The effect of combined, generating R- and Q-factors of measured variables on the loadings resulting from R-factor analysis was investigated. It was found algebraically that R-factor analysis of measured variables generated by a combination of R- and Q-factors results in biased population R-factor loadings. In this context, the loadings of the generating R-factors cannot be perfectly estimated by means of R-factor analysis. This effect was also shown in a simulation study at the population level. Moreover, the simulation study based on the samples drawn from the populations revealed that the R-factor loadings averaged across samples were substantially larger than the population loadings of the generating R-factors. This effect was due to between sample variability of measured variables resulting from generating Q-factors at the population level which does not occur when a single sample is investigated. These results indicate that -in data that are generated by a combination of R- and Q-factors- the effect of the Q-factors may lead to substantial over-estimation of the R-factor loadings in sample-based R-factor analysis.
Current practices in metric evaluation focus on one single dataset, e.g., Newstest dataset in each year's WMT Metrics Shared Task. However, in this paper, we qualitatively and quantitatively show that the performances of metrics are sensitive to data. The ranking of metrics varies when the evaluation is conducted on different datasets. Then this paper further investigates two potential hypotheses, i.e., insignificant data points and the deviation of Independent and Identically Distributed (i.i.d) assumption, which may take responsibility for the issue of data variance. In conclusion, our findings suggest that when evaluating automatic translation metrics, researchers should take data variance into account and be cautious to claim the result on a single dataset, because it may leads to inconsistent results with most of other datasets.
The Bayesian information criterion (BIC), defined as the observed data log likelihood minus a penalty term based on the sample size $N$, is a popular model selection criterion for factor analysis with complete data. This definition has also been suggested for incomplete data. However, the penalty term based on the `complete' sample size $N$ is the same no matter whether in a complete or incomplete data case. For incomplete data, there are often only $N_i<N$ observations for variable $i$, which means that using the `complete' sample size $N$ implausibly ignores the amounts of missing information inherent in incomplete data. Given this observation, a novel criterion called hierarchical BIC (HBIC) for factor analysis with incomplete data is proposed. The novelty is that it only uses the actual amounts of observed information, namely $N_i$'s, in the penalty term. Theoretically, it is shown that HBIC is a large sample approximation of variational Bayesian (VB) lower bound, and BIC is a further approximation of HBIC, which means that HBIC shares the theoretical consistency of BIC. Experiments on synthetic and real data sets are conducted to access the finite sample performance of HBIC, BIC, and related criteria with various missing rates. The results show that HBIC and BIC perform similarly when the missing rate is small, but HBIC is more accurate when the missing rate is not small.
Forensic firearms identification, the determination by a trained firearms examiner as to whether or not bullets or cartridges came from a common weapon, has long been a mainstay in the criminal courts. Reliability of forensic firearms identification has been challenged in the general scientific community, and, in response, several studies have been carried out aimed at showing that firearms examination is accurate, that is, has low error rates. Less studied has been the question of consistency, of. whether two examinations of the same bullets or cartridge cases come to the same conclusion, carried out by an examiner on separate occasions -- intrarater reliability or repeatability -- or by two examiners -- interrater reliability or reproducibility. One important study, described in a 2020 Report by the Ames Laboratory-USDOE to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, went beyond considerations of accuracy to investigate firearms examination repeatability and reproducibility. The Report's conclusions were paradoxical. The observed agreement of examiners with themselves or with other examiners appears mediocre. However, the study concluded repeatability and reproducibility are satisfactory, on grounds that the observed agreement exceeds a quantity called the expected agreement. We find that appropriately employing expected agreement as it was intended does not suggest satisfactory repeatability and reproducibility, but the opposite.
Recently neural network based approaches to knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, such as question answering, started to rely heavily on the combination of neural retrievers and readers. Retrieval is typically performed over a large textual knowledge base (KB) which requires significant memory and compute resources, especially when scaled up. On HotpotQA we systematically investigate reducing the size of the KB index by means of dimensionality (sparse random projections, PCA, autoencoders) and numerical precision reduction. Our results show that PCA is an easy solution that requires very little data and is only slightly worse than autoencoders, which are less stable. All methods are sensitive to pre- and post-processing and data should always be centered and normalized both before and after dimension reduction. Finally, we show that it is possible to combine PCA with using 1bit per dimension. Overall we achieve (1) 100$\times$ compression with 75%, and (2) 24$\times$ compression with 92% original retrieval performance.
We propose a novel framework for learning a low-dimensional representation of data based on nonlinear dynamical systems, which we call dynamical dimension reduction (DDR). In the DDR model, each point is evolved via a nonlinear flow towards a lower-dimensional subspace; the projection onto the subspace gives the low-dimensional embedding. Training the model involves identifying the nonlinear flow and the subspace. Following the equation discovery method, we represent the vector field that defines the flow using a linear combination of dictionary elements, where each element is a pre-specified linear/nonlinear candidate function. A regularization term for the average total kinetic energy is also introduced and motivated by optimal transport theory. We prove that the resulting optimization problem is well-posed and establish several properties of the DDR method. We also show how the DDR method can be trained using a gradient-based optimization method, where the gradients are computed using the adjoint method from optimal control theory. The DDR method is implemented and compared on synthetic and example datasets to other dimension reductions methods, including PCA, t-SNE, and Umap.
