This paper presents a new dynamic approach to experiment design in settings where, due to interference or other concerns, experimental units are coarse. `Region-split' experiments on online platforms are one example of such a setting. The cost, or regret, of experimentation is a natural concern here. Our new design, dubbed Synthetically Controlled Thompson Sampling (SCTS), minimizes the regret associated with experimentation at no practically meaningful loss to inferential ability. We provide theoretical guarantees characterizing the near-optimal regret of our approach, and the error rates achieved by the corresponding treatment effect estimator. Experiments on synthetic and real world data highlight the merits of our approach relative to both fixed and `switchback' designs common to such experimental settings.
Isogeometric analysis (IGA) has proven to be an improvement on the classical finite element method (FEM) in several fields, including structural mechanics and fluid dynamics. In this paper, the performance of IGA coupled with the infinite element method (IEM) for some acoustic scattering problems is investigated. In particular, the simple problem of acoustic scattering by a rigid sphere, and the scattering of acoustic waves by an elastic spherical shell with fluid domains both inside and outside, representing a full acoustic-structure interaction (ASI) problem. Finally, a mock shell and a simplified submarine benchmark are investigated. The numerical examples include comparisons between IGA and the FEM. Our main finding is that the usage of IGA significantly increases the accuracy compared to the usage of $C^0$ FEM due to increased inter-element continuity of the spline basis functions.
Differential privacy is a mathematical concept that provides an information-theoretic security guarantee. While differential privacy has emerged as a de facto standard for guaranteeing privacy in data sharing, the known mechanisms to achieve it come with some serious limitations. Utility guarantees are usually provided only for a fixed, a priori specified set of queries. Moreover, there are no utility guarantees for more complex - but very common - machine learning tasks such as clustering or classification. In this paper we overcome some of these limitations. Working with metric privacy, a powerful generalization of differential privacy, we develop a polynomial-time algorithm that creates a private measure from a data set. This private measure allows us to efficiently construct private synthetic data that are accurate for a wide range of statistical analysis tools. Moreover, we prove an asymptotically sharp min-max result for private measures and synthetic data for general compact metric spaces. A key ingredient in our construction is a new superregular random walk, whose joint distribution of steps is as regular as that of independent random variables, yet which deviates from the origin logarithmicaly slowly.
Mixed-dimensional elliptic equations exhibiting a hierarchical structure are commonly used to model problems with high aspect ratio inclusions, such as flow in fractured porous media. We derive general abstract estimates based on the theory of functional a posteriori error estimates, for which guaranteed upper bounds for the primal and dual variables and two-sided bounds for the primal-dual pair are obtained. We improve on the abstract results obtained with the functional approach by proposing four different ways of estimating the residual errors based on the extent the approximate solution has conservation properties, i.e.: (1) no conservation, (2) subdomain conservation, (3) grid-level conservation, and (4) exact conservation. This treatment results in sharper and fully computable estimates when mass is conserved either at the grid level or exactly, with a comparable structure to those obtained from grid-based a posteriori techniques. We demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our theoretical results through numerical experiments using four different discretization methods for synthetic problems and applications based on benchmarks of flow in fractured porous media.
The Bayesian information criterion (BIC), defined as the observed data log likelihood minus a penalty term based on the sample size $N$, is a popular model selection criterion for factor analysis with complete data. This definition has also been suggested for incomplete data. However, the penalty term based on the `complete' sample size $N$ is the same no matter whether in a complete or incomplete data case. For incomplete data, there are often only $N_i<N$ observations for variable $i$, which means that using the `complete' sample size $N$ implausibly ignores the amounts of missing information inherent in incomplete data. Given this observation, a novel criterion called hierarchical BIC (HBIC) for factor analysis with incomplete data is proposed. The novelty is that it only uses the actual amounts of observed information, namely $N_i$'s, in the penalty term. Theoretically, it is shown that HBIC is a large sample approximation of variational Bayesian (VB) lower bound, and BIC is a further approximation of HBIC, which means that HBIC shares the theoretical consistency of BIC. Experiments on synthetic and real data sets are conducted to access the finite sample performance of HBIC, BIC, and related criteria with various missing rates. The results show that HBIC and BIC perform similarly when the missing rate is small, but HBIC is more accurate when the missing rate is not small.
