Linear multivariate Hawkes processes (MHP) are a fundamental class of point processes with self-excitation. When estimating parameters for these processes, a difficulty is that the two main error functionals, the log-likelihood and the least squares error (LSE), as well as the evaluation of their gradients, have a quadratic complexity in the number of observed events. In practice, this prohibits the use of exact gradient-based algorithms for parameter estimation. We construct an adaptive stratified sampling estimator of the gradient of the LSE. This results in a fast parametric estimation method for MHP with general kernels, applicable to large datasets, which compares favourably with existing methods.
We develop a novel procedure for estimating the optimizer of general convex stochastic optimization problems of the form $\min_{x\in\mathcal{X}} \mathbb{E}[F(x,\xi)]$, when the given data is a finite independent sample selected according to $\xi$. The procedure is based on a median-of-means tournament, and is the first procedure that exhibits the optimal statistical performance in heavy tailed situations: we recover the asymptotic rates dictated by the central limit theorem in a non-asymptotic manner once the sample size exceeds some explicitly computable threshold. Additionally, our results apply in the high-dimensional setup, as the threshold sample size exhibits the optimal dependence on the dimension (up to a logarithmic factor). The general setting allows us to recover recent results on multivariate mean estimation and linear regression in heavy-tailed situations and to prove the first sharp, non-asymptotic results for the portfolio optimization problem.
Generalized linear mixed models are useful in studying hierarchical data with possibly non-Gaussian responses. However, the intractability of likelihood functions poses challenges for estimation. We develop a new method suitable for this problem, called imputation maximization stochastic approximation (IMSA). For each iteration, IMSA first imputes latent variables/random effects, then maximizes over the complete data likelihood, and finally moves the estimate towards the new maximizer while preserving a proportion of the previous value. The limiting point of IMSA satisfies a self-consistency property and can be less biased in finite samples than the maximum likelihood estimator solved by score-equation based stochastic approximation (ScoreSA). Numerically, IMSA can also be advantageous over ScoreSA in achieving more stable convergence and respecting the parameter ranges under various transformations such as nonnegative variance components. This is corroborated through our simulation studies where IMSA consistently outperforms ScoreSA.
We construct a family of genealogy-valued Markov processes that are induced by a continuous-time Markov population process. We derive exact expressions for the likelihood of a given genealogy conditional on the history of the underlying population process. These lead to a nonlinear filtering equation which can be used to design efficient Monte Carlo inference algorithms. We demonstrate these calculations with several examples. Existing full-information approaches for phylodynamic inference are special cases of the theory.
In this article, we aim to provide a general and complete understanding of semi-supervised (SS) causal inference for treatment effects. Specifically, we consider two such estimands: (a) the average treatment effect and (b) the quantile treatment effect, as prototype cases, in an SS setting, characterized by two available data sets: (i) a labeled data set of size $n$, providing observations for a response and a set of high dimensional covariates, as well as a binary treatment indicator; and (ii) an unlabeled data set of size $N$, much larger than $n$, but without the response observed. Using these two data sets, we develop a family of SS estimators which are ensured to be: (1) more robust and (2) more efficient than their supervised counterparts based on the labeled data set only. Beyond the 'standard' double robustness results (in terms of consistency) that can be achieved by supervised methods as well, we further establish root-n consistency and asymptotic normality of our SS estimators whenever the propensity score in the model is correctly specified, without requiring specific forms of the nuisance functions involved. Such an improvement of robustness arises from the use of the massive unlabeled data, so it is generally not attainable in a purely supervised setting. In addition, our estimators are shown to be semi-parametrically efficient as long as all the nuisance functions are correctly specified. Moreover, as an illustration of the nuisance estimators, we consider inverse-probability-weighting type kernel smoothing estimators involving unknown covariate transformation mechanisms, and establish in high dimensional scenarios novel results on their uniform convergence rates, which should be of independent interest. Numerical results on both simulated and real data validate the advantage of our methods over their supervised counterparts with respect to both robustness and efficiency.
We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in an infinite-horizon Markov decision process with continuous states and actions. We recast the $Q$-function estimation into a special form of the nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV) estimation problem. We first show that under one mild condition the NPIV formulation of $Q$-function estimation is well-posed in the sense of $L^2$-measure of ill-posedness with respect to the data generating distribution, bypassing a strong assumption on the discount factor $\gamma$ imposed in the recent literature for obtaining the $L^2$ convergence rates of various $Q$-function estimators. Thanks to this new well-posed property, we derive the first minimax lower bounds for the convergence rates of nonparametric estimation of $Q$-function and its derivatives in both sup-norm and $L^2$-norm, which are shown to be the same as those for the classical nonparametric regression (Stone, 1982). We then propose a sieve two-stage least squares estimator and establish its rate-optimality in both norms under some mild conditions. Our general results on the well-posedness and the minimax lower bounds are of independent interest to study not only other nonparametric estimators for $Q$-function but also efficient estimation on the value of any target policy in off-policy settings.
