How should social scientists understand and communicate the uncertainty of statistically estimated causal effects? It is well-known that the conventional significance-vs.-insignificance approach is associated with misunderstandings and misuses. Behavioral research suggests people understand uncertainty more appropriately in a numerical, continuous scale than in a verbal, discrete scale. Motivated by these backgrounds, I propose presenting the probabilities of different effect sizes. Probability is an intuitive continuous measure of uncertainty. It allows researchers to better understand and communicate the uncertainty of statistically estimated effects. In addition, my approach needs no decision threshold for an uncertainty measure or an effect size, unlike the conventional approaches, allowing researchers to be agnostic about a decision threshold such as p<5% and a justification for that. I apply my approach to a previous social scientific study, showing it enables richer inference than the significance-vs.-insignificance approach taken by the original study. The accompanying R package makes my approach easy to implement.
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Computer models are widely used in decision support for energy systems operation, planning and policy. A system of models is often employed, where model inputs themselves arise from other computer models, with each model being developed by different teams of experts. Gaussian Process emulators can be used to approximate the behaviour of complex, computationally intensive models and used to generate predictions together with a measure of uncertainty about the predicted model output. This paper presents a computationally efficient framework for propagating uncertainty within a network of models with high-dimensional outputs used for energy planning. We present a case study from a UK county council considering low carbon technologies to transform its infrastructure to reach a net-zero carbon target. The system model considered for this case study is simple, however the framework can be applied to larger networks of more complex models.
In this study, we examine a clustering problem in which the covariates of each individual element in a dataset are associated with an uncertainty specific to that element. More specifically, we consider a clustering approach in which a pre-processing applying a non-linear transformation to the covariates is used to capture the hidden data structure. To this end, we approximate the sets representing the propagated uncertainty for the pre-processed features empirically. To exploit the empirical uncertainty sets, we propose a greedy and optimistic clustering (GOC) algorithm that finds better feature candidates over such sets, yielding more condensed clusters. As an important application, we apply the GOC algorithm to synthetic datasets of the orbital properties of stars generated through our numerical simulation mimicking the formation process of the Milky Way. The GOC algorithm demonstrates an improved performance in finding sibling stars originating from the same dwarf galaxy. These realistic datasets have also been made publicly available.
We study the decentralized consensus and stochastic optimization problems with compressed communications over static directed graphs. We propose an iterative gradient-based algorithm that compresses messages according to a desired compression ratio. The proposed method provably reduces the communication overhead on the network at every communication round. Contrary to existing literature, we allow for arbitrary compression ratios in the communicated messages. We show a linear convergence rate for the proposed method on the consensus problem. Moreover, we provide explicit convergence rates for decentralized stochastic optimization problems on smooth functions that are either (i) strongly convex, (ii) convex, or (iii) non-convex. Finally, we provide numerical experiments to illustrate convergence under arbitrary compression ratios and the communication efficiency of our algorithm.
Heavy ball momentum is a popular acceleration idea in stochastic optimization. There have been several attempts to understand its perceived benefits, but the complete picture is still unclear. Specifically, the error expression in the presence of noise has two separate terms: the bias and the variance, but most existing works only focus on bias and show that momentum accelerates its decay. Such analyses overlook the interplay between bias and variance and, therefore, miss important implications. In this work, we analyze a sample complexity bound of stochastic approximation algorithms with heavy-ball momentum that accounts for both bias and variance. We find that for the same step size, which is small enough, the iterates with momentum have improved sample complexity compared to the ones without. However, by using a different step-size sequence, the non-momentum version can nullify this benefit. Subsequently, we show that our sample complexity bounds are indeed tight for a small enough neighborhood around the solution and large enough noise variance. Our analysis also sheds some light on the finite-time behavior of these algorithms. This explains the perceived benefit in the initial phase of momentum-based schemes.
When researchers carry out a null hypothesis significance test, it is tempting to assume that a statistically significant result lowers Prob(H0), the probability of the null hypothesis being true. Technically, such a statement is meaningless for various reasons: e.g., the null hypothesis does not have a probability associated with it. However, it is possible to relax certain assumptions to compute the posterior probability Prob(H0) under repeated sampling. We show in a step-by-step guide that the intuitively appealing belief, that Prob(H0) is low when significant results have been obtained under repeated sampling, is in general incorrect and depends greatly on: (a) the prior probability of the null being true; (b) type-I error rate, (c) type-II error rate, and (d) replication of a result. Through step-by-step simulations using open-source code in the R System of Statistical Computing, we show that uncertainty about the null hypothesis being true often remains high despite a significant result. To help the reader develop intuitions about this common misconception, we provide a Shiny app (//danielschad.shinyapps.io/probnull/). We expect that this tutorial will help researchers better understand and judge results from null hypothesis significance tests.
