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.
Variable importance is central to scientific studies, including the social sciences and causal inference, healthcare, and other domains. However, current notions of variable importance are often tied to a specific predictive model. This is problematic: what if there were multiple well-performing predictive models, and …
Statistical inference is considered for variables of interest, called primary variables, when auxiliary variables are observed along with the primary variables. We consider the setting of incomplete data analysis, where some primary variables are not observed. Utilizing a parametric model of joint distribution of prima…
We propose a procedure for assigning a relevance measure to each explanatory variable in a complex predictive model. We assume that we have a training set to fit the model and a test set to check the out of sample performance. First, the individual relevance of each variable is computed by comparing the predictions in …
A serious problem in learning probabilistic models is the presence of hidden variables. These variables are not observed, yet interact with several of the observed variables. Detecting hidden variables poses two problems: determining the relations to other variables in the model and determining the number of states of …
Variable selection for Gaussian process models is often done using automatic relevance determination, which uses the inverse length-scale parameter of each input variable as a proxy for variable relevance. This implicitly determined relevance has several drawbacks that prevent the selection of optimal input variables i…
Many widely studied graphical models with latent variables lead to nontrivial constraints on the distribution of the observed variables. Inspired by the Bell inequalities in quantum mechanics, we refer to any linear inequality whose violation rules out some latent variable model as a "hidden variable test" for that mod…
We present a new variable selection method based on model-based gradient boosting and randomly permuted variables. Model-based boosting is a tool to fit a statistical model while performing variable selection at the same time. A drawback of the fitting lies in the need of multiple model fits on slightly altered data (e…
Ising models describe the joint probability distribution of a vector of binary feature variables. Typically, not all the variables interact with each other and one is interested in learning the presumably sparse network structure of the interacting variables. However, in the presence of latent variables, the convention…
Many statistical methods have been proposed to estimate causal models in classical situations with fewer variables than observations (p<n, p: the number of variables and n: the number of observations). However, modern datasets including gene expression data need high-dimensional causal modeling in challenging situation…
DAG models with hidden variables present many difficulties that are not present when all nodes are observed. In particular, fully observed DAG models are identified and correspond to well-defined sets ofdistributions, whereas this is not true if nodes are unobserved. Inthis paper we characterize exactly the set of dist…
The causal discovery of Bayesian networks is an active and important research area, and it is based upon searching the space of causal models for those which can best explain a pattern of probabilistic dependencies shown in the data. However, some of those dependencies are generated by causal structures involving varia…
Variational autoencoders learn distributions of high-dimensional data. They model data with a deep latent-variable model and then fit the model by maximizing a lower bound of the log marginal likelihood. VAEs can capture complex distributions, but they can also suffer from an issue known as "latent variable collapse," …
Hierarchical statistical models are widely employed in information science and data engineering. The models consist of two types of variables: observable variables that represent the given data and latent variables for the unobservable labels. An asymptotic analysis of the models plays an important role in evaluating t…
There has been much recent, exciting work on combining the complementary strengths of latent variable models and deep learning. Latent variable modeling makes it easy to explicitly specify model constraints through conditional independence properties, while deep learning makes it possible to parameterize these conditio…
A wide class of machine learning algorithms can be reduced to variable elimination on factor graphs. While factor graphs provide a unifying notation for these algorithms, they do not provide a compact way to express repeated structure when compared to plate diagrams for directed graphical models. To exploit efficient t…
Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are a rich source of patient information, including measurements reflecting physiologic signs and administered therapies. Identifying which variables are useful in predicting clinical outcomes can be challenging. Advanced algorithms such as deep neural networks were designed to process …
Variable selection is of significant importance for classification and regression tasks in machine learning and statistical applications where both predictability and explainability are needed. In this paper, a Copula Entropy (CE) based method for variable selection which use CE based ranks to select variables is propo…
We provide a classification of graphical models according to their representation as subfamilies of exponential families. Undirected graphical models with no hidden variables are linear exponential families (LEFs), directed acyclic graphical models and chain graphs with no hidden variables, including Bayesian networks …
Study compares variable selection methods for model evaluation and search.
problem Understanding underlying mechanisms in scientific questions through variable selection.
method Comprehensive comparison of BIC and AIC for model evaluation and various search methods (exhaustive, greedy, LASSO path, stochastic search) for model space exploration.
result Exhaustive search BIC and stochastic search BIC outperform other methods in small and large model spaces, respectively, improving correct identification rate and reducing false discovery rate.