We consider the multiwinner election problem where the goal is to choose a committee of $k$ candidates given the voters' utility functions. We allow arbitrary additional constraints on the chosen committee, and the utilities of voters to belong to a very general class of set functions called $\beta$-self bounding. When $\beta=1$, this class includes XOS (and hence, submodular and additive) utilities. We define a novel generalization of core stability called restrained core to handle constraints and consider multiplicative approximations on the utility under this notion. Our main result is the following: If a smooth version of Nash Welfare is globally optimized over committees within the constraints, the resulting committee lies in the $e^{\beta}$-approximate restrained core for $\beta$-self bounding utilities and arbitrary constraints. As a result, we obtain the first constant approximation for stability with arbitrary additional constraints even for additive utilities (factor of $e$), and the first analysis of the stability of Nash Welfare with XOS functions even with no constraints. We complement this positive result by showing that the $c$-approximate restrained core can be empty for $c<16/15$ even for approval utilities and one additional constraint. Furthermore, the exponential dependence on $\beta$ in the approximation is unavoidable for $\beta$-self bounding functions even with no constraints. We next present improved and tight approximation results for simpler classes of utility functions and simpler types of constraints. We also present an extension of restrained core to extended justified representation with constraints and show an existence result for matroid constraints. We finally generalize our results to the setting with arbitrary-size candidates and no additional constraints. Our techniques are different from previous analyses and are of independent interest.
In recent years, network models have gained prominence for their ability to capture complex associations. In statistical omics, networks can be used to model and study the functional relationships between genes, proteins, and other types of omics data. If a Gaussian graphical model is assumed, a gene association network can be determined from the non-zero entries of the inverse covariance matrix of the data. Due to the high-dimensional nature of such problems, integrative methods that leverage similarities between multiple graphical structures have become increasingly popular. The joint graphical lasso is a powerful tool for this purpose, however, the current AIC-based selection criterion used to tune the network sparsities and similarities leads to poor performance in high-dimensional settings. We propose stabJGL, which equips the joint graphical lasso with a stable and accurate penalty parameter selection approach that combines the notion of model stability with likelihood-based similarity selection. The resulting method makes the powerful joint graphical lasso available for use in omics settings, and outperforms the standard joint graphical lasso, as well as state-of-the-art joint methods, in terms of all performance measures we consider. Applying stabJGL to proteomic data from a pan-cancer study, we demonstrate the potential for novel discoveries the method brings. A user-friendly R package for stabJGL with tutorials is available on Github at //github.com/Camiling/stabJGL.
We consider the problem of learning from data corrupted by underrepresentation bias, where positive examples are filtered from the data at different, unknown rates for a fixed number of sensitive groups. We show that with a small amount of unbiased data, we can efficiently estimate the group-wise drop-out parameters, even in settings where intersectional group membership makes learning each intersectional rate computationally infeasible. Using this estimate for the group-wise drop-out rate, we construct a re-weighting scheme that allows us to approximate the loss of any hypothesis on the true distribution, even if we only observe the empirical error on a biased sample. Finally, we present an algorithm encapsulating this learning and re-weighting process, and we provide strong PAC-style guarantees that, with high probability, our estimate of the risk of the hypothesis over the true distribution will be arbitrarily close to the true risk.
If the assumed model does not accurately capture the underlying structure of the data, a statistical method is likely to yield sub-optimal results, and so model selection is crucial in order to conduct any statistical analysis. However, in case of massive datasets, the selection of an appropriate model from a large pool of candidates becomes computationally challenging, and limited research has been conducted on data selection for model selection. In this study, we conduct subdata selection based on the A-optimality criterion, allowing to perform model selection on a smaller subset of the data. We evaluate our approach based on the probability of selecting the best model and on the estimation efficiency through simulation experiments and two real data applications.
In this article we develop a feasible version of the assumption-lean tests in Liu et al. 20 that can falsify an analyst's justification for the validity of a reported nominal $(1 - \alpha)$ Wald confidence interval (CI) centered at a double machine learning (DML) estimator for any member of the class of doubly robust (DR) functionals studied by Rotnitzky et al. 21. The class of DR functionals is broad and of central importance in economics and biostatistics. It strictly includes both (i) the class of mean-square continuous functionals that can be written as an expectation of an affine functional of a conditional expectation studied by Chernozhukov et al. 22 and the class of functionals studied by Robins et al. 08. The present state-of-the-art estimators for DR functionals $\psi$ are DML estimators $\hat{\psi}_{1}$. The bias of $\hat{\psi}_{1}$ depends on the product of the rates at which two nuisance functions $b$ and $p$ are estimated. Most commonly an analyst justifies the validity of her Wald CIs by proving that, under her complexity-reducing assumptions, the Cauchy-Schwarz (CS) upper bound for the bias of $\hat{\psi}_{1}$ is $o (n^{- 1 / 2})$. Thus if the hypothesis $H_{0}$: the CS upper bound is $o (n^{- 1 / 2})$ is rejected by our test, we will have falsified the analyst's justification for the validity of her Wald CIs. In this work, we exhibit a valid assumption-lean falsification test of $H_{0}$, without relying on complexity-reducing assumptions on $b, p$, or their estimates $\hat{b}, \hat{p}$. Simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate how the proposed assumption-lean test can be used in practice. An unavoidable limitation of our methodology is that no assumption-lean test of $H_{0}$, including ours, can be a consistent test. Thus failure of our test to reject is not meaningful evidence in favor of $H_{0}$.
