This paper establishes bounds on the performance of empirical risk minimization for large-dimensional linear regression. We generalize existing results by allowing the data to be dependent and heavy-tailed. The analysis covers both the cases of identically and heterogeneously distributed observations. Our analysis is nonparametric in the sense that the relationship between the regressand and the regressors is not specified. The main results of this paper show that the empirical risk minimizer achieves the optimal performance (up to a logarithmic factor) in a dependent data setting.
A new variant of Newton's method for empirical risk minimization is studied, where at each iteration of the optimization algorithm, the gradient and Hessian of the objective function are replaced by robust estimators taken from existing literature on robust mean estimation for multivariate data. After proving a general theorem about the convergence of successive iterates to a small ball around the population-level minimizer, consequences of the theory in generalized linear models are studied when data are generated from Huber's epsilon-contamination model and/or heavytailed distributions. An algorithm for obtaining robust Newton directions based on the conjugate gradient method is also proposed, which may be more appropriate for high-dimensional settings, and conjectures about the convergence of the resulting algorithm are offered. Compared to robust gradient descent, the proposed algorithm enjoys the faster rates of convergence for successive iterates often achieved by second-order algorithms for convex problems, i.e., quadratic convergence in a neighborhood of the optimum, with a stepsize that may be chosen adaptively via backtracking linesearch.
We investigate trade-offs in static and dynamic evaluation of hierarchical queries with arbitrary free variables. In the static setting, the trade-off is between the time to partially compute the query result and the delay needed to enumerate its tuples. In the dynamic setting, we additionally consider the time needed to update the query result under single-tuple inserts or deletes to the database. Our approach observes the degree of values in the database and uses different computation and maintenance strategies for high-degree (heavy) and low-degree (light) values. For the latter it partially computes the result, while for the former it computes enough information to allow for on-the-fly enumeration. We define the preprocessing time, the update time, and the enumeration delay as functions of the light/heavy threshold. By appropriately choosing this threshold, our approach recovers a number of prior results when restricted to hierarchical queries. We show that for a restricted class of hierarchical queries, our approach achieves worst-case optimal update time and enumeration delay conditioned on the Online Matrix-Vector Multiplication Conjecture.
The projection predictive variable selection is a decision-theoretically justified Bayesian variable selection approach achieving an outstanding trade-off between predictive performance and sparsity. Its projection problem is not easy to solve in general because it is based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence from a restricted posterior predictive distribution of the so-called reference model to the parameter-conditional predictive distribution of a candidate model. Previous work showed how this projection problem can be solved for response families employed in generalized linear models and how an approximate latent-space approach can be used for many other response families. Here, we present an exact projection method for all response families with discrete and finite support, called the augmented-data projection. A simulation study for an ordinal response family shows that the proposed method performs better than or similarly to the previously proposed approximate latent-space projection. The cost of the slightly better performance of the augmented-data projection is a substantial increase in runtime. Thus, in such cases, we recommend the latent projection in the early phase of a model-building workflow and the augmented-data projection for final results. The ordinal response family from our simulation study is supported by both projection methods, but we also include a real-world cancer subtyping example with a nominal response family, a case that is not supported by the latent projection.
Background: Machine Learning (ML) methods are being increasingly used for automating different activities, e.g., Test Case Prioritization (TCP), of Continuous Integration (CI). However, ML models need frequent retraining as a result of changes in the CI environment, more commonly known as data drift. Also, continuously retraining ML models consume a lot of time and effort. Hence, there is an urgent need of identifying and evaluating suitable approaches that can help in reducing the retraining efforts and time for ML models used for TCP in CI environments. Aims: This study aims to investigate the performance of using data drift detection techniques for automatically detecting the retraining points for ML models for TCP in CI environments without requiring detailed knowledge of the software projects. Method: We employed the Hellinger distance to identify changes in both the values and distribution of input data and leveraged these changes as retraining points for the ML model. We evaluated the efficacy of this method on multiple datasets and compared the APFDc and NAPFD evaluation metrics against models that were regularly retrained, with careful consideration of the statistical methods. Results: Our experimental evaluation of the Hellinger distance-based method demonstrated its efficacy and efficiency in detecting retraining points and reducing the associated costs. However, the performance of this method may vary depending on the dataset. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that data drift detection methods can assist in identifying retraining points for ML models in CI environments, while significantly reducing the required retraining time. These methods can be helpful for practitioners who lack specialized knowledge of software projects, enabling them to maintain ML model accuracy.
Motivated by the need for communication-efficient distributed learning, we investigate the method for compressing a unit norm vector into the minimum number of bits, while still allowing for some acceptable level of distortion in recovery. This problem has been explored in the rate-distortion/covering code literature, but our focus is exclusively on the "high-distortion" regime. We approach this problem in a worst-case scenario, without any prior information on the vector, but allowing for the use of randomized compression maps. Our study considers both biased and unbiased compression methods and determines the optimal compression rates. It turns out that simple compression schemes are nearly optimal in this scenario. While the results are a mix of new and known, they are compiled in this paper for completeness.
