In linear regression we wish to estimate the optimum linear least squares predictor for a distribution over $d$-dimensional input points and real-valued responses, based on a small sample. Under standard random design analysis, where the sample is drawn i.i.d. from the input distribution, the least squares solution for that sample can be viewed as the natural estimator of the optimum. Unfortunately, this estimator almost always incurs an undesirable bias coming from the randomness of the input points, which is a significant bottleneck in model averaging. In this paper we show that it is possible to draw a non-i.i.d. sample of input points such that, regardless of the response model, the least squares solution is an unbiased estimator of the optimum. Moreover, this sample can be produced efficiently by augmenting a previously drawn i.i.d. sample with an additional set of $d$ points, drawn jointly according to a certain determinantal point process constructed from the input distribution rescaled by the squared volume spanned by the points. Motivated by this, we develop a theoretical framework for studying volume-rescaled sampling, and in the process prove a number of new matrix expectation identities. We use them to show that for any input distribution and $\epsilon>0$ there is a random design consisting of $O(d\log d+ d/\epsilon)$ points from which an unbiased estimator can be constructed whose expected square loss over the entire distribution is bounded by $1+\epsilon$ times the loss of the optimum. We provide efficient algorithms for generating such unbiased estimators in a number of practical settings and support our claims experimentally.
Stochastic gradient algorithms are widely used for both optimization and sampling in large-scale learning and inference problems. However, in practice, tuning these algorithms is typically done using heuristics and trial-and-error rather than rigorous, generalizable theory. To address this gap between theory and practice, we novel insights into the effect of tuning parameters by characterizing the large-sample behavior of iterates of a very general class of preconditioned stochastic gradient algorithms with fixed step size. In the optimization setting, our results show that iterate averaging with a large fixed step size can result in statistically efficient approximation of the (local) M-estimator. In the sampling context, our results show that with appropriate choices of tuning parameters, the limiting stationary covariance can match either the Bernstein--von Mises limit of the posterior, adjustments to the posterior for model misspecification, or the asymptotic distribution of the MLE; and that with a naive tuning the limit corresponds to none of these. Moreover, we argue that an essentially independent sample from the stationary distribution can be obtained after a fixed number of passes over the dataset. We validate our asymptotic results in realistic finite-sample regimes via several experiments using simulated and real data. Overall, we demonstrate that properly tuned stochastic gradient algorithms with constant step size offer a computationally efficient and statistically robust approach to obtaining point estimates or posterior-like samples.
We present a novel hybrid algorithm for training Deep Neural Networks that combines the state-of-the-art Gradient Descent (GD) method with a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) solver, outperforming GD and variants in terms of accuracy, as well as resource and data efficiency for both regression and classification tasks. Our GD+Solver hybrid algorithm, called GDSolver, works as follows: given a DNN $D$ as input, GDSolver invokes GD to partially train $D$ until it gets stuck in a local minima, at which point GDSolver invokes an MILP solver to exhaustively search a region of the loss landscape around the weight assignments of $D$'s final layer parameters with the goal of tunnelling through and escaping the local minima. The process is repeated until desired accuracy is achieved. In our experiments, we find that GDSolver not only scales well to additional data and very large model sizes, but also outperforms all other competing methods in terms of rates of convergence and data efficiency. For regression tasks, GDSolver produced models that, on average, had 31.5% lower MSE in 48% less time, and for classification tasks on MNIST and CIFAR10, GDSolver was able to achieve the highest accuracy over all competing methods, using only 50% of the training data that GD baselines required.
