Inference about a scalar parameter of interest typically relies on the asymptotic normality of common likelihood pivots, such as the signed likelihood root, the score and Wald statistics. Nevertheless, the resulting inferential procedures are known to perform poorly when the dimension of the nuisance parameter is large relative to the sample size and when the information about the parameters is limited. In many such cases, the use of asymptotic normality of analytical modifications of the signed likelihood root is known to recover inferential performance. It is proved here that parametric bootstrap of standard likelihood pivots results in as accurate inferences as analytical modifications of the signed likelihood root do in stratified models with stratum specific nuisance parameters. We focus on the challenging case where the number of strata increases as fast or faster than the stratum samples size. It is also shown that this equivalence holds regardless of whether constrained or unconstrained bootstrap is used. This is in contrast to when the number of strata is fixed or increases slower than the stratum sample size, where we show that constrained bootstrap corrects inference to a higher order than unconstrained bootstrap. Simulation experiments support the theoretical findings and demonstrate the excellent performance of bootstrap in extreme scenarios.
Hyperspectral images often have hundreds of spectral bands of different wavelengths captured by aircraft or satellites that record land coverage. Identifying detailed classes of pixels becomes feasible due to the enhancement in spectral and spatial resolution of hyperspectral images. In this work, we propose a novel framework that utilizes both spatial and spectral information for classifying pixels in hyperspectral images. The method consists of three stages. In the first stage, the pre-processing stage, Nested Sliding Window algorithm is used to reconstruct the original data by {enhancing the consistency of neighboring pixels} and then Principal Component Analysis is used to reduce the dimension of data. In the second stage, Support Vector Machines are trained to estimate the pixel-wise probability map of each class using the spectral information from the images. Finally, a smoothed total variation model is applied to smooth the class probability vectors by {ensuring spatial connectivity} in the images. We demonstrate the superiority of our method against three state-of-the-art algorithms on six benchmark hyperspectral data sets with 10 to 50 training labels for each class. The results show that our method gives the overall best performance in accuracy. Especially, our gain in accuracy increases when the number of labeled pixels decreases and therefore our method is more advantageous to be applied to problems with small training set. Hence it is of great practical significance since expert annotations are often expensive and difficult to collect.
We define a new method for taking advantage of net reductions in combination with a SMT-based model checker. Our approach consists in transforming a reachability problem about some Petri net, into the verification of an updated reachability property on a reduced version of this net. This method relies on a new state space abstraction based on systems of constraints, called polyhedral abstraction. We prove the correctness of this method using a new notion of equivalence between nets. We provide a complete framework to define and check the correctness of equivalence judgements; prove that this relation is a congruence; and give examples of basic equivalence relations that derive from structural reductions. Our approach has been implemented in a tool, named SMPT, that provides two main procedures: Bounded Model Checking (BMC) and Property Directed Reachability (PDR). Each procedure has been adapted in order to use reductions and to work with arbitrary Petri nets. We tested SMPT on a large collection of queries used in the Model Checking Contest. Our experimental results show that our approach works well, even when we only have a moderate amount of reductions.
Anomaly Detection is becoming increasingly popular within the experimental physics community. At experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, anomaly detection is at the forefront of finding new physics beyond the Standard Model. This paper details the implementation of a novel Machine Learning architecture, called Flux+Mutability, which combines cutting-edge conditional generative models with clustering algorithms. In the `flux' stage we learn the distribution of a reference class. The `mutability' stage at inference addresses if data significantly deviates from the reference class. We demonstrate the validity of our approach and its connection to multiple problems spanning from one-class classification to anomaly detection. In particular, we apply our method to the isolation of neutral showers in an electromagnetic calorimeter and show its performance in detecting anomalous dijets events from standard QCD background. This approach limits assumptions on the reference sample and remains agnostic to the complementary class of objects of a given problem. We describe the possibility of dynamically generating a reference population and defining selection criteria via quantile cuts. Remarkably this flexible architecture can be deployed for a wide range of problems, and applications like multi-class classification or data quality control are left for further exploration.
We investigate the feature compression of high-dimensional ridge regression using the optimal subsampling technique. Specifically, based on the basic framework of random sampling algorithm on feature for ridge regression and the A-optimal design criterion, we first obtain a set of optimal subsampling probabilities. Considering that the obtained probabilities are uneconomical, we then propose the nearly optimal ones. With these probabilities, a two step iterative algorithm is established which has lower computational cost and higher accuracy. We provide theoretical analysis and numerical experiments to support the proposed methods. Numerical results demonstrate the decent performance of our methods.
This paper considers the problem of inference in cluster randomized experiments when cluster sizes are non-ignorable. Here, by a cluster randomized experiment, we mean one in which treatment is assigned at the level of the cluster; by non-ignorable cluster sizes we mean that "large" clusters and "small" clusters may be heterogeneous, and, in particular, the effects of the treatment may vary across clusters of differing sizes. In order to permit this sort of flexibility, we consider a sampling framework in which cluster sizes themselves are random. In this way, our analysis departs from earlier analyses of cluster randomized experiments in which cluster sizes are treated as non-random. We distinguish between two different parameters of interest: the equally-weighted cluster-level average treatment effect, and the size-weighted cluster-level average treatment effect. For each parameter, we provide methods for inference in an asymptotic framework where the number of clusters tends to infinity and treatment is assigned using simple random sampling. We additionally permit the experimenter to sample only a subset of the units within each cluster rather than the entire cluster and demonstrate the implications of such sampling for some commonly used estimators. A small simulation study shows the practical relevance of our theoretical results.
