We propose a novel coupled rejection-sampling method for sampling from couplings of arbitrary distributions. The method relies on accepting or rejecting coupled samples coming from dominating marginals. Contrary to existing acceptance-rejection methods, the variance of the execution time of the proposed method is limited and stays finite as the two target marginals approach each other in the sense of the total variation norm. In the important special case of coupling multivariate Gaussians with different means and covariances, we derive positive lower bounds for the resulting coupling probability of our algorithm, and we then show how the coupling method can be optimised using convex optimisation. Finally, we show how we can modify the coupled-rejection method to propose from coupled ensemble of proposals, so as to asymptotically recover a maximal coupling. We then apply the method to derive a novel parallel coupled particle filter resampling algorithm, and show how it can be used to speed up unbiased MCMC methods based on couplings.
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Given its status as a classic problem and its importance to both theoreticians and practitioners, edit distance provides an excellent lens through which to understand how the theoretical analysis of algorithms impacts practical implementations. From an applied perspective, the goals of theoretical analysis are to predict the empirical performance of an algorithm and to serve as a yardstick to design novel algorithms that perform well in practice. In this paper, we systematically survey the types of theoretical analysis techniques that have been applied to edit distance and evaluate the extent to which each one has achieved these two goals. These techniques include traditional worst-case analysis, worst-case analysis parametrized by edit distance or entropy or compressibility, average-case analysis, semi-random models, and advice-based models. We find that the track record is mixed. On one hand, two algorithms widely used in practice have been born out of theoretical analysis and their empirical performance is captured well by theoretical predictions. On the other hand, all the algorithms developed using theoretical analysis as a yardstick since then have not had any practical relevance. We conclude by discussing the remaining open problems and how they can be tackled.
By defining two important terms called basic perturbation vectors and obtaining their linear bounds, we obtain the linear componentwise perturbation bounds for unitary factors and upper triangular factors of the generalized Schur decomposition. The perturbation bounds for the diagonal elements of the upper triangular factors and the generalized invariant subspace are also derived. From the former, we present an upper bound and a condition number of the generalized eigenvalue. Furthermore, with numerical iterative method, the nonlinear componentwise perturbation bounds of the generalized Schur decomposition are also provided. Numerical examples are given to test the obtained bounds. Among them, we compare our upper bound and condition number of the generalized eigenvalue with their counterparts given in the literature. Numerical results show that they are very close to each other but our results don't contain the information on the left and right generalized eigenvectors.
Per-instance algorithm selection seeks to recommend, for a given problem instance and a given performance criterion, one or several suitable algorithms that are expected to perform well for the particular setting. The selection is classically done offline, using openly available information about the problem instance or features that are extracted from the instance during a dedicated feature extraction step. This ignores valuable information that the algorithms accumulate during the optimization process. In this work, we propose an alternative, online algorithm selection scheme which we coin per-run algorithm selection. In our approach, we start the optimization with a default algorithm, and, after a certain number of iterations, extract instance features from the observed trajectory of this initial optimizer to determine whether to switch to another optimizer. We test this approach using the CMA-ES as the default solver, and a portfolio of six different optimizers as potential algorithms to switch to. In contrast to other recent work on online per-run algorithm selection, we warm-start the second optimizer using information accumulated during the first optimization phase. We show that our approach outperforms static per-instance algorithm selection. We also compare two different feature extraction principles, based on exploratory landscape analysis and time series analysis of the internal state variables of the CMA-ES, respectively. We show that a combination of both feature sets provides the most accurate recommendations for our test cases, taken from the BBOB function suite from the COCO platform and the YABBOB suite from the Nevergrad platform.
We consider the offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problem, in which the agent aims to compute a policy that maximizes expected return while satisfying given cost constraints, learning only from a pre-collected dataset. This problem setting is appealing in many real-world scenarios, where direct interaction with the environment is costly or risky, and where the resulting policy should comply with safety constraints. However, it is challenging to compute a policy that guarantees satisfying the cost constraints in the offline RL setting, since the off-policy evaluation inherently has an estimation error. In this paper, we present an offline constrained RL algorithm that optimizes the policy in the space of the stationary distribution. Our algorithm, COptiDICE, directly estimates the stationary distribution corrections of the optimal policy with respect to returns, while constraining the cost upper bound, with the goal of yielding a cost-conservative policy for actual constraint satisfaction. Experimental results show that COptiDICE attains better policies in terms of constraint satisfaction and return-maximization, outperforming baseline algorithms.