Multi-scale problems, where variables of interest evolve in different time-scales and live in different state-spaces. can be found in many fields of science. Here, we introduce a new recursive methodology for Bayesian inference that aims at estimating the static parameters and tracking the dynamic variables of these kind of systems. Although the proposed approach works in rather general multi-scale systems, for clarity we analyze the case of a heterogeneous multi-scale model with 3 time-scales (static parameters, slow dynamic state variables and fast dynamic state variables). The proposed scheme, based on nested filtering methodology of P\'erez-Vieites et al. (2018), combines three intertwined layers of filtering techniques that approximate recursively the joint posterior probability distribution of the parameters and both sets of dynamic state variables given a sequence of partial and noisy observations. We explore the use of sequential Monte Carlo schemes in the first and second layers while we use an unscented Kalman filter to obtain a Gaussian approximation of the posterior probability distribution of the fast variables in the third layer. Some numerical results are presented for a stochastic two-scale Lorenz 96 model with unknown parameters.
Low-rank matrix estimation under heavy-tailed noise is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs, especially since robust loss functions are usually non-smooth. More recently, computationally fast non-convex approaches via sub-gradient descent are proposed, which, unfortunately, fail to deliver a statistically consistent estimator even under sub-Gaussian noise. In this paper, we introduce a novel Riemannian sub-gradient (RsGrad) algorithm which is not only computationally efficient with linear convergence but also is statistically optimal, be the noise Gaussian or heavy-tailed. Convergence theory is established for a general framework and specific applications to absolute loss, Huber loss, and quantile loss are investigated. Compared with existing non-convex methods, ours reveals a surprising phenomenon of dual-phase convergence. In phase one, RsGrad behaves as in a typical non-smooth optimization that requires gradually decaying stepsizes. However, phase one only delivers a statistically sub-optimal estimator which is already observed in the existing literature. Interestingly, during phase two, RsGrad converges linearly as if minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function and thus a constant stepsize suffices. Underlying the phase-two convergence is the smoothing effect of random noise to the non-smooth robust losses in an area close but not too close to the truth. Lastly, RsGrad is applicable for low-rank tensor estimation under heavy-tailed noise where a statistically optimal rate is attainable with the same phenomenon of dual-phase convergence, and a novel shrinkage-based second-order moment method is guaranteed to deliver a warm initialization. Numerical simulations confirm our theoretical discovery and showcase the superiority of RsGrad over prior methods.
The fruits of science are relationships made comprehensible, often by way of approximation. While deep learning is an extremely powerful way to find relationships in data, its use in science has been hindered by the difficulty of understanding the learned relationships. The Information Bottleneck (IB) is an information theoretic framework for understanding a relationship between an input and an output in terms of a trade-off between the fidelity and complexity of approximations to the relationship. Here we show that a crucial modification -- distributing bottlenecks across multiple components of the input -- opens fundamentally new avenues for interpretable deep learning in science. The Distributed Information Bottleneck throttles the downstream complexity of interactions between the components of the input, deconstructing a relationship into meaningful approximations found through deep learning without requiring custom-made datasets or neural network architectures. Applied to a complex system, the approximations illuminate aspects of the system's nature by restricting -- and monitoring -- the information about different components incorporated into the approximation. We demonstrate the Distributed IB's explanatory utility in systems drawn from applied mathematics and condensed matter physics. In the former, we deconstruct a Boolean circuit into approximations that isolate the most informative subsets of input components without requiring exhaustive search. In the latter, we localize information about future plastic rearrangement in the static structure of a sheared glass, and find the information to be more or less diffuse depending on the system's preparation. By way of a principled scheme of approximations, the Distributed IB brings much-needed interpretability to deep learning and enables unprecedented analysis of information flow through a system.
We present a novel static analysis technique to derive higher moments for program variables for a large class of probabilistic loops with potentially uncountable state spaces. Our approach is fully automatic, meaning it does not rely on externally provided invariants or templates. We employ algebraic techniques based on linear recurrences and introduce program transformations to simplify probabilistic programs while preserving their statistical properties. We develop power reduction techniques to further simplify the polynomial arithmetic of probabilistic programs and define the theory of moment-computable probabilistic loops for which higher moments can precisely be computed. Our work has applications towards recovering probability distributions of random variables and computing tail probabilities. The empirical evaluation of our results demonstrates the applicability of our work on many challenging examples.
Due to their increasing spread, confidence in neural network predictions became more and more important. However, basic neural networks do not deliver certainty estimates or suffer from over or under confidence. Many researchers have been working on understanding and quantifying uncertainty in a neural network's prediction. As a result, different types and sources of uncertainty have been identified and a variety of approaches to measure and quantify uncertainty in neural networks have been proposed. This work gives a comprehensive overview of uncertainty estimation in neural networks, reviews recent advances in the field, highlights current challenges, and identifies potential research opportunities. It is intended to give anyone interested in uncertainty estimation in neural networks a broad overview and introduction, without presupposing prior knowledge in this field. A comprehensive introduction to the most crucial sources of uncertainty is given and their separation into reducible model uncertainty and not reducible data uncertainty is presented. The modeling of these uncertainties based on deterministic neural networks, Bayesian neural networks, ensemble of neural networks, and test-time data augmentation approaches is introduced and different branches of these fields as well as the latest developments are discussed. For a practical application, we discuss different measures of uncertainty, approaches for the calibration of neural networks and give an overview of existing baselines and implementations. Different examples from the wide spectrum of challenges in different fields give an idea of the needs and challenges regarding uncertainties in practical applications. Additionally, the practical limitations of current methods for mission- and safety-critical real world applications are discussed and an outlook on the next steps towards a broader usage of such methods is given.
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