As a traditional and widely-adopted mortality rate projection technique, by representing the log mortality rate as a simple bilinear form $\log(m_{x,t})=a_x+b_xk_t$. The Lee-Carter model has been extensively studied throughout the past 30 years, however, the performance of the model in the presence of outliers has been paid little attention, particularly for the parameter estimation of $b_x$. In this paper, we propose a robust estimation method for Lee-Carter model by formulating it as a probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA) with multivariate $t$-distributions, and an efficient expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for implementation. The advantages of the method are threefold. It yields significantly more robust estimates of both $b_x$ and $k_t$, preserves the fundamental interpretation for $b_x$ as the first principal component as in the traditional approach and is flexible to be integrated into other existing time series models for $k_t$. The parameter uncertainties are examined by adopting a standard residual bootstrap. A simulation study based on Human Mortality Database shows superior performance of the proposed model compared to other conventional approaches.
The hard thresholding technique plays a vital role in the development of algorithms for sparse signal recovery. By merging this technique and heavy-ball acceleration method which is a multi-step extension of the traditional gradient descent method, we propose the so-called heavy-ball-based hard thresholding (HBHT) and heavy-ball-based hard thresholding pursuit (HBHTP) algorithms for signal recovery. It turns out that the HBHT and HBHTP can successfully recover a $k$-sparse signal if the restricted isometry constant of the measurement matrix satisfies $\delta_{3k}<0.618 $ and $\delta_{3k}<0.577,$ respectively. The guaranteed success of HBHT and HBHTP is also shown under the conditions $\delta_{2k}<0.356$ and $\delta_{2k}<0.377,$ respectively. Moreover, the finite convergence and stability of the two algorithms are also established in this paper. Simulations on random problem instances are performed to compare the performance of the proposed algorithms and several existing ones. Empirical results indicate that the HBHTP performs very comparably to a few existing algorithms and it takes less average time to achieve the signal recovery than these existing methods.
We study reinforcement learning for two-player zero-sum Markov games with simultaneous moves in the finite-horizon setting, where the transition kernel of the underlying Markov games can be parameterized by a linear function over the current state, both players' actions and the next state. In particular, we assume that we can control both players and aim to find the Nash Equilibrium by minimizing the duality gap. We propose an algorithm Nash-UCRL based on the principle "Optimism-in-Face-of-Uncertainty". Our algorithm only needs to find a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE), which is computationally efficient. Specifically, we show that Nash-UCRL can provably achieve an $\tilde{O}(dH\sqrt{T})$ regret, where $d$ is the linear function dimension, $H$ is the length of the game and $T$ is the total number of steps in the game. To assess the optimality of our algorithm, we also prove an $\tilde{\Omega}( dH\sqrt{T})$ lower bound on the regret. Our upper bound matches the lower bound up to logarithmic factors, which suggests the optimality of our algorithm.
In this paper we get error bounds for fully discrete approximations of infinite horizon problems via the dynamic programming approach. It is well known that considering a time discretization with a positive step size $h$ an error bound of size $h$ can be proved for the difference between the value function (viscosity solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation corresponding to the infinite horizon) and the value function of the discrete time problem. However, including also a spatial discretization based on elements of size $k$ an error bound of size $O(k/h)$ can be found in the literature for the error between the value functions of the continuous problem and the fully discrete problem. In this paper we revise the error bound of the fully discrete method and prove, under similar assumptions to those of the time discrete case, that the error of the fully discrete case is in fact $O(h+k)$ which gives first order in time and space for the method. This error bound matches the numerical experiments of many papers in the literature in which the behaviour $1/h$ from the bound $O(k/h)$ have not been observed.
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane, the $k$-center problem is to find $k$ congruent disks of minimum possible radius such that their union covers all the points in $P$. The $2$-center problem is a special case of the $k$-center problem that has been extensively studied in the recent past \cite{CAHN,HT,SH}. In this paper, we consider a generalized version of the $2$-center problem called \textit{proximity connected} $2$-center (PCTC) problem. In this problem, we are also given a parameter $\delta\geq 0$ and we have the additional constraint that the distance between the centers of the disks should be at most $\delta$. Note that when $\delta=0$, the PCTC problem is reduced to the $1$-center(minimum enclosing disk) problem and when $\delta$ tends to infinity, it is reduced to the $2$-center problem. The PCTC problem first appeared in the context of wireless networks in 1992 \cite{ACN0}, but obtaining a nontrivial deterministic algorithm for the problem remained open. In this paper, we resolve this open problem by providing a deterministic $O(n^2\log n)$ time algorithm for the problem.
Covariance estimation for matrix-valued data has received an increasing interest in applications. Unlike previous works that rely heavily on matrix normal distribution assumption and the requirement of fixed matrix size, we propose a class of distribution-free regularized covariance estimation methods for high-dimensional matrix data under a separability condition and a bandable covariance structure. Under these conditions, the original covariance matrix is decomposed into a Kronecker product of two bandable small covariance matrices representing the variability over row and column directions. We formulate a unified framework for estimating bandable covariance, and introduce an efficient algorithm based on rank one unconstrained Kronecker product approximation. The convergence rates of the proposed estimators are established, and the derived minimax lower bound shows our proposed estimator is rate-optimal under certain divergence regimes of matrix size. We further introduce a class of robust covariance estimators and provide theoretical guarantees to deal with heavy-tailed data. We demonstrate the superior finite-sample performance of our methods using simulations and real applications from a gridded temperature anomalies dataset and a S&P 500 stock data analysis.