Data collection and research methodology represents a critical part of the research pipeline. On the one hand, it is important that we collect data in a way that maximises the validity of what we are measuring, which may involve the use of long scales with many items. On the other hand, collecting a large number of items across multiple scales results in participant fatigue, and expensive and time consuming data collection. It is therefore important that we use the available resources optimally. In this work, we consider how a consideration for theory and the associated causal/structural model can help us to streamline data collection procedures by not wasting time collecting data for variables which are not causally critical for subsequent analysis. This not only saves time and enables us to redirect resources to attend to other variables which are more important, but also increases research transparency and the reliability of theory testing. In order to achieve this streamlined data collection, we leverage structural models, and Markov conditional independency structures implicit in these models to identify the substructures which are critical for answering a particular research question. In this work, we review the relevant concepts and present a number of didactic examples with the hope that psychologists can use these techniques to streamline their data collection process without invalidating the subsequent analysis. We provide a number of simulation results to demonstrate the limited analytical impact of this streamlining.
The naive importance sampling (IS) estimator generally does not work well in examples involving simultaneous inference on several targets, as the importance weights can take arbitrarily large values, making the estimator highly unstable. In such situations, alternative multiple IS estimators involving samples from multiple proposal distributions are preferred. Just like the naive IS, the success of these multiple IS estimators crucially depends on the choice of the proposal distributions. The selection of these proposal distributions is the focus of this article. We propose three methods: (i) a geometric space filling approach, (ii) a minimax variance approach, and (iii) a maximum entropy approach. The first two methods are applicable to any IS estimator, whereas the third approach is described in the context of Doss's (2010) two-stage IS estimator. For the first method, we propose a suitable measure of 'closeness' based on the symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence, while the second and third approaches use estimates of asymptotic variances of Doss's (2010) IS estimator and Geyer's (1994) reverse logistic regression estimator, respectively. Thus, when samples from the proposal distributions are obtained by running Markov chains, we provide consistent spectral variance estimators for these asymptotic variances. The proposed methods for selecting proposal densities are illustrated using various detailed examples.
Dynamic Linear Models (DLMs) are commonly employed for time series analysis due to their versatile structure, simple recursive updating, ability to handle missing data, and probabilistic forecasting. However, the options for count time series are limited: Gaussian DLMs require continuous data, while Poisson-based alternatives often lack sufficient modeling flexibility. We introduce a novel semiparametric methodology for count time series by warping a Gaussian DLM. The warping function has two components: a (nonparametric) transformation operator that provides distributional flexibility and a rounding operator that ensures the correct support for the discrete data-generating process. We develop conjugate inference for the warped DLM, which enables analytic and recursive updates for the state space filtering and smoothing distributions. We leverage these results to produce customized and efficient algorithms for inference and forecasting, including Monte Carlo simulation for offline analysis and an optimal particle filter for online inference. This framework unifies and extends a variety of discrete time series models and is valid for natural counts, rounded values, and multivariate observations. Simulation studies illustrate the excellent forecasting capabilities of the warped DLM. The proposed approach is applied to a multivariate time series of daily overdose counts and demonstrates both modeling and computational successes.
Most existing works of polar codes focus on the analysis of block error probability. However, in many scenarios, bit error probability is also important for evaluating the performance of channel codes. In this paper, we establish a new framework to analyze the bit error probability of polar codes. Specifically, by revisiting the error event of bit-channel, we first introduce the conditional bit error probability as a metric to evaluate the reliability of bit-channel for both systematic and non-systematic polar codes. Guided by the concept of polar subcode, we then derive an upper bound on the conditional bit error probability of each bit-channel, and accordingly, an upper bound on the bit error probability of polar codes. Based on these, two types of construction metrics aiming at minimizing the bit error probability of polar codes are proposed, which are of linear computational complexity and explicit forms. Simulation results show that the polar codes constructed by the proposed methods can outperform those constructed by the conventional methods.
In the pooled data problem we are given a set of $n$ agents, each of which holds a hidden state bit, either $0$ or $1$. A querying procedure returns for a query set the sum of the states of the queried agents. The goal is to reconstruct the states using as few queries as possible. In this paper we consider two noise models for the pooled data problem. In the noisy channel model, the result for each agent flips with a certain probability. In the noisy query model, each query result is subject to random Gaussian noise. Our results are twofold. First, we present and analyze for both error models a simple and efficient distributed algorithm that reconstructs the initial states in a greedy fashion. Our novel analysis pins down the range of error probabilities and distributions for which our algorithm reconstructs the exact initial states with high probability. Secondly, we present simulation results of our algorithm and compare its performance with approximate message passing (AMP) algorithms that are conjectured to be optimal in a number of related problems.
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.
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