We propose Narrowest Significance Pursuit (NSP), a general and flexible methodology for automatically detecting localised regions in data sequences which each must contain a change-point (understood as an abrupt change in the parameters of an underlying linear model), at a prescribed global significance level. NSP works with a wide range of distributional assumptions on the errors, and guarantees important stochastic bounds which directly yield exact desired coverage probabilities, regardless of the form or number of the regressors. In contrast to the widely studied "post-selection inference" approach, NSP paves the way for the concept of "post-inference selection". An implementation is available in the R package nsp (see //CRAN.R-project.org/package=nsp ).
The sheer volume of online user-generated content has rendered content moderation technologies essential in order to protect digital platform audiences from content that may cause anxiety, worry, or concern. Despite the efforts towards developing automated solutions to tackle this problem, creating accurate models remains challenging due to the lack of adequate task-specific training data. The fact that manually annotating such data is a highly demanding procedure that could severely affect the annotators' emotional well-being is directly related to the latter limitation. In this paper, we propose the CM-Refinery framework that leverages large-scale multimedia datasets to automatically extend initial training datasets with hard examples that can refine content moderation models, while significantly reducing the involvement of human annotators. We apply our method on two model adaptation strategies designed with respect to the different challenges observed while collecting data, i.e. lack of (i) task-specific negative data or (ii) both positive and negative data. Additionally, we introduce a diversity criterion applied to the data collection process that further enhances the generalization performance of the refined models. The proposed method is evaluated on the Not Safe for Work (NSFW) and disturbing content detection tasks on benchmark datasets achieving 1.32% and 1.94% accuracy improvements compared to the state of the art, respectively. Finally, it significantly reduces human involvement, as 92.54% of data are automatically annotated in case of disturbing content while no human intervention is required for the NSFW task.
We study the problem of learning unknown parameters in stochastic interacting particle systems with polynomial drift, interaction and diffusion functions from the path of one single particle in the system. Our estimator is obtained by solving a linear system which is constructed by imposing appropriate conditions on the moments of the invariant distribution of the mean field limit and on the quadratic variation of the process. Our approach is easy to implement as it only requires the approximation of the moments via the ergodic theorem and the solution of a low-dimensional linear system. Moreover, we prove that our estimator is asymptotically unbiased in the limits of infinite data and infinite number of particles (mean field limit). In addition, we present several numerical experiments that validate the theoretical analysis and show the effectiveness of our methodology to accurately infer parameters in systems of interacting particles.
A typical desideratum for quantifying the uncertainty from a classification model as a prediction set is class-conditional singleton set calibration. That is, such sets should map to the output of well-calibrated selective classifiers, matching the observed frequencies of similar instances. Recent works proposing adaptive and localized conformal p-values for deep networks do not guarantee this behavior, nor do they achieve it empirically. Instead, we use the strong signals for prediction reliability from KNN-based approximations of Transformer networks to construct data-driven partitions for Mondrian Conformal Predictors, which are treated as weak selective classifiers that are then calibrated via a new Inductive Venn Predictor, the Venn-ADMIT Predictor. The resulting selective classifiers are well-calibrated, in a conservative but practically useful sense for a given threshold. They are inherently robust to changes in the proportions of the data partitions, and straightforward conservative heuristics provide additional robustness to covariate shifts. We compare and contrast to the quantities produced by recent Conformal Predictors on several representative and challenging natural language processing classification tasks, including class-imbalanced and distribution-shifted settings.
We study sublinear time algorithms for estimating the size of maximum matching. After a long line of research, the problem was finally settled by Behnezhad [FOCS'22], in the regime where one is willing to pay an approximation factor of $2$. Very recently, Behnezhad et al.[SODA'23] improved the approximation factor to $(2-\frac{1}{2^{O(1/\gamma)}})$ using $n^{1+\gamma}$ time. This improvement over the factor $2$ is, however, minuscule and they asked if even $1.99$-approximation is possible in $n^{2-\Omega(1)}$ time. We give a strong affirmative answer to this open problem by showing $(1.5+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithms that run in $n^{2-\Theta(\epsilon^{2})}$ time. Our approach is conceptually simple and diverges from all previous sublinear-time matching algorithms: we show a sublinear time algorithm for computing a variant of the edge-degree constrained subgraph (EDCS), a concept that has previously been exploited in dynamic [Bernstein Stein ICALP'15, SODA'16], distributed [Assadi et al. SODA'19] and streaming [Bernstein ICALP'20] settings, but never before in the sublinear setting. Independent work: Behnezhad, Roghani and Rubinstein [BRR'23] independently showed sublinear algorithms similar to our Theorem 1.2 in both adjacency list and matrix models. Furthermore, in [BRR'23], they show additional results on strictly better-than-1.5 approximate matching algorithms in both upper and lower bound sides.
