We propose a deterministic-statistical method for an inverse source problem using multiple frequency limited aperture far field data. The direct sampling method is used to obtain a disc such that it contains the compact support of the source. The Dirichlet eigenfunctions of the disc are used to expand the source function. Then the inverse problem is recast as a statistical inference problem for the expansion coefficients and the Bayesian inversion is employed to reconstruct the coefficients. The stability of the statistical inverse problem with respect to the measured data is justified in the sense of Hellinger distance. A preconditioned Crank-Nicolson (pCN) Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is implemented to explore the posterior density function of the unknowns. Numerical examples show that the proposed method is effective for both smooth and non-smooth sources given limited-aperture data.
Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) is a supervised learning algorithm extended from Support Vector Machine (SVM) based on the Bayesian sparsity model. Compared with the regression problem, RVM classification is difficult to be conducted because there is no closed-form solution for the weight parameter posterior. Original RVM classification algorithm used Newton's method in optimization to obtain the mode of weight parameter posterior then approximated it by a Gaussian distribution in Laplace's method. It would work but just applied the frequency methods in a Bayesian framework. This paper proposes a Generic Bayesian approach for the RVM classification. We conjecture that our algorithm achieves convergent estimates of the quantities of interest compared with the nonconvergent estimates of the original RVM classification algorithm. Furthermore, a Fully Bayesian approach with the hierarchical hyperprior structure for RVM classification is proposed, which improves the classification performance, especially in the imbalanced data problem. By the numeric studies, our proposed algorithms obtain high classification accuracy rates. The Fully Bayesian hierarchical hyperprior method outperforms the Generic one for the imbalanced data classification.
We introduce two synthetic likelihood methods for Simulation-Based Inference (SBI), to conduct either amortized or targeted inference from experimental observations when a high-fidelity simulator is available. Both methods learn a conditional energy-based model (EBM) of the likelihood using synthetic data generated by the simulator, conditioned on parameters drawn from a proposal distribution. The learned likelihood can then be combined with any prior to obtain a posterior estimate, from which samples can be drawn using MCMC. Our methods uniquely combine a flexible Energy-Based Model and the minimization of a KL loss: this is in contrast to other synthetic likelihood methods, which either rely on normalizing flows, or minimize score-based objectives; choices that come with known pitfalls. Our first method, Amortized Unnormalized Neural Likelihood Estimation (AUNLE), introduces a tilting trick during training that allows to significantly lower the computational cost of inference by enabling the use of efficient MCMC techniques. Our second method, Sequential UNLE (SUNLE), employs a robust doubly intractable approach in order to re-use simulation data and improve posterior accuracy on a specific dataset. We demonstrate the properties of both methods on a range of synthetic datasets, and apply them to a neuroscience model of the pyloric network in the crab Cancer Borealis, matching the performance of other synthetic likelihood methods at a fraction of the simulation budget.
We establish a disintegrated PAC-Bayesian bound, for classifiers that are trained via continuous-time (non-stochastic) gradient descent. Contrarily to what is standard in the PAC-Bayesian setting, our result applies to a training algorithm that is deterministic, conditioned on a random initialisation, without requiring any $\textit{de-randomisation}$ step. We provide a broad discussion of the main features of the bound that we propose, and we study analytically and empirically its behaviour on linear models, finding promising results.
In this article, we propose a novel pessimism-based Bayesian learning method for optimal dynamic treatment regimes in the offline setting. When the coverage condition does not hold, which is common for offline data, the existing solutions would produce sub-optimal policies. The pessimism principle addresses this issue by discouraging recommendation of actions that are less explored conditioning on the state. However, nearly all pessimism-based methods rely on a key hyper-parameter that quantifies the degree of pessimism, and the performance of the methods can be highly sensitive to the choice of this parameter. We propose to integrate the pessimism principle with Thompson sampling and Bayesian machine learning for optimizing the degree of pessimism. We derive a credible set whose boundary uniformly lower bounds the optimal Q-function, and thus does not require additional tuning of the degree of pessimism. We develop a general Bayesian learning method that works with a range of models, from Bayesian linear basis model to Bayesian neural network model. We develop the computational algorithm based on variational inference, which is highly efficient and scalable. We establish the theoretical guarantees of the proposed method, and show empirically that it outperforms the existing state-of-the-art solutions through both simulations and a real data example.
Bayesian nonparametric mixture models are common for modeling complex data. While these models are well-suited for density estimation, their application for clustering has some limitations. Miller and Harrison (2014) proved posterior inconsistency in the number of clusters when the true number of clusters is finite for Dirichlet process and Pitman--Yor process mixture models. In this work, we extend this result to additional Bayesian nonparametric priors such as Gibbs-type processes and finite-dimensional representations of them. The latter include the Dirichlet multinomial process and the recently proposed Pitman--Yor and normalized generalized gamma multinomial processes. We show that mixture models based on these processes are also inconsistent in the number of clusters and discuss possible solutions. Notably, we show that a post-processing algorithm introduced by Guha et al. (2021) for the Dirichlet process extends to more general models and provides a consistent method to estimate the number of components.
