A deep generative model yields an implicit estimator for the unknown distribution or density function of the observation. This paper investigates some statistical properties of the implicit density estimator pursued by VAE-type methods from a nonparametric density estimation framework. More specifically, we obtain convergence rates of the VAE-type density estimator under the assumption that the underlying true density function belongs to a locally H\"{o}lder class. Remarkably, a near minimax optimal rate with respect to the Hellinger metric can be achieved by the simplest network architecture, a shallow generative model with a one-dimensional latent variable.
相關內容
Parameters of differential equations are essential to characterize intrinsic behaviors of dynamic systems. Numerous methods for estimating parameters in dynamic systems are computationally and/or statistically inadequate, especially for complex systems with general-order differential operators, such as motion dynamics. This article presents Green's matching, a computationally tractable and statistically efficient two-step method, which only needs to approximate trajectories in dynamic systems but not their derivatives due to the inverse of differential operators by Green's function. This yields a statistically optimal guarantee for parameter estimation in general-order equations, a feature not shared by existing methods, and provides an efficient framework for broad statistical inferences in complex dynamic systems.
In many application settings, the data have missing entries which make analysis challenging. An abundant literature addresses missing values in an inferential framework: estimating parameters and their variance from incomplete tables. Here, we consider supervised-learning settings: predicting a target when missing values appear in both training and testing data. We show the consistency of two approaches in prediction. A striking result is that the widely-used method of imputing with a constant, such as the mean prior to learning is consistent when missing values are not informative. This contrasts with inferential settings where mean imputation is pointed at for distorting the distribution of the data. That such a simple approach can be consistent is important in practice. We also show that a predictor suited for complete observations can predict optimally on incomplete data, through multiple imputation. Finally, to compare imputation with learning directly with a model that accounts for missing values, we analyze further decision trees. These can naturally tackle empirical risk minimization with missing values, due to their ability to handle the half-discrete nature of incomplete variables. After comparing theoretically and empirically different missing values strategies in trees, we recommend using the "missing incorporated in attribute" method as it can handle both non-informative and informative missing values.
We introduce a statistical method for modeling and forecasting functional panel data, where each element is a density. Density functions are nonnegative and have a constrained integral and thus do not constitute a linear vector space. We implement a center log-ratio transformation to transform densities into unconstrained functions. These functions exhibit cross-sectionally correlation and temporal dependence. Via a functional analysis of variance decomposition, we decompose the unconstrained functional panel data into a deterministic trend component and a time-varying residual component. To produce forecasts for the time-varying component, a functional time series forecasting method, based on the estimation of the long-range covariance, is implemented. By combining the forecasts of the time-varying residual component with the deterministic trend component, we obtain h-step-ahead forecast curves for multiple populations. Illustrated by age- and sex-specific life-table death counts in the United States, we apply our proposed method to generate forecasts of the life-table death counts for 51 states.
We consider a geometric programming problem consisting in minimizing a function given by the supremum of finitely many log-Laplace transforms of discrete nonnegative measures on a Euclidean space. Under a coerciveness assumption, we show that a $\varepsilon$-minimizer can be computed in a time that is polynomial in the input size and in $|\log\varepsilon|$. This is obtained by establishing bit-size estimates on approximate minimizers and by applying the ellipsoid method. We also derive polynomial iteration complexity bounds for the interior point method applied to the same class of problems. We deduce that the spectral radius of a partially symmetric, weakly irreducible nonnegative tensor can be approximated within $\varepsilon$ error in poly-time. For strongly irreducible tensors, we also show that the logarithm of the positive eigenvector is poly-time computable. Our results also yield that the the maximum of a nonnegative homogeneous $d$-form in the unit ball with respect to $d$-H\"older norm can be approximated in poly-time. In particular, the spectral radius of uniform weighted hypergraphs and some known upper bounds for the clique number of uniform hypergraphs are poly-time computable.
Global variance-based reliability sensitivity indices arise from a variance decomposition of the indicator function describing the failure event. The first-order indices reflect the main effect of each variable on the variance of the failure event and can be used for variable prioritization; the total-effect indices represent the total effect of each variable, including its interaction with other variables, and can be used for variable fixing. This contribution derives expressions for the variance-based reliability indices of systems with multiple failure modes that are based on the first-order reliability method (FORM). The derived expressions are a function of the FORM results and, hence, do not require additional expensive model evaluations. They do involve the evaluation of multinormal integrals, for which effective solutions are available. We demonstrate that the derived expressions enable an accurate estimation of variance-based reliability sensitivities for general system problems to which FORM is applicable.
Conformal inference is a fundamental and versatile tool that provides distribution-free guarantees for many machine learning tasks. We consider the transductive setting, where decisions are made on a test sample of $m$ new points, giving rise to $m$ conformal $p$-values. While classical results only concern their marginal distribution, we show that their joint distribution follows a P\'olya urn model, and establish a concentration inequality for their empirical distribution function. The results hold for arbitrary exchangeable scores, including adaptive ones that can use the covariates of the test+calibration samples at training stage for increased accuracy. We demonstrate the usefulness of these theoretical results through uniform, in-probability guarantees for two machine learning tasks of current interest: interval prediction for transductive transfer learning and novelty detection based on two-class classification.
Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are probabilistic methods in which observations are seen as realizations of a latent Markov process with discrete states that switch over time. Moving beyond standard statistical tests, HMMs offer a statistical environment to optimally exploit the information present in multivariate time series, uncovering the latent dynamics that rule them. Here, we extend the Poisson HMM to the multilevel framework, accommodating variability between individuals with continuously distributed individual random effects following a lognormal distribution, and describe how to estimate the model in a fully parametric Bayesian framework. The proposed multilevel HMM enables probabilistic decoding of hidden state sequences from multivariate count time-series based on individual-specific parameters, and offers a framework to quantificate between-individual variability formally. Through a Monte Carlo study we show that the multilevel HMM outperforms the HMM for scenarios involving heterogeneity between individuals, demonstrating improved decoding accuracy and estimation performance of parameters of the emission distribution, and performs equally well when not between heterogeneity is present. Finally, we illustrate how to use our model to explore the latent dynamics governing complex multivariate count data in an empirical application concerning pilot whale diving behaviour in the wild, and how to identify neural states from multi-electrode recordings of motor neural cortex activity in a macaque monkey in an experimental set up. We make the multilevel HMM introduced in this study publicly available in the R-package mHMMbayes in CRAN.
We consider the fundamental task of optimising a real-valued function defined in a potentially high-dimensional Euclidean space, such as the loss function in many machine-learning tasks or the logarithm of the probability distribution in statistical inference. We use Riemannian geometry notions to redefine the optimisation problem of a function on the Euclidean space to a Riemannian manifold with a warped metric, and then find the function's optimum along this manifold. The warped metric chosen for the search domain induces a computational friendly metric-tensor for which optimal search directions associated with geodesic curves on the manifold becomes easier to compute. Performing optimization along geodesics is known to be generally infeasible, yet we show that in this specific manifold we can analytically derive Taylor approximations up to third-order. In general these approximations to the geodesic curve will not lie on the manifold, however we construct suitable retraction maps to pull them back onto the manifold. Therefore, we can efficiently optimize along the approximate geodesic curves. We cover the related theory, describe a practical optimization algorithm and empirically evaluate it on a collection of challenging optimisation benchmarks. Our proposed algorithm, using 3rd-order approximation of geodesics, tends to outperform standard Euclidean gradient-based counterparts in term of number of iterations until convergence.
The use of discretized variables in the development of prediction models is a common practice, in part because the decision-making process is more natural when it is based on rules created from segmented models. Although this practice is perhaps more common in medicine, it is extensible to any area of knowledge where a predictive model helps in decision-making. Therefore, providing researchers with a useful and valid categorization method could be a relevant issue when developing prediction models. In this paper, we propose a new general methodology that can be applied to categorize a predictor variable in any regression model where the response variable belongs to the exponential family distribution. Furthermore, it can be applied in any multivariate context, allowing to categorize more than one continuous covariate simultaneously. In addition, a computationally very efficient method is proposed to obtain the optimal number of categories, based on a pseudo-BIC proposal. Several simulation studies have been conducted in which the efficiency of the method with respect to both the location and the number of estimated cut-off points is shown. Finally, the categorization proposal has been applied to a real data set of 543 patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease from Galdakao Hospital's five outpatient respiratory clinics, who were followed up for 10 years. We applied the proposed methodology to jointly categorize the continuous variables six-minute walking test and forced expiratory volume in one second in a multiple Poisson generalized additive model for the response variable rate of the number of hospital admissions by years of follow-up. The location and number of cut-off points obtained were clinically validated as being in line with the categorizations used in the literature.
Mendelian randomization uses genetic variants as instrumental variables to make causal inferences about the effects of modifiable risk factors on diseases from observational data. One of the major challenges in Mendelian randomization is that many genetic variants are only modestly or even weakly associated with the risk factor of interest, a setting known as many weak instruments. Many existing methods, such as the popular inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method, could be biased when the instrument strength is weak. To address this issue, the debiased IVW (dIVW) estimator, which is shown to be robust to many weak instruments, was recently proposed. However, this estimator still has non-ignorable bias when the effective sample size is small. In this paper, we propose a modified debiased IVW (mdIVW) estimator by multiplying a modification factor to the original dIVW estimator. After this simple correction, we show that the bias of the mdIVW estimator converges to zero at a faster rate than that of the dIVW estimator under some regularity conditions. Moreover, the mdIVW estimator has smaller variance than the dIVW estimator.We further extend the proposed method to account for the presence of instrumental variable selection and balanced horizontal pleiotropy. We demonstrate the improvement of the mdIVW estimator over the dIVW estimator through extensive simulation studies and real data analysis.
注冊地址： 北京市海淀區羊坊店路18號2幢3層301-191