Models used for many important engineering and natural systems are imperfect. The discrepancy between the mathematical representations of a true physical system and its imperfect model is called the model error. These model errors can lead to substantial difference between the numerical solutions of the model and the observations of the system, particularly in those involving nonlinear, multi-scale phenomena. Thus, there is substantial interest in reducing model errors, particularly through understanding their physics and sources and leveraging the rapid growth of observational data. Here we introduce a framework named MEDIDA: Model Error Discovery with Interpretability and Data Assimilation. MEDIDA only requires a working numerical solver of the model and a small number of noise-free or noisy sporadic observations of the system. In MEDIDA, first the model error is estimated from differences between the observed states and model-predicted states (the latter are obtained from a number of one-time-step numerical integrations from the previous observed states). If observations are noisy, a data assimilation (DA) technique such as ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is first used to provide a noise-free analysis state of the system, which is then used in estimating the model error. Finally, an equation-discovery technique, such as the relevance vector machine (RVM), a sparsity-promoting Bayesian method, is used to identify an interpretable, parsimonious, closed-form representation of the model error. Using the chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky (KS) system as the test case, we demonstrate the excellent performance of MEDIDA in discovering different types of structural/parametric model errors, representing different types of missing physics, using noise-free and noisy observations.
Since the increasing outspread of COVID-19 in the U.S., with the highest number of confirmed cases and deaths in the world as of September 2020, most states in the country have enforced travel restrictions resulting in sharp reductions in mobility. However, the overall impact and long-term implications of this crisis to travel and mobility remain uncertain. To this end, this study develops an analytical framework that determines and analyzes the most dominant factors impacting human mobility and travel in the U.S. during this pandemic. In particular, the study uses Granger causality to determine the important predictors influencing daily vehicle miles traveled and utilize linear regularization algorithms, including Ridge and LASSO techniques, to model and predict mobility. State-level time-series data were obtained from various open-access sources for the period starting from March 1, 2020 through June 13, 2020 and the entire data set was divided into two parts for training and testing purposes. The variables selected by Granger causality were used to train the three different reduced order models by ordinary least square regression, Ridge regression, and LASSO regression algorithms. Finally, the prediction accuracy of the developed models was examined on the test data. The results indicate that the factors including the number of new COVID cases, social distancing index, population staying at home, percent of out of county trips, trips to different destinations, socioeconomic status, percent of people working from home, and statewide closure, among others, were the most important factors influencing daily VMT. Also, among all the modeling techniques, Ridge regression provides the most superior performance with the least error, while LASSO regression also performed better than the ordinary least square model.
We develop a new method to find the number of volatility regimes in a nonstationary financial time series by applying unsupervised learning to its volatility structure. We use change point detection to partition a time series into locally stationary segments and then compute a distance matrix between segment distributions. The segments are clustered into a learned number of discrete volatility regimes via an optimization routine. Using this framework, we determine a volatility clustering structure for financial indices, large-cap equities, exchange-traded funds and currency pairs. Our method overcomes the rigid assumptions necessary to implement many parametric regime-switching models, while effectively distilling a time series into several characteristic behaviours. Our results provide significant simplification of these time series and a strong descriptive analysis of prior behaviours of volatility. Finally, we create and validate a dynamic trading strategy that learns the optimal match between the current distribution of a time series and its past regimes, thereby making online risk-avoidance decisions in the present.
Inference in deep Bayesian neural networks is only fully understood in the infinite-width limit, where the posterior flexibility afforded by increased depth washes out and the posterior predictive collapses to a shallow Gaussian process. Here, we interpret finite deep linear Bayesian neural networks as data-dependent scale mixtures of Gaussian process predictors across output channels. We leverage this observation to study representation learning in these networks, allowing us to connect limiting results obtained in previous studies within a unified framework. In total, these results advance our analytical understanding of how depth affects inference in a simple class of Bayesian neural networks.
For various purposes and, in particular, in the context of data compression, a graph can be examined at three levels. Its structure can be described as the unlabeled version of the graph; then the labeling of its structure can be added; and finally, given then structure and labeling, the contents of the labels can be described. Determining the amount of information present at each level and quantifying the degree of dependence between them, requires the study of symmetry, graph automorphism, entropy, and graph compressibility. In this paper, we focus on a class of small-world graphs. These are geometric random graphs where vertices are first connected to their nearest neighbors on a circle and then pairs of non-neighbors are connected according to a distance-dependent probability distribution. We establish the degree distribution of this model, and use it to prove the model's asymmetry in an appropriate range of parameters. Then we derive the relevant entropy and structural entropy of these random graphs, in connection with graph compression.
