We develop a fully Bayesian nonparametric regression model based on a L\'evy process prior named MLABS (Multivariate L\'evy Adaptive B-Spline regression) model, a multivariate version of the LARK models, for obtaining an elaborate estimation of unknown functions with either varying degrees of smoothness or high interaction orders. L\'evy process priors have advantages of encouraging sparsity in the expansions and providing automatic selection over the number of basis functions. The unknown regression function is expressed as a weighted sum of tensor product of B-spline basis functions as the elements of an overcomplete system, which can deal with multi-dimensional data. The B-spline basis can express systematically functions with varying degrees of smoothness. By changing a set of degrees of the tensor product basis function, MLABS can adapt the smoothness of target functions due to the nice properties of B-spline bases. The local support of the B-spline basis enables the MLABS to make more delicate predictions than other existing methods in the two-dimensional surface data. For practice, we apply the structure of tensor products bases of (Bayesian) MARS to the MLABS model to reduce the computation burden. Experiments on various simulated and real-world datasets illustrate that the MLABS model has comparable performance on regression and classification problems. We also show that the MLABS model has more stable and accurate predictive abilities than state-of-the-art nonparametric regression models in relatively low-dimensional data.
Conditional Neural Processes (CNP; Garnelo et al., 2018) are an attractive family of meta-learning models which produce well-calibrated predictions, enable fast inference at test time, and are trainable via a simple maximum likelihood procedure. A limitation of CNPs is their inability to model dependencies in the outputs. This significantly hurts predictive performance and renders it impossible to draw coherent function samples, which limits the applicability of CNPs in down-stream applications and decision making. Neural Processes (NPs; Garnelo et al., 2018) attempt to alleviate this issue by using latent variables, relying on these to model output dependencies, but introduces difficulties stemming from approximate inference. One recent alternative (Bruinsma et al., 2021), which we refer to as the FullConvGNP, models dependencies in the predictions while still being trainable via exact maximum-likelihood. Unfortunately, the FullConvGNP relies on expensive 2D-dimensional convolutions, which limit its applicability to only one-dimensional data. In this work, we present an alternative way to model output dependencies which also lends itself maximum likelihood training but, unlike the FullConvGNP, can be scaled to two- and three-dimensional data. The proposed models exhibit good performance in synthetic experiments.
Ensemble Kalman inversion (EKI) is a derivative-free optimizer aimed at solving inverse problems, taking motivation from the celebrated ensemble Kalman filter. The purpose of this article is to consider the introduction of adaptive Tikhonov strategies for EKI. This work builds upon Tikhonov EKI (TEKI) which was proposed for a fixed regularization constant. By adaptively learning the regularization parameter, this procedure is known to improve the recovery of the underlying unknown. For the analysis, we consider a continuous-time setting where we extend known results such as well-posdeness and convergence of various loss functions, but with the addition of noisy observations. Furthermore, we allow a time-varying noise and regularization covariance in our presented convergence result which mimic adaptive regularization schemes. In turn we present three adaptive regularization schemes, which are highlighted from both the deterministic and Bayesian approaches for inverse problems, which include bilevel optimization, the MAP formulation and covariance learning. We numerically test these schemes and the theory on linear and nonlinear partial differential equations, where they outperform the non-adaptive TEKI and EKI.
In this paper we propose and study a version of the Dyadic Classification and Regression Trees (DCART) estimator from Donoho (1997) for (fixed design) quantile regression in general dimensions. We refer to this proposed estimator as the QDCART estimator. Just like the mean regression version, we show that a) a fast dynamic programming based algorithm with computational complexity $O(N \log N)$ exists for computing the QDCART estimator and b) an oracle risk bound (trading off squared error and a complexity parameter of the true signal) holds for the QDCART estimator. This oracle risk bound then allows us to demonstrate that the QDCART estimator enjoys adaptively rate optimal estimation guarantees for piecewise constant and bounded variation function classes. In contrast to existing results for the DCART estimator which requires subgaussianity of the error distribution, for our estimation guarantees to hold we do not need any restrictive tail decay assumptions on the error distribution. For instance, our results hold even when the error distribution has no first moment such as the Cauchy distribution. Apart from the Dyadic CART method, we also consider other variant methods such as the Optimal Regression Tree (ORT) estimator introduced in Chatterjee and Goswami (2019). In particular, we also extend the ORT estimator to the quantile setting and establish that it enjoys analogous guarantees. Thus, this paper extends the scope of these globally optimal regression tree based methodologies to be applicable for heavy tailed data. We then perform extensive numerical experiments on both simulated and real data which illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methods.
Extreme-value copulas arise as the limiting dependence structure of component-wise maxima. Defined in terms of a functional parameter, they are one of the most widespread copula families due to their flexibility and ability to capture asymmetry. Despite this, meeting the complex analytical properties of this parameter in an unconstrained setting remains a challenge, restricting most uses to models with very few parameters or nonparametric models. In this paper, we focus on the bivariate case and propose a novel approach for estimating this functional parameter in a semiparametric manner. Our procedure relies on a series of transformations, including Williamson's transform and starting from a zero-integral spline. Spline coordinates are fit through maximum likelihood estimation, leveraging gradient optimization, without imposing further constraints. Our method produces efficient and wholly compliant solutions. We successfully conducted several experiments on both simulated and real-world data. Specifically, we test our method on scarce data gathered by the gravitational wave detection LIGO and Virgo collaborations.
