Practical data assimilation algorithms often contain hyper-parameters, which may arise due to, for instance, the use of certain auxiliary techniques like covariance inflation and localization in an ensemble Kalman filter, the re-parameterization of certain quantities such as model and/or observation error covariance matrices, and so on. Given the richness of the established assimilation algorithms, and the abundance of the approaches through which hyper-parameters are introduced to the assimilation algorithms, one may ask whether it is possible to develop a sound and generic method to efficiently choose various types of (sometimes high-dimensional) hyper-parameters. This work aims to explore a feasible, although likely partial, answer to this question. Our main idea is built upon the notion that a data assimilation algorithm with hyper-parameters can be considered as a parametric mapping that links a set of quantities of interest (e.g., model state variables and/or parameters) to a corresponding set of predicted observations in the observation space. As such, the choice of hyper-parameters can be recast as a parameter estimation problem, in which our objective is to tune the hyper-parameters in such a way that the resulted predicted observations can match the real observations to a good extent. From this perspective, we propose a hyper-parameter estimation workflow and investigate the performance of this workflow in an ensemble Kalman filter. In a series of experiments, we observe that the proposed workflow works efficiently even in the presence of a relatively large amount (up to $10^3$) of hyper-parameters, and exhibits reasonably good and consistent performance under various conditions.
We develop a (co)algebraic framework to study a family of process calculi with monadic branching structures and recursion operators. Our framework features a uniform semantics of process terms and a complete axiomatisation of semantic equivalence. We show that there are uniformly defined fragments of our calculi that capture well-known examples from the literature like regular expressions modulo bisimilarity and guarded Kleene algebra with tests. We also derive new calculi for probabilistic and convex processes with an analogue of Kleene star.
We study \textit{rescaled gradient dynamical systems} in a Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$, where implicit discretization in a finite-dimensional Euclidean space leads to high-order methods for solving monotone equations (MEs). Our framework can be interpreted as a natural generalization of celebrated dual extrapolation method~\citep{Nesterov-2007-Dual} from first order to high order via appeal to the regularization toolbox of optimization theory~\citep{Nesterov-2021-Implementable, Nesterov-2021-Inexact}. More specifically, we establish the existence and uniqueness of a global solution and analyze the convergence properties of solution trajectories. We also present discrete-time counterparts of our high-order continuous-time methods, and we show that the $p^{th}$-order method achieves an ergodic rate of $O(k^{-(p+1)/2})$ in terms of a restricted merit function and a pointwise rate of $O(k^{-p/2})$ in terms of a residue function. Under regularity conditions, the restarted version of $p^{th}$-order methods achieves local convergence with the order $p \geq 2$. Notably, our methods are \textit{optimal} since they have matched the lower bound established for solving the monotone equation problems under a standard linear span assumption~\citep{Lin-2022-Perseus}.
The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) has emerged as a powerful tool to provide memorization, optimization and generalization guarantees in deep neural networks. A line of work has studied the NTK spectrum for two-layer and deep networks with at least a layer with $\Omega(N)$ neurons, $N$ being the number of training samples. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence suggesting that deep networks with sub-linear layer widths are powerful memorizers and optimizers, as long as the number of parameters exceeds the number of samples. Thus, a natural open question is whether the NTK is well conditioned in such a challenging sub-linear setup. In this paper, we answer this question in the affirmative. Our key technical contribution is a lower bound on the smallest NTK eigenvalue for deep networks with the minimum possible over-parameterization: the number of parameters is roughly $\Omega(N)$ and, hence, the number of neurons is as little as $\Omega(\sqrt{N})$. To showcase the applicability of our NTK bounds, we provide two results concerning memorization capacity and optimization guarantees for gradient descent training.
Bi-quadratic programming over unit spheres is a fundamental problem in quantum mechanics introduced by pioneer work of Einstein, Schr\"odinger, and others. It has been shown to be NP-hard; so it must be solve by efficient heuristic algorithms such as the block improvement method (BIM). This paper focuses on the maximization of bi-quadratic forms, which leads to a rank-one approximation problem that is equivalent to computing the M-spectral radius and its corresponding eigenvectors. Specifically, we provide a tight upper bound of the M-spectral radius for nonnegative fourth-order partially symmetric (PS) tensors, which can be considered as an approximation of the M-spectral radius. Furthermore, we showed that the proposed upper bound can be obtained more efficiently, if the nonnegative fourth-order PS-tensors is a member of certain monoid semigroups. Furthermore, as an extension of the proposed upper bound, we derive the exact solutions of the M-spectral radius and its corresponding M-eigenvectors for certain classes of fourth-order PS-tensors. Lastly, as an application of the proposed bound, we obtain a practically testable sufficient condition for nonsingular elasticity M-tensors with strong ellipticity condition. We conduct several numerical experiments to demonstrate the utility of the proposed results. The results show that: (a) our proposed method can attain a tight upper bound of the M-spectral radius with little computational burden, and (b) such tight and efficient upper bounds greatly enhance the convergence speed of the BIM-algorithm, allowing it to be applicable for large-scale problems in applications.
It is a well-known fact that there is no complete and discrete invariant on the collection of all multiparameter persistence modules. Nonetheless, many invariants have been proposed in the literature to study multiparameter persistence modules, though each invariant will lose some amount of information. One such invariant is the generalized rank invariant. This invariant is known to be complete on the class of interval decomposable persistence modules in general, under mild assumptions on the indexing poset $P$. There is often a trade-off, where the stronger an invariant is, the more expensive it is to compute in practice. The generalized rank invariant on its own is difficult to compute, whereas the standard rank invariant is readily computable through software implementations such as RIVET. We can interpolate between these two to induce new invariants via restricting the domain of the generalized rank invariant, and this family exhibits the aforementioned trade-off. This work studies the tension which exists between computational efficiency and retaining strength when restricting the domain of the generalized rank invariant. We provide a characterization result on where such restrictions are complete invariants in the setting where $P$ is finite, and furthermore show that such restricted generalized rank invariants are stable.