Many recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) optical flow models use finite-step recurrent update operations to emulate traditional algorithms by encouraging iterative refinements toward a stable flow estimation. However, these RNNs impose large computation and memory overheads, and are not directly trained to model such stable estimation. They can converge poorly and thereby suffer from performance degradation. To combat these drawbacks, we propose deep equilibrium (DEQ) flow estimators, an approach that directly solves for the flow as the infinite-level fixed point of an implicit layer (using any black-box solver), and differentiates through this fixed point analytically (thus requiring $O(1)$ training memory). This implicit-depth approach is not predicated on any specific model, and thus can be applied to a wide range of SOTA flow estimation model designs. The use of these DEQ flow estimators allows us to compute the flow faster using, e.g., fixed-point reuse and inexact gradients, consumes $4\sim6\times$ times less training memory than the recurrent counterpart, and achieves better results with the same computation budget. In addition, we propose a novel, sparse fixed-point correction scheme to stabilize our DEQ flow estimators, which addresses a longstanding challenge for DEQ models in general. We test our approach in various realistic settings and show that it improves SOTA methods on Sintel and KITTI datasets with substantially better computational and memory efficiency.
We provide a decision theoretic analysis of bandit experiments. The setting corresponds to a dynamic programming problem, but solving this directly is typically infeasible. Working within the framework of diffusion asymptotics, we define suitable notions of asymptotic Bayes and minimax risk for bandit experiments. For normally distributed rewards, the minimal Bayes risk can be characterized as the solution to a nonlinear second-order partial differential equation (PDE). Using a limit of experiments approach, we show that this PDE characterization also holds asymptotically under both parametric and non-parametric distribution of the rewards. The approach further describes the state variables it is asymptotically sufficient to restrict attention to, and therefore suggests a practical strategy for dimension reduction. The upshot is that we can approximate the dynamic programming problem defining the bandit experiment with a PDE which can be efficiently solved using sparse matrix routines. We derive the optimal Bayes and minimax policies from the numerical solutions to these equations. The proposed policies substantially dominate existing methods such as Thompson sampling. The framework also allows for substantial generalizations to the bandit problem such as time discounting and pure exploration motives.
A High-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrix is frequently encountered in a big data-related application like an e-commerce system or a social network services system. To perform highly accurate representation learning on it is of great significance owing to the great desire of extracting latent knowledge and patterns from it. Latent factor analysis (LFA), which represents an HiDS matrix by learning the low-rank embeddings based on its observed entries only, is one of the most effective and efficient approaches to this issue. However, most existing LFA-based models perform such embeddings on a HiDS matrix directly without exploiting its hidden graph structures, thereby resulting in accuracy loss. To address this issue, this paper proposes a graph-incorporated latent factor analysis (GLFA) model. It adopts two-fold ideas: 1) a graph is constructed for identifying the hidden high-order interaction (HOI) among nodes described by an HiDS matrix, and 2) a recurrent LFA structure is carefully designed with the incorporation of HOI, thereby improving the representa-tion learning ability of a resultant model. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GLFA outperforms six state-of-the-art models in predicting the missing data of an HiDS matrix, which evidently supports its strong representation learning ability to HiDS data.
We propose a novel federated learning paradigm to model data variability among heterogeneous clients in multi-centric studies. Our method is expressed through a hierarchical Bayesian latent variable model, where client-specific parameters are assumed to be realization from a global distribution at the master level, which is in turn estimated to account for data bias and variability across clients. We show that our framework can be effectively optimized through expectation maximization (EM) over latent master's distribution and clients' parameters. We also introduce formal differential privacy (DP) guarantees compatibly with our EM optimization scheme. We tested our method on the analysis of multi-modal medical imaging data and clinical scores from distributed clinical datasets of patients affected by Alzheimer's disease. We demonstrate that our method is robust when data is distributed either in iid and non-iid manners, even when local parameters perturbation is included to provide DP guarantees. Moreover, the variability of data, views and centers can be quantified in an interpretable manner, while guaranteeing high-quality data reconstruction as compared to state-of-the-art autoencoding models and federated learning schemes. The code is available at //gitlab.inria.fr/epione/federated-multi-views-ppca.
Estimating counterfactual outcomes over time from observational data is relevant for many applications (e.g., personalized medicine). Yet, state-of-the-art methods build upon simple long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, thus rendering inferences for complex, long-range dependencies challenging. In this paper, we develop a novel Causal Transformer for estimating counterfactual outcomes over time. Our model is specifically designed to capture complex, long-range dependencies among time-varying confounders. For this, we combine three transformer subnetworks with separate inputs for time-varying covariates, previous treatments, and previous outcomes into a joint network with in-between cross-attentions. We further develop a custom, end-to-end training procedure for our Causal Transformer. Specifically, we propose a novel counterfactual domain confusion loss to address confounding bias: it aims to learn adversarial balanced representations, so that they are predictive of the next outcome but non-predictive of the current treatment assignment. We evaluate our Causal Transformer based on synthetic and real-world datasets, where it achieves superior performance over current baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work proposing transformer-based architecture for estimating counterfactual outcomes from longitudinal data.
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.