Often the question arises whether $Y$ can be predicted based on $X$ using a certain model. Especially for highly flexible models such as neural networks one may ask whether a seemingly good prediction is actually better than fitting pure noise or whether it has to be attributed to the flexibility of the model. This paper proposes a rigorous permutation test to assess whether the prediction is better than the prediction of pure noise. The test avoids any sample splitting and is based instead on generating new pairings of $(X_i, Y_j)$. It introduces a new formulation of the null hypothesis and rigorous justification for the test, which distinguishes it from previous literature. The theoretical findings are applied both to simulated data and to sensor data of tennis serves in an experimental context. The simulation study underscores how the available information affects the test. It shows that the less informative the predictors, the lower the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis of fitting pure noise and emphasizes that detecting weaker dependence between variables requires a sufficient sample size.
This paper deals with Hermite osculatory interpolating splines. For a partition of a real interval endowed with a refinement consisting in dividing each subinterval into two small subintervals, we consider a space of smooth splines with additional smoothness at the vertices of the initial partition, and of the lowest possible degree. A normalized B-spline-like representation for the considered spline space is provided. In addition, several quasi-interpolation operators based on blossoming and control polynomials have also been developed. Some numerical tests are presented and compared with some recent works to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.
Physics-compliant models of RIS-parametrized channels assign a load-terminated port to each RIS element. For conventional diagonal RIS (D-RIS), each auxiliary port is terminated by its own independent and individually tunable load (i.e., independent of the other auxiliary ports). For beyond-diagonal RIS (BD-RIS), the auxiliary ports are terminated by a tunable load circuit which couples the auxiliary ports to each other. Here, we point out that a physics-compliant model of the load circuit of a BD-RIS takes the same form as a physics-compliant model of a D-RIS-parametrized radio environment: a multi-port network with a subset of ports terminated by individually tunable loads (independent of each other). Consequently, we recognize that a BD-RIS-parametrized radio environment can be understood as a multi-port cascade network (i.e., the cascade of radio environment with load circuit) terminated by individually tunable loads (independent of each other). Hence, the BD-RIS problem can be mapped into the original D-RIS problem by replacing the radio environment with the cascade of radio environment and load circuit. The insight that BD-RIS can be physics-compliantly analyzed with the conventional D-RIS formalism implies that (i) the same optimization protocols as for D-RIS can be used for the BD-RIS case, and (ii) it is unclear if existing comparisons between BD-RIS and D-RIS are fair because for a fixed number of RIS elements, a BD-RIS has usually more tunable lumped elements.
We present an estimator of the covariance matrix $\Sigma$ of random $d$-dimensional vector from an i.i.d. sample of size $n$. Our sole assumption is that this vector satisfies a bounded $L^p-L^2$ moment assumption over its one-dimensional marginals, for some $p\geq 4$. Given this, we show that $\Sigma$ can be estimated from the sample with the same high-probability error rates that the sample covariance matrix achieves in the case of Gaussian data. This holds even though we allow for very general distributions that may not have moments of order $>p$. Moreover, our estimator can be made to be optimally robust to adversarial contamination. This result improves the recent contributions by Mendelson and Zhivotovskiy and Catoni and Giulini, and matches parallel work by Abdalla and Zhivotovskiy (the exact relationship with this last work is described in the paper).
The present article aims to design and analyze efficient first-order strong schemes for a generalized A\"{i}t-Sahalia type model arising in mathematical finance and evolving in a positive domain $(0, \infty)$, which possesses a diffusion term with superlinear growth and a highly nonlinear drift that blows up at the origin. Such a complicated structure of the model unavoidably causes essential difficulties in the construction and convergence analysis of time discretizations. By incorporating implicitness in the term $\alpha_{-1} x^{-1}$ and a corrective mapping $\Phi_h$ in the recursion, we develop a novel class of explicit and unconditionally positivity-preserving (i.e., for any step-size $h>0$) Milstein-type schemes for the underlying model. In both non-critical and general critical cases, we introduce a novel approach to analyze mean-square error bounds of the novel schemes, without relying on a priori high-order moment bounds of the numerical approximations. The expected order-one mean-square convergence is attained for the proposed scheme. The above theoretical guarantee can be used to justify the optimal complexity of the Multilevel Monte Carlo method. Numerical experiments are finally provided to verify the theoretical findings.
