In manufacturing, rework refers to an optional step of a production process which aims to eliminate errors or remedy products that do not meet the desired quality standards. Reworking a production lot involves repeating a previous production stage with adjustments to ensure that the final product meets the required specifications. While offering the chance to improve the yield and thus increase the revenue of a production lot, a rework step also incurs additional costs. Additionally, the rework of parts that already meet the target specifications may damage them and decrease the yield. In this paper, we apply double/debiased machine learning (DML) to estimate the conditional treatment effect of a rework step during the color conversion process in opto-electronic semiconductor manufacturing on the final product yield. We utilize the implementation DoubleML to develop policies for the rework of components and estimate their value empirically. From our causal machine learning analysis we derive implications for the coating of monochromatic LEDs with conversion layers.
Preserving the topology from being inferred by external adversaries has become a paramount security issue for network systems (NSs), and adding random noises to the nodal states provides a promising way. Nevertheless, recent works have revealed that the topology cannot be preserved under i.i.d. noises in the asymptotic sense. How to effectively characterize the non-asymptotic preservation performance still remains an open issue. Inspired by the deviation quantification of concentration inequalities, this paper proposes a novel metric named trace-based variance-expectation ratio. This metric effectively captures the decaying rate of the topology inference error, where a slower rate indicates better non-asymptotic preservation performance. We prove that the inference error will always decay to zero asymptotically, as long as the added noises are non-increasing and independent (milder than the i.i.d. condition). Then, the optimal noise design that produces the slowest decaying rate for the error is obtained. More importantly, we amend the noise design by introducing one-lag time dependence, achieving the zero state deviation and the non-zero topology inference error in the asymptotic sense simultaneously. Extensions to a general class of noises with multi-lag time dependence are provided. Comprehensive simulations verify the theoretical findings.
Generative modeling is a widely-used machine learning method with various applications in scientific and industrial fields. Its primary objective is to simulate new examples drawn from an unknown distribution given training data while ensuring diversity and avoiding replication of examples from the training data. This paper presents theoretical insights into training a generative model with two properties: (i) the error of replacing the true data-generating distribution with the trained data-generating distribution should optimally converge to zero as the sample size approaches infinity, and (ii) the trained data-generating distribution should be far enough from any distribution replicating examples in the training data. We provide non-asymptotic results in the form of finite sample risk bounds that quantify these properties and depend on relevant parameters such as sample size, the dimension of the ambient space, and the dimension of the latent space. Our results are applicable to general integral probability metrics used to quantify errors in probability distribution spaces, with the Wasserstein-$1$ distance being the central example. We also include numerical examples to illustrate our theoretical findings.
We evaluate benchmark deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms on the task of portfolio optimisation under a simulator. The simulator is based on correlated geometric Brownian motion (GBM) with the Bertsimas-Lo (BL) market impact model. Using the Kelly criterion (log utility) as the objective, we can analytically derive the optimal policy without market impact and use it as an upper bound to measure performance when including market impact. We found that the off-policy algorithms DDPG, TD3 and SAC were unable to learn the right Q function due to the noisy rewards and therefore perform poorly. The on-policy algorithms PPO and A2C, with the use of generalised advantage estimation (GAE), were able to deal with the noise and derive a close to optimal policy. The clipping variant of PPO was found to be important in preventing the policy from deviating from the optimal once converged. In a more challenging environment where we have regime changes in the GBM parameters, we found that PPO, combined with a hidden Markov model (HMM) to learn and predict the regime context, is able to learn different policies adapted to each regime. Overall, we find that the sample complexity of these algorithms is too high, requiring more than 2m steps to learn a good policy in the simplest setting, which is equivalent to almost 8,000 years of daily prices.
Joint multimodal functional data acquisition, where functional data from multiple modes are measured simultaneously from the same subject, has emerged as an exciting modern approach enabled by recent engineering breakthroughs in the neurological and biological sciences. One prominent motivation to acquire such data is to enable new discoveries of the underlying connectivity by combining multimodal signals. Despite the scientific interest, there remains a gap in principled statistical methods for estimating the graph underlying multimodal functional data. To this end, we propose a new integrative framework that models the data generation process and identifies operators mapping from the observation space to the latent space. We then develop an estimator that simultaneously estimates the transformation operators and the latent graph. This estimator is based on the partial correlation operator, which we rigorously extend from the multivariate to the functional setting. Our procedure is provably efficient, with the estimator converging to a stationary point with quantifiable statistical error. Furthermore, we show recovery of the latent graph under mild conditions. Our work is applied to analyze simultaneously acquired multimodal brain imaging data where the graph indicates functional connectivity of the brain. We present simulation and empirical results that support the benefits of joint estimation.
