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.
We examine counterfactual explanations for explaining the decisions made by model-based AI systems. The counterfactual approach we consider defines an explanation as a set of the system's data inputs that causally drives the decision (i.e., changing the inputs in the set changes the decision) and is irreducible (i.e., …
We present an alternative layer to convolution layers in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our approach reduces the complexity of convolutions by replacing it with binary decisions. Those binary decisions are used as indexes to conditional distributions where each weight represents a leaf in a decision tree. This m…
This work presents an approach to automatically induction for non-greedy decision trees constructed from neural network architecture. This construction can be used to transfer weights when growing or pruning a decision tree, allowing non-greedy decision tree algorithms to automatically learn and adapt to the ideal arch…
We consider a setting where an agent's uncertainty is represented by a set of probability measures, rather than a single measure. Measure-bymeasure updating of such a set of measures upon acquiring new information is well-known to suffer from problems; agents are not always able to learn appropriately. To deal with the…
The paper addresses statistical inference for online decision-making in a contextual bandit setting.
problem Understanding the performance of reward models in online decision-making with contextual information.
method The paper uses the contextual bandit framework with a linear reward model and the ε-greedy policy to address the exploration-exploitation dilemma. It employs the martingale central limit theorem and inverse propensity score weighting to establish asymptotic normality of parameter estimators.
result The online ordinary least squares estimator and the online weighted least squares estimator are asymptotically normal, providing insights into the performance of the reward model.
We present a new approach to the problems of evaluating and learning personalized decision policies from observational data of past contexts, decisions, and outcomes. Only the outcome of the enacted decision is available and the historical policy is unknown. These problems arise in personalized medicine using electroni…
Learning probability distributions on the weights of neural networks (NNs) has recently proven beneficial in many applications. Bayesian methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), offer an elegant framework to reason about NN model uncertainty. However, by assuming independent Gaussian priors for the i…
The paper proposes a method to improve random forest classification accuracy by weighting trees based on their decision path reliability.
problem Random forests' uniform voting fails to correct errors in regions where incorrect tree representations outnumber correct ones.
method The paper introduces using the structural pattern of each tree's decision path as an instance-adaptive reliability signal to identify and weight more reliable trees.
result Using the proposed method yields a statistically significant accuracy improvement over RF on 36 binary classification benchmarks.
In this paper we study convex stochastic search problems where a noisy objective function value is observed after a decision is made. There are many stochastic search problems whose behavior depends on an exogenous state variable which affects the shape of the objective function. Currently, there is no general purpose …
MARCD uses generative scenarios to improve portfolio decisions during regime shifts.
problem Improving portfolio decisions under regime shifts and drawdowns.
method MARCD employs a Gaussian HMM for regime inference, a diffusion generator for scenario production, and a CVaR allocator with tail-weighted and crisis-aware components.
result MARCD reduces maximum drawdowns by 34% compared to baseline methods over 2020-2025.
We investigate how the choice of decision makers can be varied under the presence of risk and uncertainty. Our analysis is based on the approach we have previously applied to individual decision makers, which we now generalize to the case of decision makers that are members of a society. The approach employs the mathem…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces have powerful flexibility for representing real-world decision and control problems but are notoriously difficult to solve. Recent online sampling-based algorithms that use observation likelihood weighting have shown un…
Machine learning classifiers often stumble over imbalanced datasets where classes are not equally represented. This inherent bias towards the majority class may result in low accuracy in labeling minority class. Imbalanced learning is prevalent in many real-world applications, such as medical research, network intrusio…
Many problems that appear in biomedical decision making, such as diagnosing disease and predicting response to treatment, can be expressed as binary classification problems. The costs of false positives and false negatives vary across application domains and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves provide a visu…
The influence of additional information on the decision making of agents, who are interacting members of a society, is analyzed within the mathematical framework based on the use of quantum probabilities. The introduction of social interactions, which influence the decisions of individual agents, leads to a generalizat…
Bayesian Decision Trees are known for their probabilistic interpretability. However, their construction can sometimes be costly. In this article we present a general Bayesian Decision Tree algorithm applicable to both regression and classification problems. The algorithm does not apply Markov Chain Monte Carlo and does…
We explain why numbers occurring in the classification of polygon spaces coincide with numbers of self-dual equivalence classes of threshold functions, or of regular Boolean functions, or of decisive weighted majority games.
Decision makers, such as doctors and judges, make crucial decisions such as recommending treatments to patients, and granting bails to defendants on a daily basis. Such decisions typically involve weighting the potential benefits of taking an action against the costs involved. In this work, we aim to automate this task…
A fundamental question for companies with large amount of logged data is: How to use such logged data together with incoming streaming data to make good decisions? Many companies currently make decisions via online A/B tests, but wrong decisions during testing hurt users' experiences and cause irreversible damage. A ty…
Societies often rely on human experts to take a wide variety of decisions affecting their members, from jail-or-release decisions taken by judges and stop-and-frisk decisions taken by police officers to accept-or-reject decisions taken by academics. In this context, each decision is taken by an expert who is typically …
Prior-weighted logistic regression has become a standard tool for calibration in speaker recognition. Logistic regression is the optimization of the expected value of the logarithmic scoring rule. We generalize this via a parametric family of proper scoring rules. Our theoretical analysis shows how different members of…