This paper settles an open and challenging question pertaining to the design of simple high-order regularization methods for solving smooth and monotone variational inequalities (VIs). A VI involves finding $x^\star \in \mathcal{X}$ such that $\langle F(x), x - x^\star\rangle \geq 0$ for all $x \in \mathcal{X}$ and we consider the setting where $F: \mathbb{R}^d \mapsto \mathbb{R}^d$ is smooth with up to $(p-1)^{th}$-order derivatives. For $p = 2$,~\citet{Nesterov-2006-Constrained} extended the cubic regularized Newton's method to VIs with a global rate of $O(\epsilon^{-1})$.~\citet{Monteiro-2012-Iteration} proposed another second-order method which achieved an improved rate of $O(\epsilon^{-2/3}\log(1/\epsilon))$, but this method required a nontrivial binary search procedure as an inner loop. High-order methods based on similar binary search procedures have been further developed and shown to achieve a rate of $O(\epsilon^{-2/(p+1)}\log(1/\epsilon))$. However, such search procedure can be computationally prohibitive in practice and the problem of finding a simple high-order regularization methods remains as an open and challenging question in optimization theory. We propose a $p^{th}$-order method that does \textit{not} require any binary search procedure and prove that it can converge to a weak solution at a global rate of $O(\epsilon^{-2/(p+1)})$. A lower bound of $\Omega(\epsilon^{-2/(p+1)})$ is also established to show that our method is optimal in the monotone setting. A version with restarting attains a global linear and local superlinear convergence rate for smooth and strongly monotone VIs. Moreover, our method can achieve a global rate of $O(\epsilon^{-2/p})$ for solving smooth and non-monotone VIs satisfying the Minty condition; moreover, the restarted version again attains a global linear and local superlinear convergence rate if the strong Minty condition holds.
Unbiased Learning to Rank~(ULTR) that learns to rank documents with biased user feedback data is a well-known challenge in information retrieval. Existing methods in unbiased learning to rank typically rely on click modeling or inverse propensity weighting~(IPW). Unfortunately, the search engines are faced with severe long-tail query distribution, where neither click modeling nor IPW can handle well. Click modeling suffers from data sparsity problem since the same query-document pair appears limited times on tail queries; IPW suffers from high variance problem since it is highly sensitive to small propensity score values. Therefore, a general debiasing framework that works well under tail queries is in desperate need. To address this problem, we propose a model-based unbiased learning-to-rank framework. Specifically, we develop a general context-aware user simulator to generate pseudo clicks for unobserved ranked lists to train rankers, which addresses the data sparsity problem. In addition, considering the discrepancy between pseudo clicks and actual clicks, we take the observation of a ranked list as the treatment variable and further incorporate inverse propensity weighting with pseudo labels in a doubly robust way. The derived bias and variance indicate that the proposed model-based method is more robust than existing methods. Finally, extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including simulated datasets and real click logs, demonstrate that the proposed model-based method consistently performs outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various scenarios.
It is a well-known fact that there is no complete and discrete invariant on the collection of all multiparameter persistence modules. Nonetheless, many invariants have been proposed in the literature to study multiparameter persistence modules, though each invariant will lose some amount of information. One such invariant is the generalized rank invariant. This invariant is known to be complete on the class of interval decomposable persistence modules in general, under mild assumptions on the indexing poset $P$. There is often a trade-off, where the stronger an invariant is, the more expensive it is to compute in practice. The generalized rank invariant on its own is difficult to compute, whereas the standard rank invariant is readily computable through software implementations such as RIVET. We can interpolate between these two to induce new invariants via restricting the domain of the generalized rank invariant, and this family exhibits the aforementioned trade-off. This work studies the tension which exists between computational efficiency and retaining strength when restricting the domain of the generalized rank invariant. We provide a characterization result on where such restrictions are complete invariants in the setting where $P$ is finite, and furthermore show that such restricted generalized rank invariants are stable.
We consider studies where multiple measures on an outcome variable are collected over time, but some subjects drop out before the end of follow up. Analyses of such data often proceed under either a 'last observation carried forward' or 'missing at random' assumption. We consider two alternative strategies for identification; the first is closely related to the difference-in-differences methodology in the causal inference literature. The second enables correction for violations of the parallel trend assumption, so long as one has access to a valid 'bespoke instrumental variable'. These are compared with existing approaches, first conceptually and then in an analysis of data from the Framingham Heart Study.