The Kalman filter has been adopted in acoustic echo cancellation due to its robustness to double-talk, fast convergence, and good steady-state performance. The performance of Kalman filter is closely related to the estimation accuracy of the state noise covariance and the observation noise covariance. The estimation error may lead to unacceptable results, especially when the echo path suffers abrupt changes, the tracking performance of the Kalman filter could be degraded significantly. In this paper, we propose the neural Kalman filtering (NKF), which uses neural networks to implicitly model the covariance of the state noise and observation noise and to output the Kalman gain in real-time. Experimental results on both synthetic test sets and real-recorded test sets show that, the proposed NKF has superior convergence and re-convergence performance while ensuring low near-end speech degradation comparing with the state-of-the-art model-based methods. Moreover, the model size of the proposed NKF is merely 5.3 K and the RTF is as low as 0.09, which indicates that it can be deployed in low-resource platforms.
Visualization and analysis of multivariate data and their uncertainty are top research challenges in data visualization. Constructing fiber surfaces is a popular technique for multivariate data visualization that generalizes the idea of level-set visualization for univariate data to multivariate data. In this paper, we present a statistical framework to quantify positional probabilities of fibers extracted from uncertain bivariate fields. Specifically, we extend the state-of-the-art Gaussian models of uncertainty for bivariate data to other parametric distributions (e.g., uniform and Epanechnikov) and more general nonparametric probability distributions (e.g., histograms and kernel density estimation) and derive corresponding spatial probabilities of fibers. In our proposed framework, we leverage Green's theorem for closed-form computation of fiber probabilities when bivariate data are assumed to have independent parametric and nonparametric noise. Additionally, we present a nonparametric approach combined with numerical integration to study the positional probability of fibers when bivariate data are assumed to have correlated noise. For uncertainty analysis, we visualize the derived probability volumes for fibers via volume rendering and extracting level sets based on probability thresholds. We present the utility of our proposed techniques via experiments on synthetic and simulation datasets.
In dynamical systems, it is advantageous to identify regions of flow which can exhibit maximal influence on nearby behaviour. Hyperbolic Lagrangian Coherent Structures have been introduced to obtain two-dimensional surfaces which maximise repulsion or attraction in three-dimensional dynamical systems with arbitrary time-dependence. However, the numerical method to compute them requires obtaining derivatives associated with the system, often performed through the approximation of divided differences, which can lead to significant numerical error and numerical noise. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for the numerical calculation of hyperbolic Lagrangian Coherent Structures using Differential Algebra called DA-LCS. As a form of automatic forward differentiation, it allows direct computation of the Taylor expansion of the flow, its derivatives, and the eigenvectors of the associated strain tensor, with all derivatives obtained algebraically and to machine precision. It does so without a priori information about the system, such as variational equations or explicit derivatives. We demonstrate that this can provide significant improvements in the accuracy of the Lagrangian Coherent Structures identified compared to finite-differencing methods in a series of test cases drawn from the literature. We also show how DA-LCS uncovers additional dynamical behaviour in a real-world example drawn from astrodynamics.
Heterogeneity is a dominant factor in the behaviour of many biological processes. Despite this, it is common for mathematical and statistical analyses to ignore biological heterogeneity as a source of variability in experimental data. Therefore, methods for exploring the identifiability of models that explicitly incorporate heterogeneity through variability in model parameters are relatively underdeveloped. We develop a new likelihood-based framework, based on moment matching, for inference and identifiability analysis of differential equation models that capture biological heterogeneity through parameters that vary according to probability distributions. As our novel method is based on an approximate likelihood function, it is highly flexible; we demonstrate identifiability analysis using both a frequentist approach based on profile likelihood, and a Bayesian approach based on Markov-chain Monte Carlo. Through three case studies, we demonstrate our method by providing a didactic guide to inference and identifiability analysis of hyperparameters that relate to the statistical moments of model parameters from independent observed data. Our approach has a computational cost comparable to analysis of models that neglect heterogeneity, a significant improvement over many existing alternatives. We demonstrate how analysis of random parameter models can aid better understanding of the sources of heterogeneity from biological data.
Modeling multivariate time series has long been a subject that has attracted researchers from a diverse range of fields including economics, finance, and traffic. A basic assumption behind multivariate time series forecasting is that its variables depend on one another but, upon looking closely, it is fair to say that existing methods fail to fully exploit latent spatial dependencies between pairs of variables. In recent years, meanwhile, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high capability in handling relational dependencies. GNNs require well-defined graph structures for information propagation which means they cannot be applied directly for multivariate time series where the dependencies are not known in advance. In this paper, we propose a general graph neural network framework designed specifically for multivariate time series data. Our approach automatically extracts the uni-directed relations among variables through a graph learning module, into which external knowledge like variable attributes can be easily integrated. A novel mix-hop propagation layer and a dilated inception layer are further proposed to capture the spatial and temporal dependencies within the time series. The graph learning, graph convolution, and temporal convolution modules are jointly learned in an end-to-end framework. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on 3 of 4 benchmark datasets and achieves on-par performance with other approaches on two traffic datasets which provide extra structural information.