Let $\pi\in \Pi(\mu,\nu)$ be a coupling between two probability measures $\mu$ and $\nu$ on a Polish space. In this article we propose and study a class of nonparametric measures of association between $\mu$ and $\nu$, which we call Wasserstein correlation coefficients. These coefficients are based on the Wasserstein distance between $\nu$ and the disintegration $\pi_{x_1}$ of $\pi$ with respect to the first coordinate. We also establish basic statistical properties of this new class of measures: we develop a statistical theory for strongly consistent estimators and determine their convergence rate in the case of compactly supported measures $\mu$ and $\nu$. Throughout our analysis we make use of the so-called adapted/bicausal Wasserstein distance, in particular we rely on results established in [Backhoff, Bartl, Beiglb\"ock, Wiesel. Estimating processes in adapted Wasserstein distance. 2020]. Our approach applies to probability laws on general Polish spaces.
In this paper, we consider the distributed optimization problem where $n$ agents, each possessing a local cost function, collaboratively minimize the average of the local cost functions over a connected network. To solve the problem, we propose a distributed random reshuffling (D-RR) algorithm that combines the classical distributed gradient descent (DGD) method and Random Reshuffling (RR). We show that D-RR inherits the superiority of RR for both smooth strongly convex and smooth nonconvex objective functions. In particular, for smooth strongly convex objective functions, D-RR achieves $\mathcal{O}(1/T^2)$ rate of convergence (here, $T$ counts the total number of iterations) in terms of the squared distance between the iterate and the unique minimizer. When the objective function is assumed to be smooth nonconvex and has Lipschitz continuous component functions, we show that D-RR drives the squared norm of gradient to $0$ at a rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/T^{2/3})$. These convergence results match those of centralized RR (up to constant factors).
In this article, we study the pointwise asymptotic behavior of iterated convolutions on Z. We generalize the so-called local limit theorem in probability theory to complex valued sequences. A sharp rate of convergence is proved together with a generalized Gaussian bound for the first corrector.
The idea of slicing divergences has been proven to be successful when comparing two probability measures in various machine learning applications including generative modeling, and consists in computing the expected value of a `base divergence' between one-dimensional random projections of the two measures. However, the topological, statistical, and computational consequences of this technique have not yet been well-established. In this paper, we aim at bridging this gap and derive various theoretical properties of sliced probability divergences. First, we show that slicing preserves the metric axioms and the weak continuity of the divergence, implying that the sliced divergence will share similar topological properties. We then precise the results in the case where the base divergence belongs to the class of integral probability metrics. On the other hand, we establish that, under mild conditions, the sample complexity of a sliced divergence does not depend on the problem dimension. We finally apply our general results to several base divergences, and illustrate our theory on both synthetic and real data experiments.
We study the class of first-order locally-balanced Metropolis--Hastings algorithms introduced in Livingstone & Zanella (2021). To choose a specific algorithm within the class the user must select a balancing function $g:\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$ satisfying $g(t) = tg(1/t)$, and a noise distribution for the proposal increment. Popular choices within the class are the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm and the recently introduced Barker proposal. We first establish a universal limiting optimal acceptance rate of 57% and scaling of $n^{-1/3}$ as the dimension $n$ tends to infinity among all members of the class under mild smoothness assumptions on $g$ and when the target distribution for the algorithm is of the product form. In particular we obtain an explicit expression for the asymptotic efficiency of an arbitrary algorithm in the class, as measured by expected squared jumping distance. We then consider how to optimise this expression under various constraints. We derive an optimal choice of noise distribution for the Barker proposal, optimal choice of balancing function under a Gaussian noise distribution, and optimal choice of first-order locally-balanced algorithm among the entire class, which turns out to depend on the specific target distribution. Numerical simulations confirm our theoretical findings and in particular show that a bi-modal choice of noise distribution in the Barker proposal gives rise to a practical algorithm that is consistently more efficient than the original Gaussian version.
The Sliced-Wasserstein distance (SW) is being increasingly used in machine learning applications as an alternative to the Wasserstein distance and offers significant computational and statistical benefits. Since it is defined as an expectation over random projections, SW is commonly approximated by Monte Carlo. We adopt a new perspective to approximate SW by making use of the concentration of measure phenomenon: under mild assumptions, one-dimensional projections of a high-dimensional random vector are approximately Gaussian. Based on this observation, we develop a simple deterministic approximation for SW. Our method does not require sampling a number of random projections, and is therefore both accurate and easy to use compared to the usual Monte Carlo approximation. We derive nonasymptotical guarantees for our approach, and show that the approximation error goes to zero as the dimension increases, under a weak dependence condition on the data distribution. We validate our theoretical findings on synthetic datasets, and illustrate the proposed approximation on a generative modeling problem.
