We develop a post-selective Bayesian framework to jointly and consistently estimate parameters in group-sparse linear regression models. After selection with the Group LASSO (or generalized variants such as the overlapping, sparse, or standardized Group LASSO), uncertainty estimates for the selected parameters are unreliable in the absence of adjustments for selection bias. Existing post-selective approaches are limited to uncertainty estimation for (i) real-valued projections onto very specific selected subspaces for the group-sparse problem, (ii) selection events categorized broadly as polyhedral events that are expressible as linear inequalities in the data variables. Our Bayesian methods address these gaps by deriving a likelihood adjustment factor, and an approximation thereof, that eliminates bias from selection. Paying a very nominal price for this adjustment, experiments on simulated data, and data from the Human Connectome Project demonstrate the efficacy of our methods for a joint estimation of group-sparse parameters and their uncertainties post selection.
We aim to make inferences about a smooth, finite-dimensional parameter by fusing data from multiple sources together. Previous works have studied the estimation of a variety of parameters in similar data fusion settings, including in the estimation of the average treatment effect, optimal treatment rule, and average reward, with the majority of them merging one historical data source with covariates, actions, and rewards and one data source of the same covariates. In this work, we consider the general case where one or more data sources align with each part of the distribution of the target population, for example, the conditional distribution of the reward given actions and covariates. We describe potential gains in efficiency that can arise from fusing these data sources together in a single analysis, which we characterize by a reduction in the semiparametric efficiency bound. We also provide a general means to construct estimators that achieve these bounds. In numerical experiments, we show marked improvements in efficiency from using our proposed estimators rather than their natural alternatives. Finally, we illustrate the magnitude of efficiency gains that can be realized in vaccine immunogenicity studies by fusing data from two HIV vaccine trials.
Bayesian methods feature useful properties for solving inverse problems, such as tomographic reconstruction. The prior distribution introduces regularization, which helps solving the ill-posed problem and reduces overfitting. In practice, this often results in a suboptimal posterior temperature and the full potential of the Bayesian approach is not realized. In this paper, we optimize both the parameters of the prior distribution and the posterior temperature using Bayesian optimization. Well-tempered posteriors lead to better predictive performance and improved uncertainty calibration, which we demonstrate for the task of sparse-view CT reconstruction.
Estimating the mask-wearing ratio in public places is important as it enables health authorities to promptly analyze and implement policies. Methods for estimating the mask-wearing ratio on the basis of image analysis have been reported. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive research on both methodologies and datasets. Most recent reports straightforwardly propose estimating the ratio by applying conventional object detection and classification methods. It is feasible to use regression-based approaches to estimate the number of people wearing masks, especially for congested scenes with tiny and occluded faces, but this has not been well studied. A large-scale and well-annotated dataset is still in demand. In this paper, we present two methods for ratio estimation that leverage either a detection-based or regression-based approach. For the detection-based approach, we improved the state-of-the-art face detector, RetinaFace, used to estimate the ratio. For the regression-based approach, we fine-tuned the baseline network, CSRNet, used to estimate the density maps for masked and unmasked faces. We also present the first large-scale dataset, the ``NFM dataset,'' which contains 581,108 face annotations extracted from 18,088 video frames in 17 street-view videos. Experiments demonstrated that the RetinaFace-based method has higher accuracy under various situations and that the CSRNet-based method has a shorter operation time thanks to its compactness.
Human pose information is a critical component in many downstream image processing tasks, such as activity recognition and motion tracking. Likewise, a pose estimator for the illustrated character domain would provide a valuable prior for assistive content creation tasks, such as reference pose retrieval and automatic character animation. But while modern data-driven techniques have substantially improved pose estimation performance on natural images, little work has been done for illustrations. In our work, we bridge this domain gap by efficiently transfer-learning from both domain-specific and task-specific source models. Additionally, we upgrade and expand an existing illustrated pose estimation dataset, and introduce two new datasets for classification and segmentation subtasks. We then apply the resultant state-of-the-art character pose estimator to solve the novel task of pose-guided illustration retrieval. All data, models, and code will be made publicly available.
Quality of Life (QOL) outcomes are important in the management of chronic illnesses. In studies of efficacies of treatments or intervention modalities, QOL scales multi-dimensional constructs are routinely used as primary endpoints. The standard data analysis strategy computes composite (average) overall and domain scores, and conducts a mixed-model analysis for evaluating efficacy or monitoring medical conditions as if these scores were in continuous metric scale. However, assumptions of parametric models like continuity and homoscedastivity can be violated in many cases. Furthermore, it is even more challenging when there are missing values on some of the variables. In this paper, we propose a purely nonparametric approach in the sense that meaningful and, yet, nonparametric effect size measures are developed. We propose estimator for the effect size and develop the asymptotic properties. Our methods are shown to be particularly effective in the presence of some form of clustering and/or missing values. Inferential procedures are derived from the asymptotic theory. The Asthma Randomized Trial of Indoor Wood Smoke data will be used to illustrate the applications of the proposed methods. The data was collected from a three-arm randomized trial which evaluated interventions targeting biomass smoke particulate matter from older model residential wood stoves in homes that have children with asthma.
