Preference modelling lies at the intersection of economics, decision theory, machine learning and statistics. By understanding individuals' preferences and how they make choices, we can build products that closely match their expectations, paving the way for more efficient and personalised applications across a wide range of domains. The objective of this tutorial is to present a cohesive and comprehensive framework for preference learning with Gaussian Processes (GPs), demonstrating how to seamlessly incorporate rationality principles (from economics and decision theory) into the learning process. By suitably tailoring the likelihood function, this framework enables the construction of preference learning models that encompass random utility models, limits of discernment, and scenarios with multiple conflicting utilities for both object- and label-preference. This tutorial builds upon established research while simultaneously introducing some novel GP-based models to address specific gaps in the existing literature.
We generalize McDiarmid's inequality for functions with bounded differences on a high probability set, using an extension argument. Those functions concentrate around their conditional expectations. We further extend the results to concentration in general metric spaces.
When estimating causal effects from observational studies, researchers often need to adjust for many covariates to deconfound the non-causal relationship between exposure and outcome, among which many covariates are discrete. The behavior of commonly used estimators in the presence of many discrete covariates is not well understood since their properties are often analyzed under structural assumptions including sparsity and smoothness, which do not apply in discrete settings. In this work, we study the estimation of causal effects in a model where the covariates required for confounding adjustment are discrete but high-dimensional, meaning the number of categories $d$ is comparable with or even larger than sample size $n$. Specifically, we show the mean squared error of commonly used regression, weighting and doubly robust estimators is bounded by $\frac{d^2}{n^2}+\frac{1}{n}$. We then prove the minimax lower bound for the average treatment effect is of order $\frac{d^2}{n^2 \log^2 n}+\frac{1}{n}$, which characterizes the fundamental difficulty of causal effect estimation in the high-dimensional discrete setting, and shows the estimators mentioned above are rate-optimal up to log-factors. We further consider additional structures that can be exploited, namely effect homogeneity and prior knowledge of the covariate distribution, and propose new estimators that enjoy faster convergence rates of order $\frac{d}{n^2} + \frac{1}{n}$, which achieve consistency in a broader regime. The results are illustrated empirically via simulation studies.
Contraction coefficients give a quantitative strengthening of the data processing inequality. As such, they have many natural applications whenever closer analysis of information processing is required. However, it is often challenging to calculate these coefficients. As a remedy we discuss a quantum generalization of Doeblin coefficients. These give an efficiently computable upper bound on many contraction coefficients. We prove several properties and discuss generalizations and applications. In particular, we give additional stronger bounds for PPT channels and introduce reverse Doeblin coefficients that bound certain expansion coefficients.
The article introduces a method to learn dynamical systems that are governed by Euler--Lagrange equations from data. The method is based on Gaussian process regression and identifies continuous or discrete Lagrangians and is, therefore, structure preserving by design. A rigorous proof of convergence as the distance between observation data points converges to zero is provided. Next to convergence guarantees, the method allows for quantification of model uncertainty, which can provide a basis of adaptive sampling techniques. We provide efficient uncertainty quantification of any observable that is linear in the Lagrangian, including of Hamiltonian functions (energy) and symplectic structures, which is of interest in the context of system identification. The article overcomes major practical and theoretical difficulties related to the ill-posedness of the identification task of (discrete) Lagrangians through a careful design of geometric regularisation strategies and through an exploit of a relation to convex minimisation problems in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces.
We propose a comprehensive framework for policy gradient methods tailored to continuous time reinforcement learning. This is based on the connection between stochastic control problems and randomised problems, enabling applications across various classes of Markovian continuous time control problems, beyond diffusion models, including e.g. regular, impulse and optimal stopping/switching problems. By utilizing change of measure in the control randomisation technique, we derive a new policy gradient representation for these randomised problems, featuring parametrised intensity policies. We further develop actor-critic algorithms specifically designed to address general Markovian stochastic control issues. Our framework is demonstrated through its application to optimal switching problems, with two numerical case studies in the energy sector focusing on real options.
Reachability and other path-based measures on temporal graphs can be used to understand spread of infection, information, and people in modelled systems. Due to delays and errors in reporting, temporal graphs derived from data are unlikely to perfectly reflect reality, especially with respect to the precise times at which edges appear. To reflect this uncertainty, we consider a model in which some number $\zeta$ of edge appearances may have their timestamps perturbed by $\pm\delta$ for some $\delta$. Within this model, we investigate temporal reachability and consider the problem of determining the maximum number of vertices any vertex can reach under these perturbations. We show that this problem is intractable in general but is efficiently solvable when $\zeta$ is sufficiently large. We also give algorithms which solve this problem in several restricted settings. We complement this with some contrasting results concerning the complexity of related temporal eccentricity problems under perturbation.