The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve is a useful tool that measures the discriminating power of a continuous variable or the accuracy of a pharmaceutical or medical test to distinguish between two conditions or classes. In certain situations, the practitioner may be able to measure some covariates related to the diagnostic variable which can increase the discriminating power of the ROC curve. To protect against the existence of atypical data among the observations, a procedure to obtain robust estimators for the ROC curve in presence of covariates is introduced. The considered proposal focusses on a semiparametric approach which fits a location-scale regression model to the diagnostic variable and considers empirical estimators of the regression residuals distributions. Robust parametric estimators are combined with adaptive weighted empirical distribution estimators to down-weight the influence of outliers. The uniform consistency of the proposal is derived under mild assumptions. A Monte Carlo study is carried out to compare the performance of the robust proposed estimators with the classical ones both, in clean and contaminated samples. A real data set is also analysed.
We consider the problem of joint simultaneous confidence band (JSCB) construction for regression coefficient functions of time series scalar-on-function linear regression when the regression model is estimated by roughness penalization approach with flexible choices of orthonormal basis functions. A simple and unified multiplier bootstrap methodology is proposed for the JSCB construction which is shown to achieve the correct coverage probability asymptotically. Furthermore, the JSCB is asymptotically robust to inconsistently estimated standard deviations of the model. The proposed methodology is applied to a time series data set of electricity market to visually investigate and formally test the overall regression relationship as well as perform model validation. A uniform Gaussian approximation and comparison result over all Euclidean convex sets for normalized sums of a class of moderately high-dimensional stationary time series is established. Finally, the proposed methodology can be applied to simultaneous inference for scalar-on-function linear regression of independent cross-sectional data.
This paper focuses on waveform design for joint radar and communication systems and presents a new subset selection process to improve the communication error rate performance and global accuracy of radar sensing of the random stepped frequency permutation waveform. An optimal communication receiver based on integer programming is proposed to handle any subset of permutations followed by a more efficient sub-optimal receiver based on the Hungarian algorithm. Considering optimum maximum likelihood detection, the block error rate is analyzed under both additive white Gaussian noise and correlated Rician fading. We propose two methods to select a permutation subset with an improved block error rate and an efficient encoding scheme to map the information symbols to selected permutations under these subsets. From the radar perspective, the ambiguity function is analyzed with regards to the local and the global accuracy of target detection. Furthermore, a subset selection method to reduce the maximum sidelobe height is proposed by extending the properties of Costas arrays. Finally, the process of remapping the frequency tones to the symbol set used to generate permutations is introduced as a method to improve both the communication and radar performances of the selected permutation subset.
This paper studies \emph{linear} and \emph{affine} error-correcting codes for correcting synchronization errors such as insertions and deletions. We call such codes linear/affine insdel codes. Linear codes that can correct even a single deletion are limited to have information rate at most $1/2$ (achieved by the trivial 2-fold repetition code). Previously, it was (erroneously) reported that more generally no non-trivial linear codes correcting $k$ deletions exist, i.e., that the $(k+1)$-fold repetition codes and its rate of $1/(k+1)$ are basically optimal for any $k$. We disprove this and show the existence of binary linear codes of length $n$ and rate just below $1/2$ capable of correcting $\Omega(n)$ insertions and deletions. This identifies rate $1/2$ as a sharp threshold for recovery from deletions for linear codes, and reopens the quest for a better understanding of the capabilities of linear codes for correcting insertions/deletions. We prove novel outer bounds and existential inner bounds for the rate vs. (edit) distance trade-off of linear insdel codes. We complement our existential results with an efficient synchronization-string-based transformation that converts any asymptotically-good linear code for Hamming errors into an asymptotically-good linear code for insdel errors. Lastly, we show that the $\frac{1}{2}$-rate limitation does not hold for affine codes by giving an explicit affine code of rate $1-\epsilon$ which can efficiently correct a constant fraction of insdel errors.