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.
Consider the problem of finding a population or a probability distribution amongst many with the largest mean when these means are unknown but population samples can be simulated or otherwise generated. Typically, by selecting largest sample mean population, it can be shown that false selection probability decays at an…
In this paper we model the problem of learning preferences of a population as an active learning problem. We propose an algorithm can adaptively choose pairs of items to show to users coming from a heterogeneous population, and use the obtained reward to decide which pair of items to show next. We provide computational…
We develop a general framework for proving rigorous guarantees on the performance of the EM algorithm and a variant known as gradient EM. Our analysis is divided into two parts: a treatment of these algorithms at the population level (in the limit of infinite data), followed by results that apply to updates based on a …
This study improves audit sampling by using sequential procedures with statistical guarantees.
problem Improving audit efficiency and reliability with statistical methods.
method Formulated as a sequential testing problem, defining null and alternative hypotheses, stopping and decision rules, and exact boundary conditions.
result Exact design yields ex ante control of decision error probabilities, and simulation-based implementation approximates this design.
We propose a population-based Evolutionary Stochastic Gradient Descent (ESGD) framework for optimizing deep neural networks. ESGD combines SGD and gradient-free evolutionary algorithms as complementary algorithms in one framework in which the optimization alternates between the SGD step and evolution step to improve th…
Recent studies on fairness in automated decision making systems have both investigated the potential future impact of these decisions on the population at large, and emphasized that imposing ''typical'' fairness constraints such as demographic parity or equality of opportunity does not guarantee a benefit to disadvanta…
The paper learns pose variations within shape populations using constrained mixtures of factor analyzers.
problem Learning pose variations within a shape population with articulated parts and relative rotations.
method Formulated as mixtures of factor analyzers, segmentation by component posterior probabilities, and constraints on factor loading matrices for rotation matrices.
result Automatic learning of pose variations from shape populations, resulting in smooth and realistic animations.
We study methods for improving fairness to subgroups in settings with overlapping populations and sequential predictions. Classical notions of fairness focus on the balance of some property across different populations. However, in many applications the goal of the different groups is not to be predicted equally but ra…
We investigate the problems of identity and closeness testing over a discrete population from random samples. Our goal is to develop efficient testers while guaranteeing Differential Privacy to the individuals of the population. We describe an approach that yields sample-efficient differentially private testers for the…
This research provides theoretical guarantees for hyperparameter estimation in complex network dynamical systems.
problem Theoretical guarantees for hyperparameter estimation in large, inhomogeneous complex network dynamical systems.
method Formulating the system's evolution in a measure transport perspective, proposing a theoretical framework for estimating hyperparameters with mean-type observations.
result A nonasymptotic bound for the deviation of hyperparameter estimates in inhomogeneous complex network dynamical systems with respect to network population size.
This work aims to provide understandings on the remarkable success of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by theoretically analyzing their generalization performance and establishing optimization guarantees for gradient descent based training algorithms. Specifically, for a CNN model consisting of l convolution…
We provide non-asymptotic excess risk guarantees for statistical learning in a setting where the population risk with respect to which we evaluate the target parameter depends on an unknown nuisance parameter that must be estimated from data. We analyze a two-stage sample splitting meta-algorithm that takes as input ar…
Differential privacy comes equipped with multiple analytical tools for the design of private data analyses. One important tool is the so-called "privacy amplification by subsampling" principle, which ensures that a differentially private mechanism run on a random subsample of a population provides higher privacy guaran…
Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples and researchers have proposed many heuristic attack and defense mechanisms. We address this problem through the principled lens of distributionally robust optimization, which guarantees performance under adversarial input perturbations. By considering a Lagrangian …
This paper studies the landscape of empirical risk of deep neural networks by theoretically analyzing its convergence behavior to the population risk as well as its stationary points and properties. For an l-layer linear neural network, we prove its empirical risk uniformly converges to its population risk at the rat…
We lay theoretical foundations for new database release mechanisms that allow third-parties to construct consistent estimators of population statistics, while ensuring that the privacy of each individual contributing to the database is protected. The proposed framework rests on two main ideas. First, releasing (an esti…
Adaptive Monte Carlo schemes developed over the last years usually seek to ensure ergodicity of the sampling process in line with MCMC tradition. This poses constraints on what is possible in terms of adaptation. In the general case ergodicity can only be guaranteed if adaptation is diminished at a certain rate. Import…
The study assesses external validity by evaluating worst-case treatment effects across subpopulations.
problem Underrepresentation of marginalized groups and limited study populations.
method Develops a semiparametrically efficient estimator for worst-case treatment effects (WTE) and uses cross-fitting to guard against brittle findings.
result The proposed framework guards against invalid findings due to unanticipated population shifts.
Population risk is always of primary interest in machine learning; however, learning algorithms only have access to the empirical risk. Even for applications with nonconvex nonsmooth losses (such as modern deep networks), the population risk is generally significantly more well-behaved from an optimization point of vie…
The classical asymptotic theory for parametric M-estimators guarantees that, in the limit of infinite sample size, the excess risk has a chi-square type distribution, even in the misspecified case. We demonstrate how self-concordance of the loss allows to characterize the critical sample size sufficient to guarantee …
In stochastic optimization, the population risk is generally approximated by the empirical risk. However, in the large-scale setting, minimization of the empirical risk may be computationally restrictive. In this paper, we design an efficient algorithm to approximate the population risk minimizer in generalized linear …