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.
This paper considers a new family of variational distributions motivated by Sklar's theorem. This family is based on new copula-like densities on the hypercube with non-uniform marginals which can be sampled efficiently, i.e. with a complexity linear in the dimension of state space. Then, the proposed variational densi…
Hidden variables are ubiquitous in practical data analysis, and therefore modeling marginal densities and doing inference with the resulting models is an important problem in statistics, machine learning, and causal inference. Recently, a new type of graphical model, called the nested Markov model, was developed which …
We propose a high dimensional classification method that involves nonparametric feature augmentation. Knowing that marginal density ratios are the most powerful univariate classifiers, we use the ratio estimates to transform the original feature measurements. Subsequently, penalized logistic regression is invoked, taki…
Log-density gradient estimation is a fundamental statistical problem and possesses various practical applications such as clustering and measuring non-Gaussianity. A naive two-step approach of first estimating the density and then taking its log-gradient is unreliable because an accurate density estimate does not neces…
We prove that the marginal densities of a global probability mass function in a primal normal factor graph and the corresponding marginal densities in the dual normal factor graph are related via local mappings. The mapping depends on the Fourier transform of the local factors of the models. Details of the mapping, inc…
Training deep generative models with maximum likelihood remains a challenge. The typical workaround is to use variational inference (VI) and maximize a lower bound to the log marginal likelihood of the data. Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) adopt this approach. They further amortize the cost of inference by using a rec…
The reparameterization trick is widely used in variational inference as it yields more accurate estimates of the gradient of the variational objective than alternative approaches such as the score function method. Although there is overwhelming empirical evidence in the literature showing its success, there is relative…
We study the connections between spectral clustering and the problems of maximum margin clustering, and estimation of the components of level sets of a density function. Specifically, we obtain bounds on the eigenvectors of graph Laplacian matrices in terms of the between cluster separation, and within cluster connecti…
We examine the vertical component of surface area in the warped product of a Euclidean interval and a fiber manifold with product density. We determine general conditions under which vertical fibers minimize vertical surface area among regions bounding the same volume and use these results to conclude that in many such…
We consider learning continuous probabilistic graphical models in the face of missing data. For non-Gaussian models, learning the parameters and structure of such models depends on our ability to perform efficient inference, and can be prohibitive even for relatively modest domains. Recently, we introduced the Copula B…
This work gives an in-depth derivation of the trainable evidence lower bound obtained from the marginal joint log-Likelihood with the goal of training a Multi-Modal Variational Autoencoder (M2VAE).
We completely characterize isoperimetric regions in R^n with density e^h, where h is convex, smooth, and radially symmetric. In particular, balls around the origin constitute isoperimetric regions of any given volume, proving the Log-Convex Density Conjecture due to Kenneth Brakke.
In the present paper we construct stock price processes with the same marginal log-normal law as that of a geometric Brownian motion and also with the same transition density (and returns' distributions) between any two instants in a given discrete-time grid. We then illustrate how option prices based on such processes…
A new imputation method estimates missing values by matching observed marginals from masked data.
problem Missing values in data undermine statistical and machine learning analysis.
method Estimates a distribution from masked observations using positive semi-definite kernel density estimation.
result The method yields both single and multiple imputations from the same fitted density, with statistical consistency and fast adaptive excess risk.
Associating distinct groups of objects (clusters) with contiguous regions of high probability density (high-density clusters), is central to many statistical and machine learning approaches to the classification of unlabelled data. We propose a novel hyperplane classifier for clustering and semi-supervised classificati…
New findings on PAC learning and marginal distribution estimation.
problem Understanding how PAC learning relates to marginal distribution estimation under distributional constraints.
method Revisited the connection between PAC learning, uniform convergence, and density estimation, considering a known family of marginal distributions.
result PAC learning is sandwiched between two refined models of density estimation, differing only in whether the learner knows the set of well-estimated events in H.
Several classification methods assume that the underlying distributions follow tree-structured graphical models. Indeed, trees capture statistical dependencies between pairs of variables, which may be crucial to attain low classification errors. The resulting classifier is linear in the log-transformed univariate and b…
Evaluation of the marginal likelihood plays an important role in model selection problems. The widely applicable Bayesian information criterion (WBIC) and singular Bayesian information criterion (sBIC) give approximations to the log marginal likelihood, which can be applied to both regular and singular models. When the…