We consider the problem of forecasting debt recovery from large portfolios of non-performing unsecured consumer loans under management. The state of the art in industry is to use stochastic processes to approximately model payment behaviour of individual customers based on several covariates, including credit scores and payment history. Monte Carlo simulation of these stochastic processes can enable forecasting of the possible returns from portfolios of defaulted debt, and the quantification of uncertainty. Despite the fact that the individual-level models are relatively simple, it is challenging to carry out simulations at the portfolio level because of the very large number of accounts. The accounts are also heterogeneous, with a broad range of values for the collection variances. We aim to solve two main problems: efficient allocation of computational resources in the simulations to estimate the likely collections as precisely as possible, and quantification of the uncertainty in the forecasts. We show that under certain conditions, robust estimators of population-level variance can be constructed by summing over coarse unbiased estimators of the variance of individual accounts. The proposed methods are demonstrated through application to a model which shares key features with those that are used in practice.
Mathematical models are essential for understanding and making predictions about systems arising in nature and engineering. Yet, mathematical models are a simplification of true phenomena, thus making predictions subject to uncertainty. Hence, the ability to quantify uncertainties is essential to any modelling framework, enabling the user to assess the importance of certain parameters on quantities of interest and have control over the quality of the model output by providing a rigorous understanding of uncertainty. Peridynamic models are a particular class of mathematical models that have proven to be remarkably accurate and robust for a large class of material failure problems. However, the high computational expense of peridynamic models remains a major limitation, hindering outer-loop applications that require a large number of simulations, for example, uncertainty quantification. This contribution provides a framework to make such computations feasible. By employing a Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) framework, where the majority of simulations are performed using a coarse mesh, and performing relatively few simulations using a fine mesh, a significant reduction in computational cost can be realised, and statistics of structural failure can be estimated. The results show a speed-up factor of 16x over a standard Monte Carlo estimator, enabling the forward propagation of uncertain parameters in a computationally expensive peridynamic model. Furthermore, the multilevel method provides an estimate of both the discretisation error and sampling error, thus improving the confidence in numerical predictions. The performance of the approach is demonstrated through an examination of the statistical size effect in quasi-brittle materials.
Power analyses are an important aspect of experimental design, because they help determine how experiments are implemented in practice. It is common to specify a desired level of power and compute the sample size necessary to obtain that power. Such calculations are well-known for completely randomized experiments, but there can be many benefits to using other experimental designs. For example, it has recently been established that rerandomization, where subjects are randomized until covariate balance is obtained, increases the precision of causal effect estimators. This work establishes the power of rerandomized treatment-control experiments, thereby allowing for sample size calculators. We find the surprising result that, while power is often greater under rerandomization than complete randomization, the opposite can occur for very small treatment effects. The reason is that inference under rerandomization can be relatively more conservative, in the sense that it can have a lower type-I error at the same nominal significance level, and this additional conservativeness adversely affects power. This surprising result is due to treatment effect heterogeneity, a quantity often ignored in power analyses. We find that heterogeneity increases power for large effect sizes but decreases power for small effect sizes.
This paper proposes a novel signed $\beta$-model for directed signed network, which is frequently encountered in application domains but largely neglected in literature. The proposed signed $\beta$-model decomposes a directed signed network as the difference of two unsigned networks and embeds each node with two latent factors for in-status and out-status. The presence of negative edges leads to a non-concave log-likelihood, and a one-step estimation algorithm is developed to facilitate parameter estimation, which is efficient both theoretically and computationally. We also develop an inferential procedure for pairwise and multiple node comparisons under the signed $\beta$-model, which fills the void of lacking uncertainty quantification for node ranking. Theoretical results are established for the coverage probability of confidence interval, as well as the false discovery rate (FDR) control for multiple node comparison. The finite sample performance of the signed $\beta$-model is also examined through extensive numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-life networks.
Results on the spectral behavior of random matrices as the dimension increases are applied to the problem of detecting the number of sources impinging on an array of sensors. A common strategy to solve this problem is to estimate the multiplicity of the smallest eigenvalue of the spatial covariance matrix $R$ of the sensed data from the sample covariance matrix $\widehat{R}$. Existing approaches, such as that based on information theoretic criteria, rely on the closeness of the noise eigenvalues of $\widehat R$ to each other and, therefore, the sample size has to be quite large when the number of sources is large in order to obtain a good estimate. The analysis presented in this report focuses on the splitting of the spectrum of $\widehat{R}$ into noise and signal eigenvalues. It is shown that, when the number of sensors is large, the number of signals can be estimated with a sample size considerably less than that required by previous approaches. The practical significance of the main result is that detection can be achieved with a number of samples comparable to the number of sensors in large dimensional array processing.
Localization of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) relies heavily on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), which are susceptible to interference. Especially in security applications, robust localization algorithms independent of GNSS are needed to provide dependable operations of autonomous UAVs also in interfered conditions. Typical non-GNSS visual localization approaches rely on known starting pose, work only on a small-sized map, or require known flight paths before a mission starts. We consider the problem of localization with no information on initial pose or planned flight path. We propose a solution for global visual localization on a map at scale up to 100 km2, based on matching orthoprojected UAV images to satellite imagery using learned season-invariant descriptors. We show that the method is able to determine heading, latitude and longitude of the UAV at 12.6-18.7 m lateral translation error in as few as 23.2-44.4 updates from an uninformed initialization, also in situations of significant seasonal appearance difference (winter-summer) between the UAV image and the map. We evaluate the characteristics of multiple neural network architectures for generating the descriptors, and likelihood estimation methods that are able to provide fast convergence and low localization error. We also evaluate the operation of the algorithm using real UAV data and evaluate running time on a real-time embedded platform. We believe this is the first work that is able to recover the pose of an UAV at this scale and rate of convergence, while allowing significant seasonal difference between camera observations and map.
