In many modern statistical problems, the limited available data must be used both to develop the hypotheses to test, and to test these hypotheses-that is, both for exploratory and confirmatory data analysis. Reusing the same dataset for both exploration and testing can lead to massive selection bias, leading to many false discoveries. Selective inference is a framework that allows for performing valid inference even when the same data is reused for exploration and testing. In this work, we are interested in the problem of selective inference for data clustering, where a clustering procedure is used to hypothesize a separation of the data points into a collection of subgroups, and we then wish to test whether these data-dependent clusters in fact represent meaningful differences within the data. Recent work by Gao et al. [2022] provides a framework for doing selective inference for this setting, where the hierarchical clustering algorithm is used for producing the cluster assignments, which was then extended to k-means clustering by Chen and Witten [2022]. Both these works rely on assuming a known covariance structure for the data, but in practice, the noise level needs to be estimated-and this is particularly challenging when the true cluster structure is unknown. In our work, we extend to the setting of noise with unknown variance, and provide a selective inference method for this more general setting. Empirical results show that our new method is better able to maintain high power while controlling Type I error when the true noise level is unknown.
Age of information (AoI) is a powerful metric to evaluate the freshness of information, where minimization of average statistics, such as the average AoI and average peak AoI, currently prevails in guiding freshness optimization for related applications. Although minimizing the statistics does improve the received information's freshness for status update systems in the sense of average, the time-varying fading characteristics of wireless channels often cause uncertain yet frequent age violations. The recently-proposed statistical AoI metric can better characterize more features of AoI dynamics, which evaluates the achievable minimum peak AoI under the certain constraint on age violation probability. In this paper, we study the statistical AoI minimization problem for status update systems over multi-state fading channels, which can effectively upper-bound the AoI violation probability but introduce the prohibitively-high computing complexity. To resolve this issue, we tackle the problem with a two-fold approach. For a small AoI exponent, the problem is approximated via a fractional programming problem. For a large AoI exponent, the problem is converted to a convex problem. Solving the two problems respectively, we derive the near-optimal sampling interval for diverse status update systems. Insightful observations are obtained on how sampling interval shall be tuned as a decreasing function of channel state information (CSI). Surprisingly, for the extremely stringent AoI requirement, the sampling interval converges to a constant regardless of CSI's variation. Numerical results verify effectiveness as well as superiority of our proposed scheme.
We develop an optimization-based algorithm for parametric model order reduction (PMOR) of linear time-invariant dynamical systems. Our method aims at minimizing the $\mathcal{H}_\infty \otimes \mathcal{L}_\infty$ approximation error in the frequency and parameter domain by an optimization of the reduced order model (ROM) matrices. State-of-the-art PMOR methods often compute several nonparametric ROMs for different parameter samples, which are then combined to a single parametric ROM. However, these parametric ROMs can have a low accuracy between the utilized sample points. In contrast, our optimization-based PMOR method minimizes the approximation error across the entire parameter domain. Moreover, due to our flexible approach of optimizing the system matrices directly, we can enforce favorable features such as a port-Hamiltonian structure in our ROMs across the entire parameter domain. Our method is an extension of the recently developed SOBMOR-algorithm to parametric systems. We extend both the ROM parameterization and the adaptive sampling procedure to the parametric case. Several numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness and high accuracy of our method in a comparison with other PMOR methods.
It is a common phenomenon that for high-dimensional and nonparametric statistical models, rate-optimal estimators balance squared bias and variance. Although this balancing is widely observed, little is known whether methods exist that could avoid the trade-off between bias and variance. We propose a general strategy to obtain lower bounds on the variance of any estimator with bias smaller than a prespecified bound. This shows to which extent the bias-variance trade-off is unavoidable and allows to quantify the loss of performance for methods that do not obey it. The approach is based on a number of abstract lower bounds for the variance involving the change of expectation with respect to different probability measures as well as information measures such as the Kullback-Leibler or $\chi^2$-divergence. In a second part of the article, the abstract lower bounds are applied to several statistical models including the Gaussian white noise model, a boundary estimation problem, the Gaussian sequence model and the high-dimensional linear regression model. For these specific statistical applications, different types of bias-variance trade-offs occur that vary considerably in their strength. For the trade-off between integrated squared bias and integrated variance in the Gaussian white noise model, we propose to combine the general strategy for lower bounds with a reduction technique. This allows us to reduce the original problem to a lower bound on the bias-variance trade-off for estimators with additional symmetry properties in a simpler statistical model. In the Gaussian sequence model, different phase transitions of the bias-variance trade-off occur. Although there is a non-trivial interplay between bias and variance, the rate of the squared bias and the variance do not have to be balanced in order to achieve the minimax estimation rate.
This paper proposes a methodology for discovering meaningful properties in data by exploring the latent space of unsupervised deep generative models. We combine manipulation of individual latent variables to extreme values outside the training range with methods inspired by causal inference into an approach we call causal disentanglement with extreme values (CDEV) and show that this approach yields insights for model interpretability. Using this technique, we can infer what properties of unknown data the model encodes as meaningful. We apply the methodology to test what is meaningful in the communication system of sperm whales, one of the most intriguing and understudied animal communication systems. We train a network that has been shown to learn meaningful representations of speech and test whether we can leverage such unsupervised learning to decipher the properties of another vocal communication system for which we have no ground truth. The proposed technique suggests that sperm whales encode information using the number of clicks in a sequence, the regularity of their timing, and audio properties such as the spectral mean and the acoustic regularity of the sequences. Some of these findings are consistent with existing hypotheses, while others are proposed for the first time. We also argue that our models uncover rules that govern the structure of communication units in the sperm whale communication system and apply them while generating innovative data not shown during training. This paper suggests that an interpretation of the outputs of deep neural networks with causal methodology can be a viable strategy for approaching data about which little is known and presents another case of how deep learning can limit the hypothesis space. Finally, the proposed approach combining latent space manipulation and causal inference can be extended to other architectures and arbitrary datasets.
