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.
Non-symmetric rectangular correlation matrices occur in many problems in economics. We test the method of extracting statistically meaningful correlations between input and output variables of large dimensionality and build a toy model for artificially included correlations in large random time series.The results are t…
Three physics-constrained regression exercises for image velocimetry and turbulence modeling.
Greedy selection works well in a toy model of independent increments.
We present MDP Playground, a testbed for Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with dimensions of hardness that can be controlled independently to challenge agents in different ways and obtain varying degrees of hardness in toy and complex RL environments. We consider and allow control over a wide variety of dimensions, i…
Toy model study shows resampling/reweighting can improve feature learning in imbalanced classification.
In this paper we model the loss function of high-dimensional optimization problems by a Gaussian random field, or equivalently a Gaussian process. Our aim is to study gradient descent in such loss functions or energy landscapes and compare it to results obtained from real high-dimensional optimization problems such as …
Study compares ZBDT model to BDT for financial derivatives valuation.
This letter introduces an abstract learning problem called the "set embedding": The objective is to map sets into probability distributions so as to lose less information. We relate set union and intersection operations with corresponding interpolations of probability distributions. We also demonstrate a preliminary so…
New PAC bound for meta-learning improves generalization guarantees.
A toy model shows how locality can emerge in the universe's Hamiltonian and initial state.
In this work, we generalize semi-supervised generative adversarial networks (GANs) from classification problems to regression problems. In the last few years, the importance of improving the training of neural networks using semi-supervised training has been demonstrated for classification problems. We present a novel …
We study the relation between the trading behavior of agents and volatility in toy markets of adaptive inductively rational agents. We show that excess volatility, in such simplified markets, arises as a consequence of {\em i)} the neglect of market impact implicit in price taking behavior and of {\em ii)} excessive re…
Conventional prior for Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) is a Gaussian distribution. Recent works demonstrated that choice of prior distribution affects learning capacity of VAE models. We propose a general technique (embedding-reparameterization procedure, or ER) for introducing arbitrary manifold-valued variables in VAE…
Graph Networks are used to make decisions in potentially complex scenarios but it is usually not obvious how or why they made them. In this work, we study the explainability of Graph Network decisions using two main classes of techniques, gradient-based and decomposition-based, on a toy dataset and a chemistry task. Ou…
In the last few years, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) has become a highly active area of research. A particularly challenging class of problems in this area is partially observable, cooperative, multi-agent learning, in which teams of agents must learn to coordinate their behaviour while conditioning only…
APD method decomposes neural network parameters into simple, faithful components.
We consider a simple market where a vendor offers multiple variants of a certain product and preferences of both the vendor and potential buyers are heterogeneous and possibly even antagonistic. Optimization of the joint benefit of the vendor and the buyers turns the toy market into a combinatorial matching problem. We…
Traditional set prediction models can struggle with simple datasets due to an issue we call the responsibility problem. We introduce a pooling method for sets of feature vectors based on sorting features across elements of the set. This can be used to construct a permutation-equivariant auto-encoder that avoids this re…
User authentication and intrusion detection differ from standard classification problems in that while we have data generated from legitimate users, impostor or intrusion data is scarce or non-existent. We review existing techniques for dealing with this problem and propose a novel alternative based on a principled sta…
This paper is a comment on the survey paper by Biau and Scornet (2016) about random forests. We focus on the problem of quantifying the impact of each ingredient of random forests on their performance. We show that such a quantification is possible for a simple pure forest , leading to conclusions that could apply more…
In this paper, we address the problem of embedded feature selection for ranking on top of the list problems. We pose this problem as a regularized empirical risk minimization with -norm push loss function () and sparsity inducing regularizers. We leverage the issues related to this challenging optimization…
SLT explains neural network success by closing theory-practice gap.
