Probabilistic price forecasting has recently gained attention in power trading because decisions based on such predictions can yield significantly higher profits than those made with point forecasts alone. At the same time, methods are being developed to combine predictive distributions, since no model is perfect and averaging generally improves forecasting performance. In this article we address the question of whether using CRPS learning, a novel weighting technique minimizing the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS), leads to optimal decisions in day-ahead bidding. To this end, we conduct an empirical study using hourly day-ahead electricity prices from the German EPEX market. We find that increasing the diversity of an ensemble can have a positive impact on accuracy. At the same time, the higher computational cost of using CRPS learning compared to an equal-weighted aggregation of distributions is not offset by higher profits, despite significantly more accurate predictions.
While deep neural networks have excellent results in many fields, they are susceptible to interference from attacking samples resulting in erroneous judgments. Feature-level attacks are one of the effective attack types, which targets the learnt features in the hidden layers to improve its transferability across different models. Yet it is observed that the transferability has been largely impacted by the neuron importance estimation results. In this paper, a double adversarial neuron attribution attack method, termed `DANAA', is proposed to obtain more accurate feature importance estimation. In our method, the model outputs are attributed to the middle layer based on an adversarial non-linear path. The goal is to measure the weight of individual neurons and retain the features that are more important towards transferability. We have conducted extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets to demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Our code is available at: //github.com/Davidjinzb/DANAA
As models grow larger and more complex, achieving better off-sample generalization with minimal trial-and-error is critical to the reliability and economy of machine learning workflows. As a proxy for the well-studied heuristic of seeking "flat" local minima, gradient regularization is a natural avenue, and first-order approximations such as Flooding and sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) have received significant attention, but their performance depends critically on hyperparameters (flood threshold and neighborhood radius, respectively) that are non-trivial to specify in advance. In order to develop a procedure which is more resilient to misspecified hyperparameters, with the hard-threshold "ascent-descent" switching device used in Flooding as motivation, we propose a softened, pointwise mechanism called SoftAD that downweights points on the borderline, limits the effects of outliers, and retains the ascent-descent effect. We contrast formal stationarity guarantees with those for Flooding, and empirically demonstrate how SoftAD can realize classification accuracy competitive with SAM and Flooding while maintaining a much smaller loss generalization gap and model norm. Our empirical tests range from simple binary classification on the plane to image classification using neural networks with millions of parameters; the key trends are observed across all datasets and models studied, and suggest a potential new approach to implicit regularization.
We introduce time-ordered multibody interactions to describe complex systems manifesting temporal as well as multibody dependencies. First, we show how the dynamics of multivariate Markov chains can be decomposed in ensembles of time-ordered multibody interactions. Then, we present an algorithm to extract those interactions from data capturing the system-level dynamics of node states and a measure to characterize the complexity of interaction ensembles. Finally, we experimentally validate the robustness of our algorithm against statistical errors and its efficiency at inferring parsimonious interaction ensembles.
We numerically investigate the possibility of defining stabilization-free Virtual Element (VEM) discretizations of advection-diffusion problems in the advection-dominated regime. To this end, we consider a SUPG stabilized formulation of the scheme. Numerical tests comparing the proposed method with standard VEM show that the lack of an additional arbitrary stabilization term, typical of VEM schemes, that adds artificial diffusion to the discrete solution, allows to better approximate boundary layers, in particular in the case of a low order scheme.
Historical materials are abundant. Yet, piecing together how human knowledge has evolved and spread both diachronically and synchronically remains a challenge that can so far only be very selectively addressed. The vast volume of materials precludes comprehensive studies, given the restricted number of human specialists. However, as large amounts of historical materials are now available in digital form there is a promising opportunity for AI-assisted historical analysis. In this work, we take a pivotal step towards analyzing vast historical corpora by employing innovative machine learning (ML) techniques, enabling in-depth historical insights on a grand scale. Our study centers on the evolution of knowledge within the `Sacrobosco Collection' -- a digitized collection of 359 early modern printed editions of textbooks on astronomy used at European universities between 1472 and 1650 -- roughly 76,000 pages, many of which contain astronomic, computational tables. An ML based analysis of these tables helps to unveil important facets of the spatio-temporal evolution of knowledge and innovation in the field of mathematical astronomy in the period, as taught at European universities.