Granger causality is among the widely used data-driven approaches for causal analysis of time series data with applications in various areas including economics, molecular biology, and neuroscience. Two of the main challenges of this methodology are: 1) over-fitting as a result of limited data duration, and 2) correlated process noise as a confounding factor, both leading to errors in identifying the causal influences. Sparse estimation via the LASSO has successfully addressed these challenges for parameter estimation. However, the classical statistical tests for Granger causality resort to asymptotic analysis of ordinary least squares, which require long data duration to be useful and are not immune to confounding effects. In this work, we address this disconnect by introducing a LASSO-based statistic and studying its non-asymptotic properties under the assumption that the true models admit sparse autoregressive representations. We establish fundamental limits for reliable identification of Granger causal influences using the proposed LASSO-based statistic. We further characterize the false positive error probability and test power of a simple thresholding rule for identifying Granger causal effects and provide two methods to set the threshold in a data-driven fashion. We present simulation studies and application to real data to compare the performance of our proposed method to ordinary least squares and existing LASSO-based methods in detecting Granger causal influences, which corroborate our theoretical results.
Gaussian process (GP) regression is a Bayesian nonparametric method for regression and interpolation, offering a principled way of quantifying the uncertainties of predicted function values. For the quantified uncertainties to be well-calibrated, however, the covariance kernel of the GP prior has to be carefully selected. In this paper, we theoretically compare two methods for choosing the kernel in GP regression: cross-validation and maximum likelihood estimation. Focusing on the scale-parameter estimation of a Brownian motion kernel in the noiseless setting, we prove that cross-validation can yield asymptotically well-calibrated credible intervals for a broader class of ground-truth functions than maximum likelihood estimation, suggesting an advantage of the former over the latter.
This paper studies online convex optimization with stochastic constraints. We propose a variant of the drift-plus-penalty algorithm that guarantees $O(\sqrt{T})$ expected regret and zero constraint violation, after a fixed number of iterations, which improves the vanilla drift-plus-penalty method with $O(\sqrt{T})$ constraint violation. Our algorithm is oblivious to the length of the time horizon $T$, in contrast to the vanilla drift-plus-penalty method. This is based on our novel drift lemma that provides time-varying bounds on the virtual queue drift and, as a result, leads to time-varying bounds on the expected virtual queue length. Moreover, we extend our framework to stochastic-constrained online convex optimization under two-point bandit feedback. We show that by adapting our algorithmic framework to the bandit feedback setting, we may still achieve $O(\sqrt{T})$ expected regret and zero constraint violation, improving upon the previous work for the case of identical constraint functions. Numerical results demonstrate our theoretical results.
Bayesian model comparison (BMC) offers a principled approach for assessing the relative merits of competing computational models and propagating uncertainty into model selection decisions. However, BMC is often intractable for the popular class of hierarchical models due to their high-dimensional nested parameter structure. To address this intractability, we propose a deep learning method for performing BMC on any set of hierarchical models which can be instantiated as probabilistic programs. Since our method enables amortized inference, it allows efficient re-estimation of posterior model probabilities and fast performance validation prior to any real-data application. In a series of extensive validation studies, we benchmark the performance of our method against the state-of-the-art bridge sampling method and demonstrate excellent amortized inference across all BMC settings. We then showcase our method by comparing four hierarchical evidence accumulation models that have previously been deemed intractable for BMC due to partly implicit likelihoods. In this application, we corroborate evidence for the recently proposed L\'evy flight model of decision-making and show how transfer learning can be leveraged to enhance training efficiency. We provide reproducible code for all analyses and an open-source implementation of our method.
Analysis of high-dimensional data, where the number of covariates is larger than the sample size, is a topic of current interest. In such settings, an important goal is to estimate the signal level $\tau^2$ and noise level $\sigma^2$, i.e., to quantify how much variation in the response variable can be explained by the covariates, versus how much of the variation is left unexplained. This thesis considers the estimation of these quantities in a semi-supervised setting, where for many observations only the vector of covariates $X$ is given with no responses $Y$. Our main research question is: how can one use the unlabeled data to better estimate $\tau^2$ and $\sigma^2$? We consider two frameworks: a linear regression model and a linear projection model in which linearity is not assumed. In the first framework, while linear regression is used, no sparsity assumptions on the coefficients are made. In the second framework, the linearity assumption is also relaxed and we aim to estimate the signal and noise levels defined by the linear projection. We first propose a naive estimator which is unbiased and consistent, under some assumptions, in both frameworks. We then show how the naive estimator can be improved by using zero-estimators, where a zero-estimator is a statistic arising from the unlabeled data, whose expected value is zero. In the first framework, we calculate the optimal zero-estimator improvement and discuss ways to approximate the optimal improvement. In the second framework, such optimality does no longer hold and we suggest two zero-estimators that improve the naive estimator although not necessarily optimally. Furthermore, we show that our approach reduces the variance for general initial estimators and we present an algorithm that potentially improves any initial estimator. Lastly, we consider four datasets and study the performance of our suggested methods.