In this paper, we show that the diagonal of a high-dimensional sample covariance matrix stemming from $n$ independent observations of a $p$-dimensional time series with finite fourth moments can be approximated in spectral norm by the diagonal of the population covariance matrix. We assume that $n,p\to \infty$ with $p/n$ tending to a constant which might be positive or zero. As applications, we provide an approximation of the sample correlation matrix ${\mathbf R}$ and derive a variety of results for its eigenvalues. We identify the limiting spectral distribution of ${\mathbf R}$ and construct an estimator for the population correlation matrix and its eigenvalues. Finally, the almost sure limits of the extreme eigenvalues of ${\mathbf R}$ in a generalized spiked correlation model are analyzed.
We introduce a new metric ($W_\nu$ $\nu$-based Wasserstein metric) on the set of probability measures on $X \subseteq \mathbb{R}^m$, based on a slight refinement of the notion of generalized geodesics with respect to a base measure $\nu$, relevant in particular for the case when $\nu$ is singular with respect to $m$-dimensional Lebesgue measure. $W_\nu$ is defined in terms of an iterated variational problem involving optimal transport to $\nu$; we also characterize it in terms of integrations of classical Wasserstein distance between the conditional probabilities with respect to $\nu$, and through limits of certain multi-marginal optimal transport problems. We also introduce a class of metrics which are dual in a certain sense to $W_\nu$ on the set of measures which are absolutely continuous with respect to a second fixed based measure $\sigma$.As we vary the base measure $\nu$, $W_\nu$ interpolates between the usual quadratic Wasserstein distance and a metric associated with the uniquely defined generalized geodesics obtained when $\nu$ is sufficiently regular. When $\nu$ concentrates on a lower dimensional submanifold of $\mathbb{R}^m$, we prove that the variational problem in the definition of the $\nu$-based Wasserstein distance has a unique solution. We establish geodesic convexity of the usual class of functionals and of the set of source measures $\mu$ such that optimal transport between $\mu$ and $\nu$ satisfies a strengthening of the generalized nestedness condition introduced in \cite{McCannPass20}. We also present two applications of the ideas introduced here. First, our dual metric is used to prove convergence of an iterative scheme to solve a variational problem arising in game theory. We also use the multi-marginal formulation to characterize solutions to the multi-marginal problem by an ordinary differential equation, yielding a new numerical method for it.
A Gaussian process (GP) is a powerful and widely used regression technique. The main building block of a GP regression is the covariance kernel, which characterizes the relationship between pairs in the random field. The optimization to find the optimal kernel, however, requires several large-scale and often unstructured matrix inversions. We tackle this challenge by introducing a hierarchical matrix approach, named HMAT, which effectively decomposes the matrix structure, in a recursive manner, into significantly smaller matrices where a direct approach could be used for inversion. Our matrix partitioning uses a particular aggregation strategy for data points, which promotes the low-rank structure of off-diagonal blocks in the hierarchical kernel matrix. We employ a randomized linear algebra method for matrix reduction on the low-rank off-diagonal blocks without factorizing a large matrix. We provide analytical error and cost estimates for the inversion of the matrix, investigate them empirically with numerical computations, and demonstrate the application of our approach on three numerical examples involving GP regression for engineering problems and a large-scale real dataset. We provide the computer implementation of GP-HMAT, HMAT adapted for GP likelihood and derivative computations, and the implementation of the last numerical example on a real dataset. We demonstrate superior scalability of the HMAT approach compared to built-in $\backslash$ operator in MATLAB for large-scale linear solves $\bf{A}\bf{x} = \bf{y}$ via a repeatable and verifiable empirical study. An extension to hierarchical semiseparable (HSS) matrices is discussed as future research.
While Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have empirically produced impressive results on learning complex real-world distributions, recent work has shown that they suffer from lack of diversity or mode collapse. The theoretical work of Arora et al.~\cite{AroraGeLiMaZh17} suggests a dilemma about GANs' statistical properties: powerful discriminators cause overfitting, whereas weak discriminators cannot detect mode collapse. In contrast, we show in this paper that GANs can in principle learn distributions in Wasserstein distance (or KL-divergence in many cases) with polynomial sample complexity, if the discriminator class has strong distinguishing power against the particular generator class (instead of against all possible generators). For various generator classes such as mixture of Gaussians, exponential families, and invertible neural networks generators, we design corresponding discriminators (which are often neural nets of specific architectures) such that the Integral Probability Metric (IPM) induced by the discriminators can provably approximate the Wasserstein distance and/or KL-divergence. This implies that if the training is successful, then the learned distribution is close to the true distribution in Wasserstein distance or KL divergence, and thus cannot drop modes. Our preliminary experiments show that on synthetic datasets the test IPM is well correlated with KL divergence, indicating that the lack of diversity may be caused by the sub-optimality in optimization instead of statistical inefficiency.
We present new intuitions and theoretical assessments of the emergence of disentangled representation in variational autoencoders. Taking a rate-distortion theory perspective, we show the circumstances under which representations aligned with the underlying generative factors of variation of data emerge when optimising the modified ELBO bound in $\beta$-VAE, as training progresses. From these insights, we propose a modification to the training regime of $\beta$-VAE, that progressively increases the information capacity of the latent code during training. This modification facilitates the robust learning of disentangled representations in $\beta$-VAE, without the previous trade-off in reconstruction accuracy.