We develop multilevel methods for interface-driven multiphysics problems that can be coupled across dimensions and where complexity and strength of the interface coupling deteriorates the performance of standard methods. We focus on solvers based on aggregation-based algebraic multigrid methods with custom smoothers that preserve the coupling information on each coarse level. We prove that with the proper choice of subspace splitting we obtain uniform convergence in discretization and physical parameters in the two-level setting. Additionally, we show parameter robustness and scalability with regards to number of the degrees of freedom of the system on several numerical examples related to the biophysical processes in the brain, namely the electric signalling in excitable tissue modeled by bidomain, EMI and reduced EMI equations.
In multivariate time series analysis, the coherence measures the linear dependency between two-time series at different frequencies. However, real data applications often exhibit nonlinear dependency in the frequency domain. Conventional coherence analysis fails to capture such dependency. The quantile coherence, on the other hand, characterizes nonlinear dependency by defining the coherence at a set of quantile levels based on trigonometric quantile regression. Although quantile coherence is a more powerful tool, its estimation remains challenging due to the high level of noise. This paper introduces a new estimation technique for quantile coherence. The proposed method is semi-parametric, which uses the parametric form of the spectrum of the vector autoregressive (VAR) model as an approximation to the quantile spectral matrix, along with nonparametric smoothing across quantiles. For each fixed quantile level, we obtain the VAR parameters from the quantile periodograms, then, using the Durbin-Levinson algorithm, we calculate the preliminary estimate of quantile coherence using the VAR parameters. Finally, we smooth the preliminary estimate of quantile coherence across quantiles using a nonparametric smoother. Numerical results show that the proposed estimation method outperforms nonparametric methods. We show that quantile coherence-based bivariate time series clustering has advantages over the ordinary VAR coherence. For applications, the identified clusters of financial stocks by quantile coherence with a market benchmark are shown to have an intriguing and more accurate structure of diversified investment portfolios that may be used by investors to make better decisions.
In this article, we present a method for increasing adaptivity of an existing robust estimation algorithm by learning two parameters to better fit the residual distribution. The analyzed method uses these two parameters to calculate weights for Iterative Re-weighted Least Squares. This adaptive nature of the weights can be helpful in situations where the noise level varies in the measurements. We test our algorithm first on the point cloud registration problem with synthetic data sets and LiDAR odometry with open source real-world data sets. We show that the existing approach needs an additional manual tuning of a residual scale parameter which our method directly learns from data and has similar or better performance. We further present the idea of decoupling scale and shape parameters to improve performance of the algorithm. We give detailed analysis of our algorithm along with its comparison with similar well-known algorithms from literature to show the benefits of the proposed approach.
This paper proposes novel computational multiscale methods for linear second-order elliptic partial differential equations in nondivergence-form with heterogeneous coefficients satisfying a Cordes condition. The construction follows the methodology of localized orthogonal decomposition (LOD) and provides operator-adapted coarse spaces by solving localized cell problems on a fine scale in the spirit of numerical homogenization. The degrees of freedom of the coarse spaces are related to nonconforming and mixed finite element methods for homogeneous problems. The rigorous error analysis of one exemplary approach shows that the favorable properties of the LOD methodology known from divergence-form PDEs, i.e., its applicability and accuracy beyond scale separation and periodicity, remain valid for problems in nondivergence-form.
This paper presents a novel approach to Bayesian nonparametric spectral analysis of stationary multivariate time series. Starting with a parametric vector-autoregressive model, the parametric likelihood is nonparametrically adjusted in the frequency domain to account for potential deviations from parametric assumptions. We show mutual contiguity of the nonparametrically corrected likelihood, the multivariate Whittle likelihood approximation and the exact likelihood for Gaussian time series. A multivariate extension of the nonparametric Bernstein-Dirichlet process prior for univariate spectral densities to the space of Hermitian positive definite spectral density matrices is specified directly on the correction matrices. An infinite series representation of this prior is then used to develop a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from the posterior distribution. The code is made publicly available for ease of use and reproducibility. With this novel approach we provide a generalization of the multivariate Whittle-likelihood-based method of Meier et al. (2020) as well as an extension of the nonparametrically corrected likelihood for univariate stationary time series of Kirch et al. (2019) to the multivariate case. We demonstrate that the nonparametrically corrected likelihood combines the efficiencies of a parametric with the robustness of a nonparametric model. Its numerical accuracy is illustrated in a comprehensive simulation study. We illustrate its practical advantages by a spectral analysis of two environmental time series data sets: a bivariate time series of the Southern Oscillation Index and fish recruitment and time series of windspeed data at six locations in California.
