We study variants of the average treatment effect on the treated with population parameters replaced by their sample counterparts. For each estimand, we derive the limiting distribution with respect to a semiparametric efficient estimator of the population effect and provide guidance on variance estimation. Included in our analysis is the well-known sample average treatment effect on the treated, for which we obtain some unexpected results. Unlike for the ordinary sample average treatment effect, we find that the asymptotic variance for the sample average treatment effect on the treated is point-identified and consistently estimable, but it potentially exceeds that of the population estimand. To address this shortcoming, we propose a modification that yields a new estimand, the mixed average treatment effect on the treated, which is always estimated more precisely than both the population and sample effects. We also introduce a second new estimand that arises from an alternative interpretation of the treatment effect on the treated with which all individuals are weighted by the propensity score.
Dynamical systems across the sciences, from electrical circuits to ecological networks, undergo qualitative and often catastrophic changes in behavior, called bifurcations, when their underlying parameters cross a threshold. Existing methods predict oncoming catastrophes in individual systems but are primarily time-series-based and struggle both to categorize qualitative dynamical regimes across diverse systems and to generalize to real data. To address this challenge, we propose a data-driven, physically-informed deep-learning framework for classifying dynamical regimes and characterizing bifurcation boundaries based on the extraction of topologically invariant features. We focus on the paradigmatic case of the supercritical Hopf bifurcation, which is used to model periodic dynamics across a wide range of applications. Our convolutional attention method is trained with data augmentations that encourage the learning of topological invariants which can be used to detect bifurcation boundaries in unseen systems and to design models of biological systems like oscillatory gene regulatory networks. We further demonstrate our method's use in analyzing real data by recovering distinct proliferation and differentiation dynamics along pancreatic endocrinogenesis trajectory in gene expression space based on single-cell data. Our method provides valuable insights into the qualitative, long-term behavior of a wide range of dynamical systems, and can detect bifurcations or catastrophic transitions in large-scale physical and biological systems.
In this paper we consider functional data with heterogeneity in time and in population. We propose a mixture model with segmentation of time to represent this heterogeneity while keeping the functional structure. Maximum likelihood estimator is considered, proved to be identifiable and consistent. In practice, an EM algorithm is used, combined with dynamic programming for the maximization step, to approximate the maximum likelihood estimator. The method is illustrated on a simulated dataset, and used on a real dataset of electricity consumption.
This paper presents a method for future motion prediction of multi-agent systems by including group formation information and future intent. Formation of groups depends on a physics-based clustering method that follows the agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm. We identify clusters that incorporate the minimum cost-to-go function of a relevant optimal control problem as a metric for clustering between the groups among agents, where groups with similar associated costs are assumed to be likely to move together. The cost metric accounts for proximity to other agents as well as the intended goal of each agent. An unscented Kalman filter based approach is used to update the established clusters as well as add new clusters when new information is obtained. Our approach is verified through non-trivial numerical simulations implementing the proposed algorithm on different datasets pertaining to a variety of scenarios and agents.
The Adam optimizer, often used in Machine Learning for neural network training, corresponds to an underlying ordinary differential equation (ODE) in the limit of very small learning rates. This work shows that the classical Adam algorithm is a first order implicit-explicit (IMEX) Euler discretization of the underlying ODE. Employing the time discretization point of view, we propose new extensions of the Adam scheme obtained by using higher order IMEX methods to solve the ODE. Based on this approach, we derive a new optimization algorithm for neural network training that performs better than classical Adam on several regression and classification problems.
In the present study we investigate overall population effects on episodic memory of an intervention over 15 years that reduces systolic blood pressure in individuals with hypertension. A limitation with previous research on the potential risk reduction of such interventions is that they do not properly account for the reduction of mortality rates. Hence, one can only speculate whether the effect is due to changes in memory or changes in mortality. Therefore, we extend previous research by providing both an etiological and a prognostic effect estimate. To do this, we propose a Bayesian semi-parametric estimation approach for an incremental threshold intervention, using the extended G-formula. Additionally, we introduce a novel sparsity-inducing Dirichlet hyperprior for longitudinal data, that exploits the longitudinal structure of the data. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach in simulations, and compare its performance to other Bayesian decision tree ensemble approaches. In our analysis of the data from the Betula cohort, we found no significant prognostic or etiological effects across all ages. This suggests that systolic blood pressure interventions likely do not strongly affect memory, whether at the overall population level or in the population that would survive under both the natural course and the intervention (the always survivor stratum).
