Since the extreme value index (EVI) controls the tail behaviour of the distribution function, the estimation of EVI is a very important topic in extreme value theory. Recent developments in the estimation of EVI along with covariates have been in the context of nonparametric regression. However, for the large dimension of covariates, the fully nonparametric estimator faces the problem of the curse of dimensionality. To avoid this, we apply the single index model to EVI regression under Pareto-type tailed distribution. We study the penalized maximum likelihood estimation of the single index model. The asymptotic properties of the estimator are also developed. Numerical studies are presented to show the efficiency of the proposed model.
This paper studies the high-dimensional quantile regression problem under the transfer learning framework, where possibly related source datasets are available to make improvements on the estimation or prediction based solely on the target data. In the oracle case with known transferable sources, a smoothed two-step transfer learning algorithm based on convolution smoothing is proposed and the L1/L2 estimation error bounds of the corresponding estimator are also established. To avoid including non-informative sources, we propose a clustering-based algorithm to select the transferable sources adaptively and establish its selection consistency under regular conditions; we also provide an alternative model averaging procedure, of which the optimality of the excess risk is proved. Monte Carlo simulations as well as an empirical analysis of gene expression data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed procedure.
This paper describes three methods for carrying out non-asymptotic inference on partially identified parameters that are solutions to a class of optimization problems. Applications in which the optimization problems arise include estimation under shape restrictions, estimation of models of discrete games, and estimation based on grouped data. The partially identified parameters are characterized by restrictions that involve the unknown population means of observed random variables in addition to structural parameters. Inference consists of finding confidence intervals for functions of the structural parameters. Our theory provides finite-sample lower bounds on the coverage probabilities of the confidence intervals under three sets of assumptions of increasing strength. With the moderate sample sizes found in most economics applications, the bounds become tighter as the assumptions strengthen. We discuss estimation of population parameters that the bounds depend on and contrast our methods with alternative methods for obtaining confidence intervals for partially identified parameters. The results of Monte Carlo experiments and empirical examples illustrate the usefulness of our method.
Surrogate models have shown to be an extremely efficient aid in solving engineering problems that require repeated evaluations of an expensive computational model. They are built by sparsely evaluating the costly original model and have provided a way to solve otherwise intractable problems. A crucial aspect in surrogate modelling is the assumption of smoothness and regularity of the model to approximate. This assumption is however not always met in reality. For instance in civil or mechanical engineering, some models may present discontinuities or non-smoothness, e.g., in case of instability patterns such as buckling or snap-through. Building a single surrogate model capable of accounting for these fundamentally different behaviors or discontinuities is not an easy task. In this paper, we propose a three-stage approach for the approximation of non-smooth functions which combines clustering, classification and regression. The idea is to split the space following the localized behaviors or regimes of the system and build local surrogates that are eventually assembled. A sequence of well-known machine learning techniques are used: Dirichlet process mixtures models (DPMM), support vector machines and Gaussian process modelling. The approach is tested and validated on two analytical functions and a finite element model of a tensile membrane structure.
This paper proposes a data and Machine Learning-based forecasting solution for the Telecommunications network-rollout planning problem. Milestone completion-time estimation is crucial to network-rollout planning; accurate estimates enable better crew utilisation and optimised cost of materials and logistics. Using historical data of milestone completion times, a model needs to incorporate domain knowledge, handle noise and yet be interpretable to project managers. This paper proposes partition-based regression models that incorporate data-driven statistical models within each partition, as a solution to the problem. Benchmarking experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach obtains competitive to better performance, at a small fraction of the model complexity of the best alternative approach based on Gradient Boosting. Experiments also demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective for both short and long-range forecasts. The proposed idea is applicable in any context requiring time-series regression with noisy and attributed data.