Many existing algorithms for streaming geometric data analysis have been plagued by exponential dependencies in the space complexity, which are undesirable for processing high-dimensional data sets. In particular, once $d\geq\log n$, there are no known non-trivial streaming algorithms for problems such as maintaining convex hulls and L\"owner-John ellipsoids of $n$ points, despite a long line of work in streaming computational geometry since [AHV04]. We simultaneously improve these results to $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ bits of space by trading off with a $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ factor distortion. We achieve these results in a unified manner, by designing the first streaming algorithm for maintaining a coreset for $\ell_\infty$ subspace embeddings with $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ space and $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ distortion. Our algorithm also gives similar guarantees in the \emph{online coreset} model. Along the way, we sharpen results for online numerical linear algebra by replacing a log condition number dependence with a $\log n$ dependence, answering a question of [BDM+20]. Our techniques provide a novel connection between leverage scores, a fundamental object in numerical linear algebra, and computational geometry. For $\ell_p$ subspace embeddings, we give nearly optimal trade-offs between space and distortion for one-pass streaming algorithms. For instance, we give a deterministic coreset using $O(d^2\log n)$ space and $O((d\log n)^{1/2-1/p})$ distortion for $p>2$, whereas previous deterministic algorithms incurred a $\mathrm{poly}(n)$ factor in the space or the distortion [CDW18]. Our techniques have implications in the offline setting, where we give optimal trade-offs between the space complexity and distortion of subspace sketch data structures. To do this, we give an elementary proof of a "change of density" theorem of [LT80] and make it algorithmic.
An important challenge in statistical analysis lies in controlling the estimation bias when handling the ever-increasing data size and model complexity. For example, approximate methods are increasingly used to address the analytical and/or computational challenges when implementing standard estimators, but they often lead to inconsistent estimators. So consistent estimators can be difficult to obtain, especially for complex models and/or in settings where the number of parameters diverges with the sample size. We propose a general simulation-based estimation framework that allows to construct consistent and bias corrected estimators for parameters of increasing dimensions. The key advantage of the proposed framework is that it only requires to compute a simple inconsistent estimator multiple times. The resulting Just Identified iNdirect Inference estimator (JINI) enjoys nice properties, including consistency, asymptotic normality, and finite sample bias correction better than alternative methods. We further provide a simple algorithm to construct the JINI in a computationally efficient manner. Therefore, the JINI is especially useful in settings where standard methods may be challenging to apply, for example, in the presence of misclassification and rounding. We consider comprehensive simulation studies and analyze an alcohol consumption data example to illustrate the excellent performance and usefulness of the method.
In this work, we study the transfer learning problem under high-dimensional generalized linear models (GLMs), which aim to improve the fit on target data by borrowing information from useful source data. Given which sources to transfer, we propose a transfer learning algorithm on GLM, and derive its $\ell_1/\ell_2$-estimation error bounds as well as a bound for a prediction error measure. The theoretical analysis shows that when the target and source are sufficiently close to each other, these bounds could be improved over those of the classical penalized estimator using only target data under mild conditions. When we don't know which sources to transfer, an algorithm-free transferable source detection approach is introduced to detect informative sources. The detection consistency is proved under the high-dimensional GLM transfer learning setting. We also propose an algorithm to construct confidence intervals of each coefficient component, and the corresponding theories are provided. Extensive simulations and a real-data experiment verify the effectiveness of our algorithms. We implement the proposed GLM transfer learning algorithms in a new R package glmtrans, which is available on CRAN.
Let $X^{(n)}$ be an observation sampled from a distribution $P_{\theta}^{(n)}$ with an unknown parameter $\theta,$ $\theta$ being a vector in a Banach space $E$ (most often, a high-dimensional space of dimension $d$). We study the problem of estimation of $f(\theta)$ for a functional $f:E\mapsto {\mathbb R}$ of some smoothness $s>0$ based on an observation $X^{(n)}\sim P_{\theta}^{(n)}.$ Assuming that there exists an estimator $\hat \theta_n=\hat \theta_n(X^{(n)})$ of parameter $\theta$ such that $\sqrt{n}(\hat \theta_n-\theta)$ is sufficiently close in distribution to a mean zero Gaussian random vector in $E,$ we construct a functional $g:E\mapsto {\mathbb R}$ such that $g(\hat \theta_n)$ is an asymptotically normal estimator of $f(\theta)$ with $\sqrt{n}$ rate provided that $s>\frac{1}{1-\alpha}$ and $d\leq n^{\alpha}$ for some $\alpha\in (0,1).$ We also derive general upper bounds on Orlicz norm error rates for estimator $g(\hat \theta)$ depending on smoothness $s,$ dimension $d,$ sample size $n$ and the accuracy of normal approximation of $\sqrt{n}(\hat \theta_n-\theta).$ In particular, this approach yields asymptotically efficient estimators in some high-dimensional exponential models.
Remarkable progress has been achieved in synthesizing photo-realistic images with generative adversarial neural networks (GANs). Recently, GANs are utilized as the training sample generator when obtaining or storing real training data is expensive even infeasible. However, traditional GANs generated images are not as informative as the real training samples when being used to train deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a novel method to synthesize Informative Training samples with GAN (IT-GAN). Specifically, we freeze a pre-trained GAN model and learn the informative latent vectors that corresponds to informative training samples. The synthesized images are required to preserve information for training deep neural networks rather than visual reality or fidelity. Experiments verify that the deep neural networks can learn faster and achieve better performance when being trained with our IT-GAN generated images. We also show that our method is a promising solution to dataset condensation problem.