In multivariate time series analysis, the coherence measures the linear dependency between two-time series at different frequencies. However, real data applications often exhibit nonlinear dependency in the frequency domain. Conventional coherence analysis fails to capture such dependency. The quantile coherence, on the other hand, characterizes nonlinear dependency by defining the coherence at a set of quantile levels based on trigonometric quantile regression. Although quantile coherence is a more powerful tool, its estimation remains challenging due to the high level of noise. This paper introduces a new estimation technique for quantile coherence. The proposed method is semi-parametric, which uses the parametric form of the spectrum of the vector autoregressive (VAR) model as an approximation to the quantile spectral matrix, along with nonparametric smoothing across quantiles. For each fixed quantile level, we obtain the VAR parameters from the quantile periodograms, then, using the Durbin-Levinson algorithm, we calculate the preliminary estimate of quantile coherence using the VAR parameters. Finally, we smooth the preliminary estimate of quantile coherence across quantiles using a nonparametric smoother. Numerical results show that the proposed estimation method outperforms nonparametric methods. We show that quantile coherence-based bivariate time series clustering has advantages over the ordinary VAR coherence. For applications, the identified clusters of financial stocks by quantile coherence with a market benchmark are shown to have an intriguing and more accurate structure of diversified investment portfolios that may be used by investors to make better decisions.
We present a robust deep incremental learning framework for regression tasks on financial temporal tabular datasets which is built upon the incremental use of commonly available tabular and time series prediction models to adapt to distributional shifts typical of financial datasets. The framework uses a simple basic building block (decision trees) to build self-similar models of any required complexity to deliver robust performance under adverse situations such as regime changes, fat-tailed distributions, and low signal-to-noise ratios. As a detailed study, we demonstrate our scheme using XGBoost models trained on the Numerai dataset and show that a two layer deep ensemble of XGBoost models over different model snapshots delivers high quality predictions under different market regimes. We also show that the performance of XGBoost models with different number of boosting rounds in three scenarios (small, standard and large) is monotonically increasing with respect to model size and converges towards the generalisation upper bound. We also evaluate the robustness of the model under variability of different hyperparameters, such as model complexity and data sampling settings. Our model has low hardware requirements as no specialised neural architectures are used and each base model can be independently trained in parallel.
Partial differential equations (PDEs) with uncertain or random inputs have been considered in many studies of uncertainty quantification. In forward uncertainty quantification, one is interested in analyzing the stochastic response of the PDE subject to input uncertainty, which usually involves solving high-dimensional integrals of the PDE output over a sequence of stochastic variables. In practical computations, one typically needs to discretize the problem in several ways: approximating an infinite-dimensional input random field with a finite-dimensional random field, spatial discretization of the PDE using, e.g., finite elements, and approximating high-dimensional integrals using cubatures such as quasi-Monte Carlo methods. In this paper, we focus on the error resulting from dimension truncation of an input random field. We show how Taylor series can be used to derive theoretical dimension truncation rates for a wide class of problems and we provide a simple checklist of conditions that a parametric mathematical model needs to satisfy in order for our dimension truncation error bound to hold. Some of the novel features of our approach include that our results are applicable to non-affine parametric operator equations, dimensionally-truncated conforming finite element discretized solutions of parametric PDEs, and even compositions of PDE solutions with smooth nonlinear quantities of interest. As a specific application of our method, we derive an improved dimension truncation error bound for elliptic PDEs with lognormally parameterized diffusion coefficients. Numerical examples support our theoretical findings.
Stochastic inverse problems are typically encountered when it is wanted to quantify the uncertainty affecting the inputs of computer models. They consist in estimating input distributions from noisy, observable outputs, and such problems are increasingly examined in Bayesian contexts where the targeted inputs are affected by stochastic uncertainties. In this regard, a stochastic input can be qualified as meaningful if it explains most of the output uncertainty. While such inverse problems are characterized by identifiability conditions, constraints of "signal to noise", that can formalize this meaningfulness, should be accounted for within the definition of the model, prior to inference. This article investigates the possibility of forcing a solution to be meaningful in the context of parametric uncertainty quantification, through the tools of global sensitivity analysis and information theory (variance, entropy, Fisher information). Such forcings have mainly the nature of constraints placed on the input covariance, and can be made explicit by considering linear or linearizable models. Simulated experiments indicate that, when injected into the modeling process, these constraints can limit the influence of measurement or process noise on the estimation of the input distribution, and let hope for future extensions in a full non-linear framework, for example through the use of linear Gaussian mixtures.