This paper analyses conforming and nonconforming virtual element formulations of arbitrary polynomial degrees on general polygonal meshes for the coupling of solid and fluid phases in deformable porous plates. The governing equations consist of one fourth-order equation for the transverse displacement of the middle surface coupled with a second-order equation for the pressure head relative to the solid with mixed boundary conditions. We propose novel enrichment operators that connect nonconforming virtual element spaces of general degree to continuous Sobolev spaces. These operators satisfy additional orthogonal and best-approximation properties (referred to as a conforming companion operator in the context of finite element methods), which play an important role in the nonconforming methods. This paper proves a priori error estimates in the best-approximation form, and derives residual--based reliable and efficient a posteriori error estimates in appropriate norms, and shows that these error bounds are robust with respect to the main model parameters. The computational examples illustrate the numerical behaviour of the suggested virtual element discretisations and confirm the theoretical findings on different polygonal meshes with mixed boundary conditions.
This paper develops an in-depth treatment concerning the problem of approximating the Gaussian smoothing and Gaussian derivative computations in scale-space theory for application on discrete data. With close connections to previous axiomatic treatments of continuous and discrete scale-space theory, we consider three main ways discretizing these scale-space operations in terms of explicit discrete convolutions, based on either (i) sampling the Gaussian kernels and the Gaussian derivative kernels, (ii) locally integrating the Gaussian kernels and the Gaussian derivative kernels over each pixel support region and (iii) basing the scale-space analysis on the discrete analogue of the Gaussian kernel, and then computing derivative approximations by applying small-support central difference operators to the spatially smoothed image data. We study the properties of these three main discretization methods both theoretically and experimentally, and characterize their performance by quantitative measures, including the results they give rise to with respect to the task of scale selection, investigated for four different use cases, and with emphasis on the behaviour at fine scales. The results show that the sampled Gaussian kernels and derivatives as well as the integrated Gaussian kernels and derivatives perform very poorly at very fine scales. At very fine scales, the discrete analogue of the Gaussian kernel with its corresponding discrete derivative approximations performs substantially better. The sampled Gaussian kernel and the sampled Gaussian derivatives do, on the other hand, lead to numerically very good approximations of the corresponding continuous results, when the scale parameter is sufficiently large, in the experiments presented in the paper, when the scale parameter is greater than a value of about 1, in units of the grid spacing.
We randomize the implicit two-stage Runge-Kutta scheme in order to improve the rate of convergence (with respect to a deterministic scheme) and stability of the approximate solution (with respect to the solution generated by the explicit scheme). For stability analysis, we use Dahlquist's concept of A-stability, adopted to randomized schemes by considering three notions of stability: asymptotic, mean-square, and in probability. The randomized implicit RK2 scheme proves to be A-stable asymptotically and in probability but not in the mean-square sense.
The remarkable practical success of deep learning has revealed some major surprises from a theoretical perspective. In particular, simple gradient methods easily find near-optimal solutions to non-convex optimization problems, and despite giving a near-perfect fit to training data without any explicit effort to control model complexity, these methods exhibit excellent predictive accuracy. We conjecture that specific principles underlie these phenomena: that overparametrization allows gradient methods to find interpolating solutions, that these methods implicitly impose regularization, and that overparametrization leads to benign overfitting. We survey recent theoretical progress that provides examples illustrating these principles in simpler settings. We first review classical uniform convergence results and why they fall short of explaining aspects of the behavior of deep learning methods. We give examples of implicit regularization in simple settings, where gradient methods lead to minimal norm functions that perfectly fit the training data. Then we review prediction methods that exhibit benign overfitting, focusing on regression problems with quadratic loss. For these methods, we can decompose the prediction rule into a simple component that is useful for prediction and a spiky component that is useful for overfitting but, in a favorable setting, does not harm prediction accuracy. We focus specifically on the linear regime for neural networks, where the network can be approximated by a linear model. In this regime, we demonstrate the success of gradient flow, and we consider benign overfitting with two-layer networks, giving an exact asymptotic analysis that precisely demonstrates the impact of overparametrization. We conclude by highlighting the key challenges that arise in extending these insights to realistic deep learning settings.