A key challenge when trying to understand innovation is that it is a dynamic, ongoing process, which can be highly contingent on ephemeral factors such as culture, economics, or luck. This means that any analysis of the real-world process must necessarily be historical - and thus probably too late to be most useful - but also cannot be sure what the properties of the web of connections between innovations is or was. Here I try to address this by designing and generating a set of synthetic innovation web "dictionaries" that can be used to host sampled innovation timelines, probe the overall statistics and behaviours of these processes, and determine the degree of their reliance on the structure or generating algorithm. Thus, inspired by the work of Fink, Reeves, Palma and Farr (2017) on innovation in language, gastronomy, and technology, I study how new symbol discovery manifests itself in terms of additional "word" vocabulary being available from dictionaries generated from a finite number of symbols. Several distinct dictionary generation models are investigated using numerical simulation, with emphasis on the scaling of knowledge as dictionary generators and parameters are varied, and the role of which order the symbols are discovered in.
There has been significant progress in the study of sampling discretization of integral norms for both a designated finite-dimensional function space and a finite collection of such function spaces (universal discretization). Sampling discretization results turn out to be very useful in various applications, particularly in sampling recovery. Recent sampling discretization results typically provide existence of good sampling points for discretization. In this paper, we show that independent and identically distributed random points provide good universal discretization with high probability. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a simple greedy algorithm based on those points that are good for universal discretization provides excellent sparse recovery results in the square norm.
In order to give quantitative estimates for approximating the ergodic limit, we investigate probabilistic limit behaviors of time-averaging estimators of numerical discretizations for a class of time-homogeneous Markov processes, by studying the corresponding strong law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. Verifiable general sufficient conditions are proposed to ensure these limit behaviors, which are related to the properties of strong mixing and strong convergence for numerical discretizations of Markov processes. Our results hold for test functionals with lower regularity compared with existing results, and the analysis does not require the existence of the Poisson equation associated with the underlying Markov process. Notably, our results are applicable to numerical discretizations for a large class of stochastic systems, including stochastic ordinary differential equations, infinite dimensional stochastic evolution equations, and stochastic functional differential equations.
Power posteriors "robustify" standard Bayesian inference by raising the likelihood to a constant fractional power, effectively downweighting its influence in the calculation of the posterior. Power posteriors have been shown to be more robust to model misspecification than standard posteriors in many settings. Previous work has shown that power posteriors derived from low-dimensional, parametric locally asymptotically normal models are asymptotically normal (Bernstein-von Mises) even under model misspecification. We extend these results to show that the power posterior moments converge to those of the limiting normal distribution suggested by the Bernstein-von Mises theorem. We then use this result to show that the mean of the power posterior, a point estimator, is asymptotically equivalent to the maximum likelihood estimator.
We introduce a general differentiable solver for time-dependent deformation problems with contact and friction. Our approach uses a finite element discretization with a high-order time integrator coupled with the recently proposed incremental potential contact method for handling contact and friction forces to solve PDE- and ODE-constrained optimization problems on scenes with a complex geometry. It support static and dynamic problems and differentiation with respect to all physical parameters involved in the physical problem description, which include shape, material parameters, friction parameters, and initial conditions. Our analytically derived adjoint formulation is efficient, with a small overhead (typically less than 10% for nonlinear problems) over the forward simulation, and shares many similarities with the forward problem, allowing the reuse of large parts of existing forward simulator code. We implement our approach on top of the open-source PolyFEM library, and demonstrate the applicability of our solver to shape design, initial condition optimization, and material estimation on both simulated results and in physical validations.