This paper proposes methods for Bayesian inference in time-varying parameter (TVP) quantile regression (QR) models featuring conditional heteroskedasticity. I use data augmentation schemes to render the model conditionally Gaussian and develop an efficient Gibbs sampling algorithm. Regularization of the high-dimensional parameter space is achieved via flexible dynamic shrinkage priors. A simple version of TVP-QR based on an unobserved component model is applied to dynamically trace the quantiles of the distribution of inflation in the United States, the United Kingdom and the euro area. In an out-of-sample forecast exercise, I find the proposed model to be competitive and perform particularly well for higher-order and tail forecasts. A detailed analysis of the resulting predictive distributions reveals that they are sometimes skewed and occasionally feature heavy tails.
A frequent challenge encountered with ecological data is how to interpret, analyze, or model data having a high proportion of zeros. Much attention has been given to zero-inflated count data, whereas models for non-negative continuous data with an abundance of 0s are lacking. We consider zero-inflated data on the unit interval and provide modeling to capture two types of 0s in the context of the Beta regression model. We model 0s due to missing by chance through left censoring of a latent regression, and 0s due to unsuitability using an independent Bernoulli specification to create a point mass at 0. We first develop the model as a spatial regression in environmental features and then extend to introduce spatial random effects. We specify models hierarchically, employing latent variables, fit them within a Bayesian framework, and present new model comparison tools. Our motivating dataset consists of percent cover abundance of two plant species at a collection of sites in the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa. We find that environmental features enable learning about the incidence of both types of 0s as well as the positive percent covers. We also show that the spatial random effects model improves predictive performance. The proposed modeling enables ecologists, using environmental regressors, to extract a better understanding of the presence/absence of species in terms of absence due to unsuitability vs. missingness by chance, as well as abundance when present.
In addition to traditional concerns such as throughput and latency, freshness is becoming increasingly important. To stay fresh, applications stream status updates among their components. Existing studies propose the metric age of information (AoI) to gauge the freshness and design systems to achieve low AoI. Despite active research in this area, existing results are not applicable to general wired networks for two reasons. First, they focus on wireless settings where AoI is mostly affected by interference and collision while queueing is more dominant in wired settings. Second, the legacy drop-adverse flows are not taken into account in the literature. Scheduling mixed flows with distinct performance objective is not yet addressed. In this paper, we study wired networks shared by two classes of flows, aiming for high throughput and low AoI respectively, and achieve a good trade-off between their throughput and AoI. Our approach to the problem consists of two layers: freshness-aware traffic engineering (FATE) and in-network freshness control (IFC). FATE derives sending rate/update frequency for flows via optimization, and its solution is then enforced by IFC through efficient scheduling mechanisms at each outport of in-network nodes. We also present efficient Linux implementation of IFC and demonstrate the effectiveness of FATE/IFC through extensive emulations. Our results show that it is possible to trade a little throughput (5 % lower) for much shorter AoI (49 to 71% shorter) compared to state-of-the-art traffic engineering.
In practice functional data are sampled on a discrete set of observation points and often susceptible to noise. We consider in this paper the setting where such data are used as explanatory variables in a regression problem. If the primary goal is prediction, we show that the gain by embedding the problem into a scalar-on-function regression is limited. Instead we impose a factor model on the predictors and suggest regressing the response on an appropriate number of factor scores. This approach is shown to be consistent under mild technical assumptions, numerically efficient and gives good practical performance in both simulations as well as real data settings.
In this note, we introduce a general version of the well-known elliptical potential lemma that is a widely used technique in the analysis of algorithms in sequential learning and decision-making problems. We consider a stochastic linear bandit setting where a decision-maker sequentially chooses among a set of given actions, observes their noisy rewards, and aims to maximize her cumulative expected reward over a decision-making horizon. The elliptical potential lemma is a key tool for quantifying uncertainty in estimating parameters of the reward function, but it requires the noise and the prior distributions to be Gaussian. Our general elliptical potential lemma relaxes this Gaussian requirement which is a highly non-trivial extension for a number of reasons; unlike the Gaussian case, there is no closed-form solution for the covariance matrix of the posterior distribution, the covariance matrix is not a deterministic function of the actions, and the covariance matrix is not decreasing with respect to the semidefinite inequality. While this result is of broad interest, we showcase an application of it to prove an improved Bayesian regret bound for the well-known Thompson sampling algorithm in stochastic linear bandits with changing action sets where prior and noise distributions are general. This bound is minimax optimal up to constants.