Recent research has demonstrated the potential of reinforcement learning (RL) in enabling effective multi-robot collaboration, particularly in social dilemmas where robots face a trade-off between self-interests and collective benefits. However, environmental factors such as miscommunication and adversarial robots can impact cooperation, making it crucial to explore how multi-robot communication can be manipulated to achieve different outcomes. This paper presents a novel approach, namely PIMbot, to manipulating the reward function in multi-robot collaboration through two distinct forms of manipulation: policy and incentive manipulation. Our work introduces a new angle for manipulation in recent multi-agent RL social dilemmas that utilize a unique reward function for incentivization. By utilizing our proposed PIMbot mechanisms, a robot is able to manipulate the social dilemma environment effectively. PIMbot has the potential for both positive and negative impacts on the task outcome, where positive impacts lead to faster convergence to the global optimum and maximized rewards for any chosen robot. Conversely, negative impacts can have a detrimental effect on the overall task performance. We present comprehensive experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods in the Gazebo-simulated multi-robot environment. Our work provides insights into how inter-robot communication can be manipulated and has implications for various robotic applications. %, including robotics, transportation, and manufacturing.
In this paper, we consider decentralized optimization problems where agents have individual cost functions to minimize subject to subspace constraints that require the minimizers across the network to lie in low-dimensional subspaces. This constrained formulation includes consensus or single-task optimization as special cases, and allows for more general task relatedness models such as multitask smoothness and coupled optimization. In order to cope with communication constraints, we propose and study an adaptive decentralized strategy where the agents employ differential randomized quantizers to compress their estimates before communicating with their neighbors. The analysis shows that, under some general conditions on the quantization noise, and for sufficiently small step-sizes $\mu$, the strategy is stable both in terms of mean-square error and average bit rate: by reducing $\mu$, it is possible to keep the estimation errors small (on the order of $\mu$) without increasing indefinitely the bit rate as $\mu\rightarrow 0$. Simulations illustrate the theoretical findings and the effectiveness of the proposed approach, revealing that decentralized learning is achievable at the expense of only a few bits.
We consider estimation and inference with data collected from episodic reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms; i.e. adaptive experimentation algorithms that at each period (aka episode) interact multiple times in a sequential manner with a single treated unit. Our goal is to be able to evaluate counterfactual adaptive policies after data collection and to estimate structural parameters such as dynamic treatment effects, which can be used for credit assignment (e.g. what was the effect of the first period action on the final outcome). Such parameters of interest can be framed as solutions to moment equations, but not minimizers of a population loss function, leading to $Z$-estimation approaches in the case of static data. However, such estimators fail to be asymptotically normal in the case of adaptive data collection. We propose a re-weighted $Z$-estimation approach with carefully designed adaptive weights to stabilize the episode-varying estimation variance, which results from the nonstationary policy that typical episodic RL algorithms invoke. We identify proper weighting schemes to restore the consistency and asymptotic normality of the re-weighted Z-estimators for target parameters, which allows for hypothesis testing and constructing uniform confidence regions for target parameters of interest. Primary applications include dynamic treatment effect estimation and dynamic off-policy evaluation.
In this manuscript we derive the optimal out-of-sample causal predictor for a linear system that has been observed in $k+1$ within-sample environments. In this model we consider $k$ shifted environments and one observational environment. Each environment corresponds to a linear structural equation model (SEM) with its own shift and noise vector, both in $L^2$. The strength of the shifts can be put in a certain order, and we may therefore speak of all shifts that are less or equally strong than a given shift. We consider the space of all shifts are $\gamma$ times less or equally strong than any weighted average of the observed shift vectors with weights on the unit sphere. For each $\beta\in\mathbb{R}^p$ we show that the supremum of the risk functions $R_{\tilde{A}}(\beta)$ over $\tilde{A}\in C^\gamma$ has a worst-risk decomposition into a (positive) linear combination of risk functions, depending on $\gamma$. We then define the causal regularizer, $\beta_\gamma$, as the argument $\beta$ that minimizes this risk. The main result of the paper is that this regularizer can be consistently estimated with a plug-in estimator outside a set of zero Lebesgue measure in the parameter space. A practical obstacle for such estimation is that it involves the solution of a general degree polynomial which cannot be done explicitly. Therefore we also prove that an approximate plug-in estimator using the bisection method is also consistent. An interesting by-product of the proof of the main result is that the plug-in estimation of the argmin of the maxima of a finite set of quadratic risk functions is consistent outside a set of zero Lebesgue measure in the parameter space.
Understanding causality helps to structure interventions to achieve specific goals and enables predictions under interventions. With the growing importance of learning causal relationships, causal discovery tasks have transitioned from using traditional methods to infer potential causal structures from observational data to the field of pattern recognition involved in deep learning. The rapid accumulation of massive data promotes the emergence of causal search methods with brilliant scalability. Existing summaries of causal discovery methods mainly focus on traditional methods based on constraints, scores and FCMs, there is a lack of perfect sorting and elaboration for deep learning-based methods, also lacking some considers and exploration of causal discovery methods from the perspective of variable paradigms. Therefore, we divide the possible causal discovery tasks into three types according to the variable paradigm and give the definitions of the three tasks respectively, define and instantiate the relevant datasets for each task and the final causal model constructed at the same time, then reviews the main existing causal discovery methods for different tasks. Finally, we propose some roadmaps from different perspectives for the current research gaps in the field of causal discovery and point out future research directions.
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.