This work puts forth low-complexity Riemannian subspace descent algorithms for the minimization of functions over the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold. Different from the existing Riemannian gradient descent variants, the proposed approach utilizes carefully chosen subspaces that allow the update to be written as a product of the Cholesky factor of the iterate and a sparse matrix. The resulting updates avoid the costly matrix operations like matrix exponentiation and dense matrix multiplication, which are generally required in almost all other Riemannian optimization algorithms on SPD manifold. We further identify a broad class of functions, arising in diverse applications, such as kernel matrix learning, covariance estimation of Gaussian distributions, maximum likelihood parameter estimation of elliptically contoured distributions, and parameter estimation in Gaussian mixture model problems, over which the Riemannian gradients can be calculated efficiently. The proposed uni-directional and multi-directional Riemannian subspace descent variants incur per-iteration complexities of $\mathcal{O}(n)$ and $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ respectively, as compared to the $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$ or higher complexity incurred by all existing Riemannian gradient descent variants. The superior runtime and low per-iteration complexity of the proposed algorithms is also demonstrated via numerical tests on large-scale covariance estimation problems.
A variant of the standard notion of branching bisimilarity for processes with discrete relative timing is proposed which is coarser than the standard notion. Using a version of ACP (Algebra of Communicating Processes) with abstraction for processes with discrete relative timing, it is shown that the proposed variant allows of both the functional correctness and the performance properties of the PAR (Positive Acknowledgement with Retransmission) protocol to be analyzed. In the version of ACP concerned, the difference between the standard notion of branching bisimilarity and its proposed variant is characterized by a single axiom schema.
The aim of the current research is to analyse and discover, in a real context, behaviours, reactions and modes of interaction of social actors (people) with the humanoid robot Pepper. Indeed, we wanted to observe in a real, highly frequented context, the reactions and interactions of people with Pepper, placed in a shop window, through a systematic observation approach. The most interesting aspects of this research will be illustrated, bearing in mind that this is a preliminary analysis, therefore, not yet definitively concluded.
We consider an unknown multivariate function representing a system-such as a complex numerical simulator-taking both deterministic and uncertain inputs. Our objective is to estimate the set of deterministic inputs leading to outputs whose probability (with respect to the distribution of the uncertain inputs) of belonging to a given set is less than a given threshold. This problem, which we call Quantile Set Inversion (QSI), occurs for instance in the context of robust (reliability-based) optimization problems, when looking for the set of solutions that satisfy the constraints with sufficiently large probability. To solve the QSI problem, we propose a Bayesian strategy based on Gaussian process modeling and the Stepwise Uncertainty Reduction (SUR) principle, to sequentially choose the points at which the function should be evaluated to efficiently approximate the set of interest. We illustrate the performance and interest of the proposed SUR strategy through several numerical experiments.
We present a rigorous and precise analysis of the maximum degree and the average degree in a dynamic duplication-divergence graph model introduced by Sol\'e, Pastor-Satorras et al. in which the graph grows according to a duplication-divergence mechanism, i.e. by iteratively creating a copy of some node and then randomly alternating the neighborhood of a new node with probability $p$. This model captures the growth of some real-world processes e.g. biological or social networks. In this paper, we prove that for some $0 < p < 1$ the maximum degree and the average degree of a duplication-divergence graph on $t$ vertices are asymptotically concentrated with high probability around $t^p$ and $\max\{t^{2 p - 1}, 1\}$, respectively, i.e. they are within at most a polylogarithmic factor from these values with probability at least $1 - t^{-A}$ for any constant $A > 0$.
The main computational cost per iteration of adaptive cubic regularization methods for solving large-scale nonconvex problems is the computation of the step $s_k$, which requires an approximate minimizer of the cubic model. We propose a new approach in which this minimizer is sought in a low dimensional subspace that, in contrast to classical approaches, is reused for a number of iterations. A regularized Newton step to correct $s_k$ is also incorporated whenever needed. We show that our method increases efficiency while preserving the worst-case complexity of classical cubic regularized methods. We also explore the use of rational Krylov subspaces for the subspace minimization, to overcome some of the issues encountered when using polynomial Krylov subspaces. We provide several experimental results illustrating the gains of the new approach when compared to classic implementations.
We propose, analyze and realize a variational multiclass segmentation scheme that partitions a given image into multiple regions exhibiting specific properties. Our method determines multiple functions that encode the segmentation regions by minimizing an energy functional combining information from different channels. Multichannel image data can be obtained by lifting the image into a higher dimensional feature space using specific multichannel filtering or may already be provided by the imaging modality under consideration, such as an RGB image or multimodal medical data. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs well in various scenarios. In particular, promising results are presented for two medical applications involving classification of brain abscess and tumor growth, respectively. As main theoretical contributions, we prove the existence of global minimizers of the proposed energy functional and show its stability and convergence with respect to noisy inputs. In particular, these results also apply to the special case of binary segmentation, and these results are also novel in this particular situation.