Matrix valued data has become increasingly prevalent in many applications. Most of the existing clustering methods for this type of data are tailored to the mean model and do not account for the dependence structure of the features, which can be very informative, especially in high-dimensional settings. To extract the information from the dependence structure for clustering, we propose a new latent variable model for the features arranged in matrix form, with some unknown membership matrices representing the clusters for the rows and columns. Under this model, we further propose a class of hierarchical clustering algorithms using the difference of a weighted covariance matrix as the dissimilarity measure. Theoretically, we show that under mild conditions, our algorithm attains clustering consistency in the high-dimensional setting. While this consistency result holds for our algorithm with a broad class of weighted covariance matrices, the conditions for this result depend on the choice of the weight. To investigate how the weight affects the theoretical performance of our algorithm, we establish the minimax lower bound for clustering under our latent variable model. Given these results, we identify the optimal weight in the sense that using this weight guarantees our algorithm to be minimax rate-optimal in terms of the magnitude of some cluster separation metric. The practical implementation of our algorithm with the optimal weight is also discussed. Finally, we conduct simulation studies to evaluate the finite sample performance of our algorithm and apply the method to a genomic dataset.
This paper establishes the asymptotic independence between the quadratic form and maximum of a sequence of independent random variables. Based on this theoretical result, we find the asymptotic joint distribution for the quadratic form and maximum, which can be applied into the high-dimensional testing problems. By combining the sum-type test and the max-type test, we propose the Fisher's combination tests for the one-sample mean test and two-sample mean test. Under this novel general framework, several strong assumptions in existing literature have been relaxed. Monte Carlo simulation has been done which shows that our proposed tests are strongly robust to both sparse and dense data.
Covariance estimation for matrix-valued data has received an increasing interest in applications. Unlike previous works that rely heavily on matrix normal distribution assumption and the requirement of fixed matrix size, we propose a class of distribution-free regularized covariance estimation methods for high-dimensional matrix data under a separability condition and a bandable covariance structure. Under these conditions, the original covariance matrix is decomposed into a Kronecker product of two bandable small covariance matrices representing the variability over row and column directions. We formulate a unified framework for estimating bandable covariance, and introduce an efficient algorithm based on rank one unconstrained Kronecker product approximation. The convergence rates of the proposed estimators are established, and the derived minimax lower bound shows our proposed estimator is rate-optimal under certain divergence regimes of matrix size. We further introduce a class of robust covariance estimators and provide theoretical guarantees to deal with heavy-tailed data. We demonstrate the superior finite-sample performance of our methods using simulations and real applications from a gridded temperature anomalies dataset and a S&P 500 stock data analysis.
We investigate the feature compression of high-dimensional ridge regression using the optimal subsampling technique. Specifically, based on the basic framework of random sampling algorithm on feature for ridge regression and the A-optimal design criterion, we first obtain a set of optimal subsampling probabilities. Considering that the obtained probabilities are uneconomical, we then propose the nearly optimal ones. With these probabilities, a two step iterative algorithm is established which has lower computational cost and higher accuracy. We provide theoretical analysis and numerical experiments to support the proposed methods. Numerical results demonstrate the decent performance of our methods.
This paper considers the problem of inference in cluster randomized experiments when cluster sizes are non-ignorable. Here, by a cluster randomized experiment, we mean one in which treatment is assigned at the level of the cluster; by non-ignorable cluster sizes we mean that "large" clusters and "small" clusters may be heterogeneous, and, in particular, the effects of the treatment may vary across clusters of differing sizes. In order to permit this sort of flexibility, we consider a sampling framework in which cluster sizes themselves are random. In this way, our analysis departs from earlier analyses of cluster randomized experiments in which cluster sizes are treated as non-random. We distinguish between two different parameters of interest: the equally-weighted cluster-level average treatment effect, and the size-weighted cluster-level average treatment effect. For each parameter, we provide methods for inference in an asymptotic framework where the number of clusters tends to infinity and treatment is assigned using simple random sampling. We additionally permit the experimenter to sample only a subset of the units within each cluster rather than the entire cluster and demonstrate the implications of such sampling for some commonly used estimators. A small simulation study shows the practical relevance of our theoretical results.
Many existing algorithms for streaming geometric data analysis have been plagued by exponential dependencies in the space complexity, which are undesirable for processing high-dimensional data sets. In particular, once $d\geq\log n$, there are no known non-trivial streaming algorithms for problems such as maintaining convex hulls and L\"owner-John ellipsoids of $n$ points, despite a long line of work in streaming computational geometry since [AHV04]. We simultaneously improve these results to $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ bits of space by trading off with a $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ factor distortion. We achieve these results in a unified manner, by designing the first streaming algorithm for maintaining a coreset for $\ell_\infty$ subspace embeddings with $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ space and $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ distortion. Our algorithm also gives similar guarantees in the \emph{online coreset} model. Along the way, we sharpen results for online numerical linear algebra by replacing a log condition number dependence with a $\log n$ dependence, answering a question of [BDM+20]. Our techniques provide a novel connection between leverage scores, a fundamental object in numerical linear algebra, and computational geometry. For $\ell_p$ subspace embeddings, we give nearly optimal trade-offs between space and distortion for one-pass streaming algorithms. For instance, we give a deterministic coreset using $O(d^2\log n)$ space and $O((d\log n)^{1/2-1/p})$ distortion for $p>2$, whereas previous deterministic algorithms incurred a $\mathrm{poly}(n)$ factor in the space or the distortion [CDW18]. Our techniques have implications in the offline setting, where we give optimal trade-offs between the space complexity and distortion of subspace sketch data structures. To do this, we give an elementary proof of a "change of density" theorem of [LT80] and make it algorithmic.