Existing inferential methods for small area data involve a trade-off between maintaining area-level frequentist coverage rates and improving inferential precision via the incorporation of indirect information. In this article, we propose a method to obtain an area-level prediction region for a future observation which mitigates this trade-off. The proposed method takes a conformal prediction approach in which the conformity measure is the posterior predictive density of a working model that incorporates indirect information. The resulting prediction region has guaranteed frequentist coverage regardless of the working model, and, if the working model assumptions are accurate, the region has minimum expected volume compared to other regions with the same coverage rate. When constructed under a normal working model, we prove such a prediction region is an interval and construct an efficient algorithm to obtain the exact interval. We illustrate the performance of our method through simulation studies and an application to EPA radon survey data.
Locating 3D objects from a single RGB image via Perspective-n-Points (PnP) is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Driven by end-to-end deep learning, recent studies suggest interpreting PnP as a differentiable layer, so that 2D-3D point correspondences can be partly learned by backpropagating the gradient w.r.t. object pose. Yet, learning the entire set of unrestricted 2D-3D points from scratch fails to converge with existing approaches, since the deterministic pose is inherently non-differentiable. In this paper, we propose the EPro-PnP, a probabilistic PnP layer for general end-to-end pose estimation, which outputs a distribution of pose on the SE(3) manifold, essentially bringing categorical Softmax to the continuous domain. The 2D-3D coordinates and corresponding weights are treated as intermediate variables learned by minimizing the KL divergence between the predicted and target pose distribution. The underlying principle unifies the existing approaches and resembles the attention mechanism. EPro-PnP significantly outperforms competitive baselines, closing the gap between PnP-based method and the task-specific leaders on the LineMOD 6DoF pose estimation and nuScenes 3D object detection benchmarks.
Bearing fault identification and analysis is an important research area in the field of machinery fault diagnosis. Aiming at the common faults of rolling bearings, we propose a data-driven diagnostic algorithm based on the characteristics of bearing vibrations called multi-size kernel based adaptive convolutional neural network (MSKACNN). Using raw bearing vibration signals as the inputs, MSKACNN provides vibration feature learning and signal classification capabilities to identify and analyze bearing faults. Ball mixing is a ball bearing production quality problem that is difficult to identify using traditional frequency domain analysis methods since it requires high frequency resolutions of the measurement signals and results in a long analyzing time. The proposed MSKACNN is shown to improve the efficiency and accuracy of ball mixing diagnosis. To further demonstrate the effectiveness of MSKACNN in bearing fault identification, a bearing vibration data acquisition system was developed, and vibration signal acquisition was performed on rolling bearings under five different fault conditions including ball mixing. The resulting datasets were used to analyze the performance of our proposed model. To validate the adaptive ability of MSKACNN, fault test data from the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center were also used. Test results show that MSKACNN can identify the different bearing conditions with high accuracy with high generalization ability. We presented an implementation of the MSKACNN as a lightweight module for a real-time bearing fault diagnosis system that is suitable for production.
One of the most important problems in system identification and statistics is how to estimate the unknown parameters of a given model. Optimization methods and specialized procedures, such as Empirical Minimization (EM) can be used in case the likelihood function can be computed. For situations where one can only simulate from a parametric model, but the likelihood is difficult or impossible to evaluate, a technique known as the Two-Stage (TS) Approach can be applied to obtain reliable parametric estimates. Unfortunately, there is currently a lack of theoretical justification for TS. In this paper, we propose a statistical decision-theoretical derivation of TS, which leads to Bayesian and Minimax estimators. We also show how to apply the TS approach on models for independent and identically distributed samples, by computing quantiles of the data as a first step, and using a linear function as the second stage. The proposed method is illustrated via numerical simulations.
We present a new sublinear time algorithm for approximating the spectral density (eigenvalue distribution) of an $n\times n$ normalized graph adjacency or Laplacian matrix. The algorithm recovers the spectrum up to $\epsilon$ accuracy in the Wasserstein-1 distance in $O(n\cdot \text{poly}(1/\epsilon))$ time given sample access to the graph. This result compliments recent work by David Cohen-Steiner, Weihao Kong, Christian Sohler, and Gregory Valiant (2018), which obtains a solution with runtime independent of $n$, but exponential in $1/\epsilon$. We conjecture that the trade-off between dimension dependence and accuracy is inherent. Our method is simple and works well experimentally. It is based on a Chebyshev polynomial moment matching method that employees randomized estimators for the matrix trace. We prove that, for any Hermitian $A$, this moment matching method returns an $\epsilon$ approximation to the spectral density using just $O({1}/{\epsilon})$ matrix-vector products with $A$. By leveraging stability properties of the Chebyshev polynomial three-term recurrence, we then prove that the method is amenable to the use of coarse approximate matrix-vector products. Our sublinear time algorithm follows from combining this result with a novel sampling algorithm for approximating matrix-vector products with a normalized graph adjacency matrix. Of independent interest, we show a similar result for the widely used \emph{kernel polynomial method} (KPM), proving that this practical algorithm nearly matches the theoretical guarantees of our moment matching method. Our analysis uses tools from Jackson's seminal work on approximation with positive polynomial kernels.