Fiducial inference, as generalized by Hannig et al. (2016), is applied to nonparametric g-modeling (Efron, 2016) in the discrete case. We propose a computationally efficient algorithm to sample from the fiducial distribution, and use the generated samples to construct point estimates and confidence intervals. We study the theoretical properties of the fiducial distribution and perform extensive simulations in various scenarios. The proposed approach yields good statistical performance in terms of the mean squared error of point estimators and the coverage of confidence intervals. Furthermore, we apply the proposed fiducial method to estimate the probability of each satellite site being malignant using gastric adenocarcinoma data with 844 patients (Efron, 2016).
A distributional symmetry is invariance of a distribution under a group of transformations. Exchangeability and stationarity are examples. We explain that a result of ergodic theory provides a law of large numbers: If the group satisfies suitable conditions, expectations can be estimated by averaging over subsets of transformations, and these estimators are strongly consistent. We show that, if a mixing condition holds, the averages also satisfy a central limit theorem, a Berry-Esseen bound, and concentration. These are extended further to apply to triangular arrays, to randomly subsampled averages, and to a generalization of U-statistics. As applications, we obtain new results on exchangeability, random fields, network models, and a class of marked point processes. We also establish asymptotic normality of the empirical entropy for a large class of processes. Some known results are recovered as special cases, and can hence be interpreted as an outcome of symmetry. The proofs adapt Stein's method.
This article introduces the R package hermiter which facilitates estimation of univariate and bivariate probability density functions and cumulative distribution functions along with full quantile functions (univariate) and nonparametric correlation coefficients (bivariate) using Hermite series based estimators. The algorithms implemented in the hermiter package are particularly useful in the sequential setting (both stationary and non-stationary) and one-pass batch estimation setting for large data sets. In addition, the Hermite series based estimators are approximately mergeable allowing decentralized estimation.
In this paper a class of optimization problems with uncertain linear constraints is discussed. It is assumed that the constraint coefficients are random vectors whose probability distributions are only partially known. Possibility theory is used to model the imprecise probabilities. In one of the interpretations, a possibility distribution (a membership function of a fuzzy set) in the set of coefficient realizations induces a necessity measure, which in turn defines a family of probability distributions in this set. The distributionally robust approach is then used to transform the imprecise constraints into deterministic counterparts. Namely, the uncertain left-had side of each constraint is replaced with the expected value with respect to the worst probability distribution that can occur. It is shown how to represent the resulting problem by using linear or second order cone constraints. This leads to problems which are computationally tractable for a wide class of optimization models, in particular for linear programming.
Censored data, where the event time is partially observed, are challenging for survival probability estimation. In this paper, we introduce a novel nonparametric fiducial approach to interval-censored data, including right-censored, current status, case II censored, and mixed case censored data. The proposed approach leveraging a simple Gibbs sampler has a useful property of being "one size fits all", i.e., the proposed approach automatically adapts to all types of non-informative censoring mechanisms. As shown in the extensive simulations, the proposed fiducial confidence intervals significantly outperform existing methods in terms of both coverage and length. In addition, the proposed fiducial point estimator has much smaller estimation errors than the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator. Furthermore, we apply the proposed method to Austrian rubella data and a study of hemophiliacs infected with the human immunodeficiency virus. The strength of the proposed fiducial approach is not only estimation and uncertainty quantification but also its automatic adaptation to a variety of censoring mechanisms.
Determinantal Point Process (DPPs) are statistical models for repulsive point patterns. Both sampling and inference are tractable for DPPs, a rare feature among models with negative dependence that explains their popularity in machine learning and spatial statistics. Parametric and nonparametric inference methods have been proposed in the finite case, i.e. when the point patterns live in a finite ground set. In the continuous case, only parametric methods have been investigated, while nonparametric maximum likelihood for DPPs -- an optimization problem over trace-class operators -- has remained an open question. In this paper, we show that a restricted version of this maximum likelihood (MLE) problem falls within the scope of a recent representer theorem for nonnegative functions in an RKHS. This leads to a finite-dimensional problem, with strong statistical ties to the original MLE. Moreover, we propose, analyze, and demonstrate a fixed point algorithm to solve this finite-dimensional problem. Finally, we also provide a controlled estimate of the correlation kernel of the DPP, thus providing more interpretability.
We propose and analyze volume-preserving parametric finite element methods for surface diffusion, conserved mean curvature flow and an intermediate evolution law in an axisymmetric setting. The weak formulations are presented in terms of the generating curves of the axisymmetric surfaces. The proposed numerical methods are based on piecewise linear parametric finite elements. The constructed fully practical schemes satisfy the conservation of the enclosed volume. In addition, we prove the unconditional stability and consider the distribution of vertices for the discretized schemes. The introduced methods are implicit and the resulting nonlinear systems of equations can be solved very efficiently and accurately via the Newton's iterative method. Numerical results are presented to show the accuracy and efficiency of the introduced schemes for computing the considered axisymmetric geometric flows.
We propose a general and scalable approximate sampling strategy for probabilistic models with discrete variables. Our approach uses gradients of the likelihood function with respect to its discrete inputs to propose updates in a Metropolis-Hastings sampler. We show empirically that this approach outperforms generic samplers in a number of difficult settings including Ising models, Potts models, restricted Boltzmann machines, and factorial hidden Markov models. We also demonstrate the use of our improved sampler for training deep energy-based models on high dimensional discrete data. This approach outperforms variational auto-encoders and existing energy-based models. Finally, we give bounds showing that our approach is near-optimal in the class of samplers which propose local updates.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
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.
Robust estimation is much more challenging in high dimensions than it is in one dimension: Most techniques either lead to intractable optimization problems or estimators that can tolerate only a tiny fraction of errors. Recent work in theoretical computer science has shown that, in appropriate distributional models, it is possible to robustly estimate the mean and covariance with polynomial time algorithms that can tolerate a constant fraction of corruptions, independent of the dimension. However, the sample and time complexity of these algorithms is prohibitively large for high-dimensional applications. In this work, we address both of these issues by establishing sample complexity bounds that are optimal, up to logarithmic factors, as well as giving various refinements that allow the algorithms to tolerate a much larger fraction of corruptions. Finally, we show on both synthetic and real data that our algorithms have state-of-the-art performance and suddenly make high-dimensional robust estimation a realistic possibility.