We study a natural extension of classical empirical risk minimization, where the hypothesis space is a random subspace of a given space. In particular, we consider possibly data dependent subspaces spanned by a random subset of the data, recovering as a special case Nystrom approaches for kernel methods. Considering random subspaces naturally leads to computational savings, but the question is whether the corresponding learning accuracy is degraded. These statistical-computational tradeoffs have been recently explored for the least squares loss and self-concordant loss functions, such as the logistic loss. Here, we work to extend these results to convex Lipschitz loss functions, that might not be smooth, such as the hinge loss used in support vector machines. This unified analysis requires developing new proofs, that use different technical tools, such as sub-gaussian inputs, to achieve fast rates. Our main results show the existence of different settings, depending on how hard the learning problem is, for which computational efficiency can be improved with no loss in performance.
In this paper, we propose a deep learning based numerical scheme for strongly coupled FBSDEs, stemming from stochastic control. It is a modification of the deep BSDE method in which the initial value to the backward equation is not a free parameter, and with a new loss function being the weighted sum of the cost of the control problem, and a variance term which coincides with the mean squared error in the terminal condition. We show by a numerical example that a direct extension of the classical deep BSDE method to FBSDEs, fails for a simple linear-quadratic control problem, and motivate why the new method works. Under regularity and boundedness assumptions on the exact controls of time continuous and time discrete control problems, we provide an error analysis for our method. We show empirically that the method converges for three different problems, one being the one that failed for a direct extension of the deep BSDE method.
We study a variant of online convex optimization where the player is permitted to switch decisions at most $S$ times in expectation throughout $T$ rounds. Similar problems have been addressed in prior work for the discrete decision set setting, and more recently in the continuous setting but only with an adaptive adversary. In this work, we aim to fill the gap and present computationally efficient algorithms in the more prevalent oblivious setting, establishing a regret bound of $O(T/S)$ for general convex losses and $\widetilde O(T/S^2)$ for strongly convex losses. In addition, for stochastic i.i.d.~losses, we present a simple algorithm that performs $\log T$ switches with only a multiplicative $\log T$ factor overhead in its regret in both the general and strongly convex settings. Finally, we complement our algorithms with lower bounds that match our upper bounds in some of the cases we consider.
Bayesian posterior distributions arising in modern applications, including inverse problems in partial differential equation models in tomography and subsurface flow, are often computationally intractable due to the large computational cost of evaluating the data likelihood. To alleviate this problem, we consider using Gaussian process regression to build a surrogate model for the likelihood, resulting in an approximate posterior distribution that is amenable to computations in practice. This work serves as an introduction to Gaussian process regression, in particular in the context of building surrogate models for inverse problems, and presents new insights into a suitable choice of training points. We show that the error between the true and approximate posterior distribution can be bounded by the error between the true and approximate likelihood, measured in the $L^2$-norm weighted by the true posterior, and that efficiently bounding the error between the true and approximate likelihood in this norm suggests choosing the training points in the Gaussian process surrogate model based on the true posterior.
We develop new tools in the theory of nonlinear random matrices and apply them to study the performance of the Sum of Squares (SoS) hierarchy on average-case problems. The SoS hierarchy is a powerful optimization technique that has achieved tremendous success for various problems in combinatorial optimization, robust statistics and machine learning. It's a family of convex relaxations that lets us smoothly trade off running time for approximation guarantees. In recent works, it's been shown to be extremely useful for recovering structure in high dimensional noisy data. It also remains our best approach towards refuting the notorious Unique Games Conjecture. In this work, we analyze the performance of the SoS hierarchy on fundamental problems stemming from statistics, theoretical computer science and statistical physics. In particular, we show subexponential-time SoS lower bounds for the problems of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Hamiltonian, Planted Slightly Denser Subgraph, Tensor Principal Components Analysis and Sparse Principal Components Analysis. These SoS lower bounds involve analyzing large random matrices, wherein lie our main contributions. These results offer strong evidence for the truth of and insight into the low-degree likelihood ratio hypothesis, an important conjecture that predicts the power of bounded-time algorithms for hypothesis testing. We also develop general-purpose tools for analyzing the behavior of random matrices which are functions of independent random variables. Towards this, we build on and generalize the matrix variant of the Efron-Stein inequalities. In particular, our general theorem on matrix concentration recovers various results that have appeared in the literature. We expect these random matrix theory ideas to have other significant applications.