This paper considers a convex composite optimization problem with affine constraints, which includes problems that take the form of minimizing a smooth convex objective function over the intersection of (simple) convex sets, or regularized with multiple (simple) functions. Motivated by high-dimensional applications in which exact projection/proximal computations are not tractable, we propose a \textit{projection-free} augmented Lagrangian-based method, in which primal updates are carried out using a \textit{weak proximal oracle} (WPO). In an earlier work, WPO was shown to be more powerful than the standard \textit{linear minimization oracle} (LMO) that underlies conditional gradient-based methods (aka Frank-Wolfe methods). Moreover, WPO is computationally tractable for many high-dimensional problems of interest, including those motivated by recovery of low-rank matrices and tensors, and optimization over polytopes which admit efficient LMOs. The main result of this paper shows that under a certain curvature assumption (which is weaker than strong convexity), our WPO-based algorithm achieves an ergodic rate of convergence of $O(1/T)$ for both the objective residual and feasibility gap. This result, to the best of our knowledge, improves upon the $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ rate for existing LMO-based projection-free methods for this class of problems. Empirical experiments on a low-rank and sparse covariance matrix estimation task and the Max Cut semidefinite relaxation demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art LMO-based Lagrangian-based methods.
Current treatment planning of patients diagnosed with a brain tumor, such as glioma, could significantly benefit by accessing the spatial distribution of tumor cell concentration. Existing diagnostic modalities, e.g. magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), contrast sufficiently well areas of high cell density. In gliomas, however, they do not portray areas of low cell concentration, which can often serve as a source for the secondary appearance of the tumor after treatment. To estimate tumor cell densities beyond the visible boundaries of the lesion, numerical simulations of tumor growth could complement imaging information by providing estimates of full spatial distributions of tumor cells. Over recent years a corpus of literature on medical image-based tumor modeling was published. It includes different mathematical formalisms describing the forward tumor growth model. Alongside, various parametric inference schemes were developed to perform an efficient tumor model personalization, i.e. solving the inverse problem. However, the unifying drawback of all existing approaches is the time complexity of the model personalization which prohibits a potential integration of the modeling into clinical settings. In this work, we introduce a deep learning based methodology for inferring the patient-specific spatial distribution of brain tumors from T1Gd and FLAIR MRI medical scans. Coined as Learn-Morph-Infer the method achieves real-time performance in the order of minutes on widely available hardware and the compute time is stable across tumor models of different complexity, such as reaction-diffusion and reaction-advection-diffusion models. We believe the proposed inverse solution approach not only bridges the way for clinical translation of brain tumor personalization but can also be adopted to other scientific and engineering domains.
The generalized least square (GLS) is one of the most basic tools in regression analyses. A major issue in implementing the GLS is estimation of the conditional variance function of the error term, which typically requires a restrictive functional form assumption for parametric estimation or tuning parameters for nonparametric estimation. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to estimate the conditional variance function under nonparametric monotonicity constraints by utilizing the isotonic regression method. Our GLS estimator is shown to be asymptotically equivalent to the infeasible GLS estimator with knowledge of the conditional error variance, and is free from tuning parameters, not only for point estimation but also for interval estimation or hypothesis testing. Our analysis extends the scope of the isotonic regression method by showing that the isotonic estimates, possibly with generated variables, can be employed as first stage estimates to be plugged in for semiparametric objects. Simulation studies illustrate excellent finite sample performances of the proposed method. As an empirical example, we revisit Acemoglu and Restrepo's (2017) study on the relationship between an aging population and economic growth to illustrate how our GLS estimator effectively reduces estimation errors.
Dimension reduction and data visualization aim to project a high-dimensional dataset to a low-dimensional space while capturing the intrinsic structures in the data. It is an indispensable part of modern data science, and many dimensional reduction and visualization algorithms have been developed. However, different algorithms have their own strengths and weaknesses, making it critically important to evaluate their relative performance for a given dataset, and to leverage and combine their individual strengths. In this paper, we propose an efficient spectral method for assessing and combining multiple visualizations of a given dataset produced by diverse algorithms. The proposed method provides a quantitative measure -- the visualization eigenscore -- of the relative performance of the visualizations for preserving the structure around each data point. Then it leverages the eigenscores to obtain a consensus visualization, which has much improved { quality over the individual visualizations in capturing the underlying true data structure.} Our approach is flexible and works as a wrapper around any visualizations. We analyze multiple simulated and real-world datasets from diverse applications to demonstrate the effectiveness of the eigenscores for evaluating visualizations and the superiority of the proposed consensus visualization. Furthermore, we establish rigorous theoretical justification of our method based on a general statistical framework, yielding fundamental principles behind the empirical success of consensus visualization along with practical guidance.
A new approach to calculating the finite Fourier transform is suggested throughout the process of this study. The idea that the series has been updated with the appropriate modification and purification, which serves as the basis for the study, and that this update functions as the basis for the investigation is the conceptual goal of this method, which was designed especially for the purpose of this study. It is provided here that this methodology, which was designed especially for the purpose of this study, has been updated with the appropriate modification and purification, which serves as the basis for the study, is provided here. This study also used this update as the premise to get started. In order for this approach to be successful, the starting point must be the presumption that the series has been appropriately purified and organized to the point where it can be considered adequate. The attributes of this series were discovered as a result of the work that was ordered to choose an acceptable application of the Fourier series, to apply it, and to conduct an analysis of it in relation to the finite Fourier transform. These qualities were determined this study. The results of this study provided a better understanding of the characteristics of this series.