Bayesian modelling enables us to accommodate complex forms of data and make a comprehensive inference, but the effect of partial misspecification of the model is a concern. One approach in this setting is to modularize the model, and prevent feedback from suspect modules, using a cut model. After observing data, this leads to the cut distribution which normally does not have a closed-form. Previous studies have proposed algorithms to sample from this distribution, but these algorithms have unclear theoretical convergence properties. To address this, we propose a new algorithm called the Stochastic Approximation Cut algorithm (SACut) as an alternative. The algorithm is divided into two parallel chains. The main chain targets an approximation to the cut distribution; the auxiliary chain is used to form an adaptive proposal distribution for the main chain. We prove convergence of the samples drawn by the proposed algorithm and present the exact limit. Although SACut is biased, since the main chain does not target the exact cut distribution, we prove this bias can be reduced geometrically by increasing a user-chosen tuning parameter. In addition, parallel computing can be easily adopted for SACut, which greatly reduces computation time.
The deep neural network suffers from many fundamental issues in machine learning. For example, it often gets trapped into a local minimum in training, and its prediction uncertainty is hard to be assessed. To address these issues, we propose the so-called kernel-expanded stochastic neural network (K-StoNet) model, which incorporates support vector regression (SVR) as the first hidden layer and reformulates the neural network as a latent variable model. The former maps the input vector into an infinite dimensional feature space via a radial basis function (RBF) kernel, ensuring absence of local minima on its training loss surface. The latter breaks the high-dimensional nonconvex neural network training problem into a series of low-dimensional convex optimization problems, and enables its prediction uncertainty easily assessed. The K-StoNet can be easily trained using the imputation-regularized optimization (IRO) algorithm. Compared to traditional deep neural networks, K-StoNet possesses a theoretical guarantee to asymptotically converge to the global optimum and enables the prediction uncertainty easily assessed. The performances of the new model in training, prediction and uncertainty quantification are illustrated by simulated and real data examples.
Efficient contact tracing and isolation is an effective strategy to control epidemics. It was used effectively during the Ebola epidemic and successfully implemented in several parts of the world during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. An important consideration in contact tracing is the budget on the number of individuals asked to quarantine -- the budget is limited for socioeconomic reasons. In this paper, we present a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework to formulate the problem of using contact tracing to reduce the size of an outbreak while asking a limited number of people to quarantine. We formulate each step of the MDP as a combinatorial problem, MinExposed, which we demonstrate is NP-Hard; as a result, we develop an LP-based approximation algorithm. Though this algorithm directly solves MinExposed, it is often impractical in the real world due to information constraints. To this end, we develop a greedy approach based on insights from the analysis of the previous algorithm, which we show is more interpretable. A key feature of the greedy algorithm is that it does not need complete information of the underlying social contact network. This makes the heuristic implementable in practice and is an important consideration. Finally, we carry out experiments on simulations of the MDP run on real-world networks, and show how the algorithms can help in bending the epidemic curve while limiting the number of isolated individuals. Our experimental results demonstrate that the greedy algorithm and its variants are especially effective, robust, and practical in a variety of realistic scenarios, such as when the contact graph and specific transmission probabilities are not known. All code can be found in our GitHub repository: //github.com/gzli929/ContactTracing.
When are inferences (whether Direct-Likelihood, Bayesian, or Frequentist) obtained from partial data valid? This paper answers this question by offering a new asymptotic theory about inference with missing data that is more general than existing theories. By using more powerful tools from real analysis and probability theory than those used in previous research, it proves that as the sample size increases and the extent of missingness decreases, the mean-loglikelihood function generated by partial data and that ignores the missingness mechanism will almost surely converge uniformly to that which would have been generated by complete data; and if the data are Missing at Random, this convergence depends only on sample size. Thus, inferences from partial data, such as posterior modes, uncertainty estimates, confidence intervals, likelihood ratios, test statistics, and indeed, all quantities or features derived from the partial-data loglikelihood function, will be consistently estimated. They will approximate their complete-data analogues. This adds to previous research which has only proved the consistency and asymptotic normality of the posterior mode, and developed separate theories for Direct-Likelihood, Bayesian, and Frequentist inference. Practical implications of this result are discussed, and the theory is verified using a previous study of International Human Rights Law.