Given a graph, the $k$-plex is a vertex set in which each vertex is not adjacent to at most $k-1$ other vertices in the set. The maximum $k$-plex problem, which asks for the largest $k$-plex from a given graph, is an important but computationally challenging problem in applications like graph search and community detection. So far, there is a number of empirical algorithms without sufficient theoretical explanations on the efficiency. We try to bridge this gap by defining a novel parameter of the input instance, $g_k(G)$, the gap between the degeneracy bound and the size of maximum $k$-plex in the given graph, and presenting an exact algorithm parameterized by $g_k(G)$. In other words, we design an algorithm with running time polynomial in the size of input graph and exponential in $g_k(G)$ where $k$ is a constant. Usually, $g_k(G)$ is small and bounded by $O(\log{(|V|)})$ in real-world graphs, indicating that the algorithm runs in polynomial time. We also carry out massive experiments and show that the algorithm is competitive with the state-of-the-art solvers. Additionally, for large $k$ values such as $15$ and $20$, our algorithm has superior performance over existing algorithms.
The equilibrium configuration of a plasma in an axially symmetric reactor is described mathematically by a free boundary problem associated with the celebrated Grad--Shafranov equation. The presence of uncertainty in the model parameters introduces the need to quantify the variability in the predictions. This is often done by computing a large number of model solutions on a computational grid for an ensemble of parameter values and then obtaining estimates for the statistical properties of solutions. In this study, we explore the savings that can be obtained using multilevel Monte Carlo methods, which reduce costs by performing the bulk of the computations on a sequence of spatial grids that are coarser than the one that would typically be used for a simple Monte Carlo simulation. We examine this approach using both a set of uniformly refined grids and a set of adaptively refined grids guided by a discrete error estimator. Numerical experiments show that multilevel methods dramatically reduce the cost of simulation, with cost reductions typically on the order of 60 or more and possibly as large as 200. Adaptive gridding results in more accurate computation of geometric quantities such as x-points associated with the model.
Dimension reduction is crucial in functional data analysis (FDA). The key tool to reduce the dimension of the data is functional principal component analysis. Existing approaches for functional principal component analysis usually involve the diagonalization of the covariance operator. With the increasing size and complexity of functional datasets, estimating the covariance operator has become more challenging. Therefore, there is a growing need for efficient methodologies to estimate the eigencomponents. Using the duality of the space of observations and the space of functional features, we propose to use the inner-product between the curves to estimate the eigenelements of multivariate and multidimensional functional datasets. The relationship between the eigenelements of the covariance operator and those of the inner-product matrix is established. We explore the application of these methodologies in several FDA settings and provide general guidance on their usability.
The effectiveness of machine learning in evaluating the creditworthiness of loan applicants has been demonstrated for a long time. However, there is concern that the use of automated decision-making processes may result in unequal treatment of groups or individuals, potentially leading to discriminatory outcomes. This paper seeks to address this issue by evaluating the effectiveness of 12 leading bias mitigation methods across 5 different fairness metrics, as well as assessing their accuracy and potential profitability for financial institutions. Through our analysis, we have identified the challenges associated with achieving fairness while maintaining accuracy and profitabiliy, and have highlighted both the most successful and least successful mitigation methods. Ultimately, our research serves to bridge the gap between experimental machine learning and its practical applications in the finance industry.
We consider Biot model with block preconditioners and generalized eigenvalue problems for scalability and robustness to parameters. A discontinuous Galerkin discretization is employed with the displacement and Darcy flow flux discretized as piecewise continuous in $P_1$ elements, and the pore pressure as piecewise constant in the $P_0$ element with a stabilizing term. Parallel algorithms are designed to solve the resulting linear system. Specifically, the GMRES method is employed as the outer iteration algorithm and block-triangular preconditioners are designed to accelerate the convergence. In the preconditioners, the elliptic operators are further approximated by using incomplete Cholesky factorization or two-level additive overlapping Schwartz method where coarse grids are constructed by generalized eigenvalue problems in the overlaps (GenEO). Extensive numerical experiments show a scalability and parametric robustness of the resulting parallel algorithms.
The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with standard probability and probabilistic predictions. Yet, due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications and related issues such as safety requirements, new problems and challenges have recently been identified by machine learning scholars, and these problems may call for new methodological developments. In particular, this includes the importance of distinguishing between (at least) two different types of uncertainty, often refereed to as aleatoric and epistemic. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of uncertainty in machine learning as well as an overview of hitherto attempts at handling uncertainty in general and formalizing this distinction in particular.