We prove that optimistic-follow-the-regularized-leader (OFTRL), together with smooth value updates, finds an $O(T^{-1})$-approximate Nash equilibrium in $T$ iterations for two-player zero-sum Markov games with full information. This improves the $\tilde{O}(T^{-5/6})$ convergence rate recently shown in the paper Zhang et al (2022). The refined analysis hinges on two essential ingredients. First, the sum of the regrets of the two players, though not necessarily non-negative as in normal-form games, is approximately non-negative in Markov games. This property allows us to bound the second-order path lengths of the learning dynamics. Second, we prove a tighter algebraic inequality regarding the weights deployed by OFTRL that shaves an extra $\log T$ factor. This crucial improvement enables the inductive analysis that leads to the final $O(T^{-1})$ rate.
In day-ahead electricity markets based on uniform marginal pricing, small variations in the offering and bidding curves may substantially modify the resulting market outcomes. In this work, we deal with the problem of finding the optimal offering curve for a risk-averse profit-maximizing generating company (GENCO) in a data-driven context. In particular, a large GENCO's market share may imply that her offering strategy can alter the marginal price formation, which can be used to increase profit. We tackle this problem from a novel perspective. First, we propose a optimization-based methodology to summarize each GENCO's step-wise supply curves into a subset of representative price-energy blocks. Then, the relationship between the market price and the resulting energy block offering prices is modeled through a Bayesian linear regression approach, which also allows us to generate stochastic scenarios for the sensibility of the market towards the GENCO strategy, represented by the regression coefficient probabilistic distributions. Finally, this predictive model is embedded in the stochastic optimization model by employing a constraint learning approach. Results show how allowing the GENCO to deviate from her true marginal costs renders significant changes in her profits and the market marginal price. Furthermore, these results have also been tested in an out-of-sample validation setting, showing how this optimal offering strategy is also effective in a real-world market contest.
Inverse problems involve making inference about unknown parameters of a physical process using observational data. This paper investigates an important class of inverse problems -- the estimation of the initial condition of a spatio-temporal advection-diffusion process using spatially sparse data streams. Three spatial sampling schemes are considered, including irregular, non-uniform and shifted uniform sampling. The irregular sampling scheme is the general scenario, while computationally efficient solutions are available in the spectral domain for non-uniform and shifted uniform sampling. For each sampling scheme, the inverse problem is formulated as a regularized convex optimization problem that minimizes the distance between forward model outputs and observations. The optimization problem is solved by the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers algorithm, which also handles the situation when a linear inequality constraint (e.g., non-negativity) is imposed on the model output. Numerical examples are presented, code is made available on GitHub, and discussions are provided to generate some useful insights of the proposed inverse modeling approaches.
In various applied areas such as reliability engineering, molecular biology, finance, etc., the measure of uncertainty of a probability distribution plays an important role. In the present work, we consider the estimation of a function of the scale parameter, namely entropy of several exponential distributions with unknown and unequal location parameters with a common scale parameter under a general class of bowl-shaped location invariant loss functions. The inadmissibility of the minimum risk invariant estimator (MRIE) is proved by deriving a non-smooth improved estimator. Also, we have obtained a smooth estimator which improves upon the MRIE. As an application, we have obtained explicit expressions of improved estimators for two special loss functions: squared error loss and linex loss. It is further shown that these estimators can be derived for four important sampling schemes: (i) complete and i.i.d. sample, (ii) record values, (iii) type-II censoring, and (iv) progressive Type-II censoring. Finally, a simulation study was carried out to compare the risk performance of the proposed estimators.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.
Sufficient training data is normally required to train deeply learned models. However, the number of pedestrian images per ID in person re-identification (re-ID) datasets is usually limited, since manually annotations are required for multiple camera views. To produce more data for training deeply learned models, generative adversarial network (GAN) can be leveraged to generate samples for person re-ID. However, the samples generated by vanilla GAN usually do not have labels. So in this paper, we propose a virtual label called Multi-pseudo Regularized Label (MpRL) and assign it to the generated images. With MpRL, the generated samples will be used as supplementary of real training data to train a deep model in a semi-supervised learning fashion. Considering data bias between generated and real samples, MpRL utilizes different contributions from predefined training classes. The contribution-based virtual labels are automatically assigned to generated samples to reduce ambiguous prediction in training. Meanwhile, MpRL only relies on predefined training classes without using extra classes. Furthermore, to reduce over-fitting, a regularized manner is applied to MpRL to regularize the learning process. To verify the effectiveness of MpRL, two state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are adopted in our experiments. Experiments demonstrate that by assigning MpRL to generated samples, we can further improve the person re-ID performance on three datasets i.e., Market-1501, DukeMTMCreID, and CUHK03. The proposed method obtains +6.29%, +6.30% and +5.58% improvements in rank-1 accuracy over a strong CNN baseline respectively, and outperforms the state-of-the- art methods.