In this short paper, we study the simulation of a large system of stochastic processes subject to a common driving noise and fast mean-reverting stochastic volatilities. This model may be used to describe the firm values of a large pool of financial entities. We then seek an efficient estimator for the probability of a default, indicated by a firm value below a certain threshold, conditional on common factors. We consider approximations where coefficients containing the fast volatility are replaced by certain ergodic averages (a type of law of large numbers), and study a correction term (of central limit theorem-type). The accuracy of these approximations is assessed by numerical simulation of pathwise losses and the estimation of payoff functions as they appear in basket credit derivatives.
Longitudinal and survival sub-models are two building blocks for joint modelling of longitudinal and time to event data. Extensive research indicates separate analysis of these two processes could result in biased outputs due to their associations. Conditional independence between measurements of biomarkers and event time process given latent classes or random effects is a common approach for characterising the association between the two sub-models while taking the heterogeneity among the population into account. However, this assumption is tricky to validate because of the unobservable latent variables. Thus a Gaussian copula joint model with random effects is proposed to accommodate the scenarios where the conditional independence assumption is questionable. In our proposed model, the conventional joint model assuming conditional independence is a special case when the association parameter in the Gaussian copula shrinks to zero. Simulation studies and real data application are carried out to evaluate the performance of our proposed model. In addition, personalised dynamic predictions of survival probabilities are obtained based on the proposed model and comparisons are made to the predictions obtained under the conventional joint model.
Multiple antenna arrays play a key role in wireless networks for communications but also localization and sensing. The use of large antenna arrays pushes towards a propagation regime in which the wavefront is no longer plane but spherical. This allows to infer the position and orientation of an arbitrary source from the received signal without the need of using multiple anchor nodes. To understand the fundamental limits of large antenna arrays for localization, this paper fusions wave propagation theory with estimation theory, and computes the Cram{\'e}r-Rao Bound (CRB) for the estimation of the three Cartesian coordinates of the source on the basis of the electromagnetic vector field, observed over a rectangular surface area. To simplify the analysis, we assume that the source is a dipole, whose center is located on the line perpendicular to the surface center, with an orientation a priori known. Numerical and asymptotic results are given to quantify the CRBs, and to gain insights into the effect of various system parameters on the ultimate estimation accuracy. It turns out that surfaces of practical size may guarantee a centimeter-level accuracy in the mmWave bands.
Theoretically, the conditional expectation of a square-integrable random variable $Y$ given a $d$-dimensional random vector $X$ can be obtained by minimizing the mean squared distance between $Y$ and $f(X)$ over all Borel measurable functions $f \colon \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}$. However, in many applications this minimization problem cannot be solved exactly, and instead, a numerical method that computes an approximate minimum over a suitable subfamily of Borel functions has to be used. The quality of the result depends on the adequacy of the subfamily and the performance of the numerical method. In this paper, we derive an expected value representation of the minimal mean square distance which in many applications can efficiently be approximated with a standard Monte Carlo average. This enables us to provide guarantees for the accuracy of any numerical approximation of a given conditional expectation. We illustrate the method by assessing the quality of approximate conditional expectations obtained by linear, polynomial as well as neural network regression in different concrete examples.
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is the dominant algorithm in many optimization scenarios, including convex optimization instances and non-convex neural network training. Yet, in the stochastic setting, momentum interferes with gradient noise, often leading to specific step size and momentum choices in order to guarantee convergence, set aside acceleration. Proximal point methods, on the other hand, have gained much attention due to their numerical stability and elasticity against imperfect tuning. Their stochastic accelerated variants though have received limited attention: how momentum interacts with the stability of (stochastic) proximal point methods remains largely unstudied. To address this, we focus on the convergence and stability of the stochastic proximal point algorithm with momentum (SPPAM), and show that SPPAM allows a faster linear convergence rate compared to stochastic proximal point algorithm (SPPA) with a better contraction factor, under proper hyperparameter tuning. In terms of stability, we show that SPPAM depends on problem constants more favorably than SGDM, allowing a wider range of step size and momentum that lead to convergence.