We introduce stochastic variational inference for Gaussian process models. This enables the application of Gaussian process (GP) models to data sets containing millions of data points. We show how GPs can be vari- ationally decomposed to depend on a set of globally relevant inducing variables which factorize the model …
Irregular features disrupt the desired classification. In this paper, we consider aggressively modifying scales of features in the original space according to the label information to form well-separated clusters in low-dimensional space. The proposed method exploits spectral clustering to derive scaling factors that a…
We propose a modification of the classical Black-Derman-Toy (BDT) interest rate tree model, which includes the possibility of a jump with small probability at each step to a practically zero interest rate. The corresponding BDT algorithms are consequently modified to calibrate the tree containing the zero interest rate…
This is an extended write-up of a talk given in April, 1993 in honor of Raoul Bott's 70th birthday. We first illustrate how some traditional topological and geometric invariants obey ``gluing laws'' inspired by those in classical and quantum field theory. Here we discuss characteristic numbers, particularly the Euler n…
We consider training probabilistic classifiers in the case of a large number of classes. The number of classes is assumed too large to perform exact normalisation over all classes. To account for this we consider a simple approach that directly approximates the likelihood. We show that this simple approach works well o…
Autoregressive (AR) models have become a popular tool for unsupervised learning, achieving state-of-the-art log likelihood estimates. We investigate the use of AR models as density estimators in two settings -- as a learning signal for image translation, and as an outlier detector -- and find that these density estimat…
Learning rate annealing helps even in convex problems, improving generalization.
New findings on when to use action space exploration in reinforcement learning.
Conservative Policy Iteration (CPI) is a founding algorithm of Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP). Its core principle is to stabilize greediness through stochastic mixtures of consecutive policies. It comes with strong theoretical guarantees, and inspired approaches in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, CPI …
Applying standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to large data sets is computationally infeasible. The recently proposed stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) method circumvents this problem in three ways: it generates proposed moves using only a subset of the data, it skips the Metropolis-Hastings a…
Paper generalizes path signature using fractional calculus for improved machine learning.
Graph Neural Networks solve topology problems in simple 3D models.
The speculation game is an agent-based toy model to investigate the dynamics of the financial market. Our model has achieved the reproduction of 10 of the well-known stylized facts for financial time series. However, there is also a divergence from the behavior of real market. The market price of the model tends to be …
New Bayesian optimization models for efficient material screening.
We develop a normative framework for hierarchical model-based policy optimization based on applying second-order methods in the space of all possible state-action paths. The resulting natural path gradient performs policy updates in a manner which is sensitive to the long-range correlational structure of the induced st…
Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) has emerged as a powerful tool for analyzing the dynamics of non-linear systems from experimental datasets. Recently, several attempts have extended DMD to the context of low-rank approximations. This extension is of particular interest for reduced-order modeling in various applicative …
We consider the class of short rate interest rate models for which the short rate is proportional to the exponential of a Gaussian Markov process x(t) in the terminal measure r(t) = a(t) exp(x(t)). These models include the Black, Derman, Toy and Black, Karasinski models in the terminal measure. We show that such intere…
A key problem in financial mathematics is the forecasting of financial crashes: if we perturb asset prices, will financial institutions fail on a massive scale? This was recently shown to be a computationally intractable (NP-hard) problem. Financial crashes are inherently difficult to predict, even for a regulator whic…
We describe some of the algebra underlying the decomposition of planar grid diagrams. This provides a useful toy model for an extension of Heegaard Floer homology to 3-manifolds with parametrized boundary. This paper is meant to serve as a gentle introduction to the subject, and does not itself have immediate topologic…
Visual attention serves as a means of feature selection mechanism in the perceptual system. Motivated by Broadbent's leaky filter model of selective attention, we evaluate how such mechanism could be implemented and affect the learning process of deep reinforcement learning. We visualize and analyze the feature maps of…
Games generalize the single-objective optimization paradigm by introducing different objective functions for different players. Differentiable games often proceed by simultaneous or alternating gradient updates. In machine learning, games are gaining new importance through formulations like generative adversarial netwo…
Reflective Hamiltonian Monte Carlo struggles with high-dimensional sampling.
Joint state and parameter estimation is a core problem for dynamic Bayesian networks. Although modern probabilistic inference toolkits make it relatively easy to specify large and practically relevant probabilistic models, the silver bullet---an efficient and general online inference algorithm for such problems---remai…
Bayesian optimisation framework considers only variable orderings to handle ill-conditioned objectives.
This paper presents a method for solving the supervised learning problem in which the output is highly nonlinear and discontinuous. It is proposed to solve this problem in three stages: (i) cluster the pairs of input-output data points, resulting in a label for each point; (ii) classify the data, where the correspondin…
We consider Bayesian inference when only a limited number of noisy log-likelihood evaluations can be obtained. This occurs for example when complex simulator-based statistical models are fitted to data, and synthetic likelihood (SL) method is used to form the noisy log-likelihood estimates using computationally costly …