Incomplete factorizations have long been popular general-purpose algebraic preconditioners for solving large sparse linear systems of equations. Guaranteeing the factorization is breakdown free while computing a high quality preconditioner is challenging. A resurgence of interest in using low precision arithmetic makes the search for robustness more urgent and tougher. In this paper, we focus on symmetric positive definite problems and explore a number of approaches: a look-ahead strategy to anticipate break down as early as possible, the use of global shifts, and a modification of an idea developed in the field of numerical optimization for the complete Cholesky factorization of dense matrices. Our numerical simulations target highly ill-conditioned sparse linear systems with the goal of computing the factors in half precision arithmetic and then achieving double precision accuracy using mixed precision refinement.
Sobol' sensitivity index estimators for stochastic models are functions of nested Monte Carlo estimators, which are estimators built from two nested Monte Carlo loops. The outer loop explores the input space and, for each of the explorations, the inner loop repeats model runs to estimate conditional expectations. Although the optimal allocation between explorations and repetitions of one's computational budget is well-known for nested Monte Carlo estimators, it is less clear how to deal with functions of nested Monte Carlo estimators, especially when those functions have unbounded Hessian matrices, as it is the case for Sobol' index estimators. To address this problem, a regularization method is introduced to bound the mean squared error of functions of nested Monte Carlo estimators. Based on a heuristic, an allocation strategy that seeks to minimize a bias-variance trade-off is proposed. The method is applied to Sobol' index estimators for stochastic models. A practical algorithm that adapts to the level of intrinsic randomness in the models is given and illustrated on numerical experiments.
A fundamental aspect of statistics is the integration of data from different sources. Classically, Fisher and others were focused on how to integrate homogeneous (or only mildly heterogeneous) sets of data. More recently, as data are becoming more accessible, the question of if data sets from different sources should be integrated is becoming more relevant. The current literature treats this as a question with only two answers: integrate or don't. Here we take a different approach, motivated by information-sharing principles coming from the shrinkage estimation literature. In particular, we deviate from the do/don't perspective and propose a dial parameter that controls the extent to which two data sources are integrated. How far this dial parameter should be turned is shown to depend, for example, on the informativeness of the different data sources as measured by Fisher information. In the context of generalized linear models, this more nuanced data integration framework leads to relatively simple parameter estimates and valid tests/confidence intervals. Moreover, we demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that setting the dial parameter according to our recommendation leads to more efficient estimation compared to other binary data integration schemes.
This paper studies the fundamental limits of availability and throughput for independent and heterogeneous demands of a limited resource. Availability is the probability that the demands are below the capacity of the resource. Throughput is the expected fraction of the resource that is utilized by the demands. We offer a concentration inequality generator that gives lower bounds on feasible availability and throughput pairs with a given capacity and independent but not necessarily identical distributions of up-to-unit demands. We show that availability and throughput cannot both be poor. These bounds are analogous to tail inequalities on sums of independent random variables, but hold throughout the support of the demand distribution. This analysis gives analytically tractable bounds supporting the unit-demand characterization of Chawla, Devanur, and Lykouris (2023) and generalizes to up-to-unit demands. Our bounds also provide an approach towards improved multi-unit prophet inequalities (Hajiaghayi, Kleinberg, and Sandholm, 2007). They have applications to transaction fee mechanism design (for blockchains) where high availability limits the probability of profitable user-miner coalitions (Chung and Shi, 2023).
Verbal autopsies (VAs) are extensively used to investigate the population-level distributions of deaths by cause in low-resource settings without well-organized vital statistics systems. Computer-based methods are often adopted to assign causes of death to deceased individuals based on the interview responses of their family members or caregivers. In this article, we develop a new Bayesian approach that extracts information about cause-of-death distributions from VA data considering the age- and sex-related variation in the associations between symptoms. Its performance is compared with that of existing approaches using gold-standard data from the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium. In addition, we compute the relevance of predictors to causes of death based on information-theoretic measures.