgarden (2016). Majority of the machine learning literature has focused on Lipsc…

Investigates chaotic financial time series with monthly contributions and devaluation.

Finding anonymization mechanisms to protect personal data is at the heart of recent machine learning research. Here, we consider the consequences of local differential privacy constraints on goodness-of-fit testing, i.e. the statistical problem assessing whether sample points are generated from a fixed density $f_0$, o…

Piecewise constant denoising can be solved either by deterministic optimization approaches, based on the Potts model, or by stochastic Bayesian procedures. The former lead to low computational time but require the selection of a regularization parameter, whose value significantly impacts the achieved solution, and whos…

We show that on a two-dimensional compact nontrapping Riemannian manifold with strictly convex boundary, a piecewise constant function can be recovered from its integrals over geodesics. We adapt the injectivity proof which uses variations through geodesics to recover the function and we improve this result when the ma…

A piecewise constant curvature manifold is a triangulated manifold that is assigned a geometry by specifying lengths of edges and stipulating that for a chosen background geometry (Euclidean, hyperbolic, or spherical), each simplex has an isometric embedding into the background geometry with the chosen edge lengths. Ad…

A method identifies abrupt changes in functions with fixed confidence under noisy feedback.

Transformers struggle to approximate smooth functions, relying on piecewise constant approximations.

A new method solves complex financial equations efficiently.

Marchal's lemma is the basic tool for eliminating collisions when using the direct method of the calculus of variations to establish existence of "designer" solutions to the classical N-body problem. Our goal here is to understand why Marchal's lemma holds, by taking a metric geometry perspective and employing the Jaco…

We study the theoretical properties of image denoising via total variation penalized least-squares. We define the total vatiation in terms of the two-dimensional total discrete derivative of the image and show that it gives rise to denoised images that are piecewise constant on rectangular sets. We prove that, if the t…

2D Total Variation Denoising (TVD) is a widely used technique for image denoising. It is also an important nonparametric regression method for estimating functions with heterogenous smoothness. Recent results have shown the TVD estimator to be nearly minimax rate optimal for the class of functions with bounded variatio…

Smoothing graphons improve link prediction in Bayesian SBM without increasing computational complexity.

New method unifies and formalizes data partitioning using a single vector.

We consider stochastic volatility models using piecewise constant parameters. We suggest a hybrid optimization algorithm for fitting the models to a volatility surface and provide some numerical results. Finally, we provide an outlook on how to further improve the calibration procedure.

This paper solves a variation of the isoperimetric problem in higher dimensions.

The time-evolving precision matrix of a piecewise-constant Gaussian graphical model encodes the dynamic conditional dependency structure of a multivariate time-series. Traditionally, graphical models are estimated under the assumption that data is drawn identically from a generating distribution. Introducing sparsity a…

We consider the problem of nonparametric regression when the covariate is $d$-dimensional, where $d \geq 1$. In this paper we introduce and study two nonparametric least squares estimators (LSEs) in this setting---the entirely monotonic LSE and the constrained Hardy-Krause variation LSE. We show that these two LSEs are…

This paper aims at formulating the issue of ranking multivariate unlabeled observations depending on their degree of abnormality as an unsupervised statistical learning task. In the 1-d situation, this problem is usually tackled by means of tail estimation techniques: univariate observations are viewed as all the more …

MF-PID uses interacting samples to efficiently transport probability mass.

Enhances random forests by smoothing predictions for better performance.

We propose in this paper an exploratory analysis algorithm for functional data. The method partitions a set of functions into $K$ clusters and represents each cluster by a simple prototype (e.g., piecewise constant). The total number of segments in the prototypes, $P$, is chosen by the user and optimally distributed am…

The paper studies deformation of discrete conformal structures on surfaces using combinatorial curvature flows.

NODEs with explicit time dependence can interpolate and generalize like piecewise-constant estimators.

We consider the numerical approximation of the quantile hedging price in a non-linear market. In a Markovian framework, we propose a numerical method based on a Piecewise Constant Policy Timestepping (PCPT) scheme coupled with a monotone finite difference approximation. We prove the convergence of our algorithm combini…

Study of Dirac-like operators on spin manifolds with large mass parameters.

We present the group fused Lasso for detection of multiple change-points shared by a set of co-occurring one-dimensional signals. Change-points are detected by approximating the original signals with a constraint on the multidimensional total variation, leading to piecewise-constant approximations. Fast algorithms are …

We investigate the properties of the combinatorial Ricci flow for surfaces, both forward and backward -- existence, uniqueness and singularities formation. We show that the positive results that exist for the smooth Ricci flow also hold for the combinatorial one and that, moreover, the same results hold for a more gene…

This paper addresses the problem of segmenting a time-series with respect to changes in the mean value or in the variance. The first case is when the time data is modeled as a sequence of independent and normal distributed random variables with unknown, possibly changing, mean value but fixed variance. The main assumpt…

The calibration of a local volatility models to a given set of option prices is a classical problem of mathematical finance. It was considered in multiple papers where various solutions were proposed. In this paper an extension of the approach proposed in LiptonSepp2011 is developed by i) replacing a piecewise constant…

We study regularized estimation in high-dimensional longitudinal classification problems, using the lasso and fused lasso regularizers. The constructed coefficient estimates are piecewise constant across the time dimension in the longitudinal problem, with adaptively selected change points (break points). We present an…

We propose a numerical recipe for risk evaluation defined by a backward stochastic differential equation. Using dual representation of the risk measure, we convert the risk valuation to a stochastic control problem where the control is a certain Radon-Nikodym derivative process. By exploring the maximum principle, we s…

We study the problem of estimating a manifold from random samples. In particular, we consider piecewise constant and piecewise linear estimators induced by k-means and k-flats, and analyze their performance. We extend previous results for k-means in two separate directions. First, we provide new results for k-means rec…