Estimating the mixing density of a mixture distribution remains an interesting problem in statistics literature. Using a stochastic approximation method, Newton and Zhang (1999) introduced a fast recursive algorithm for estimating the mixing density of a mixture. Under suitably chosen weights the stochastic approximation estimator converges to the true solution. In Tokdar et. al. (2009) the consistency of this recursive estimation method was established. However, the proof of consistency of the resulting estimator used independence among observations as an assumption. Here, we extend the investigation of performance of Newton's algorithm to several dependent scenarios. We first prove that the original algorithm under certain conditions remains consistent when the observations are arising form a weakly dependent process with fixed marginal with the target mixture as the marginal density. For some of the common dependent structures where the original algorithm is no longer consistent, we provide a modification of the algorithm that generates a consistent estimator.
Structural matrix-variate observations routinely arise in diverse fields such as multi-layer network analysis and brain image clustering. While data of this type have been extensively investigated with fruitful outcomes being delivered, the fundamental questions like its statistical optimality and computational limit are largely under-explored. In this paper, we propose a low-rank Gaussian mixture model (LrMM) assuming each matrix-valued observation has a planted low-rank structure. Minimax lower bounds for estimating the underlying low-rank matrix are established allowing a whole range of sample sizes and signal strength. Under a minimal condition on signal strength, referred to as the information-theoretical limit or statistical limit, we prove the minimax optimality of a maximum likelihood estimator which, in general, is computationally infeasible. If the signal is stronger than a certain threshold, called the computational limit, we design a computationally fast estimator based on spectral aggregation and demonstrate its minimax optimality. Moreover, when the signal strength is smaller than the computational limit, we provide evidences based on the low-degree likelihood ratio framework to claim that no polynomial-time algorithm can consistently recover the underlying low-rank matrix. Our results reveal multiple phase transitions in the minimax error rates and the statistical-to-computational gap. Numerical experiments confirm our theoretical findings. We further showcase the merit of our spectral aggregation method on the worldwide food trading dataset.
Continuous determinantal point processes (DPPs) are a class of repulsive point processes on $\mathbb{R}^d$ with many statistical applications. Although an explicit expression of their density is known, it is too complicated to be used directly for maximum likelihood estimation. In the stationary case, an approximation using Fourier series has been suggested, but it is limited to rectangular observation windows and no theoretical results support it. In this contribution, we investigate a different way to approximate the likelihood by looking at its asymptotic behaviour when the observation window grows towards $\mathbb{R}^d$. This new approximation is not limited to rectangular windows, is faster to compute than the previous one, does not require any tuning parameter, and some theoretical justifications are provided. It moreover provides an explicit formula for estimating the asymptotic variance of the associated estimator. The performances are assessed in a simulation study on standard parametric models on $\mathbb{R}^d$ and compare favourably to common alternative estimation methods for continuous DPPs.
We study the problem of estimating the fixed point of a contractive operator defined on a separable Banach space. Focusing on a stochastic query model that provides noisy evaluations of the operator, we analyze a variance-reduced stochastic approximation scheme, and establish non-asymptotic bounds for both the operator defect and the estimation error, measured in an arbitrary semi-norm. In contrast to worst-case guarantees, our bounds are instance-dependent, and achieve the local asymptotic minimax risk non-asymptotically. For linear operators, contractivity can be relaxed to multi-step contractivity, so that the theory can be applied to problems like average reward policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning. We illustrate the theory via applications to stochastic shortest path problems, two-player zero-sum Markov games, as well as policy evaluation and $Q$-learning for tabular Markov decision processes.
Implicit probabilistic models are models defined naturally in terms of a sampling procedure and often induces a likelihood function that cannot be expressed explicitly. We develop a simple method for estimating parameters in implicit models that does not require knowledge of the form of the likelihood function or any derived quantities, but can be shown to be equivalent to maximizing likelihood under some conditions. Our result holds in the non-asymptotic parametric setting, where both the capacity of the model and the number of data examples are finite. We also demonstrate encouraging experimental results.