The class of $\alpha$-stable distributions is widely used in various applications, especially for modelling heavy-tailed data. Although the $\alpha$-stable distributions have been used in practice for many years, new methods for identification, testing, and estimation are still being refined and new approaches are being proposed. The constant development of new statistical methods is related to the low efficiency of existing algorithms, especially when the underlying sample is small or the underlying distribution is close to Gaussian. In this paper we propose a new estimation algorithm for stability index, for samples from the symmetric $\alpha$-stable distribution. The proposed approach is based on quantile conditional variance ratio. We study the statistical properties of the proposed estimation procedure and show empirically that our methodology often outperforms other commonly used estimation algorithms. Moreover, we show that our statistic extracts unique sample characteristics that can be combined with other methods to refine existing methodologies via ensamble methods. Although our focus is set on the symmetric $\alpha$-stable case, we demonstrate that the considered statistic is insensitive to the skewness parameter change, so that our method could be also used in a more generic framework. For completeness, we also show how to apply our method on real data linked to plasma physics.
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In this paper, we develop a novel high-dimensional coefficient estimation procedure based on high-frequency data. Unlike usual high-dimensional regression procedure such as LASSO, we additionally handle the heavy-tailedness of high-frequency observations as well as time variations of coefficient processes. Specifically, we employ Huber loss and truncation scheme to handle heavy-tailed observations, while $\ell_{1}$-regularization is adopted to overcome the curse of dimensionality under a sparse coefficient structure. To account for the time-varying coefficient, we estimate local high-dimensional coefficients which are biased estimators due to the $\ell_{1}$-regularization. Thus, when estimating integrated coefficients, we propose a debiasing scheme to enjoy the law of large number property and employ a thresholding scheme to further accommodate the sparsity of the coefficients. We call this Robust thrEsholding Debiased LASSO (RED-LASSO) estimator. We show that the RED-LASSO estimator can achieve a near-optimal convergence rate with only finite $\gamma$th moment for any $\gamma>2$. In the empirical study, we apply the RED-LASSO procedure to the high-dimensional integrated coefficient estimation using high-frequency trading data.
We study policy evaluation of offline contextual bandits subject to unobserved confounders. Sensitivity analysis methods are commonly used to estimate the policy value under the worst-case confounding over a given uncertainty set. However, existing work often resorts to some coarse relaxation of the uncertainty set for the sake of tractability, leading to overly conservative estimation of the policy value. In this paper, we propose a general estimator that provides a sharp lower bound of the policy value. It can be shown that our estimator contains the recently proposed sharp estimator by Dorn and Guo (2022) as a special case, and our method enables a novel extension of the classical marginal sensitivity model using f-divergence. To construct our estimator, we leverage the kernel method to obtain a tractable approximation to the conditional moment constraints, which traditional non-sharp estimators failed to take into account. In the theoretical analysis, we provide a condition for the choice of the kernel which guarantees no specification error that biases the lower bound estimation. Furthermore, we provide consistency guarantees of policy evaluation and learning. In the experiments with synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is concerned with identifying data points that do not belong to the same distribution as the model's training data. For the safe deployment of predictive models in a real-world environment, it is critical to avoid making confident predictions on OOD inputs as it can lead to potentially dangerous consequences. However, OOD detection largely remains an under-explored area in the audio (and speech) domain. This is despite the fact that audio is a central modality for many tasks, such as speaker diarization, automatic speech recognition, and sound event detection. To address this, we propose to leverage feature-space of the model with deep k-nearest neighbors to detect OOD samples. We show that this simple and flexible method effectively detects OOD inputs across a broad category of audio (and speech) datasets. Specifically, it improves the false positive rate (FPR@TPR95) by 17% and the AUROC score by 7% than other prior techniques.
In this paper, we target the problem of sufficient dimension reduction with symmetric positive definite matrices valued responses. We propose the intrinsic minimum average variance estimation method and the intrinsic outer product gradient method which fully exploit the geometric structure of the Riemannian manifold where responses lie. We present the algorithms for our newly developed methods under the log-Euclidean metric and the log-Cholesky metric. Each of the two metrics is linked to an abelian Lie group structure that transforms our model defined on a manifold into a Euclidean one. The proposed methods are then further extended to general Riemannian manifolds. We establish rigourous asymptotic results for the proposed estimators, including the rate of convergence and the asymptotic normality. We also develop a cross validation algorithm for the estimation of the structural dimension with theoretical guarantee Comprehensive simulation studies and an application to the New York taxi network data are performed to show the superiority of the proposed methods.
