When are inferences (whether Direct-Likelihood, Bayesian, or Frequentist) obtained from partial data valid? This paper answers this question by offering a new theory about inference with missing data. It proves that as the sample size increases and the extent of missingness decreases, the mean-loglikelihood function generated by partial data and that ignores the missingness mechanism will almost surely converge uniformly to that which would have been generated by complete data; and if the data are Missing at Random (or "partially missing at random"), this convergence depends only on sample size. Thus, inferences from partial data, such as posterior modes, uncertainty estimates, confidence intervals, likelihood ratios, and indeed, all quantities or features derived from the partial-data loglikelihood function, will be consistently estimated. They will approximate their complete-data analogues. This adds to previous research which has only proved the consistency of the posterior mode. Practical implications of this result are discussed, and the theory is verified using a previous study of International Human Rights Law.
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The approximate uniform sampling of graph realizations with a given degree sequence is an everyday task in several social science, computer science, engineering etc. projects. One approach is using Markov chains. The best available current result about the well-studied switch Markov chain is that it is rapidly mixing on P-stable degree sequences (see DOI:10.1016/j.ejc.2021.103421). The switch Markov chain does not change any degree sequence. However, there are cases where degree intervals are specified rather than a single degree sequence. (A natural scenario where this problem arises is in hypothesis testing on social networks that are only partially observed.) Rechner, Strowick, and M\"uller-Hannemann introduced in 2018 the notion of degree interval Markov chain which uses three (separately well-studied) local operations (switch, hinge-flip and toggle), and employing on degree sequence realizations where any two sequences under scrutiny have very small coordinate-wise distance. Recently Amanatidis and Kleer published a beautiful paper (arXiv:2110.09068), showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the sequences are coming from a system of very thin intervals which are centered not far from a regular degree sequence. In this paper we extend substantially their result, showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the intervals are centred at P-stable degree sequences.
Applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), in which agents learn to make a sequence of decisions despite lacking complete information about the latent states of the controlled system, that is, they act under partial observability of the states, are ubiquitous. Partially observable RL can be notoriously difficult -- well-known information-theoretic results show that learning partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) requires an exponential number of samples in the worst case. Yet, this does not rule out the existence of large subclasses of POMDPs over which learning is tractable. In this paper we identify such a subclass, which we call weakly revealing POMDPs. This family rules out the pathological instances of POMDPs where observations are uninformative to a degree that makes learning hard. We prove that for weakly revealing POMDPs, a simple algorithm combining optimism and Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) is sufficient to guarantee polynomial sample complexity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first provably sample-efficient result for learning from interactions in overcomplete POMDPs, where the number of latent states can be larger than the number of observations.
Data collection and research methodology represents a critical part of the research pipeline. On the one hand, it is important that we collect data in a way that maximises the validity of what we are measuring, which may involve the use of long scales with many items. On the other hand, collecting a large number of items across multiple scales results in participant fatigue, and expensive and time consuming data collection. It is therefore important that we use the available resources optimally. In this work, we consider how a consideration for theory and the associated causal/structural model can help us to streamline data collection procedures by not wasting time collecting data for variables which are not causally critical for subsequent analysis. This not only saves time and enables us to redirect resources to attend to other variables which are more important, but also increases research transparency and the reliability of theory testing. In order to achieve this streamlined data collection, we leverage structural models, and Markov conditional independency structures implicit in these models to identify the substructures which are critical for answering a particular research question. In this work, we review the relevant concepts and present a number of didactic examples with the hope that psychologists can use these techniques to streamline their data collection process without invalidating the subsequent analysis. We provide a number of simulation results to demonstrate the limited analytical impact of this streamlining.
Linear mixed models (LMMs) are instrumental for regression analysis with structured dependence, such as grouped, clustered, or multilevel data. However, selection among the covariates--while accounting for this structured dependence--remains a challenge. We introduce a Bayesian decision analysis for subset selection with LMMs. Using a Mahalanobis loss function that incorporates the structured dependence, we derive optimal linear coefficients for (i) any given subset of variables and (ii) all subsets of variables that satisfy a cardinality constraint. Crucially, these estimates inherit shrinkage or regularization and uncertainty quantification from the underlying Bayesian model, and apply for any well-specified Bayesian LMM. More broadly, our decision analysis strategy deemphasizes the role of a single "best" subset, which is often unstable and limited in its information content, and instead favors a collection of near-optimal subsets. This collection is summarized by key member subsets and variable-specific importance metrics. Customized subset search and out-of-sample approximation algorithms are provided for more scalable computing. These tools are applied to simulated data and a longitudinal physical activity dataset, and demonstrate excellent prediction, estimation, and selection ability.