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 a covariate-adaptive stratified randomization procedure. 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 and empirical demonstration show the practical relevance of our theoretical results.
The coresets approach, also called subsampling or subset selection, aims to select a subsample as a surrogate for the observed sample. Such an approach has been used pervasively in large-scale data analysis. Existing coresets methods construct the subsample using a subset of rows from the predictor matrix. Such methods can be significantly inefficient when the predictor matrix is sparse or numerically sparse. To overcome the limitation, we develop a novel element-wise subset selection approach, called core-elements, for large-scale least squares estimation in classical linear regression. We provide a deterministic algorithm to construct the core-elements estimator, only requiring an $O(\mbox{nnz}(\mathbf{X})+rp^2)$ computational cost, where $\mathbf{X}$ is an $n\times p$ predictor matrix, $r$ is the number of elements selected from each column of $\mathbf{X}$, and $\mbox{nnz}(\cdot)$ denotes the number of non-zero elements. Theoretically, we show that the proposed estimator is unbiased and approximately minimizes an upper bound of the estimation variance. We also provide an approximation guarantee by deriving a coresets-like finite sample bound for the proposed estimator. To handle potential outliers in the data, we further combine core-elements with the median-of-means procedure, resulting in an efficient and robust estimator with theoretical consistency guarantees. Numerical studies on various synthetic and open-source datasets demonstrate the proposed method's superior performance compared to mainstream competitors.
Selection of covariates is crucial in the estimation of average treatment effects given observational data with high or even ultra-high dimensional pretreatment variables. Existing methods for this problem typically assume sparse linear models for both outcome and univariate treatment, and cannot handle situations with ultra-high dimensional covariates. In this paper, we propose a new covariate selection strategy called double screening prior adaptive lasso (DSPAL) to select confounders and predictors of the outcome for multivariate treatments, which combines the adaptive lasso method with the marginal conditional (in)dependence prior information to select target covariates, in order to eliminate confounding bias and improve statistical efficiency. The distinctive features of our proposal are that it can be applied to high-dimensional or even ultra-high dimensional covariates for multivariate treatments, and can deal with the cases of both parametric and nonparametric outcome models, which makes it more robust compared to other methods. Our theoretical analyses show that the proposed procedure enjoys the sure screening property, the ranking consistency property and the variable selection consistency. Through a simulation study, we demonstrate that the proposed approach selects all confounders and predictors consistently and estimates the multivariate treatment effects with smaller bias and mean squared error compared to several alternatives under various scenarios. In real data analysis, the method is applied to estimate the causal effect of a three-dimensional continuous environmental treatment on cholesterol level and enlightening results are obtained.
Causal discovery and causal reasoning are classically treated as separate and consecutive tasks: one first infers the causal graph, and then uses it to estimate causal effects of interventions. However, such a two-stage approach is uneconomical, especially in terms of actively collected interventional data, since the causal query of interest may not require a fully-specified causal model. From a Bayesian perspective, it is also unnatural, since a causal query (e.g., the causal graph or some causal effect) can be viewed as a latent quantity subject to posterior inference -- other unobserved quantities that are not of direct interest (e.g., the full causal model) ought to be marginalized out in this process and contribute to our epistemic uncertainty. In this work, we propose Active Bayesian Causal Inference (ABCI), a fully-Bayesian active learning framework for integrated causal discovery and reasoning, which jointly infers a posterior over causal models and queries of interest. In our approach to ABCI, we focus on the class of causally-sufficient, nonlinear additive noise models, which we model using Gaussian processes. We sequentially design experiments that are maximally informative about our target causal query, collect the corresponding interventional data, and update our beliefs to choose the next experiment. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our approach is more data-efficient than several baselines that only focus on learning the full causal graph. This allows us to accurately learn downstream causal queries from fewer samples while providing well-calibrated uncertainty estimates for the quantities of interest.
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and wide-spread techniques in exploratory data analysis. Yet, the basic approach to clustering has not really changed: a practitioner hand-picks a task-specific clustering loss to optimize and fit the given data to reveal the underlying cluster structure. Some types of losses---such as k-means, or its non-linear version: kernelized k-means (centroid based), and DBSCAN (density based)---are popular choices due to their good empirical performance on a range of applications. Although every so often the clustering output using these standard losses fails to reveal the underlying structure, and the practitioner has to custom-design their own variation. In this work we take an intrinsically different approach to clustering: rather than fitting a dataset to a specific clustering loss, we train a recurrent model that learns how to cluster. The model uses as training pairs examples of datasets (as input) and its corresponding cluster identities (as output). By providing multiple types of training datasets as inputs, our model has the ability to generalize well on unseen datasets (new clustering tasks). Our experiments reveal that by training on simple synthetically generated datasets or on existing real datasets, we can achieve better clustering performance on unseen real-world datasets when compared with standard benchmark clustering techniques. Our meta clustering model works well even for small datasets where the usual deep learning models tend to perform worse.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.