The spectral density matrix is a fundamental object of interest in time series analysis, and it encodes both contemporary and dynamic linear relationships between component processes of the multivariate system. In this paper we develop novel inference procedures for the spectral density matrix in the high-dimensional setting. Specifically, we introduce a new global testing procedure to test the nullity of the cross-spectral density for a given set of frequencies and across pairs of component indices. For the first time, both Gaussian approximation and parametric bootstrap methodologies are employed to conduct inference for a high-dimensional parameter formulated in the frequency domain, and new technical tools are developed to provide asymptotic guarantees of the size accuracy and power for global testing. We further propose a multiple testing procedure for simultaneously testing the nullity of the cross-spectral density at a given set of frequencies. The method is shown to control the false discovery rate. Both numerical simulations and a real data illustration demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed testing methods.
Despite the popularity of feature importance (FI) measures in interpretable machine learning, the statistical adequacy of these methods is rarely discussed. From a statistical perspective, a major distinction is between analyzing a variable's importance before and after adjusting for covariates - i.e., between $\textit{marginal}$ and $\textit{conditional}$ measures. Our work draws attention to this rarely acknowledged, yet crucial distinction and showcases its implications. Further, we reveal that for testing conditional FI, only few methods are available and practitioners have hitherto been severely restricted in method application due to mismatching data requirements. Most real-world data exhibits complex feature dependencies and incorporates both continuous and categorical data (mixed data). Both properties are oftentimes neglected by conditional FI measures. To fill this gap, we propose to combine the conditional predictive impact (CPI) framework with sequential knockoff sampling. The CPI enables conditional FI measurement that controls for any feature dependencies by sampling valid knockoffs - hence, generating synthetic data with similar statistical properties - for the data to be analyzed. Sequential knockoffs were deliberately designed to handle mixed data and thus allow us to extend the CPI approach to such datasets. We demonstrate through numerous simulations and a real-world example that our proposed workflow controls type I error, achieves high power and is in line with results given by other conditional FI measures, whereas marginal FI metrics result in misleading interpretations. Our findings highlight the necessity of developing statistically adequate, specialized methods for mixed data.
Federated learning (FL) is a popular technique for training a global model on data distributed across client devices. Like other distributed training techniques, FL is susceptible to straggler (slower or failed) clients. Recent work has proposed to address this through device-to-device (D2D) offloading, which introduces privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a novel straggler-optimal approach for coded matrix computations which can significantly reduce the communication delay and privacy issues introduced from D2D data transmissions in FL. Moreover, our proposed approach leads to a considerable improvement of the local computation speed when the generated data matrix is sparse. Numerical evaluations confirm the superiority of our proposed method over baseline approaches.
We consider the problem of testing the equality of conditional distributions of a response variable given a vector of covariates between two populations. Such a hypothesis testing problem can be motivated from various machine learning and statistical inference scenarios, including transfer learning and causal predictive inference. We develop a nonparametric test procedure inspired from the conformal prediction framework. The construction of our test statistic combines recent developments in conformal prediction with a novel choice of conformity score, resulting in a weighted rank-sum test statistic that is valid and powerful under general settings. To our knowledge, this is the first successful attempt of using conformal prediction for testing statistical hypotheses beyond exchangeability. Our method is suitable for modern machine learning scenarios where the data has high dimensionality and large sample sizes, and can be effectively combined with existing classification algorithms to find good conformity score functions. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated in various numerical examples.
Estimating the Shannon entropy of a discrete distribution from which we have only observed a small sample is challenging. Estimating other information-theoretic metrics, such as the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two sparsely sampled discrete distributions, is even harder. Existing approaches to address these problems have shortcomings: they are biased, heuristic, work only for some distributions, and/or cannot be applied to all information-theoretic metrics. Here, we propose a fast, semi-analytical estimator for sparsely sampled distributions that is efficient, precise, and general. Its derivation is grounded in probabilistic considerations and uses a hierarchical Bayesian approach to extract as much information as possible from the few observations available. Our approach provides estimates of the Shannon entropy with precision at least comparable to the state of the art, and most often better. It can also be used to obtain accurate estimates of any other information-theoretic metric, including the notoriously challenging Kullback-Leibler divergence. Here, again, our approach performs consistently better than existing estimators.
Classic machine learning methods are built on the $i.i.d.$ assumption that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. However, in real scenarios, the $i.i.d.$ assumption can hardly be satisfied, rendering the sharp drop of classic machine learning algorithms' performances under distributional shifts, which indicates the significance of investigating the Out-of-Distribution generalization problem. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem addresses the challenging setting where the testing distribution is unknown and different from the training. This paper serves as the first effort to systematically and comprehensively discuss the OOD generalization problem, from the definition, methodology, evaluation to the implications and future directions. Firstly, we provide the formal definition of the OOD generalization problem. Secondly, existing methods are categorized into three parts based on their positions in the whole learning pipeline, namely unsupervised representation learning, supervised model learning and optimization, and typical methods for each category are discussed in detail. We then demonstrate the theoretical connections of different categories, and introduce the commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize the whole literature and raise some future directions for OOD generalization problem. The summary of OOD generalization methods reviewed in this survey can be found at //out-of-distribution-generalization.com.
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