In the interdependent values (IDV) model introduced by Milgrom and Weber [1982], agents have private signals that capture their information about different social alternatives, and the valuation of every agent is a function of all agent signals. While interdependence has been mainly studied for auctions, it is extremely relevant for a large variety of social choice settings, including the canonical setting of public projects. The IDV model is very challenging relative to standard independent private values, and welfare guarantees have been achieved through two alternative conditions known as {\em single-crossing} and {\em submodularity over signals (SOS)}. In either case, the existing theory falls short of solving the public projects setting. Our contribution is twofold: (i) We give a workable characterization of truthfulness for IDV public projects for the largest class of valuations for which such a characterization exists, and term this class \emph{decomposable valuations}; (ii) We provide possibility and impossibility results for welfare approximation in public projects with SOS valuations. Our main impossibility result is that, in contrast to auctions, no universally truthful mechanism performs better for public projects with SOS valuations than choosing a project at random. Our main positive result applies to {\em excludable} public projects with SOS, for which we establish a constant factor approximation similar to auctions. Our results suggest that exclusion may be a key tool for achieving welfare guarantees in the IDV model.
A High-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrix is frequently encountered in a big data-related application like an e-commerce system or a social network services system. To perform highly accurate representation learning on it is of great significance owing to the great desire of extracting latent knowledge and patterns from it. Latent factor analysis (LFA), which represents an HiDS matrix by learning the low-rank embeddings based on its observed entries only, is one of the most effective and efficient approaches to this issue. However, most existing LFA-based models perform such embeddings on a HiDS matrix directly without exploiting its hidden graph structures, thereby resulting in accuracy loss. To address this issue, this paper proposes a graph-incorporated latent factor analysis (GLFA) model. It adopts two-fold ideas: 1) a graph is constructed for identifying the hidden high-order interaction (HOI) among nodes described by an HiDS matrix, and 2) a recurrent LFA structure is carefully designed with the incorporation of HOI, thereby improving the representa-tion learning ability of a resultant model. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GLFA outperforms six state-of-the-art models in predicting the missing data of an HiDS matrix, which evidently supports its strong representation learning ability to HiDS data.
In this paper we study the finite sample and asymptotic properties of various weighting estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE), several of which are based on Abadie (2003)'s kappa theorem. Our framework presumes a binary endogenous explanatory variable ("treatment") and a binary instrumental variable, which may only be valid after conditioning on additional covariates. We argue that one of the Abadie estimators, which we show is weight normalized, is likely to dominate the others in many contexts. A notable exception is in settings with one-sided noncompliance, where certain unnormalized estimators have the advantage of being based on a denominator that is bounded away from zero. We use a simulation study and three empirical applications to illustrate our findings. In applications to causal effects of college education using the college proximity instrument (Card, 1995) and causal effects of childbearing using the sibling sex composition instrument (Angrist and Evans, 1998), the unnormalized estimates are clearly unreasonable, with "incorrect" signs, magnitudes, or both. Overall, our results suggest that (i) the relative performance of different kappa weighting estimators varies with features of the data-generating process; and that (ii) the normalized version of Tan (2006)'s estimator may be an attractive alternative in many contexts. Applied researchers with access to a binary instrumental variable should also consider covariate balancing or doubly robust estimators of the LATE.
It is shown, with two sets of indicators that separately load on two distinct factors, independent of one another conditional on the past, that if it is the case that at least one of the factors causally affects the other, then, in many settings, the process will converge to a factor model in which a single factor will suffice to capture the covariance structure among the indicators. Factor analysis with one wave of data can then not distinguish between factor models with a single factor versus those with two factors that are causally related. Therefore, unless causal relations between factors can be ruled out a priori, alleged empirical evidence from one-wave factor analysis for a single factor still leaves open the possibilities of a single factor or of two factors that causally affect one another. The implications for interpreting the factor structure of psychological scales, such as self-report scales for anxiety and depression, or for happiness and purpose, are discussed. The results are further illustrated through simulations to gain insight into the practical implications of the results in more realistic settings prior to the convergence of the processes. Some further generalizations to an arbitrary number of underlying factors are noted.
Models for dependent data are distinguished by their targets of inference. Marginal models are useful when interest lies in quantifying associations averaged across a population of clusters. When the functional form of a covariate-outcome association is unknown, flexible regression methods are needed to allow for potentially non-linear relationships. We propose a novel marginal additive model (MAM) for modelling cluster-correlated data with non-linear population-averaged associations. The proposed MAM is a unified framework for estimation and uncertainty quantification of a marginal mean model, combined with inference for between-cluster variability and cluster-specific prediction. We propose a fitting algorithm that enables efficient computation of standard errors and corrects for estimation of penalty terms. We demonstrate the proposed methods in simulations and in application to (i) a longitudinal study of beaver foraging behaviour, and (ii) a spatial analysis of Loaloa infection in West Africa. R code for implementing the proposed methodology is available at //github.com/awstringer1/mam.