We consider M-estimation problems, where the target value is determined using a minimizer of an expected functional of a Levy process. With discrete observations from the Levy process, we can produce a "quasi-path" by shuffling increments of the Levy process, we call it a quasi-process. Under a suitable sampling scheme, a quasi-process can converge weakly to the true process according to the properties of the stationary and independent increments. Using this resampling technique, we can estimate objective functionals similar to those estimated using the Monte Carlo simulations, and it is available as a contrast function. The M-estimator based on these quasi-processes can be consistent and asymptotically normal.
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.
There is a dearth of convergence results for differentially private federated learning (FL) with non-Lipschitz objective functions (i.e., when gradient norms are not bounded). The primary reason for this is that the clipping operation (i.e., projection onto an $\ell_2$ ball of a fixed radius called the clipping threshold) for bounding the sensitivity of the average update to each client's update introduces bias depending on the clipping threshold and the number of local steps in FL, and analyzing this is not easy. For Lipschitz functions, the Lipschitz constant serves as a trivial clipping threshold with zero bias. However, Lipschitzness does not hold in many practical settings; moreover, verifying it and computing the Lipschitz constant is hard. Thus, the choice of the clipping threshold is non-trivial and requires a lot of tuning in practice. In this paper, we provide the first convergence result for private FL on smooth \textit{convex} objectives \textit{for a general clipping threshold} -- \textit{without assuming Lipschitzness}. We also look at a simpler alternative to clipping (for bounding sensitivity) which is \textit{normalization} -- where we use only a scaled version of the unit vector along the client updates, completely discarding the magnitude information. {The resulting normalization-based private FL algorithm is theoretically shown to have better convergence than its clipping-based counterpart on smooth convex functions. We corroborate our theory with synthetic experiments as well as experiments on benchmarking datasets.
In this paper we study the finite sample and asymptotic properties of various weighting estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE), several of which are based on Abadie (2003)'s kappa theorem. Our framework presumes a binary endogenous explanatory variable ("treatment") and a binary instrumental variable, which may only be valid after conditioning on additional covariates. We argue that one of the Abadie estimators, which we show is weight normalized, is likely to dominate the others in many contexts. A notable exception is in settings with one-sided noncompliance, where certain unnormalized estimators have the advantage of being based on a denominator that is bounded away from zero. We use a simulation study and three empirical applications to illustrate our findings. In applications to causal effects of college education using the college proximity instrument (Card, 1995) and causal effects of childbearing using the sibling sex composition instrument (Angrist and Evans, 1998), the unnormalized estimates are clearly unreasonable, with "incorrect" signs, magnitudes, or both. Overall, our results suggest that (i) the relative performance of different kappa weighting estimators varies with features of the data-generating process; and that (ii) the normalized version of Tan (2006)'s estimator may be an attractive alternative in many contexts. Applied researchers with access to a binary instrumental variable should also consider covariate balancing or doubly robust estimators of the LATE.
In the pooled data problem we are given a set of $n$ agents, each of which holds a hidden state bit, either $0$ or $1$. A querying procedure returns for a query set the sum of the states of the queried agents. The goal is to reconstruct the states using as few queries as possible. In this paper we consider two noise models for the pooled data problem. In the noisy channel model, the result for each agent flips with a certain probability. In the noisy query model, each query result is subject to random Gaussian noise. Our results are twofold. First, we present and analyze for both error models a simple and efficient distributed algorithm that reconstructs the initial states in a greedy fashion. Our novel analysis pins down the range of error probabilities and distributions for which our algorithm reconstructs the exact initial states with high probability. Secondly, we present simulation results of our algorithm and compare its performance with approximate message passing (AMP) algorithms that are conjectured to be optimal in a number of related problems.
Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing research direction owing to the large amount of available data and low budget requirement, compared with randomized controlled trials. Embraced with the rapidly developed machine learning area, various causal effect estimation methods for observational data have sprung up. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of causal inference methods under the potential outcome framework, one of the well known causal inference framework. The methods are divided into two categories depending on whether they require all three assumptions of the potential outcome framework or not. For each category, both the traditional statistical methods and the recent machine learning enhanced methods are discussed and compared. The plausible applications of these methods are also presented, including the applications in advertising, recommendation, medicine and so on. Moreover, the commonly used benchmark datasets as well as the open-source codes are also summarized, which facilitate researchers and practitioners to explore, evaluate and apply the causal inference methods.
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