We establish sparsity and summability results for coefficient sequences of Wiener-Hermite polynomial chaos expansions of countably-parametric solutions of linear elliptic and parabolic divergence-form partial differential equations with Gaussian random field inputs. The novel proof technique developed here is based on analytic continuation of parametric solutions into the complex domain. It differs from previous works that used bootstrap arguments and induction on the differentiation order of solution derivatives with respect to the parameters. The present holomorphy-based argument allows a unified, ``differentiation-free'' proof of sparsity (expressed in terms of $\ell^p$-summability or weighted $\ell^2$-summability) of sequences of Wiener-Hermite coefficients in polynomial chaos expansions in various scales of function spaces. The analysis also implies corresponding analyticity and sparsity results for posterior densities in Bayesian inverse problems subject to Gaussian priors on uncertain inputs from function spaces. Our results furthermore yield dimension-independent convergence rates of various \emph{constructive} high-dimensional deterministic numerical approximation schemes such as single-level and multi-level versions of Hermite-Smolyak anisotropic sparse-grid interpolation and quadrature in both forward and inverse computational uncertainty quantification.
Network coding has been widely used as a technology to ensure efficient and reliable communication. The ability to recode packets at the intermediate nodes is a major benefit of network coding implementations. This allows the intermediate nodes to choose a different code rate and fine-tune the outgoing transmission to the channel conditions, decoupling the requirement for the source node to compensate for cumulative losses over a multi-hop network. Block network coding solutions already have practical recoders but an on-the-fly recoder for sliding window network coding has not been studied in detail. In this paper, we present the implementation details of a practical recoder for sliding window network coding for the first time along with a comprehensive performance analysis of a multi-hop network using the recoder. The sliding window recoder ensures that the network performs closest to its capacity and that each node can use its outgoing links efficiently.
We study the sequential decision-making problem of allocating a limited resource to agents that reveal their stochastic demands on arrival over a finite horizon. Our goal is to design fair allocation algorithms that exhaust the available resource budget. This is challenging in sequential settings where information on future demands is not available at the time of decision-making. We formulate the problem as a discrete time Markov decision process (MDP). We propose a new algorithm, SAFFE, that makes fair allocations with respect to the entire demands revealed over the horizon by accounting for expected future demands at each arrival time. The algorithm introduces regularization which enables the prioritization of current revealed demands over future potential demands depending on the uncertainty in agents' future demands. Using the MDP formulation, we show that SAFFE optimizes allocations based on an upper bound on the Nash Social Welfare fairness objective, and we bound its gap to optimality with the use of concentration bounds on total future demands. Using synthetic and real data, we compare the performance of SAFFE against existing approaches and a reinforcement learning policy trained on the MDP. We show that SAFFE leads to more fair and efficient allocations and achieves close-to-optimal performance in settings with dense arrivals.
We consider the problem of subset selection where one is given multiple rankings of items and the goal is to select the highest ``quality'' subset. Score functions from the multiwinner voting literature have been used to aggregate rankings into quality scores for subsets. We study this setting of subset selection problems when, in addition, rankings may contain systemic or unconscious biases toward a group of items. For a general model of input rankings and biases, we show that requiring the selected subset to satisfy group fairness constraints can improve the quality of the selection with respect to unbiased rankings. Importantly, we show that for fairness constraints to be effective, different multiwinner score functions may require a drastically different number of rankings: While for some functions, fairness constraints need an exponential number of rankings to recover a close-to-optimal solution, for others, this dependency is only polynomial. This result relies on a novel notion of ``smoothness'' of submodular functions in this setting that quantifies how well a function can ``correctly'' assess the quality of items in the presence of bias. The results in this paper can be used to guide the choice of multiwinner score functions for the subset selection setting considered here; we additionally provide a tool to empirically enable this.
This paper deals with the problem of finding the preferred extensions of an argumentation framework by means of a bijection with the naive sets of another framework. First, we consider the case where an argumentation framework is naive-bijective: its naive sets and preferred extensions are equal. Recognizing naive-bijective argumentation frameworks is hard, but we show that it is tractable for frameworks with bounded in-degree. Next, we give a bijection between the preferred extensions of an argumentation framework being admissible-closed (the intersection of two admissible sets is admissible) and the naive sets of another framework on the same set of arguments. On the other hand, we prove that identifying admissible-closed argumentation frameworks is coNP-complete. At last, we introduce the notion of irreducible self-defending sets as those that are not the union of others. It turns out there exists a bijection between the preferred extensions of an argumentation framework and the naive sets of a framework on its irreducible self-defending sets. Consequently, the preferred extensions of argumentation frameworks with some lattice properties can be listed with polynomial delay and polynomial space.
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.