This paper studies a service system in which arriving customers are provided with information about the delay they will experience. Based on this information they decide to wait for service or to leave the system. The main objective is to estimate the customers' patience-level distribution and the corresponding potential arrival rate, using knowledge of the actual queue-length process only. The main complication, and distinguishing feature of our setup, lies in the fact that customers who decide not to join are not observed, but, remarkably, we manage to devise a procedure to estimate the load they would generate. We express our system in terms of a multi-server queue with a Poisson stream of customers, which allows us to evaluate the corresponding likelihood function. Estimating the unknown parameters relying on a maximum likelihood procedure, we prove strong consistency and derive the asymptotic distribution of the estimation error. Several applications and extensions of the method are discussed. The performance of our approach is further assessed through a series of numerical experiments. By fitting parameters of hyperexponential and generalized-hyperexponential distributions our method provides a robust estimation framework for any continuous patience-level distribution.
Forecasting enterprise-wide revenue is critical to many companies and presents several challenges and opportunities for significant business impact. This case study is based on model developments to address these challenges for forecasting in a large-scale retail company. Focused on multivariate revenue forecasting across collections of supermarkets and product Categories, hierarchical dynamic models are natural: these are able to couple revenue streams in an integrated forecasting model, while allowing conditional decoupling to enable relevant and sensitive analysis together with scalable computation. Structured models exploit multi-scale modeling to cascade information on price and promotion activities as predictors relevant across Categories and groups of stores. With a context-relevant focus on forecasting revenue 12 weeks ahead, the study highlights product Categories that benefit from multi-scale information, defines insights into when, how and why multivariate models improve forecast accuracy, and shows how cross-Category dependencies can relate to promotion decisions in one Category impacting others. Bayesian modeling developments underlying the case study are accessible in custom code for interested readers.
Fitting regression models with many multivariate responses and covariates can be challenging, but such responses and covariates sometimes have tensor-variate structure. We extend the classical multivariate regression model to exploit such structure in two ways: first, we impose four types of low-rank tensor formats on the regression coefficients. Second, we model the errors using the tensor-variate normal distribution that imposes a Kronecker separable format on the covariance matrix. We obtain maximum likelihood estimators via block-relaxation algorithms and derive their computational complexity and asymptotic distributions. Our regression framework enables us to formulate tensor-variate analysis of variance (TANOVA) methodology. This methodology, when applied in a one-way TANOVA layout, enables us to identify cerebral regions significantly associated with the interaction of suicide attempters or non-attemptor ideators and positive-, negative- or death-connoting words in a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging study. Another application uses three-way TANOVA on the Labeled Faces in the Wild image dataset to distinguish facial characteristics related to ethnic origin, age group and gender.
Understanding dynamics of hydrological responses is essential in producing skillful runoff forecast. This can be quantitatively done by tracking changes in hydrology model parameters that represent physical characteristics. In this study, we implement a Bayesian estimation method in continuously estimating hydrology model parameters given observations of rainfall and runoff for small watersheds. The method is coupled with a conceptual hydrology model using a Gamma distribution-based Instantaneous Unit Hydrograph. The whole analytical framework is tested using synthetic data as well as observational data from the Fall Creek watershed. The results show that the Bayesian method can well track the hidden parameters that change inter-annually. Then the model is applied to examine temporal and spatial variability of the rainfall-runoff responses and we find 1) a systematic shift in the rainfall-runoff response for the Fall Creek watershed around 1943 and 2) a statistically significant relationship between rainfall-runoff responses and watershed sizes for selected NY watersheds. Our results demonstrate potential of the Bayesian estimation method as a rapid surveillance tool in monitoring and tracking changes of hydrological responses for small watersheds.
Discrete random structures are important tools in Bayesian nonparametrics and the resulting models have proven effective in density estimation, clustering, topic modeling and prediction, among others. In this paper, we consider nested processes and study the dependence structures they induce. Dependence ranges between homogeneity, corresponding to full exchangeability, and maximum heterogeneity, corresponding to (unconditional) independence across samples. The popular nested Dirichlet process is shown to degenerate to the fully exchangeable case when there are ties across samples at the observed or latent level. To overcome this drawback, inherent to nesting general discrete random measures, we introduce a novel class of latent nested processes. These are obtained by adding common and group-specific completely random measures and, then, normalising to yield dependent random probability measures. We provide results on the partition distributions induced by latent nested processes, and develop an Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler for Bayesian inferences. A test for distributional homogeneity across groups is obtained as a by product. The results and their inferential implications are showcased on synthetic and real data.
In this paper, we develop the continuous time dynamic topic model (cDTM). The cDTM is a dynamic topic model that uses Brownian motion to model the latent topics through a sequential collection of documents, where a "topic" is a pattern of word use that we expect to evolve over the course of the collection. We derive an efficient variational approximate inference algorithm that takes advantage of the sparsity of observations in text, a property that lets us easily handle many time points. In contrast to the cDTM, the original discrete-time dynamic topic model (dDTM) requires that time be discretized. Moreover, the complexity of variational inference for the dDTM grows quickly as time granularity increases, a drawback which limits fine-grained discretization. We demonstrate the cDTM on two news corpora, reporting both predictive perplexity and the novel task of time stamp prediction.