Integrative analysis of multi-level pharmacogenomic data for modeling dependencies across various biological domains is crucial for developing genomic-testing based treatments. Chain graphs characterize conditional dependence structures of such multi-level data where variables are naturally partitioned into multiple ordered layers, consisting of both directed and undirected edges. Existing literature mostly focus on Gaussian chain graphs, which are ill-suited for non-normal distributions with heavy-tailed marginals, potentially leading to inaccurate inferences. We propose a Bayesian robust chain graph model (RCGM) based on random transformations of marginals using Gaussian scale mixtures to account for node-level non-normality in continuous multivariate data. This flexible modeling strategy facilitates identification of conditional sign dependencies among non-normal nodes while still being able to infer conditional dependencies among normal nodes. In simulations, we demonstrate that RCGM outperforms existing Gaussian chain graph inference methods in data generated from various non-normal mechanisms. We apply our method to genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic data to understand underlying biological processes holistically for drug response and resistance in lung cancer cell lines. Our analysis reveals inter- and intra- platform dependencies of key signaling pathways to monotherapies of icotinib, erlotinib and osimertinib among other drugs, along with shared patterns of molecular mechanisms behind drug actions.
The nudging data assimilation algorithm is a powerful tool used to forecast phenomena of interest given incomplete and noisy observations. Machine learning is becoming increasingly popular in data assimilation given its ease of computation and forecasting ability. This work proposes a new approach to data assimilation via machine learning where Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are being taught the nudging algorithm. The accuracy of the proposed DNN based algorithm is comparable to the nudging algorithm and it is confirmed by the Lorenz 63 and Lorenz 96 numerical examples. The key advantage of the proposed approach is the fact that, once trained, DNNs are cheap to evaluate in comparison to nudging where typically differential equations are needed to be solved. Standard exponential type approximation results are established for the Lorenz 63 model for both the continuous and discrete in time models. These results can be directly coupled with estimates for DNNs (whenever available), to derive the overall approximation error estimates of the proposed algorithm.
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.
The problem of Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search is fundamental in computer science and has benefited from significant progress in the past couple of decades. However, most work has been devoted to pointsets whereas complex shapes have not been sufficiently treated. Here, we focus on distance functions between discretized curves in Euclidean space: they appear in a wide range of applications, from road segments to time-series in general dimension. For $\ell_p$-products of Euclidean metrics, for any $p$, we design simple and efficient data structures for ANN, based on randomized projections, which are of independent interest. They serve to solve proximity problems under a notion of distance between discretized curves, which generalizes both discrete Fr\'echet and Dynamic Time Warping distances. These are the most popular and practical approaches to comparing such curves. We offer the first data structures and query algorithms for ANN with arbitrarily good approximation factor, at the expense of increasing space usage and preprocessing time over existing methods. Query time complexity is comparable or significantly improved by our algorithms, our algorithm is especially efficient when the length of the curves is bounded.
Tumor detection in biomedical imaging is a time-consuming process for medical professionals and is not without errors. Thus in recent decades, researchers have developed algorithmic techniques for image processing using a wide variety of mathematical methods, such as statistical modeling, variational techniques, and machine learning. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic method for liver segmentation of 2D CT scans into three labels denoting healthy, vessel, or tumor tissue based on graph cuts. First, we create a feature vector for each pixel in a novel way that consists of the 59 intensity values in the time series data and propose a simplified perimeter cost term in the energy functional. We normalize the data and perimeter terms in the functional to expedite the graph cut without having to optimize the scaling parameter $\lambda$. In place of a training process, predetermined tissue means are computed based on sample regions identified by expert radiologists. The proposed method also has the advantage of being relatively simple to implement computationally. It was evaluated against the ground truth on a clinical CT dataset of 10 tumors and yielded segmentations with a mean Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of .77 and mean volume overlap error (VOE) of 36.7%. The average processing time was 1.25 minutes per slice.
We consider the task of learning the parameters of a {\em single} component of a mixture model, for the case when we are given {\em side information} about that component, we call this the "search problem" in mixture models. We would like to solve this with computational and sample complexity lower than solving the overall original problem, where one learns parameters of all components. Our main contributions are the development of a simple but general model for the notion of side information, and a corresponding simple matrix-based algorithm for solving the search problem in this general setting. We then specialize this model and algorithm to four common scenarios: Gaussian mixture models, LDA topic models, subspace clustering, and mixed linear regression. For each one of these we show that if (and only if) the side information is informative, we obtain parameter estimates with greater accuracy, and also improved computation complexity than existing moment based mixture model algorithms (e.g. tensor methods). We also illustrate several natural ways one can obtain such side information, for specific problem instances. Our experiments on real data sets (NY Times, Yelp, BSDS500) further demonstrate the practicality of our algorithms showing significant improvement in runtime and accuracy.