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 gradient noise of SGD is considered to play a central role in the observed strong generalization abilities of deep learning. While past studies confirm that the magnitude and the covariance structure of gradient noise are critical for regularization, it remains unclear whether or not the class of noise distribution…
In applications of Gaussian processes where quantification of uncertainty is of primary interest, it is necessary to accurately characterize the posterior distribution over covariance parameters. This paper proposes an adaptation of the Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics algorithm to draw samples from the posterior …
This short note reviews so-called Natural Gradient Descent (NGD) for multivariate Gaussians. The Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) is derived for several different parameterizations of Gaussians. Careful attention is paid to the symmetric nature of the covariance matrix when calculating derivatives. We show that there ar…
We study the problem of estimating from data, a sparse approximation to the inverse covariance matrix. Estimating a sparsity constrained inverse covariance matrix is a key component in Gaussian graphical model learning, but one that is numerically very challenging. We address this challenge by developing a new adaptive…
When training a machine learning model with observational data, it is often encountered that some values are systemically missing. Learning from the incomplete data in which the missingness depends on some covariates may lead to biased estimation of parameters and even harm the fairness of decision outcome. This paper …
Study shows how mini-batch GD with random reshuffling affects least squares regression dynamics.
problem Analyzing the error dynamics of mini-batch GD with random reshuffling for least squares regression.
method Represented training and generalization errors through a sample cross-covariance matrix Z, compared with sample covariance matrix of original features X, and used linear scaling rule for analysis.
result Mini-batch GD with random reshuffling exhibits subtle step-size dependence not detectable by gradient flow analysis, converging to a limit dependent on the step size.
The choice of batch-size in a stochastic optimization algorithm plays a substantial role for both optimization and generalization. Increasing the batch-size used typically improves optimization but degrades generalization. To address the problem of improving generalization while maintaining optimal convergence in large…
New findings on optimization landscape of Toeplitz covariance estimation.
problem Understanding the geometry of the Gaussian maximum-likelihood objective for Toeplitz covariance estimation.
method Overparameterized Carathéodory representation of positive definite Toeplitz covariance matrices, focusing on both amplitudes and frequencies.
result Joint optimization of amplitudes and frequencies leads to a benign population landscape, allowing for global recovery of the true Toeplitz covariance.
We present Natural Gradient Boosting (NGBoost), an algorithm for generic probabilistic prediction via gradient boosting. Typical regression models return a point estimate, conditional on covariates, but probabilistic regression models output a full probability distribution over the outcome space, conditional on the cov…
Uncertainty estimation in large deep-learning models is a computationally challenging task, where it is difficult to form even a Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution. In such situations, existing methods usually resort to a diagonal approximation of the covariance matrix despite, the fact that these mat…
Adaptive learning rate algorithms such as RMSProp are widely used for training deep neural networks. RMSProp offers efficient training since it uses first order gradients to approximate Hessian-based preconditioning. However, since the first order gradients include noise caused by stochastic optimization, the approxima…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is widely used for parameter estimation, especially for huge data sets and online learning. While this recursive algorithm is popular for computation and memory efficiency, quantifying variability and randomness of the solutions has been rarely studied. This paper aims at…
Latent space models are effective tools for statistical modeling and exploration of network data. These models can effectively model real world network characteristics such as degree heterogeneity, transitivity, homophily, etc. Due to their close connection to generalized linear models, it is also natural to incorporat…
Optimization algorithms that leverage gradient covariance information, such as variants of natural gradient descent (Amari, 1998), offer the prospect of yielding more effective descent directions. For models with many parameters, the covariance matrix they are based on becomes gigantic, making them inapplicable in thei…
In this work, we present direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation algorithms based on the Krylov subspace that effectively exploit prior knowledge of the signals that impinge on a sensor array. The proposed multi-step knowledge-aided iterative conjugate gradient (CG) (MS-KAI-CG) algorithms perform subtraction of the unwan…
The L1-regularized maximum likelihood estimation problem has recently become a topic of great interest within the machine learning, statistics, and optimization communities as a method for producing sparse inverse covariance estimators. In this paper, a proximal gradient method (G-ISTA) for performing L1-regularized co…