Mathematical models of cognition are often memoryless and ignore potential fluctuations of their parameters. However, human cognition is inherently dynamic, regardless of the reference time scale. Thus, we propose to augment mechanistic cognitive models with a temporal dimension and estimate the resulting dynamics from a superstatistics perspective. In its simplest form, such a model entails a hierarchy between a low-level observation model and a high-level transition model. The observation model describes the local behavior of a system, and the transition model specifies how the parameters of the observation model evolve over time. To overcome the estimation challenges resulting from the complexity of superstatistical models, we develop and validate a simulation-based deep learning method for Bayesian inference, which can recover both time-varying and time-invariant parameters. We first benchmark our method against two existing frameworks capable of estimating time-varying parameters. We then apply our method to fit a dynamic version of the diffusion decision model to long time series of human response times data. Our results show that the deep learning approach is very efficient in capturing the temporal dynamics of the model. Furthermore, we show that the erroneous assumption of static or homogeneous parameters will hide important temporal information.
We develop a fully non-parametric, easy-to-use, and powerful test for the missing completely at random (MCAR) assumption on the missingness mechanism of a dataset. The test compares distributions of different missing patterns on random projections in the variable space of the data. The distributional differences are measured with the Kullback-Leibler Divergence, using probability Random Forests. We thus refer to it as "Projected Kullback-Leibler MCAR" (PKLM) test. The use of random projections makes it applicable even if very few or no fully observed observations are available or if the number of dimensions is large. An efficient permutation approach guarantees the level for any finite sample size, resolving a major shortcoming of most other available tests. Moreover, the test can be used on both discrete and continuous data. We show empirically on a range of simulated data distributions and real datasets that our test has consistently high power and is able to avoid inflated type-I errors. Finally, we provide an R-package PKLMtest with an implementation of our test.
In Gapped String Indexing, the goal is to compactly represent a string $S$ of length $n$ such that given queries consisting of two strings $P_1$ and $P_2$, called patterns, and an integer interval $[\alpha, \beta]$, called gap range, we can quickly find occurrences of $P_1$ and $P_2$ in $S$ with distance in $[\alpha, \beta]$. Due to the many applications of this fundamental problem in computational biology and elsewhere, there is a great body of work for restricted or parameterised variants of the problem. However, for the general problem statement, no improvements upon the trivial $\mathcal{O}(n)$-space $\mathcal{O}(n)$-query time or $\Omega(n^2)$-space $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}(|P_1| + |P_2| + \mathrm{occ})$-query time solutions were known so far. We break this barrier obtaining interesting trade-offs with polynomially subquadratic space and polynomially sublinear query time. In particular, we show that, for every $0\leq \delta \leq 1$, there is a data structure for Gapped String Indexing with either $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}(n^{2-\delta/3})$ or $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}(n^{3-2\delta})$ space and $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}(|P_1| + |P_2| + n^{\delta}\cdot (\mathrm{occ}+1))$ query time, where $\mathrm{occ}$ is the number of reported occurrences. As a new fundamental tool towards obtaining our main result, we introduce the Shifted Set Intersection problem: preprocess a collection of sets $S_1, \ldots, S_k$ of integers such that given queries consisting of three integers $i,j,s$, we can quickly output YES if and only if there exist $a \in S_i$ and $b \in S_j$ with $a+s = b$. We start by showing that the Shifted Set Intersection problem is equivalent to the indexing variant of 3SUM (3SUM Indexing) [Golovnev et al., STOC 2020]. Via several steps of reduction we then show that the Gapped String Indexing problem reduces to polylogarithmically many instances of the Shifted Set Intersection problem.
The Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) is a fundamental string similarity measure, and computing the LCS of two strings is a classic algorithms question. A textbook dynamic programming algorithm gives an exact algorithm in quadratic time, and this is essentially best possible under plausible fine-grained complexity assumptions, so a natural problem is to find faster approximation algorithms. When the inputs are two binary strings, there is a simple $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation in linear time: compute the longest common all-0s or all-1s subsequence. It has been open whether a better approximation is possible even in truly subquadratic time. Rubinstein and Song showed that the answer is yes under the assumption that the two input strings have equal lengths. We settle the question, generalizing their result to unequal length strings, proving that, for any $\varepsilon>0$, there exists $\delta>0$ and a $(\frac{1}{2}+\delta)$-approximation algorithm for binary LCS that runs in $n^{1+\varepsilon}$ time. As a consequence of our result and a result of Akmal and Vassilevska-Williams, for any $\varepsilon>0$, there exists a $(\frac{1}{q}+\delta)$-approximation for LCS over $q$-ary strings in $n^{1+\varepsilon}$ time. Our techniques build on the recent work of Guruswami, He, and Li who proved new bounds for error-correcting codes tolerating deletion errors. They prove a combinatorial "structure lemma" for strings which classifies them according to their oscillation patterns. We prove and use an algorithmic generalization of this structure lemma, which may be of independent interest.
Sublinear time algorithms for approximating maximum matching size have long been studied. Much of the progress over the last two decades on this problem has been on the algorithmic side. For instance, an algorithm of Behnezhad [FOCS'21] obtains a 1/2-approximation in $\tilde{O}(n)$ time for $n$-vertex graphs. A more recent algorithm by Behnezhad, Roghani, Rubinstein, and Saberi [SODA'23] obtains a slightly-better-than-1/2 approximation in $O(n^{1+\epsilon})$ time. On the lower bound side, Parnas and Ron [TCS'07] showed 15 years ago that obtaining any constant approximation of maximum matching size requires $\Omega(n)$ time. Proving any super-linear in $n$ lower bound, even for $(1-\epsilon)$-approximations, has remained elusive since then. In this paper, we prove the first super-linear in $n$ lower bound for this problem. We show that at least $n^{1.2 - o(1)}$ queries in the adjacency list model are needed for obtaining a $(\frac{2}{3} + \Omega(1))$-approximation of maximum matching size. This holds even if the graph is bipartite and is promised to have a matching of size $\Theta(n)$. Our lower bound argument builds on techniques such as correlation decay that to our knowledge have not been used before in proving sublinear time lower bounds. We complement our lower bound by presenting two algorithms that run in strongly sublinear time of $n^{2-\Omega(1)}$. The first algorithm achieves a $(\frac{2}{3}-\epsilon)$-approximation; this significantly improves prior close-to-1/2 approximations. Our second algorithm obtains an even better approximation factor of $(\frac{2}{3}+\Omega(1))$ for bipartite graphs. This breaks the prevalent $2/3$-approximation barrier and importantly shows that our $n^{1.2-o(1)}$ time lower bound for $(\frac{2}{3}+\Omega(1))$-approximations cannot be improved all the way to $n^{2-o(1)}$.
In many biomedical problems, data are often heterogeneous, with samples spanning multiple patient subgroups, where different subgroups may have different disease subtypes, stages, or other medical contexts. These subgroups may be related, but they are also expected to have differences with respect to the underlying biology. The heterogeneous data presents a precious opportunity to explore the heterogeneities and commonalities between related subgroups. Unfortunately, effective statistical analysis methods are still lacking. Recently, several novel methods based on integrative analysis have been proposed to tackle this challenging problem. Despite promising results, the existing studies are still limited by ignoring data contamination and making strict assumptions of linear effects of covariates on response. As such, we develop a robust nonparametric integrative analysis approach to identify heterogeneity and commonality, as well as select important covariates and estimate covariate effects. Possible data contamination is accommodated by adopting the Cauchy loss function, and a nonparametric model is built to accommodate nonlinear effects. The proposed approach is based on a sparse boosting technique. The advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated in extensive simulations. The analysis of The Cancer Genome Atlas data on glioblastoma multiforme and lung adenocarcinoma shows that the proposed approach makes biologically meaningful findings with satisfactory prediction.