Unbiased and consistent variance estimators generally do not exist for design-based treatment effect estimators because experimenters never observe more than one potential outcome for any unit. The problem is exacerbated by interference and complex experimental designs. In this paper, we consider variance estimation for linear treatment effect estimators under interference and arbitrary experimental designs. Experimenters must accept conservative estimators in this setting, but they can strive to minimize the conservativeness. We show that this task can be interpreted as an optimization problem in which one aims to find the lowest estimable upper bound of the true variance given one's risk preference and knowledge of the potential outcomes. We characterize the set of admissible bounds in the class of quadratic forms, and we demonstrate that the optimization problem is a convex program for many natural objectives. This allows experimenters to construct less conservative variance estimators, making inferences about treatment effects more informative. The resulting estimators are guaranteed to be conservative regardless of whether the background knowledge used to construct the bound is correct, but the estimators are less conservative if the knowledge is reasonably accurate.
We analyze the orthogonal greedy algorithm when applied to dictionaries $\mathbb{D}$ whose convex hull has small entropy. We show that if the metric entropy of the convex hull of $\mathbb{D}$ decays at a rate of $O(n^{-\frac{1}{2}-\alpha})$ for $\alpha > 0$, then the orthogonal greedy algorithm converges at the same rate on the variation space of $\mathbb{D}$. This improves upon the well-known $O(n^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ convergence rate of the orthogonal greedy algorithm in many cases, most notably for dictionaries corresponding to shallow neural networks. These results hold under no additional assumptions on the dictionary beyond the decay rate of the entropy of its convex hull. In addition, they are robust to noise in the target function and can be extended to convergence rates on the interpolation spaces of the variation norm. Finally, we show that these improved rates are sharp and prove a negative result showing that the iterates generated by the orthogonal greedy algorithm cannot in general be bounded in the variation norm of $\mathbb{D}$.
We study the problem of learning in the stochastic shortest path (SSP) setting, where an agent seeks to minimize the expected cost accumulated before reaching a goal state. We design a novel model-based algorithm EB-SSP that carefully skews the empirical transitions and perturbs the empirical costs with an exploration bonus to guarantee both optimism and convergence of the associated value iteration scheme. We prove that EB-SSP achieves the minimax regret rate $\widetilde{O}(B_{\star} \sqrt{S A K})$, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $S$ is the number of states, $A$ is the number of actions and $B_{\star}$ bounds the expected cumulative cost of the optimal policy from any state, thus closing the gap with the lower bound. Interestingly, EB-SSP obtains this result while being parameter-free, i.e., it does not require any prior knowledge of $B_{\star}$, nor of $T_{\star}$ which bounds the expected time-to-goal of the optimal policy from any state. Furthermore, we illustrate various cases (e.g., positive costs, or general costs when an order-accurate estimate of $T_{\star}$ is available) where the regret only contains a logarithmic dependence on $T_{\star}$, thus yielding the first horizon-free regret bound beyond the finite-horizon MDP setting.
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) has become a popular method for scalable Bayesian inference. These methods are based on sampling a discrete-time approximation to a continuous time process, such as the Langevin diffusion. When applied to distributions defined on a constrained space, such as the simplex, the time-discretisation error can dominate when we are near the boundary of the space. We demonstrate that while current SGMCMC methods for the simplex perform well in certain cases, they struggle with sparse simplex spaces; when many of the components are close to zero. However, most popular large-scale applications of Bayesian inference on simplex spaces, such as network or topic models, are sparse. We argue that this poor performance is due to the biases of SGMCMC caused by the discretization error. To get around this, we propose the stochastic CIR process, which removes all discretization error and we prove that samples from the stochastic CIR process are asymptotically unbiased. Use of the stochastic CIR process within a SGMCMC algorithm is shown to give substantially better performance for a topic model and a Dirichlet process mixture model than existing SGMCMC approaches.
We propose a new method of estimation in topic models, that is not a variation on the existing simplex finding algorithms, and that estimates the number of topics K from the observed data. We derive new finite sample minimax lower bounds for the estimation of A, as well as new upper bounds for our proposed estimator. We describe the scenarios where our estimator is minimax adaptive. Our finite sample analysis is valid for any number of documents (n), individual document length (N_i), dictionary size (p) and number of topics (K), and both p and K are allowed to increase with n, a situation not handled well by previous analyses. We complement our theoretical results with a detailed simulation study. We illustrate that the new algorithm is faster and more accurate than the current ones, although we start out with a computational and theoretical disadvantage of not knowing the correct number of topics K, while we provide the competing methods with the correct value in our simulations.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.