We propose a new method for estimating the minimizer $\boldsymbol{x}^*$ and the minimum value $f^*$ of a smooth and strongly convex regression function $f$ from the observations contaminated by random noise. Our estimator $\boldsymbol{z}_n$ of the minimizer $\boldsymbol{x}^*$ is based on a version of the projected gradient descent with the gradient estimated by a regularized local polynomial algorithm. Next, we propose a two-stage procedure for estimation of the minimum value $f^*$ of regression function $f$. At the first stage, we construct an accurate enough estimator of $\boldsymbol{x}^*$, which can be, for example, $\boldsymbol{z}_n$. At the second stage, we estimate the function value at the point obtained in the first stage using a rate optimal nonparametric procedure. We derive non-asymptotic upper bounds for the quadratic risk and optimization error of $\boldsymbol{z}_n$, and for the risk of estimating $f^*$. We establish minimax lower bounds showing that, under certain choice of parameters, the proposed algorithms achieve the minimax optimal rates of convergence on the class of smooth and strongly convex functions.
County level estimates of mean sheet and rill erosion from the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) are useful for program development and evaluation. Since county sample sizes in the CEAP survey are insufficient to support reliable direct estimators, small area estimation procedures are needed. The quantity of water runoff is a useful covariate but is unavailable for the full population. We use an estimate of mean runoff from the CEAP survey as a covariate in a small area model with sheet and rill erosion as the response. As the runoff and sheet and rill erosion are estimators from the same survey, the measurement error in the covariate is important as is the correlation between the measurement error and the sampling error. We conduct a detailed investigation of small area estimation in the presence of a correlation between the measurement error in the covariate and the sampling error in the response. In simulations, the proposed predictor is superior to small area predictors that assume the response and covariate are uncorrelated or that ignore the measurement error entirely.
We identify the average dose-response function (ADRF) for a continuously valued error-contaminated treatment by a weighted conditional expectation. We then estimate the weights nonparametrically by maximising a local generalised empirical likelihood subject to an expanding set of conditional moment equations incorporated into the deconvolution kernels. Thereafter, we construct a deconvolution kernel estimator of ADRF. We derive the asymptotic bias and variance of our ADRF estimator and provide its asymptotic linear expansion, which helps conduct statistical inference. To select our smoothing parameters, we adopt the simulation-extrapolation method and propose a new extrapolation procedure to stabilise the computation. Monte Carlo simulations and a real data study illustrate our method's practical performance.
Hierarchical Bayesian Poisson regression models (HBPRMs) provide a flexible modeling approach of the relationship between predictors and count response variables. The applications of HBPRMs to large-scale datasets require efficient inference algorithms due to the high computational cost of inferring many model parameters based on random sampling. Although Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have been widely used for Bayesian inference, sampling using this class of algorithms is time-consuming for applications with large-scale data and time-sensitive decision-making, partially due to the non-conjugacy of many models. To overcome this limitation, this research develops an approximate Gibbs sampler (AGS) to efficiently learn the HBPRMs while maintaining the inference accuracy. In the proposed sampler, the data likelihood is approximated with Gaussian distribution such that the conditional posterior of the coefficients has a closed-form solution. Numerical experiments using real and synthetic datasets with small and large counts demonstrate the superior performance of AGS in comparison to the state-of-the-art sampling algorithm, especially for large datasets.
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting, focusing on Transformer models for NLP tasks that are limited by compute: self-supervised pretraining and high-resource machine translation. We first show that even though smaller Transformer models execute faster per iteration, wider and deeper models converge in significantly fewer steps. Moreover, this acceleration in convergence typically outpaces the additional computational overhead of using larger models. Therefore, the most compute-efficient training strategy is to counterintuitively train extremely large models but stop after a small number of iterations. This leads to an apparent trade-off between the training efficiency of large Transformer models and the inference efficiency of small Transformer models. However, we show that large models are more robust to compression techniques such as quantization and pruning than small models. Consequently, one can get the best of both worlds: heavily compressed, large models achieve higher accuracy than lightly compressed, small models.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.