We extend Monte Carlo samplers based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMP samplers) by formally defining different boundary conditions such as sticky floors, soft and hard walls and teleportation portals. This allows PDMP samplers to target measures with piecewise-smooth densities relative to mixtures of Dirac and continuous components and measures supported on disconnected regions or regions which are difficult to reach with continuous paths. This is achieved by specifying the transition kernel which governs the behaviour of standard PDMPs when reaching a boundary. We determine a sufficient condition for the kernel at the boundary in terms of the skew-detailed balance condition and give concrete examples. The probabilities to cross a boundary can be tuned by introducing a piecewise constant speed-up function which modifies the velocity of the process upon crossing the boundary without extra computational cost. We apply this new class of processes to two illustrative applications in epidemiology and statistical mechanics.
A modification of Newton's method for solving systems of $n$ nonlinear equations is presented. The new matrix-free method relies on a given decomposition of the invertible Jacobian of the residual into invertible sparse local Jacobians according to the chain rule of differentiation. It is motivated in the context of local Jacobians with bandwidth $2m+1$ for $m\ll n$. A reduction of the computational cost by $\mathcal{O}(\frac{n}{m})$ can be observed. Supporting run time measurements are presented for the tridiagonal case showing a reduction of the computational cost by $\mathcal{O}(n).$ Generalization yields the combinatorial Matrix-Free Newton Step problem. We prove NP-completeness and we present algorithmic components for building methods for the approximate solution. Inspired by adjoint Algorithmic Differentiation, the new method shares several challenges for the latter including the DAG Reversal problem. Further challenges are due to combinatorial problems in sparse linear algebra such as Bandwidth or Directed Elimination Ordering.
In this paper we discuss potentially practical ways to produce expander graphs with good spectral properties and a compact description. We focus on several classes of uniform and bipartite expander graphs defined as random Schreier graphs of the general linear group over the finite field of size two. We perform numerical experiments and show that such constructions produce spectral expanders that can be useful for practical applications. To find a theoretical explanation of the observed experimental results, we used the method of moments to prove upper bounds for the expected second largest eigenvalue of the random Schreier graphs used in our constructions. We focus on bounds for which it is difficult to study the asymptotic behaviour but it is possible to compute non-trivial conclusions for relatively small graphs with parameters from our numerical experiments (e.g., with less than 2^200 vertices and degree at least logarithmic in the number of vertices).
Blockchain enables peer-to-peer transactions in cyberspace without a trusted third party. The rapid growth of Ethereum and smart contract blockchains generally calls for well-designed Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs) to allocate limited storage and computation resources. However, existing research on TFMs must consider the waiting time for transactions, which is essential for computer security and economic efficiency. Integrating data from the Ethereum blockchain and memory pool (mempool), we explore how two types of events affect transaction latency. First, we apply regression discontinuity design (RDD) to study the causal inference of the Merge, the most recent significant upgrade of Ethereum. Our results show that the Merge significantly reduces the long waiting time, network loads, and market congestion. In addition, we verify our results' robustness by inspecting other compounding factors, such as censorship and unobserved delays of transactions via private changes. Second, examining three major protocol changes during the merge, we identify block interval shortening as the most plausible cause for our empirical results. Furthermore, in a mathematical model, we show block interval as a unique mechanism design choice for EIP1559 TFM to achieve better security and efficiency, generally applicable to the market congestion caused by demand surges. Finally, we apply time series analysis to research the interaction of Non-Fungible token (NFT) drops and market congestion using Facebook Prophet, an open-source algorithm for generating time-series models. Our study identified NFT drops as a unique source of market congestion -- holiday effects -- beyond trend and season effects. Finally, we envision three future research directions of TFM.
We show that in bipartite graphs a large expansion factor implies very fast dynamic matching. Coupled with known constructions of lossless expanders, this gives a solution to the main open problem in a classical paper of Feldman, Friedman, and Pippenger (SIAM J. Discret. Math., 1(2):158-173, 1988). Application 1: storing sets. We construct 1-query bitprobes that store a dynamic subset $S$ of an $N$ element set. A membership query reads a single bit, whose location is computed in time poly$(\log N, \log (1/\varepsilon))$ time and is correct with probability $1-\epsilon$. Elements can be inserted and removed efficiently in time quasipoly$(\log N)$. Previous constructions were static: membership queries have the same parameters, but each update requires the recomputation of the whole data structure, which takes time poly$(\# S \log N)$. Moreover, the size of our scheme is smaller than the best known constructions for static sets. Application 2: switching networks. We construct explicit constant depth $N$-connectors of essentially minimum size in which the path-finding algorithm runs in time quasipoly$(\log N)$. In the non-explicit construction in Feldman, Friedman and Pippenger (SIAM J. Discret. Math., 1(2):158-173, 1988). and in the explicit construction of Wigderson and Zuckerman (Combinatorica, 19(1):125-138, 1999) the runtime is exponential in $N$.