The aim of this paper is to describe a novel non-parametric noise reduction technique from the point of view of Bayesian inference that may automatically improve the signal-to-noise ratio of one- and two-dimensional data, such as e.g. astronomical images and spectra. The algorithm iteratively evaluates possible smoothed versions of the data, the smooth models, obtaining an estimation of the underlying signal that is statistically compatible with the noisy measurements. Iterations stop based on the evidence and the $\chi^2$ statistic of the last smooth model, and we compute the expected value of the signal as a weighted average of the whole set of smooth models. In this paper, we explain the mathematical formalism and numerical implementation of the algorithm, and we evaluate its performance in terms of the peak signal to noise ratio, the structural similarity index, and the time payload, using a battery of real astronomical observations. Our Fully Adaptive Bayesian Algorithm for Data Analysis (FABADA) yields results that, without any parameter tuning, are comparable to standard image processing algorithms whose parameters have been optimized based on the true signal to be recovered, something that is impossible in a real application. State-of-the-art non-parametric methods, such as BM3D, offer slightly better performance at high signal-to-noise ratio, while our algorithm is significantly more accurate for extremely noisy data (higher than $20-40\%$ relative errors, a situation of particular interest in the field of astronomy). In this range, the standard deviation of the residuals obtained by our reconstruction may become more than an order of magnitude lower than that of the original measurements. The source code needed to reproduce all the results presented in this report, including the implementation of the method, is publicly available at //github.com/PabloMSanAla/fabada
We consider a class of statistical estimation problems in which we are given a random data matrix ${\boldsymbol X}\in {\mathbb R}^{n\times d}$ (and possibly some labels ${\boldsymbol y}\in{\mathbb R}^n$) and would like to estimate a coefficient vector ${\boldsymbol \theta}\in{\mathbb R}^d$ (or possibly a constant number of such vectors). Special cases include low-rank matrix estimation and regularized estimation in generalized linear models (e.g., sparse regression). First order methods proceed by iteratively multiplying current estimates by ${\boldsymbol X}$ or its transpose. Examples include gradient descent or its accelerated variants. Celentano, Montanari, Wu proved that for any constant number of iterations (matrix vector multiplications), the optimal first order algorithm is a specific approximate message passing algorithm (known as `Bayes AMP'). The error of this estimator can be characterized in the high-dimensional asymptotics $n,d\to\infty$, $n/d\to\delta$, and provides a lower bound to the estimation error of any first order algorithm. Here we present a simpler proof of the same result, and generalize it to broader classes of data distributions and of first order algorithms, including algorithms with non-separable nonlinearities. Most importantly, the new proof technique does not require to construct an equivalent tree-structured estimation problem, and is therefore susceptible of a broader range of applications.
Measuring the predictability and complexity of time series using entropy is essential tool de-signing and controlling a nonlinear system. However, the existing methods have some drawbacks related to the strong dependence of entropy on the parameters of the methods. To overcome these difficulties, this study proposes a new method for estimating the entropy of a time series using the LogNNet neural network model. The LogNNet reservoir matrix is filled with time series elements according to our algorithm. The accuracy of the classification of images from the MNIST-10 database is considered as the entropy measure and denoted by NNetEn. The novelty of entropy calculation is that the time series is involved in mixing the input information in the res-ervoir. Greater complexity in the time series leads to a higher classification accuracy and higher NNetEn values. We introduce a new time series characteristic called time series learning inertia that determines the learning rate of the neural network. The robustness and efficiency of the method is verified on chaotic, periodic, random, binary, and constant time series. The comparison of NNetEn with other methods of entropy estimation demonstrates that our method is more robust and accurate and can be widely used in practice.
The difficulty in specifying rewards for many real-world problems has led to an increased focus on learning rewards from human feedback, such as demonstrations. However, there are often many different reward functions that explain the human feedback, leaving agents with uncertainty over what the true reward function is. While most policy optimization approaches handle this uncertainty by optimizing for expected performance, many applications demand risk-averse behavior. We derive a novel policy gradient-style robust optimization approach, PG-BROIL, that optimizes a soft-robust objective that balances expected performance and risk. To the best of our knowledge, PG-BROIL is the first policy optimization algorithm robust to a distribution of reward hypotheses which can scale to continuous MDPs. Results suggest that PG-BROIL can produce a family of behaviors ranging from risk-neutral to risk-averse and outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning algorithms when learning from ambiguous demonstrations by hedging against uncertainty, rather than seeking to uniquely identify the demonstrator's reward function.
Implicit probabilistic models are models defined naturally in terms of a sampling procedure and often induces a likelihood function that cannot be expressed explicitly. We develop a simple method for estimating parameters in implicit models that does not require knowledge of the form of the likelihood function or any derived quantities, but can be shown to be equivalent to maximizing likelihood under some conditions. Our result holds in the non-asymptotic parametric setting, where both the capacity of the model and the number of data examples are finite. We also demonstrate encouraging experimental results.
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.
Owing to the recent advances in "Big Data" modeling and prediction tasks, variational Bayesian estimation has gained popularity due to their ability to provide exact solutions to approximate posteriors. One key technique for approximate inference is stochastic variational inference (SVI). SVI poses variational inference as a stochastic optimization problem and solves it iteratively using noisy gradient estimates. It aims to handle massive data for predictive and classification tasks by applying complex Bayesian models that have observed as well as latent variables. This paper aims to decentralize it allowing parallel computation, secure learning and robustness benefits. We use Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers in a top-down setting to develop a distributed SVI algorithm such that independent learners running inference algorithms only require sharing the estimated model parameters instead of their private datasets. Our work extends the distributed SVI-ADMM algorithm that we first propose, to an ADMM-based networked SVI algorithm in which not only are the learners working distributively but they share information according to rules of a graph by which they form a network. This kind of work lies under the umbrella of `deep learning over networks' and we verify our algorithm for a topic-modeling problem for corpus of Wikipedia articles. We illustrate the results on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model in large document classification, compare performance with the centralized algorithm, and use numerical experiments to corroborate the analytical results.