The classical coding theorem in Kolmogorov complexity states that if an $n$-bit string $x$ is sampled with probability $\delta$ by an algorithm with prefix-free domain then K$(x) \leq \log(1/\delta) + O(1)$. In a recent work, Lu and Oliveira [LO21] established an unconditional time-bounded version of this result, by showing that if $x$ can be efficiently sampled with probability $\delta$ then rKt$(x) = O(\log(1/\delta)) + O(\log n)$, where rKt denotes the randomized analogue of Levin's Kt complexity. Unfortunately, this result is often insufficient when transferring applications of the classical coding theorem to the time-bounded setting, as it achieves a $O(\log(1/\delta))$ bound instead of the information-theoretic optimal $\log(1/\delta)$. We show a coding theorem for rKt with a factor of $2$. As in previous work, our coding theorem is efficient in the sense that it provides a polynomial-time probabilistic algorithm that, when given $x$, the code of the sampler, and $\delta$, it outputs, with probability $\ge 0.99$, a probabilistic representation of $x$ that certifies this rKt complexity bound. Assuming the security of cryptographic pseudorandom generators, we show that no efficient coding theorem can achieve a bound of the form rKt$(x) \leq (2 - o(1)) \cdot \log(1/\delta) +$ poly$(\log n)$. Under a weaker assumption, we exhibit a gap between efficient coding theorems and existential coding theorems with near-optimal parameters. We consider pK$^t$ complexity [GKLO22], a variant of rKt where the randomness is public and the time bound is fixed. We observe the existence of an optimal coding theorem for pK$^t$, and employ this result to establish an unconditional version of a theorem of Antunes and Fortnow [AF09] which characterizes the worst-case running times of languages that are in average polynomial-time over all P-samplable distributions.
We propose a multiple-splitting projection test (MPT) for one-sample mean vectors in high-dimensional settings. The idea of projection test is to project high-dimensional samples to a 1-dimensional space using an optimal projection direction such that traditional tests can be carried out with projected samples. However, estimation of the optimal projection direction has not been systematically studied in the literature. In this work, we bridge the gap by proposing a consistent estimation via regularized quadratic optimization. To retain type I error rate, we adopt a data-splitting strategy when constructing test statistics. To mitigate the power loss due to data-splitting, we further propose a test via multiple splits to enhance the testing power. We show that the $p$-values resulted from multiple splits are exchangeable. Unlike existing methods which tend to conservatively combine dependent $p$-values, we develop an exact level $\alpha$ test that explicitly utilizes the exchangeability structure to achieve better power. Numerical studies show that the proposed test well retains the type I error rate and is more powerful than state-of-the-art tests.
Existing inferential methods for small area data involve a trade-off between maintaining area-level frequentist coverage rates and improving inferential precision via the incorporation of indirect information. In this article, we propose a method to obtain an area-level prediction region for a future observation which mitigates this trade-off. The proposed method takes a conformal prediction approach in which the conformity measure is the posterior predictive density of a working model that incorporates indirect information. The resulting prediction region has guaranteed frequentist coverage regardless of the working model, and, if the working model assumptions are accurate, the region has minimum expected volume compared to other regions with the same coverage rate. When constructed under a normal working model, we prove such a prediction region is an interval and construct an efficient algorithm to obtain the exact interval. We illustrate the performance of our method through simulation studies and an application to EPA radon survey data.
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.
Policy gradient (PG) estimation becomes a challenge when we are not allowed to sample with the target policy but only have access to a dataset generated by some unknown behavior policy. Conventional methods for off-policy PG estimation often suffer from either significant bias or exponentially large variance. In this paper, we propose the double Fitted PG estimation (FPG) algorithm. FPG can work with an arbitrary policy parameterization, assuming access to a Bellman-complete value function class. In the case of linear value function approximation, we provide a tight finite-sample upper bound on policy gradient estimation error, that is governed by the amount of distribution mismatch measured in feature space. We also establish the asymptotic normality of FPG estimation error with a precise covariance characterization, which is further shown to be statistically optimal with a matching Cramer-Rao lower bound. Empirically, we evaluate the performance of FPG on both policy gradient estimation and policy optimization, using either softmax tabular or ReLU policy networks. Under various metrics, our results show that FPG significantly outperforms existing off-policy PG estimation methods based on importance sampling and variance reduction techniques.