The posterior covariance matrix W defined by the log-likelihood of each observation plays important roles both in the sensitivity analysis and frequentist evaluation of the Bayesian estimators. This study is focused on the matrix W and its principal space; we term the latter as an essential subspace. Projections to the essential subspace realize dimensional reduction in the sensitivity analysis and frequentist evaluation. A key tool for treating frequentist properties is the recently proposed Bayesian infinitesimal jackknife approximation(Giordano and Broderick (2023)). The matrix W can be interpreted as a reproducing kernel and is denoted as W-kernel. Using W-kernel, the essential subspace is expressed as a principal space given by the kernel principal component analysis. A relation to the Fisher kernel and neural tangent kernel is established, which elucidates the connection to the classical asymptotic theory. We also discuss a type of Bayesian-frequentist duality, naturally appeared from the kernel framework. Two applications are discussed: the selection of a representative set of observations and dimensional reduction in the approximate bootstrap. In the former, incomplete Cholesky decomposition is introduced as an efficient method for computing the essential subspace. In the latter, different implementations of the approximate bootstrap for posterior means are compared.
The rapid pace of development in quantum computing technology has sparked a proliferation of benchmarks for assessing the performance of quantum computing hardware and software. Good benchmarks empower scientists, engineers, programmers, and users to understand a computing system's power, but bad benchmarks can misdirect research and inhibit progress. In this Perspective, we survey the science of quantum computer benchmarking. We discuss the role of benchmarks and benchmarking, and how good benchmarks can drive and measure progress towards the long-term goal of useful quantum computations, i.e., "quantum utility". We explain how different kinds of benchmark quantify the performance of different parts of a quantum computer, we survey existing benchmarks, critically discuss recent trends in benchmarking, and highlight important open research questions in this field.
The occurrence of extreme events like heavy precipitation or storms at a certain location often shows a clustering behaviour and is thus not described well by a Poisson process. We construct a general model for the inter-exceedance times in between such events which combines different candidate models for such behaviour. This allows us to distinguish data generating mechanisms leading to clusters of dependent events with exponential inter-exceedance times in between clusters from independent events with heavy-tailed inter-exceedance times, and even allows us to combine these two mechanisms for better descriptions of such occurrences. We propose a modification of the Cram\'er-von Mises distance for model fitting. An application to mid-latitude winter cyclones illustrates the usefulness of our work.
A common method for estimating the Hessian operator from random samples on a low-dimensional manifold involves locally fitting a quadratic polynomial. Although widely used, it is unclear if this estimator introduces bias, especially in complex manifolds with boundaries and nonuniform sampling. Rigorous theoretical guarantees of its asymptotic behavior have been lacking. We show that, under mild conditions, this estimator asymptotically converges to the Hessian operator, with nonuniform sampling and curvature effects proving negligible, even near boundaries. Our analysis framework simplifies the intensive computations required for direct analysis.
Error control by means of a posteriori error estimators or indica-tors and adaptive discretizations, such as adaptive mesh refinement, have emerged in the late seventies. Since then, numerous theoretical developments and improvements have been made, as well as the first attempts to introduce them into real-life industrial applications. The present introductory chapter provides an overview of the subject, highlights some of the achievements to date and discusses possible perspectives.
We propose a topological mapping and localization system able to operate on real human colonoscopies, despite significant shape and illumination changes. The map is a graph where each node codes a colon location by a set of real images, while edges represent traversability between nodes. For close-in-time images, where scene changes are minor, place recognition can be successfully managed with the recent transformers-based local feature matching algorithms. However, under long-term changes -- such as different colonoscopies of the same patient -- feature-based matching fails. To address this, we train on real colonoscopies a deep global descriptor achieving high recall with significant changes in the scene. The addition of a Bayesian filter boosts the accuracy of long-term place recognition, enabling relocalization in a previously built map. Our experiments show that ColonMapper is able to autonomously build a map and localize against it in two important use cases: localization within the same colonoscopy or within different colonoscopies of the same patient. Code: //github.com/jmorlana/ColonMapper.
The trustworthiness of Machine Learning (ML) models can be difficult to assess, but is critical in high-risk or ethically sensitive applications. Many models are treated as a `black-box' where the reasoning or criteria for a final decision is opaque to the user. To address this, some existing Explainable AI (XAI) approaches approximate model behaviour using perturbed data. However, such methods have been criticised for ignoring feature dependencies, with explanations being based on potentially unrealistic data. We propose a novel framework, CHILLI, for incorporating data context into XAI by generating contextually aware perturbations, which are faithful to the training data of the base model being explained. This is shown to improve both the soundness and accuracy of the explanations.
We discuss computing with hierarchies of families of (potentially weighted) semiclassical Jacobi polynomials which arise in the construction of multivariate orthogonal polynomials. In particular, we outline how to build connection and differentiation matrices with optimal complexity and compute analysis and synthesis operations in quasi-optimal complexity. We investigate a particular application of these results to constructing orthogonal polynomials in annuli, called the generalised Zernike annular polynomials, which lead to sparse discretisations of partial differential equations. We compare against a scaled-and-shifted Chebyshev--Fourier series showing that in general the annular polynomials converge faster when approximating smooth functions and have better conditioning. We also construct a sparse spectral element method by combining disk and annulus cells, which is highly effective for solving PDEs with radially discontinuous variable coefficients and data.
We consider the motion of incompressible viscous fluid in a rectangle, imposing the periodicity condition in one direction and the no-slip boundary condition in the other. Assuming that the flow is subject to an external random force, white in time and regular in space, we construct an estimator for the viscosity using only observations of the enstrophy. The goal of the paper is to prove that the estimator is strongly consistent and asymptotically normal. The proof of consistency is based on the explicit formula for the estimator and some bounds for trajectories, while that of asymptotic normality uses in addition mixing properties of the Navier-Stokes flow.
The novelty of the current work is precisely to propose a statistical procedure to combine estimates of the modal parameters provided by any set of Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) algorithms so as to avoid preference for a particular one and also to derive an approximate joint probability distribution of the modal parameters, from which engineering statistics of interest such as mean value and variance are readily provided. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is assessed considering measured data from an actual centrifugal compressor. The statistics obtained for both forward and backward modal parameters are finally compared against modal parameters identified during standard stability verification testing (SVT) of centrifugal compressors prior to shipment, using classical Experimental Modal Analysis (EMA) algorithms. The current work demonstrates that combination of OMA algorithms can provide quite accurate estimates for both the modal parameters and the associated uncertainties with low computational costs.
In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.