Many complex tasks can be decomposed into simpler, independent parts. Discovering such underlying compositional structure has the potential to enable compositional generalization. Despite progress, our most powerful systems struggle to compose flexibly. It therefore seems natural to make models more modular to help capture the compositional nature of many tasks. However, it is unclear under which circumstances modular systems can discover hidden compositional structure. To shed light on this question, we study a teacher-student setting with a modular teacher where we have full control over the composition of ground truth modules. This allows us to relate the problem of compositional generalization to that of identification of the underlying modules. In particular we study modularity in hypernetworks representing a general class of multiplicative interactions. We show theoretically that identification up to linear transformation purely from demonstrations is possible without having to learn an exponential number of module combinations. We further demonstrate empirically that under the theoretically identified conditions, meta-learning from finite data can discover modular policies that generalize compositionally in a number of complex environments.
We propose a type-theoretic framework for describing and proving properties of quantum computations, in particular those presented as quantum circuits. Our proposal is based on an observation that, in the polymorphic type system of Coq, currying on quantum states allows us to apply quantum gates directly inside a complex circuit. By introducing a discrete notion of lens to control this currying, we are further able to separate the combinatorics of the circuit structure from the computational content of gates. We apply our development to define quantum circuits recursively from the bottom up, and prove their correctness compositionally.
We address the problem of the best uniform approximation of a continuous function on a convex domain. The approximation is by linear combinations of a finite system of functions (not necessarily Chebyshev) under arbitrary linear constraints. By modifying the concept of alternance and of the Remez iterative procedure we present a method, which demonstrates its efficiency in numerical problems. The linear rate of convergence is proved under some favourable assumptions. A special attention is paid to systems of complex exponents, Gaussian functions, lacunar algebraic and trigonometric polynomials. Applications to signal processing, linear ODE, switching dynamical systems, and to Markov-Bernstein type inequalities are considered.
Deep generative models aim to learn the underlying distribution of data and generate new ones. Despite the diversity of generative models and their high-quality generation performance in practice, most of them lack rigorous theoretical convergence proofs. In this work, we aim to establish some convergence results for OT-Flow, one of the deep generative models. First, by reformulating the framework of OT-Flow model, we establish the $\Gamma$-convergence of the formulation of OT-flow to the corresponding optimal transport (OT) problem as the regularization term parameter $\alpha$ goes to infinity. Second, since the loss function will be approximated by Monte Carlo method in training, we established the convergence between the discrete loss function and the continuous one when the sample number $N$ goes to infinity as well. Meanwhile, the approximation capability of the neural network provides an upper bound for the discrete loss function of the minimizers. The proofs in both aspects provide convincing assurances for OT-Flow.
We study differentially private (DP) estimation of a rank-$r$ matrix $M \in \RR^{d_1\times d_2}$ under the trace regression model with Gaussian measurement matrices. Theoretically, the sensitivity of non-private spectral initialization is precisely characterized, and the differential-privacy-constrained minimax lower bound for estimating $M$ under the Schatten-$q$ norm is established. Methodologically, the paper introduces a computationally efficient algorithm for DP-initialization with a sample size of $n \geq \wt O (r^2 (d_1\vee d_2))$. Under certain regularity conditions, the DP-initialization falls within a local ball surrounding $M$. We also propose a differentially private algorithm for estimating $M$ based on Riemannian optimization (DP-RGrad), which achieves a near-optimal convergence rate with the DP-initialization and sample size of $n \geq \wt O(r (d_1 + d_2))$. Finally, the paper discusses the non-trivial gap between the minimax lower bound and the upper bound of low-rank matrix estimation under the trace regression model. It is shown that the estimator given by DP-RGrad attains the optimal convergence rate in a weaker notion of differential privacy. Our powerful technique for analyzing the sensitivity of initialization requires no eigengap condition between $r$ non-zero singular values.
Within the nonparametric diffusion model, we develop a multiple test to infer about similarity of an unknown drift $b$ to some reference drift $b_0$: At prescribed significance, we simultaneously identify those regions where violation from similiarity occurs, without a priori knowledge of their number, size and location. This test is shown to be minimax-optimal and adaptive. At the same time, the procedure is robust under small deviation from Brownian motion as the driving noise process. A detailed investigation for fractional driving noise, which is neither a semimartingale nor a Markov process, is provided for Hurst indices close to the Brownian motion case.