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 paper addresses the difficulty of decision makers trusting AI-assisted predictions and proposes a method to improve confidence values.
problem Decision makers struggle to trust AI-assisted predictions based on confidence values.
method The paper investigates why decision makers have difficulties and proposes a method to construct more useful confidence values.
result Multicalibration with respect to the decision maker's confidence on her own predictions is a sufficient condition for alignment, leading to better decisions.
Estimating the value function for a fixed policy is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning. Policy evaluation algorithms---to estimate value functions---continue to be developed, to improve convergence rates, improve stability and handle variability, particularly for off-policy learning. To understand the prop…
Structural equation models and Bayesian networks have been widely used to study causal relationships between continuous variables. Recently, a non-Gaussian method called LiNGAM was proposed to discover such causal models and has been extended in various directions. An important problem with LiNGAM is that the results a…
This work uses statistical bootstrapping to provide accurate confidence intervals for policy value in reinforcement learning.
problem Bias in estimating policy value using empirical transitions and rewards.
method Statistical bootstrapping to produce calibrated confidence intervals for the true policy value.
result Statistical bootstrapping can yield correct confidence intervals under certain conditions, and mechanisms are proposed to mitigate these conditions.
We provide the asymptotic distribution of the major indexes used in the statistical literature to quantify disparate treatment in machine learning. We aim at promoting the use of confidence intervals when testing the so-called group disparate impact. We illustrate on some examples the importance of using confidence int…
Improves confidence calibration in neural networks by smoothing labels based on class similarity.
problem Improving confidence calibration in deep neural networks for safety-critical applications.
method Proposes a novel label smoothing technique where label values are based on similarities with the reference class, using different similarity measurements.
result Consistently outperforms state-of-the-art calibration techniques on various datasets and network architectures.
Confidence intervals are a popular way to visualize and analyze data distributions. Unlike p-values, they can convey information both about statistical significance as well as effect size. However, very little work exists on applying confidence intervals to multivariate data. In this paper we define confidence interval…
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…
Construction of tight confidence regions and intervals is central to statistical inference and decision making. This paper develops new theory showing minimum average volume confidence regions for categorical data. More precisely, consider an empirical distribution p generated from n iid real…
We propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence interval as simple convex optimization problems. Using the lower bound of our confiden…
Deep learning architectures have proved versatile in a number of drug discovery applications, including the modelling of in vitro compound activity. While controlling for prediction confidence is essential to increase the trust, interpretability and usefulness of virtual screening models in drug discovery, techniques t…
Optimism about the poorly understood states and actions is the main driving force of exploration for many provably-efficient reinforcement learning algorithms. We propose optimism in the face of sensible value functions (OFVF)- a novel data-driven Bayesian algorithm to constructing Plausibility sets for MDPs to explore…
In this paper I show how reliable estimates of the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) can be obtained using cross sectional data using Garen's instrumental variable (IV) approach. The increase in the range confidence intervals due to the IV setup can be reduced by a factor of 3 by using a proxy to risk attitude. In orde…
This paper extends the existing literature on empirical estimation of the confidence intervals associated to the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA). We used Montecarlo simulation to evaluate the confidence intervals. Varying the parameters in DFA technique, we point out the relationship between those and the standard…
Optimizes target value in stochastic black box functions.
problem Finding input to minimize expected squared error to target value.
method Derives acquisition functions for expected improvement, probability of improvement, and lower confidence bound, assuming Gaussian aleatoric effects.
result Acquisition functions can outperform classical Bayesian optimization under certain conditions.