In machine learning applications, it is common practice to feed as much information as possible. In most cases, the model can handle large data sets that allow to predict more accurately. In the presence of data scarcity, a Few-Shot learning (FSL) approach aims to build more accurate algorithms with limited training data. We propose a novel end-to-end lightweight architecture that verifies biometric data by producing competitive results as compared to state-of-the-art accuracies through Few-Shot learning methods. The dense layers add to the complexity of state-of-the-art deep learning models which inhibits them to be used in low-power applications. In presented approach, a shallow network is coupled with a conventional machine learning technique that exploits hand-crafted features to verify biometric images from multi-modal sources such as signatures, periocular region, iris, face, fingerprints etc. We introduce a self-estimated threshold that strictly monitors False Acceptance Rate (FAR) while generalizing its results hence eliminating user-defined thresholds from ROC curves that are likely to be biased on local data distribution. This hybrid model benefits from few-shot learning to make up for scarcity of data in biometric use-cases. We have conducted extensive experimentation with commonly used biometric datasets. The obtained results provided an effective solution for biometric verification systems.
An old problem in multivariate statistics is that linear Gaussian models are often unidentifiable, i.e. some parameters cannot be uniquely estimated. In factor (component) analysis, an orthogonal rotation of the factors is unidentifiable, while in linear regression, the direction of effect cannot be identified. For such linear models, non-Gaussianity of the (latent) variables has been shown to provide identifiability. In the case of factor analysis, this leads to independent component analysis, while in the case of the direction of effect, non-Gaussian versions of structural equation modelling solve the problem. More recently, we have shown how even general nonparametric nonlinear versions of such models can be estimated. Non-Gaussianity is not enough in this case, but assuming we have time series, or that the distributions are suitably modulated by some observed auxiliary variables, the models are identifiable. This paper reviews the identifiability theory for the linear and nonlinear cases, considering both factor analytic models and structural equation models.
The flexibility and effectiveness of message passing based graph neural networks (GNNs) induced considerable advances in deep learning on graph-structured data. In such approaches, GNNs recursively update node representations based on their neighbors and they gain expressivity through the use of node and edge attribute vectors. E.g., in computational tasks such as physics and chemistry usage of edge attributes such as relative position or distance proved to be essential. In this work, we address not what kind of attributes to use, but how to condition on this information to improve model performance. We consider three types of conditioning; weak, strong, and pure, which respectively relate to concatenation-based conditioning, gating, and transformations that are causally dependent on the attributes. This categorization provides a unifying viewpoint on different classes of GNNs, from separable convolutions to various forms of message passing networks. We provide an empirical study on the effect of conditioning methods in several tasks in computational chemistry.
A proper fusion of complex data is of interest to many researchers in diverse fields, including computational statistics, computational geometry, bioinformatics, machine learning, pattern recognition, quality management, engineering, statistics, finance, economics, etc. It plays a crucial role in: synthetic description of data processes or whole domains, creation of rule bases for approximate reasoning tasks, reaching consensus and selection of the optimal strategy in decision support systems, imputation of missing values, data deduplication and consolidation, record linkage across heterogeneous databases, and clustering. This open-access research monograph integrates the spread-out results from different domains using the methodology of the well-established classical aggregation framework, introduces researchers and practitioners to Aggregation 2.0, as well as points out the challenges and interesting directions for further research.
This PhD thesis contains several contributions to the field of statistical causal modeling. Statistical causal models are statistical models embedded with causal assumptions that allow for the inference and reasoning about the behavior of stochastic systems affected by external manipulation (interventions). This thesis contributes to the research areas concerning the estimation of causal effects, causal structure learning, and distributionally robust (out-of-distribution generalizing) prediction methods. We present novel and consistent linear and non-linear causal effects estimators in instrumental variable settings that employ data-dependent mean squared prediction error regularization. Our proposed estimators show, in certain settings, mean squared error improvements compared to both canonical and state-of-the-art estimators. We show that recent research on distributionally robust prediction methods has connections to well-studied estimators from econometrics. This connection leads us to prove that general K-class estimators possess distributional robustness properties. We, furthermore, propose a general framework for distributional robustness with respect to intervention-induced distributions. In this framework, we derive sufficient conditions for the identifiability of distributionally robust prediction methods and present impossibility results that show the necessity of several of these conditions. We present a new structure learning method applicable in additive noise models with directed trees as causal graphs. We prove consistency in a vanishing identifiability setup and provide a method for testing substructure hypotheses with asymptotic family-wise error control that remains valid post-selection. Finally, we present heuristic ideas for learning summary graphs of nonlinear time-series models.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.