Black-box machine learning models are now routinely used in high-risk settings, like medical diagnostics, which demand uncertainty quantification to avoid consequential model failures. Conformal prediction is a user-friendly paradigm for creating statistically rigorous uncertainty sets/intervals for the predictions of such models. Critically, the sets are valid in a distribution-free sense: they possess explicit, non-asymptotic guarantees even without distributional assumptions or model assumptions. One can use conformal prediction with any pre-trained model, such as a neural network, to produce sets that are guaranteed to contain the ground truth with a user-specified probability, such as 90%. It is easy-to-understand, easy-to-use, and general, applying naturally to problems arising in the fields of computer vision, natural language processing, deep reinforcement learning, and so on. This hands-on introduction is aimed to provide the reader a working understanding of conformal prediction and related distribution-free uncertainty quantification techniques with one self-contained document. We lead the reader through practical theory for and examples of conformal prediction and describe its extensions to complex machine learning tasks involving structured outputs, distribution shift, time-series, outliers, models that abstain, and more. Throughout, there are many explanatory illustrations, examples, and code samples in Python. With each code sample comes a Jupyter notebook implementing the method on a real-data example; the notebooks can be accessed and easily run using our codebase.
Multilevel Stein variational gradient descent is a method for particle-based variational inference that leverages hierarchies of approximations of target distributions with varying costs and fidelity to computationally speed up inference. This work provides a cost complexity analysis of multilevel Stein variational gradient descent that applies under milder conditions than previous results, especially in discrete-in-time regimes and beyond the limited settings where Stein variational gradient descent achieves exponentially fast convergence. The analysis shows that the convergence rate of Stein variational gradient descent enters only as a constant factor for the cost complexity of the multilevel version, which means that the costs of the multilevel version scale independently of the convergence rate of Stein variational gradient descent on a single level. Numerical experiments with Bayesian inverse problems of inferring discretized basal sliding coefficient fields of the Arolla glacier ice demonstrate that multilevel Stein variational gradient descent achieves orders of magnitude speedups compared to its single-level version.
Forecasting has always been at the forefront of decision making and planning. The uncertainty that surrounds the future is both exciting and challenging, with individuals and organisations seeking to minimise risks and maximise utilities. The large number of forecasting applications calls for a diverse set of forecasting methods to tackle real-life challenges. This article provides a non-systematic review of the theory and the practice of forecasting. We provide an overview of a wide range of theoretical, state-of-the-art models, methods, principles, and approaches to prepare, produce, organise, and evaluate forecasts. We then demonstrate how such theoretical concepts are applied in a variety of real-life contexts. We do not claim that this review is an exhaustive list of methods and applications. However, we wish that our encyclopedic presentation will offer a point of reference for the rich work that has been undertaken over the last decades, with some key insights for the future of forecasting theory and practice. Given its encyclopedic nature, the intended mode of reading is non-linear. We offer cross-references to allow the readers to navigate through the various topics. We complement the theoretical concepts and applications covered by large lists of free or open-source software implementations and publicly-available databases.
Many real-world applications require the prediction of long sequence time-series, such as electricity consumption planning. Long sequence time-series forecasting (LSTF) demands a high prediction capacity of the model, which is the ability to capture precise long-range dependency coupling between output and input efficiently. Recent studies have shown the potential of Transformer to increase the prediction capacity. However, there are several severe issues with Transformer that prevent it from being directly applicable to LSTF, such as quadratic time complexity, high memory usage, and inherent limitation of the encoder-decoder architecture. To address these issues, we design an efficient transformer-based model for LSTF, named Informer, with three distinctive characteristics: (i) a $ProbSparse$ Self-attention mechanism, which achieves $O(L \log L)$ in time complexity and memory usage, and has comparable performance on sequences' dependency alignment. (ii) the self-attention distilling highlights dominating attention by halving cascading layer input, and efficiently handles extreme long input sequences. (iii) the generative style decoder, while conceptually simple, predicts the long time-series sequences at one forward operation rather than a step-by-step way, which drastically improves the inference speed of long-sequence predictions. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets demonstrate that Informer significantly outperforms existing methods and provides a new solution to the LSTF problem.
Ensembles over neural network weights trained from different random initialization, known as deep ensembles, achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and calibration. The recently introduced batch ensembles provide a drop-in replacement that is more parameter efficient. In this paper, we design ensembles not only over weights, but over hyperparameters to improve the state of the art in both settings. For best performance independent of budget, we propose hyper-deep ensembles, a simple procedure that involves a random search over different hyperparameters, themselves stratified across multiple random initializations. Its strong performance highlights the benefit of combining models with both weight and hyperparameter diversity. We further propose a parameter efficient version, hyper-batch ensembles, which builds on the layer structure of batch ensembles and self-tuning networks. The computational and memory costs of our method are notably lower than typical ensembles. On image classification tasks, with MLP, LeNet, and Wide ResNet 28-10 architectures, our methodology improves upon both deep and batch ensembles.