There are several challenges associated with inverse problems in which we seek to reconstruct a piecewise constant field, and which we model using multiple level sets. Adopting a Bayesian viewpoint, we impose prior distributions on both the level set functions that determine the piecewise constant regions as well as the parameters that determine their magnitudes. We develop a Gauss-Newton approach with a backtracking line search to efficiently compute the maximum a priori (MAP) estimate as a solution to the inverse problem. We use the Gauss-Newton Laplace approximation to construct a Gaussian approximation of the posterior distribution and use preconditioned Krylov subspace methods to sample from the resulting approximation. To visualize the uncertainty associated with the parameter reconstructions we compute the approximate posterior variance using a matrix-free Monte Carlo diagonal estimator, which we develop in this paper. We will demonstrate the benefits of our approach and solvers on synthetic test problems (photoacoustic and hydraulic tomography, respectively a linear and nonlinear inverse problem) as well as an application to X-ray imaging with real data.
A completely randomized experiment allows us to estimate the causal effect by the difference in the averages of the outcome under the treatment and control. But, difference-in-means type estimators behave poorly if the potential outcomes have a heavy-tail, or contain a few extreme observations or outliers. We study an alternative estimator by Rosenbaum that estimates the causal effect by inverting a randomization test using ranks. We study the asymptotic properties of this estimator and develop a framework to compare the efficiencies of different estimators of the treatment effect in the setting of randomized experiments. In particular, we show that the Rosenbaum estimator has variance that is asymptotically, in the worst case, at most about 1.16 times the variance of the difference-in-means estimator, and can be much smaller when the potential outcomes are not light-tailed. We further derive a consistent estimator of the asymptotic standard error for the Rosenbaum estimator which immediately yields a readily computable confidence interval for the treatment effect, thereby alleviating the expensive numerical calculations needed to implement the original proposal of Rosenbaum. Further, we propose a regression adjusted version of the Rosenbaum estimator to incorporate additional covariate information in randomization inference. We prove gain in efficiency by this regression adjustment method under a linear regression model. Finally, we illustrate through simulations that, unlike the difference-in-means based estimators, either unadjusted or regression adjusted, these rank-based estimators are efficient and robust against heavy-tailed distributions, contamination, and various model misspecifications.
The modeling and simulation of dynamical systems is a necessary step for many control approaches. Using classical, parameter-based techniques for modeling of modern systems, e.g., soft robotics or human-robot interaction, is often challenging or even infeasible due to the complexity of the system dynamics. In contrast, data-driven approaches need only a minimum of prior knowledge and scale with the complexity of the system. In particular, Gaussian process dynamical models (GPDMs) provide very promising results for the modeling of complex dynamics. However, the control properties of these GP models are just sparsely researched, which leads to a "blackbox" treatment in modeling and control scenarios. In addition, the sampling of GPDMs for prediction purpose respecting their non-parametric nature results in non-Markovian dynamics making the theoretical analysis challenging. In this article, we present approximated GPDMs which are Markov and analyze their control theoretical properties. Among others, the approximated error is analyzed and conditions for boundedness of the trajectories are provided. The outcomes are illustrated with numerical examples that show the power of the approximated models while the the computational time is significantly reduced.
This paper deals with the grouped variable selection problem. A widely used strategy is to equip the loss function with a sparsity-promoting penalty. Existing methods include the group Lasso, group SCAD, and group MCP. The group Lasso solves a convex optimization problem but is plagued by underestimation bias. The group SCAD and group MCP avoid the estimation bias but require solving a non-convex optimization problem that suffers from local optima. In this work, we propose an alternative method based on the generalized minimax concave (GMC) penalty, which is a folded concave penalty that can maintain the convexity of the objective function. We develop a new method for grouped variable selection in linear regression, the group GMC, that generalizes the strategy of the original GMC estimator. We present an efficient algorithm for computing the group GMC estimator. We also prove properties of the solution path to guide its numerical computation and tuning parameter selection in practice. We establish error bounds for both the group GMC and original GMC estimators. A rich set of simulation studies and a real data application indicate that the proposed group GMC approach outperforms existing methods in several different aspects under a wide array of scenarios.
Heatmap-based methods dominate in the field of human pose estimation by modelling the output distribution through likelihood heatmaps. In contrast, regression-based methods are more efficient but suffer from inferior performance. In this work, we explore maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to develop an efficient and effective regression-based methods. From the perspective of MLE, adopting different regression losses is making different assumptions about the output density function. A density function closer to the true distribution leads to a better regression performance. In light of this, we propose a novel regression paradigm with Residual Log-likelihood Estimation (RLE) to capture the underlying output distribution. Concretely, RLE learns the change of the distribution instead of the unreferenced underlying distribution to facilitate the training process. With the proposed reparameterization design, our method is compatible with off-the-shelf flow models. The proposed method is effective, efficient and flexible. We show its potential in various human pose estimation tasks with comprehensive experiments. Compared to the conventional regression paradigm, regression with RLE bring 12.4 mAP improvement on MSCOCO without any test-time overhead. Moreover, for the first time, especially on multi-person pose estimation, our regression method is superior to the heatmap-based methods. Our code is available at //github.com/Jeff-sjtu/res-loglikelihood-regression