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.
The estimation of probabilities of default (PDs) for low default portfolios by means of upper confidence bounds is a well established procedure in many financial institutions. However, there are often discussions within the institutions or between institutions and supervisors about which confidence level to use for the…
Berry et al. (1997) initiated the development of the infinite arms bandit problem. They derived a regret lower bound of all allocation strategies for Bernoulli rewards with uniform priors, and proposed strategies based on success runs. Bonald and Proutière (2013) proposed a two-target algorithm that achieves the regret…
We propose a generic confidence-based approximation that can be plugged in and simplify the auto-regressive generation process with a proved convergence. We first assume that the priors of future samples can be generated in an independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) manner using an efficient predictor. Given…
New method uses fractional posteriors for semiparametric inference with improved uncertainty quantification.
problem Semiparametric inference with nonparametric priors and fractional posteriors.
method Established a general Bernstein--von Mises theorem for fractional posterior distributions, proposed shifted-and-rescaled credible sets.
result Fractional posterior credible sets provide reliable uncertainty quantification but have inflated size; shifted-and-rescaled set is an efficient confidence set.
Robust MDPs (RMDPs) can be used to compute policies with provable worst-case guarantees in reinforcement learning. The quality and robustness of an RMDP solution are determined by the ambiguity set---the set of plausible transition probabilities---which is usually constructed as a multi-dimensional confidence region. E…
We consider the correlated multiarmed bandit (MAB) problem in which the rewards associated with each arm are modeled by a multivariate Gaussian random variable, and we investigate the influence of the assumptions in the Bayesian prior on the performance of the upper credible limit (UCL) algorithm and a new correlated U…
Point estimation of class prevalences in the presence of data set shift has been a popular research topic for more than two decades. Less attention has been paid to the construction of confidence and prediction intervals for estimates of class prevalences. One little considered question is whether or not it is necessar…
We design a general framework for answering adaptive statistical queries that focuses on providing explicit confidence intervals along with point estimates. Prior work in this area has either focused on providing tight confidence intervals for specific analyses, or providing general worst-case bounds for point estimate…
This paper presents new deviation inequalities that are valid uniformly in time under adaptive sampling in a multi-armed bandit model. The deviations are measured using the Kullback-Leibler divergence in a given one-dimensional exponential family, and may take into account several arms at a time. They are obtained by c…
In the setting of high-dimensional linear regression models, we propose two frameworks for constructing pointwise and group confidence sets for penalized estimators which incorporate prior knowledge about the organization of the non-zero coefficients. This is done by desparsifying the estimator as in van de Geer et al.…
We integrate information-theoretic concepts into the design and analysis of optimistic algorithms and Thompson sampling. By making a connection between information-theoretic quantities and confidence bounds, we obtain results that relate the per-period performance of the agent with its information gain about the enviro…
We investigate and provide new insights on the sampling rule called Top-Two Thompson Sampling (TTTS). In particular, we justify its use for fixed-confidence best-arm identification. We further propose a variant of TTTS called Top-Two Transportation Cost (T3C), which disposes of the computational burden of TTTS. As our …
We introduce a two-player contest for evaluating the safety and robustness of machine learning systems, with a large prize pool. Unlike most prior work in ML robustness, which studies norm-constrained adversaries, we shift our focus to unconstrained adversaries. Defenders submit machine learning models, and try to achi…
LLMs struggle with zero-shot annotation tasks due to model-internalized priors.
problem Impact of model-internalized priors on LLM performance in zero-shot annotation tasks.
method Investigated three dimensions: familiarity, decision stickiness, and susceptibility to misaligned task definitions.
result Nearly two-thirds of zero-shot errors are resistant to correction, with a rescue rate of 34.8%. Definition-Specific Familiarity (DSF) shows a positive association with model performance.
This paper studies uncertainty quantification in deep spatiotemporal forecasting.
problem Uncertainty quantification in deep spatiotemporal forecasting models.
method Analysis of UQ methods from Bayesian and frequentist perspectives, including statistical decision theory.
result Different UQ methods have different strengths and weaknesses, with Bayesian methods being more robust in mean prediction and frequentist methods providing more extensive coverage.
The Black-Litterman model combines investors' personal views with historical data and gives optimal portfolio weights. In this paper we will introduce the original Black-Litterman model (section 1), we will modify the model such that it fits in a Bayesian framework by considering the investors' personal views to be a d…