The quasi-Newton methods generally provide curvature information by approximating the Hessian using the secant equation. However, the secant equation becomes insipid in approximating the Newton step owing to its use of the first-order derivatives. In this study, we propose an approximate Newton step-based stochastic optimization algorithm for large-scale empirical risk minimization of convex functions with linear convergence rates. Specifically, we compute a partial column Hessian of size ($d\times k$) with $k\ll d$ randomly selected variables, then use the \textit{Nystr\"om method} to better approximate the full Hessian matrix. To further reduce the computational complexity per iteration, we directly compute the update step ($\Delta\boldsymbol{w}$) without computing and storing the full Hessian or its inverse. Furthermore, to address large-scale scenarios in which even computing a partial Hessian may require significant time, we used distribution-preserving (DP) sub-sampling to compute a partial Hessian. The DP sub-sampling generates $p$ sub-samples with similar first and second-order distribution statistics and selects a single sub-sample at each epoch in a round-robin manner to compute the partial Hessian. We integrate our approximated Hessian with stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance-reduced gradients to solve the logistic regression problem. The numerical experiments show that the proposed approach was able to obtain a better approximation of Newton\textquotesingle s method with performance competitive with the state-of-the-art first-order and the stochastic quasi-Newton methods.
The Regression Discontinuity (RD) design is a widely used non-experimental method for causal inference and program evaluation. While its canonical formulation only requires a score and an outcome variable, it is common in empirical work to encounter RD implementations where additional variables are used for adjustment. This practice has led to misconceptions about the role of covariate adjustment in RD analysis, from both methodological and empirical perspectives. In this chapter, we review the different roles of covariate adjustment in RD designs, and offer methodological guidance for its correct use in applications.
An increasing number of systems are being designed by first gathering significant amounts of data, and then optimizing the system parameters directly using the obtained data. Often this is done without analyzing the dataset structure. As task complexity, data size, and parameters all increase to millions or even billions, data summarization is becoming a major challenge. In this work, we investigate data summarization via dictionary learning, leveraging the properties of recently introduced non-negative kernel regression (NNK) graphs. Our proposed NNK-Means, unlike competing techniques, such askSVD, learns geometric dictionaries with atoms that lie in the input data space. Experiments show that summaries using NNK-Meanscan provide better discrimination compared to linear and kernel versions of kMeans and kSVD. Moreover, NNK-Means has a scalable implementation, with runtime complexity similar to that of kMeans.
Quantile regression has been successfully used to study heterogeneous and heavy-tailed data. Varying-coefficient models are frequently used to capture changes in the effect of input variables on the response as a function of an index or time. In this work, we study high-dimensional varying-coefficient quantile regression models and develop new tools for statistical inference. We focus on development of valid confidence intervals and honest tests for nonparametric coefficients at a fixed time point and quantile, while allowing for a high-dimensional setting where the number of input variables exceeds the sample size. Performing statistical inference in this regime is challenging due to the usage of model selection techniques in estimation. Nevertheless, we can develop valid inferential tools that are applicable to a wide range of data generating processes and do not suffer from biases introduced by model selection. We performed numerical simulations to demonstrate the finite sample performance of our method, and we also illustrated the application with a real data example.
Data augmentation is becoming essential for improving regression accuracy in critical applications including manufacturing and finance. Existing techniques for data augmentation largely focus on classification tasks and do not readily apply to regression tasks. In particular, the recent Mixup techniques for classification rely on the key assumption that linearity holds among training examples, which is reasonable if the label space is discrete, but has limitations when the label space is continuous as in regression. We show that mixing examples that either have a large data or label distance may have an increasingly-negative effect on model performance. Hence, we use the stricter assumption that linearity only holds within certain data or label distances for regression where the degree may vary by each example. We then propose MixRL, a data augmentation meta learning framework for regression that learns for each example how many nearest neighbors it should be mixed with for the best model performance using a small validation set. MixRL achieves these objectives using Monte Carlo policy gradient reinforcement learning. Our experiments conducted both on synthetic and real datasets show that MixRL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art data augmentation baselines. MixRL can also be integrated with other classification Mixup techniques for better results.
Train machine learning models on sensitive user data has raised increasing privacy concerns in many areas. Federated learning is a popular approach for privacy protection that collects the local gradient information instead of real data. One way to achieve a strict privacy guarantee is to apply local differential privacy into federated learning. However, previous works do not give a practical solution due to three issues. First, the noisy data is close to its original value with high probability, increasing the risk of information exposure. Second, a large variance is introduced to the estimated average, causing poor accuracy. Last, the privacy budget explodes due to the high dimensionality of weights in deep learning models. In this paper, we proposed a novel design of local differential privacy mechanism for federated learning to address the abovementioned issues. It is capable of making the data more distinct from its original value and introducing lower variance. Moreover, the proposed mechanism bypasses the curse of dimensionality by splitting and shuffling model updates. A series of empirical evaluations on three commonly used datasets, MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10, demonstrate that our solution can not only achieve superior deep learning performance but also provide a strong privacy guarantee at the same time.